When We Believed in Mermaids(47)

I cross my arms.

“Simon’s family has been in Auckland for a long time. They came with some of the first settlers, so he knows everyone and everything that’s happening, and they’ve been ‘dabbling’”—she puts the word in air quotes—“in real estate for a century. When the owner died, Simon snapped it up.”

“Because you love it.”

Simply, she turns to me and says, “Yes.”

I can only look at her for a moment, then look back up to the house. “I saw pictures of your family and you when I found out your name. He clearly adores you.”

“We have a good life, Kit. Much better than I deserve. But it’s real and true. We’ve built a world together. We have children, and now I’m going to make this house over for all of us.”

I look toward the sea, back to the right where a tall line of tree ferns make a scallop of the sky. “But it’s all built on a lie, right?”

She bows her head. Nods.

“I don’t know why you think that bringing me here would change how I feel right now!” The carefully contained emotions are restless beneath my skin, deep in my abdomen, there at the base of my skull. “You landed on your feet. Great! How does that change the fact that you faked your own death? You let us believe that you were dead!”

“I know, I—”

“No, you don’t know, Josie. We had a memorial service for you!”

“Oh, I bet that was very well attended! Did you hire homeless guys to come in and cry or something? Because the only people left when I supposedly died were you and Mom. You hated me, and I hated her, so—who exactly was there to mourn me, Kit?”

“I never hated you! You hated yourself.” I refuse to let the tears fall, but they’re thick in my throat. “And believe me, I mourned you!”

“Did you?” The words are skeptical. “Really? Even after I cleared out your entire apartment?”

“I was furious, but I didn’t hate you.”

“I tried calling you. You never picked up.”

Which has haunted me more than I want to admit. “I had to keep my distance, Josie, but that didn’t mean I hated you.”

And for the first time, I see the lost Josie I knew then. “I’m so sorry I did that.”

I shake my head. “I mourned you. I didn’t want to,” I admit. “But I did. We both did. For months and months after you died, I combed the internet for any possibility that you could have survived.” I shake my head, winded. “For years, I’d think I saw you in a crowd and . . .”

She closes her eyes, and I see that tears are gathered on her lashes again. “I’m so sorry.”

“That doesn’t really help all that much.”

She takes a step closer. “Don’t you see, Kit, that I had to kill her? I had to start over.”

We’re standing face-to-face, both of us with our arms crossed. I’m so much taller than she is now. I think of the things I think I know about her, about what happened to her, this tiny woman who once loomed as large as a dragon over my life. “How did you do it?”

“Let’s go inside. I’ll make tea.”



She shows me around as the kettle boils, and then we carry our mugs into the lounge, where she opens all the doors to the sea breeze. We face each other on a sofa, and she tucks her legs up under her. Something about the way the light comes in strikes her scar, an uneven zigzag through her eyebrow that healed poorly. “The doctor who stitched you up did a terrible job,” I say. “I could have done better first year.”

“I think it was because it was so long before it got attention.” She touches it, the old wound. “Everybody else was so much worse off.”

“Triage,” I say.

“That’s right. You’re an ER doctor.” She smiles. “By the way, did you save a kid’s life on Rangitoto?”

I blink. “What? How did you know about that?”

“Simon asked me. It was in all the news. Human interest story and all that.”

“It was me, but it wasn’t exactly a big deal.” She starts to interrupt, and I raise a hand to stall her. “Remember how kids always jumped off the cliffs? And how every year somebody would crack their head wide open? It was me standing right on the rocks where they go in and seeing that somebody knocked themselves out on the way down.” I shrug. “I was in the water before he was, I think.”

She laughs. “I love it. Still heroic.”

“Whatever.” I’m feeling a little faint or something and take a long gulp of tea. “Tell me the story.”

“Okay.” She takes a breath. “I was in France with some people. We’d been traveling all over, surfing. A lot of drugs.” She looks down into her cup, and I see the weight of it on her shoulders. “I was . . . bad.” She lifts a shoulder, meets my eyes. “You saw me. When I stole all your stuff. I’m so sorry about that.”

