When We Believed in Mermaids(31)

My gigantic lie. Eyeing my beautiful husband in his crisp shirt and jeans, with one foot kicked out in front of him and his shoulder on the wall, I wonder what it would be like to confess it all. To be fully myself with the man I love more than I thought myself capable of. It’s lonely to carry a secret.

But as he smiles his honest, open, loyal smile, I know the truth. I can’t confess. He would hate me. He would never, ever speak to me again.

So I do the interview, putting on my cheeriest face, my not-quite-Kiwi, not-quite-US accent, and show them around Sapphire House. I’m captured again by the story, by the tragic love story back there in the past, by the startling, thrilling fact that I can restore it.

In the end, the reporter says with a smile, “Thanks, Mari. I think that’s it.”

“My pleasure,” I say, but the words hurt my throat, as if they have corners. When this airs, my face is going to be splattered all over TVNZ. It will be on the internet.

Anyone could see it.

Anyone.

It is the worst danger I’ve faced since I arrived, and it puts everything—everything—at stake.



Before we go, I head up to the attic to look for artifacts from Veronica’s life. It’s draped with cobwebs I sweep away with a broom I brought for just this reason.

Sarah has come with me, too, and I put her to work opening boxes while I make notes on the contents. The attic is mostly barren, with a few boxes of odds and ends, none of which looks particularly interesting. A few hold clothes, and we’ll want to explore those more carefully, considering the era. At last, far away in the back, are two smallish boxes that prove to be the bound diaries Helen filled. I bend over and pick one out at random. The date is 1952. I dig deeper and find one from 1945. The other box contains later entries, and I’m not as interested in those. “Give me a minute, kiddo.” I sit on the floor next to the box and take them all out. They’re not in any order: 1949 is next to ’55, but that seems to be the latest.

The earliest, frustratingly enough, is 1939. “I wonder where the rest of them are.”

“There’s more boxes over here,” Sarah says. “And look! Baby clothes.”

Frowning, I jump to my feet. The clothes are tucked into a wooden cradle, covered with a dusty sheet. The clothes are all for a newborn or just a little older and don’t appear to have been used at all. Someone must have had a miscarriage. My heart aches a little, lifting up tiny sweaters and rompers.

Sarah’s already lost interest in the clothes and opened a few more boxes. They contain any number of things but nothing I can really use to get the answers I need. Where are the other journals? I need the 1930s.

Maybe she hadn’t started keeping them until she moved here.

I mark the two boxes of journals and a third box of scrapbooks with an X for Simon to bring down.

Then I remember the stacks of plastic containers holding magazines, down in Helen’s room. Maybe there will be something there. “Come with me, Sarah. I have an idea.”





Chapter Fifteen

Kit

When I was seven and Josie was nine, Dylan taught us to surf.

I remember the first lesson clearly, because I had Dylan to myself for once, a very rare occurrence. I woke up in the tent, and Josie was gone. Dylan was sprawled flat on his back, hands crossed on his chest, and Cinder snored beside me, but Josie’s sleeping bag didn’t even look touched. I crawled out to pee. The morning was thick and overcast, the ocean restless below it, and I waded into the lapping waves, letting the cold water ripple over my arches and ankles. We swam most days, Josie and I, and this was how I kept myself ready—wading in as high as I could, then dashing back out, wading in, dashing out. Cinder must have heard me, because he scrambled out of the tent too and started running in and out with me. He found a long weathered piece of driftwood and tossed it to me. I laughed and picked it up and threw it back toward the beach. He was a retriever, but he didn’t love actually swimming unless he absolutely had to. Once the water reached his chest, he always ran back to the beach, barking.

This morning, he did the same. I ran into the ocean and out, and he ran in and out chasing his driftwood. After a while, Dylan emerged from the tent, blinking, wearing a pair of Hawaiian-print board shorts, all his scars on full display—the puckered pink one that ran over his biceps, the constellation of perfect circles across his belly, and one-foot-long thin marks here and there, not the ordinary kind of scars a person had. He told crazy stories about them—that he’d wrestled a pirate, danced over coals, gotten stuck in a meteor shower in outer space.

