When We Believed in Mermaids(36)

When the storm is at its height, we don swimsuits and head downstairs to the indoor pool. It’s very late, and the pool is empty, waiting there in blue splendor for us to dive in. We frolic like dolphins, diving and splashing, and then we both fall to swimming laps, easily and simply, back and forth. I want the water on my body and slip out of my suit, and he smiles and does the same. If anyone comes, there will be ample warning.

So we swim naked with the night blurry beyond rain-spattered windows. The wind whistles and howls, but inside is warm and safe.

When we finish, we wrap up in towels and head into the dry-heat sauna. “Heaven,” I say.

The heat opens my pores, my body, wafts in waves over my breasts and knees and nose. “I would love to have a pool like that, where I could swim whenever I wanted.”

“Mm. In my house in Madrid, I have a sauna and a steam shower.”

“Decadent.” I open one eye. He’s leaning back against the wall, his arms loose, hands resting on his thighs. His body is strong, well shaped, with that slight extra around the middle that I find so weirdly appealing. It makes me want to climb on him again. Instead, I close my eyes and say, “You must be a rich man.”

“Not poor,” he agrees. “But you too—you are a doctor.”

“I do all right. Housing is stratospheric in California, but the rest is fine.” I breathe in the hot air, coughing slightly. “I bought my mom a condo on the beach, and I have a little house. I can be at the beach in seven minutes on foot.”

“Lovely.”

“Is your house old?” I ask. “I think of Madrid as medieval.”

“It’s old, but inside, it’s modern. The kitchen, the bathrooms, the windows. I like plenty of light.”

“Mine is old. Mission-style.”

“Spanish,” he says with approval, and I smile.

“Yes. Our house when we were children was Spanish too, tiled all through in Art Deco.”

“Oh,” he says, “I like Art Deco.”

The words in his voice are somehow lyrical, his tongue making the syllables softer. A shiver walks up my spine, and I open my eyes again.

He’s looking at me. I’m aware of my shoulders, my thighs.

“Perhaps,” he says, “we should return to your room, hmm?”





Chapter Eighteen

Mari

It’s hot and humid the next day, and I’m cranky from too little sleep. Inside Sapphire House, the air is thick even when I open all the windows, and I make a note to look into what it would cost to add air-conditioning. I hate the idea of shutting out the ocean, but with global warming, who knows what the next thirty or forty years will bring?

I’m working on the pantry today, recording the style and variations of all the dishes on the shelves. I always do the inventory before I bring anyone else in. It’s tedious work in a way, but it gives me a chance to feel the house itself, to know it intimately before I begin the heavy work of shifting walls and tearing it apart. In some strange way, I feel I owe it to the house itself, honoring it for what it was, what it gave someone else.

It’s not exactly difficult psychology to know why. Our beautiful old Spanish-style house was devoured by the earthquake—not only the restaurant and house, the buildings, but everything that was inside them. My mother, Kit, and I scoured the beach for weeks afterward, trying to find things to rescue, but in the end it wasn’t much. Some of our clothes, some battered things from the kitchen. What the earthquake began, the sea and weather completed.

I still carry three things from the recovery effort. One is a ring made from a teaspoon, my father’s choice for Eden, simple heavy tableware designed to stand up to harsh commercial dishwashers. It has a little carving of Mount Etna on the end, which I thought unbearably beautiful when I was small. My mother had the ring made for my twelfth birthday.

The other is a chipped guitar pick that belonged to Dylan and a T-shirt that belonged to him too. The shirt is as thin and delicate now as flower petals, and I keep it wrapped up and tucked into a drawer. I wore it for years and years, and I never once put it on without thinking of a night the three of us made a big fire on the beach.

Kit and I must have been in late grade school—maybe twelve and ten—because Dylan’s hair was really long. He must have been seventeen or eighteen. He’d started growing it when he arrived at Eden, and it grew longer every year. By the end, he could braid it into a tail that was halfway down his back. His freak flag, he said, a reference to a song I didn’t know. No matter how my father nagged him, he refused to cut it.