“Later.”

A nod. “So the plan was to go to Paris and then down to Nice. I didn’t have much at that point. A backpack and my board. That’s all most of us had. We caught the train in Le Havre. I went to find a bathroom, but the first one was filled, and I just kept going down to the next one. I was high, shockingly enough, and when I came out, I turned the wrong way, and I got all the way to the back of the train before I realized it.”

My stomach aches with the tale.

“The bomb blew when I was in the back. The cars were all derailed, and I was thrown out.” She’s frowning toward the past, over my left shoulder. “I don’t honestly know what happened right after, just that I woke up, and I was . . . okay.”

She stops. Looks at me with alarm.

“What?”

“I just realized that I’ve never told anyone this story. Ever.”

And because I loved her once, I reach out and touch her knee. “Just tell it.”

She closes her eyes. “It was awful. People were dead. They were screaming. There was all this smoke and sirens and . . . noise. Smells. I just wanted to find my friends, find my backpack—like, that’s all I could think about. My pack.”

She stops. Looks out to the ocean. Taps her fingers against her cup.

I’m quiet, letting her tell the story.

“The closer I got to where they should be, the worse it got. Like, not just dead people but . . . pieces. An arm. I saw an arm, and I threw up, but I just couldn’t stop. I don’t know why. I don’t know what I was thinking; I was just fixated on that pack.”

I nod. “Shock.”

“I guess.” She takes a breath. “My friend Amy had this ridiculous little-girl pack. It was pink with flowers, and she thought it was ironic, but it was just stupid.

“I found it and picked it up and kept looking for mine. But—” She stops. The silence stretches for thirty seconds, a minute. I don’t interrupt it, and eventually she says, “I found Amy. Her face and her chest were fine, but something fell on the rest of her. She was dead. I could see other bodies and a surfboard, and I just—I just grabbed her pack and started walking. I walked . . . away. I walked all the way into Paris. It took hours.”

Outside, a bird makes a robot noise. The sea crashes against rocks somewhere. Inside is still.

Josie looks up. “She had a New Zealand passport and three hundred dollars. I found a ride on a freighter and took off. Came here.”

My heart suddenly aches. “Damn, Josie. How did you get so bad?”

She lets go of a sad, short laugh. “A day at a time.”

I bow my head. “Why didn’t you let us know? I mean, you took off constantly.”

“When I was on the freighter, I detoxed. It was awful. I was sick as a dog for weeks, and when I was finally done, I had plenty of time to think. It takes a while for a freighter to go from Paris to New Zealand.” She presses her lips together. “I had to start completely fresh.”

I close my eyes. “You abandoned me.”

She knows I’m not talking about when she supposedly died. “I know. I’m so sorry.”

“Simon doesn’t know anything about this?”

“No.” Her lips pale faintly. “He would hate me.” She shifts gears suddenly. “You have to come get to know the kids, Kit. You’ll love Sarah. She’s just like you.”

My calm snaps. “What are you even talking about? We’re just going to forget everything and start over like nothing happened, like you didn’t break our hearts into a million pieces?”

“That would be my preference,” Mari says, and the words are calm. Clear.

It makes me wonder if I can just let it all go. Set down the burden, drain the boil, and stop punishing everyone, including myself.

Mari says, “Come to dinner tonight, get to know my family. See who I am now.”

“I don’t want to add to the lie.” But if I’m honest, I’m aching to spend time with my niece and nephew. I also feel uncharacteristically nervous, and my mind goes immediately to Javier. Despite my usual solitariness, I feel the need for someone in my corner. “Can I bring someone?”

“A boyfriend?”

“Not exactly.”

“Of course. Come at seven.” She swallows. “My life is in your hands, Kit. There is nothing I can do to stop you from telling the whole story if you so choose. Please don’t.”