“Hey, kid,” he said now, his voice raspy. “Where’s your sister? Did she ever come down?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

He frowned, looking up the stairs toward the restaurant. He tugged his shirt on and sat down on the sand to light a half-smoked joint he took out of his pocket. The sweet smell mingled with ocean and fog to make a scent that I would always associate with him. “You hungry?”

“Not yet,” I lied. My stomach was growling a little bit, but I never, ever got to have him to myself, and I planned to enjoy it as long as I could. “Are you surfing today?”

“Yep.”

“Are you ever going to teach us?”

He glanced over at me. “You really want to learn?”

“Duh!” I flung out my hand toward the waves. “You’ve been telling us for ages that we could.”

He inhaled, held it. His eyes were red already from all the drinking the night before, but it only made his irises pop—those abalone-shell colors blasting right out of his face. As he exhaled in a small stream, I tried to catch it, and he laughed. “You never want to do this, little girl.”

“No,” I said definitely. “Drugs are bad for you. Smoking is really, really bad for you.”

“You’re right.”

“So why do you do drugs if you know they’re bad?”

His long hair was caught back in a ponytail, and he reached up and tugged out the rubber band, working his fingers through the tangles. I touched my braid to check it, but it was still very tight and good. “I don’t know, Kitten,” he said. He plucked a piece of pot off his lip. “It’s stupid, but I guess I like not thinking.”

“But why?” I leaned in. “I love to think.”

He smiled. “You’re so good at it—that’s why. And that’s the reason you should never, never, never do any drugs—because you are so smart.” He tapped my forehead. “You’re the smartest one of all of us. You know that, right?”

I shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Good.” He pinched the end of the joint. “Pinkie promise me, okay? You will never, ever do drugs.”

I reached up my pinkie, and we twisted them together. “Promise.” I wished he didn’t have to do drugs either, but I could feel that darkness in him getting better as he smoked his joint. It was like he carried around some mean monster that shut up only when he drank or smoked pot.

“Surfing’s better,” he said, and stood up. “It’s going to be cold.”

“Duh.”

He grinned his best grin, the one that crinkled the edges of his eyes, and held out his hand. “All right, then. Let’s do this thing.”

He kept his board, a longboard with red and yellow detailing along the rails, on the beach. He put me on the board in front of him and paddled us out only about five feet. Waves were low and slow, and even I knew that these were bland conditions.

We just sat on the board, our feet trailing. In his deep, quiet voice, he explained how to feel the movement, the energy of the waves, and I was enchanted by the science of it, feeling the movements, the swells. We practiced first on my belly; then he showed me how to stand up from a squat, which was easy. He stood me up with him, laughing when my balance was solid—“Kit, that’s great! That’s really great!”—but I wasn’t surprised. I was always good at physical things.

Paddle out, stand up, feel it. Paddle, stand up. He made me stand in front, one hand on my waist to steady me, and caught a wave so small it hardly made a ripple, but we rode it down the shoreline quite a way, and I could feel the difference between that and a no-wave.

That ride, that single, easy ride on a tiny wave, made me a surfer. Behind me, Dylan murmured encouragement—“There you go, steady, bend your knees”—and his approval made me ten feet tall, the princess of surfing. Overhead was the heavy sky, around us the ocean and her secrets, and my feet on the board, the water cold, my fingertips frozen.

The wave petered out on the far end of the cove. “Hungry?” Dylan asked.

I was ready to catch raw fish and shove them down my throat, but I didn’t want to quit. “A little.”

“Getting tired?”

“Yeah,” I admitted.

“Looks like Josie’s brought food down.” He waved toward the cove, where I saw my sister spreading out a blanket and pinning it with a basket and whatever she’d lugged from the kitchen. She waved back and put her hands on her hips.

We paddled toward her, and I waded out. Grabbing a chunk of cheese, I started to gobble it before I even went back to the tent for my hoodie. Ducking into the relative warmth of our tent, I found the hoodie, tugged it on to stop my shivering, and scrambled back out.