When We Believed in Mermaids(14)

“Fresh air,” she quipped, then touched my face. “You look tired.”

“Med school.”

Inside the diner, still in touch with the seventies with its red Naugahyde booths and chrome appointments, we sat by the window and ordered cheeseburgers. “Tell me everything,” she said, sipping Cherry Coke through a straw.

“Umm . . .” I floundered, trying to think of something that wasn’t a grind of books, rotations, notes. I was third year, on the floor for the first time, and it was both exhilarating and devastatingly exhausting. “I don’t know what to say. I’m working hard.”

She nodded eagerly, and I noticed how red her eyes were. High, as ever. “Well, what did you do yesterday?”

“Yesterday.” I took a breath, trying to remember. “I got up at four so I could get to the hospital in time to do early rounds; then we had rounds with our team, which is surgical, so I’m working with surgeons and residents. I scrubbed in for a gall bladder removal and an emergency appendectomy.” I paused, feeling sleep, like a hook on a slow-moving train, start to reel me under. I blinked hard. Shook my head. “What else? I met a study group before dinner, then ate, then went home to read for rounds this morning.”

Her eyebrows rose. “Dude. Do you ever get to sleep?”

I nodded. “Sometimes?”

“I can’t believe you’re going to be a doctor. I always brag about you.”

“Thanks.” They drop off the burgers, and all the salt and fat smells so good, I bend in and breathe it deep. “I’m freaking starving.”

“Not much time to eat there either. Do you get to surf?”

“Sometimes. Not a lot, but it’s okay. Eventually, this part will be done, and I’ll be like everybody else.”

She pointed a fry at me. “Except you will be Dr. Bianci.”

I grinned. “I do love the sound of that.” I arranged the pickles and tomatoes on top of the cheese, then added swirls of mustard. “What about you? Tell me about last week.”

She laughed, that low, raspy laugh that made everyone lean in close. “Good one.” She took a bite of her burger and nodded as she chewed, as if she were thinking about all the things she could tell me. She held her napkin in her lap primly, and in the action I saw my mother. “I bet you do more in a day than I do in a month.” She dabbed her lips politely, making sure they were ketchup- and grease-free. “But actually, last week was bitchin’ because we were chasing a hurricane up the coast, from Florida all the way to Long Island.”

“Wow.” I felt a ripple of envy. “Biggest waves?”

“Montauk. You’d love it there.”

“Okay, you got me. I’m jealous.”

“Yeah.” She grinned that impish, charming, encompassing smile. White teeth but not perfectly straight because she should have had braces and my parents never got around to it. Neither of us saw a dentist until we were in middle school, and only then because Josie had a very bad molar, and Dylan had insisted they get her in to see someone.

“Have you ever considered surfing professionally?” I asked.

She stirred her straw around in her ice, gave me a half-tilted smile. “Nah. I’m not that good.”

“Bullshit. You just have to focus, make that the center of everything.”

She gave me a slow one-shoulder shrug, her mouth twisting into a wry dismissal. “No fun. I don’t have your drive.”

I ate my burger for a time, focusing there, on the food that wasn’t from a box or bag.

“I’m so proud of you, Kit,” Josie said again.

“Thanks.”

“How’s Mom?”

“Fine. You should go see her.”

“Maybe.” Another dismissive lift of one shoulder. “I’m not here for long.”

Maybe I was jealous; maybe I missed her. Maybe it was a combination of both, but I said, “Are you just going to wander around your whole life?”

She met my gaze. “What would be wrong with that?”

“You need a job, a profession, something you can do to support yourself when—”

“When I’m old and ugly?”

“No.” I scowled.

“I don’t have your brains, Kit. I was a bad student, and no college is going to let me in, so basically I can suffer along at some pissant community college, or I can do odd jobs and surf and love my life.”

“Do you love it?”

A flicker over her eyes before she lowered them. “Of course.”

I didn’t want to fight. “Good. I’m proud of you too.”

“Don’t say things you don’t mean.”

