When We Believed in Mermaids(46)

“Mom too, actually.”

That causes a flicker. “Is that so.”

“Yep.”

She looks at me, really looks at me, my hair and face and body. “You’ve grown into a beauty, Kit.”

“Thanks.”

“I google you all the time. Stalk you on Mom’s Facebook.”

“You do?” It strikes me that she had this freedom, but I did not. While I was grieving her, searching crowds for her face, she was reading about me online. I look away, shaking my head.

She touches my arm, the inner flesh of my left arm, where my tattoo is. Quietly, she says, “You’re a doctor. And you have a cute cat.”

I relent. “His name is Hobo.”

She smiles, and right there, in that easy gesture, I see my lost sister—Josie, who read to me and cooked up schemes with me—and it nearly doubles me over.

“Hey,” she says softly, taking my arm. “Are you okay?”

“Not really. This is hard.”

“I know. It is. It’s hard for me, and I’ve known all along.” She gently turns me toward the parking lot. “I packed snacks. I thought I could take you to a place I like, so we can just talk. It might be awkward in a restaurant or something.”

I think of myself weeping and weeping and weeping on Javier’s shoulder. “That’s a good idea.”

She leads us to her car, a black SUV on the smaller end but luxurious. In the back seat are things that clearly belong to kids. I start to climb in on the right side, and then I see the wheel and round the car to the left. The passenger side.

“Sorry it’s a mess,” she says. “I’m starting a new project and it’s just—I never get everything done.”

“You were never exactly tidy.”

She lets go of a quick, bright burst of laughter. “That’s true. I drove you crazy.”

“You did.”

“Where the hell did that come from? It’s not like Mom was neat.” She starts the engine, and it hums into quiet life. A hybrid, which gives her points in my book. “Our destination is a little bit away but not terrible. Water?”

“Sure.”

She hands me a metal water bottle, very cold. “Sarah outlawed all plastic a while back.” In the words, I hear the hint of a New Zealand accent, the syllables slightly shortened. “Nothing plastic in the house at all.”

I’m quiet as we pull out, my emotions compressed and contained. It’s very hilly. We climb a steep one, go around and down another, up again to a village center that’s just as quaint as the others I’ve seen. “This is Howick,” she says. The streets fall away to the water, houses lined up all the way down.

“Pretty. The whole place is pretty.”

“It is. I love it. I feel like I can breathe here.”

“We can’t sleep unless we can hear the ocean.”

Her breath catches audibly, and she looks at me quickly, then back to the road. “Right.”

I imitate her accent. “‘R-iii-ght,” I sort of drawl. “You don’t sound American anymore.”

“Have I picked up the accent?” she says, exaggerating the pinch of the words.

“You have, a bit. Maybe you sound Australian, though I wouldn’t really know.”

“Have you traveled, Kit?”

“No,” I say, and for the first time I let myself be myself. “I haven’t, but since I got here, I’ve really wondered why.”

“You work a lot, I guess.”

“Yeah, I mean, but I have a ton of vacation time stacked up.” I look out the window to the sea that sparkles on the other side of a hill. “Seriously, look at this place. Why haven’t I ever seen it before?”

“So what do you do instead?”

“Surf.” I pause, trying to think of anything else. “Surf and work and hang out with Hobo.”

It sounds pathetic, so I’m doubly irritated when she says, “Not married, then?”

“Nope.” A gurgling heat bubbles in my gut, the lava going liquid as I think of my empty house and the little girl—my niece—who stood on the promenade and told me she has experiments. “How long have you been married?”

Her hands, slim and tanned, show white at the knuckles where she’s holding on. The ring on her finger is discreet but a beautiful stone—some kind of pale green. “Eleven years. We’ve been together thirteen. I met him surfing at Raglan.”

“Wait. Raglan—the Raglan?” It was one of the litany of places we all recited to each other, me and Josie and Dylan.

“The very one,” she answers, smiling. “It’s gorgeous. Not very far away. We could drive down there and surf another day if you want to.”