So I grew my hair out too. It was already pretty long when he came to live with us, down to the middle of my back, but by the time of the earthquake when I was fifteen, I was known for my long, long blonde hair, which swept the top of my thighs. Neither of us wore it loose very often—it tangled and matted so easily, you wouldn’t believe it. Mine was thicker than his, but his was laced with more colors—silvery blond, wheat, a little red, some glittery gold. Mine was just dishwater streaked with sun highlights, but there was power in it.

A lot of power. Boys liked it, and even some of the girls on the beach, who were kind of amazed at how long it was.

On that night of that summer fire, I took my hair down and started brushing it. Kit took the brush out of my hand and applied herself to my head, which had to be one of the ten best feelings on Earth. She loved brushing my hair and braiding it, and she was both gentle and no-nonsense. “Do you want it down?”

“Yeah.” It felt good on my back, which was bare from my bikini. We’d all been swimming in the hot day, and the sand under my butt was still warm. Dylan was shirtless, his T-shirt in a pile on the sand. He almost never let anyone else see him with it off—he even surfed with it on—but he trusted us not to stare at his scars too much. Cinder stretched out beside him, his paws muddy, eyes glinting.

Dylan fed the fire until it was snapping and bright orange, then hauled out the bag of stuff he’d brought down from the house kitchen, lining it all up in a tidy row in front of the long, thick tree branch we used for our couch.

“We have chocolate bars, marshmallows, graham crackers,” he said. “Also real food you have to eat first. Arancini, ham, and peaches.”

From the bag, he also brought out Mountain Dews, our favorite, and Kit squealed. “Mama hasn’t been letting me drink them.”

I pinched her thigh, which was thick and solid. “She doesn’t want you fat.”

She slapped my hand away, hard. “I am not fat. I’m athletic.”

“Dude,” Dylan said in agreement, and held up his hand for a high five. “You’re perfect just the way you are.”

Kit met his palm with a sharp slap, tossed her head, and settled beside him. She was still skinned knees and grimy fingernails, a kid in every way, whereas I’d learned a lot about getting attention, which I loved, so I dressed for it and cleaned up for it. Nobody really paid much attention to Kit with her crazy hair and square body.

But I was jealous of the way she leaned on him. How easy they were with each other. Kit carried around a sense of quiet with her, and it spilled into Dylan in a way I could never match. You could almost see his red aura turning a soft blue the minute she came anywhere near him, as if she carried a magic spell that calmed him down.

His hair was back in a braid. “You want me to take your braid out and brush your hair?” I asked.

“Sure.”

Eagerly, I picked up the brush and squished through the sand to kneel behind him. Kit scowled at me—it was her thing to brush our hair.

I ignored her. Tugging the rubber band from his braid, I loosened it with my fingers. It was cool and soft and still a little damp in places. Running the brush through it felt good, watching it ripple under the bristles and straighten. It was all the way down to the middle of his back, where a particularly bad scar twisted over his spine. I touched it with the tips of my fingers. “What’s this one?”

“Right in the middle?” He sat with his arms looped around his knees. His hair skimmed his shoulder blades, fell forward in drifts toward his elbows. “That’s a scar from a sword I got in a duel with Long John Silver.”

I traced the wormy pink shape of it, end to end, for the first time realizing that something else had happened to him. “For real.”

He turned to look me in the eye, and there was a pain there I’d never seen. It was like a window had opened into a hell I never wanted to visit. “That’s as real as it gets, Grasshopper.”

My heart hurt like somebody had shoved a sword through it, and I put my palm on his face. “I wish I could kill them.”

“It wouldn’t do any good,” he rasped, but he pressed my hand into his face, and for the first time, I thought maybe there was somebody on the planet who knew what I knew, that a smiling face didn’t always mean well. Somebody hurt him, just like somebody hurt me.

I also knew the exact moment he would shatter if I didn’t shift the mood. I grabbed a fistful of his hair. “We’re twins,” I said, and tied my hair to a hank of his. We all laughed before the knot slipped out.

But something changed. He tossed me the T-shirt. “You’ll get cold.”

Vaguely I heard Kit say, “What about me? I’ll get cold too!” as I pulled the T-shirt on over my head, smelling Dylan-ness all around me, against my skin.