I ducked my head, and it was all nothing but polite until the end. She ate every bite on the plate, right down to the lettuce leaf, then blotted her mouth. Cloudy light fell through the window to her bright hair, the tips of her eyelashes. A part of me was suddenly three, leaning on her as she read aloud to me, and five, tucked into a sleeping bag next to hers under the shelter of a tent. The images made me ache. How much I missed her when she deserted me! How much I still did. I looked away, thought of my immunology test. Facts and figures, facts and figures.

“Do you ever think of what might have happened if Dylan never came?” she asked suddenly. “Or if the earthquake hadn’t wrecked the restaurant?”

Her words slammed into a heavily fortified box in my heart. “I try to look forward.”

“What if, though? What if Dad was still up there at Eden, cooking, and maybe Mom got her act together and we went home for weekends or holidays and Dad told jokes and—”

“Stop.” I closed my eyes, an ache along the bottom of my lungs. “Please. I just can’t.”

Her face was haunted, adding luminosity to her cheekbones, depth to her dark eyes. “What would have happened to us without him?” She shook her head, turned those tortured eyes on me. “Our parents were horrible, Kit. Why did they neglect us like that?”

“I don’t know.” My words were hard, erecting a wall against the past. “I have to focus on the present.”

Again, she ignored me. “Why couldn’t we save Dylan?” When she turned that gaze on me, tears edged her lower lids, never quite spilling. “Don’t you miss him?”

I clenched my jaw. Swallowed away my own grief. “Of course I do. All the time.” I had to pause, bow my head. “But he wasn’t savable. He was already too broken when he showed up.”

“Maybe.” Her voice broke slightly, going husky. “But what if things happened to make him take that last step? I mean . . .”

“What things, Josie?” I was both impatient and weary. She had gone over this subject a million times when we were teenagers. “He was always going to die young. Nothing pushed him over the edge except his own demons.”

She nodded, dashed away a tear that dared fall, and stared out the window. “He was happy for a long time, wasn’t he?”

I reach out and take her hand. “Yes. I think he was.”

She clutched my hand tight, her head bowed, her hair falling in a curtain around her face. The obscuring mists of my emotion cleared, and I could see her objectively, as if she were a stranger who’d wandered into the ER, a too-thin young woman with dry skin and chapped lips. Dehydrated, I’d note, probably an addict. I wanted, suddenly, to take care of her.

“I miss all of it,” I volunteered. “Dad and Dylan and Cinder.” My voice grew croaky. “I swear to God, I miss that dog like a limb.”

“Best dog ever.”

I nodded. “He was.” I shook my hair out of my face. “I miss the restaurant. The patio, the cover. Our bedroom.” I take a breath. “Sleeping on the beach in our tent. That was the best.”

“It was.”

She ran a fingertip over the scar on her forehead. “The earthquake wrecked everything.”

“I guess.” A little burn of impatience edged my spine. “Dylan and Cinder were already gone.”

“I know that. Why do you have to be so mean in the middle of something like this?”

“It’s not mean. It’s just reality.” Facts and figures.

“Yeah, well, reality isn’t always what you think it is. Sometimes things are more complicated than simple facts.”

Like our parents. Like our childhood. Like the earthquake. “You weren’t even there that day,” I said, a rare moment of furious honesty. “I had to sit there on the edge of the cliff by myself for hours, while I knew Dad was probably dead down there. And all you ever seem to remember is that you got a cut head.”

“Oh, Kit!” She grabbed both my hands. “Oh my God, I’m sorry. You’re right. That must have been terrible.”

I didn’t take my hands away, but I closed my eyes so that I didn’t have to look at her. “I know it was bad in Santa Cruz too, but—”

She slid out of her side of the booth and into mine, flinging her body around me. “I’m sorry. I’m so selfish sometimes.”

The smell of her, the essence of Josie, unlike any other scent in the world, enveloped me, and I was lost in my love for her, my adoration, my fury. The hungry, lonely cells of my body drank it in for long minutes. Then I extracted myself.

“Life is always a mixed bag.”