“Maybe.” The entire conversation is surreal. But normal. I mean, what do you say to someone you haven’t seen in so many years? Where do you begin? Surfing is one of our languages.

On cue, she asks, “Have you surfed since you’ve been here?”

“I went to Piha. Which is actually what made me think of calling surf shops, which is how I actually figured out where you were.”

“Smart.”

Silence settles, only the soft radio playing between us. She asks, “How did you know to look in Auckland?”

“I saw you on the news, when the nightclub fire killed those kids.”

She sighs. “I figured.” A pause. “Yeah, that was a terrible night. I was having dinner with a friend at the Britomart when it happened.”

“At the Italian place?”

She looks at me. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

“I went there. They said that you came in, but they didn’t know your name.”

“Good girls.”

A ripple of rage burns beneath the skin of my face at this brazen reinforcement of her long lie. “Mom saw you on the news too. She was the one who wanted me to come find you.”

“Hmm.” Her tone is unreadable.

“She’s different, Josie.”

“Mari.”

“Right. Because if things are not convenient, you can just leave them behind.”

She glances at me. “It wasn’t like that.”

I look out the window, wondering why I even bothered to come. Maybe I would have been happier never knowing she was alive. Again, tears—when I never, ever cry—threaten to well over. I mentally count backward from one hundred.

We turn off the main drag and start driving uphill under a thick canopy of local forest. Tree ferns with extravagant leaves and some kind of flowering shrub line the road, which is rutted and uneven. It ends in front of the house that was on the New Zealand television show.

“I saw this on the news. Why did you bring me here?”

She turns off the car and looks at me. “Because I need you to see the life I’ve built here.”

Stubbornly, I stay where I am. “Are you going to tell me the truth about what happened? Or are there just going to be more lies?”

“I swear, on all that I hold holy, that I will never tell you another lie as long as I live.”

I open the door and jump out. I’m not sure if I really want the entire truth. The prospect fills me with a sense of hollow anxiety. I look up toward the vivid blue sky and suddenly sense a host of half-known things lurking in gray darkness at the edges of my mind. My arms break out in gooseflesh, even though a soft breeze soughs over us as we walk toward the house. I rub my arms, trying to calm myself. “What is this place?”

“Sapphire House. It was built by a famous New Zealand actress from the thirties, Veronica Parker. She was murdered here.”

“That’s not creepy or anything.”

My sister, whose name feels strange on my tongue, stops before we get to the door and points back the way we came. In the distance is the ocean, in between a vast spread of the city. “At night, it sparkles all the way to the coastline.”

“Great. So you have a mansion and a family and nothing bad to bother you.”

“I deserve every single ounce of that. But can we do this part first? Please?”

I take a breath. Nod once.

She turns to the front door and unlocks it, and I follow her inside to the cool interior, which is just like the shots I saw on TV, only more amazing because of the scale. The foyer is round, opening to several rooms and a staircase that leads upward, and everything, everything is Art Deco. “Wow.”

“I know. C’mon.”

I follow her into a long room that faces the sea, a green sea tossing all the way to the horizon. A wide lawn spreads between the house and what is probably a cliff, and I’m drawn outside through the glass doors to the grass. A very soft wind rustles over my skin, lifts my hair. I capture it and look up to the back of the house, where balconies line the entire upper floor.

“Holy shit,” I say. “It’s gorgeous.”

“I’ve been flipping houses since 2004. I started down in Hamilton. When I met Simon, he lived in Auckland, and he convinced me to move up here with him. The market is insane here, as bad as or worse than the Bay Area, and I’ve done very well.”

“This is a flip?”

“Not exactly.” She tucks her hands in her back pockets. She’s as slim as ever, and just as flat-chested, and her hair suits her. “I’ve kind of been in love with the house and the story of it pretty much since I got here. We used to live over there a bit, and I could see it from our living room, shining up here on the hill. When the sun rises, it washes the whole thing pink, and it looks like a . . .” She pauses, looks at me, then back to the house. “A mermaid house.”