When We Believed in Mermaids(50)

But the actual sex hurt. A lot. I pretended it didn’t, but it wasn’t easy, and he took some time making it work. Finally it did, and I pretended to like it, but I didn’t. At all. There was a lot of blood after, which I hid from him.

We fell asleep on the beach, drunk and high and also sated, wrapped up together like puppies.

One night. That one night.

The end of everything.





Chapter Twenty-Six

Kit

When I get off the ferry after meeting Mari, I stop for ice cream and sit on a bench to watch people streaming past. Ice cream is a weakness, the creamy sweetness, the cold, the depth of satisfaction. As a child, I would eat as much ice cream as my parents would let me have—giant bowls of it, triple-decker cones in three flavors. Today I’ve chosen vanilla bean and a local favorite called hokeypokey with chips of honeycomb toffee that is so good I find myself wishing I’d ordered both scoops in that flavor.

With adulthood comes discipline, however, so I give the ice cream my full attention, aware that I’m using food to soothe my aching heart and not caring a bit. Sugar and cream ease my nerves, and the flow of humanity passing by reminds me that my problems, however big they might seem at the moment, are dew in an ocean.

But damn, I feel unmoored.

After Josie “died,” my mom got serious about getting sober. She detoxed in a thirty-day residential program, then dedicated herself to AA, going to meetings every day, sometimes twice or three times. She worked the steps, found a sponsor, and became the mother I wanted so badly when I was five and nine and sixteen—present and able to listen.

Most of all, she put me first in her life.

In the beginning, it freaked me out. I didn’t know how to handle the change. How to talk to her when all she cared about was sobriety and her daughter. I didn’t have time for it, honestly. It was the end of my fellowship, and I had a lot of writing to do in addition to the responsibilities of the work—and even that was okay. She let me know she was available if I needed her. She patiently called once a week or once every other week, and even though I nearly always let it go to voice mail, she left upbeat messages, a little story about something at work or on her long daily walks. For the first time in my entire life, she didn’t have a man, and she didn’t want one, and without the constant struggle of men and booze, she had a lot more time. She threw herself into houseplants, which cracked me up—it seemed such a funny thing for the least nurturing person I knew—but when I saw her orchids, I stopped laughing.

After a while, I started taking her calls. I moved back to Santa Cruz and took a position at an ER there. After a couple of years, I bought my house. A couple of years later, I realized my mom’s sobriety was going to stick and I could trust this new version of her, and although I have never really been able to fully warm up, as is often true of the children of alcoholics after so many years of neglect, I did buy her a condo on the beach so she could hear the ocean at night.

Taking a small bite of ice cream, I think I should call her. It’s evening there. I could get an update on Hobo.

But what will I say about Josie?

I walk back up the hill to my apartment, and it occurs to me that I can probably make arrangements to go home now. I’ve found my sister. I’ll hang out with the kids tonight, maybe take an extra day or two to surf. Hang out once or twice more with Javier. I still haven’t heard him sing again.

A pang cuts through my chest, but I brush it off. We’ve had a good time. Of course I’ll miss him. We can stay in touch through email, and in a few weeks, we’ll forget the urgency of now.

You are falling a little with me, he’d said.

I test the emotion. Am I?

Maybe. Or maybe I’m stirred up by everything that’s happening. The search, the place, the fact that we’ve been having really, really satisfying sex. Beyond satisfying. Fantastic. Thinking about it makes me wish for his solid, naked body right now.

Not love, though. It’s not an emotion I can trust.

The luxe marble hallways of the high-rise are empty this time of day, midafternoon, when all the residents are working and tourists are out sightseeing. I suddenly do not want to go up to my room and stare at the water again. Instead, I turn around and cross the street to a park that climbs a steep hill, a path weaving in long zigzags toward the top.

I pause at the foot of it and loop the strap of my purse over my body; then I climb the first part of the hill. It’s a dense green landscape, dappled sunlight and shadows covering thick green grass. The lushness makes me realize how dry it’s been in California.

As I follow the asphalt path upward, it’s the trees that steal my attention. Giant, old trees, Moreton Bay figs with their improbable span, their very long arms stretching out over the landscape in a most human way. I slow to touch one, running my hand over the bark, and follow it toward the trunk, which is as wide as a small car and full of nooks and crannies. I step over the roots and into a hollow made by the bark, and it’s big enough to live in. I’m sure people did, once upon a time.

As if the trees have cast a spell over me, I find my turmoil calming down, sliding away. I wander through the trees, admiring the shapes the roots and branches make—here is a fairy stretched out, sleeping in the grass, her hair falling all around her; there is a small child, peeking out of the branches.

Around me are students from the nearby university, walking in pairs or singly trudging up the hill with a heavy backpack. A group of young men has strung a thin strap between two tree trunks, and they are attempting to walk it, and the more advanced do tricks. One spies my fascination and invites me to try. I smile and shake my head, wander on.

At last, I come to rest on the cupped curve of a tree trunk, which has clearly been worn smooth by other bottoms over time. It cradles me perfectly, and as I lean back and stretch my legs in front of me, I feel all the sorrow and anger and dismay drain right out of me. It almost feels as if the tree is vibrating very subtly against my body, nourishing and aligning me. I take a breath, look up to the canopy of leaves, and a breeze rustles them softly, touches my face.

It’s like being in the ocean, waiting for a wave. Sometimes I don’t even care about the wave. It’s just so quiet to be out there, in the middle of this ancient body, part of it and not part of it.

That’s how I feel now. Part of the tree, the park, the city that has captured my imagination in such a short time. It gives me the space to think, What do I want?

What do I want from my sister? What did I think I would find?

I don’t even know anymore. I don’t know what I expected.

From the ground, I pick up a twig and turn it round and round, and my mind is full of images. Josie bringing me chicken soup when I had the flu and sitting with me, reading aloud from a book of mermaid stories. Josie dancing wildly on the patio overlooking the sea while adults watched approvingly . . . Josie intervening, as savage as a bobcat, when a guy at our school tried to trap me in a corner and feel me up. She slugged him so hard that he sported a bruise for weeks, and Josie herself was suspended. The guy never bothered me again.

And more—Dylan reading to us when we were small and braiding my hair and waiting at the bus stop with us, and Dylan that last summer, his addiction wearing on him, making a scarecrow of him. I think of his scars, so many of them, and the way he made up stories for each of them.

I think finally of the way the house and restaurant looked after the earthquake, spilled down the side of the cliff like a tipped-over toy box, and my mother screaming, screaming, inconsolable.

Closing my eyes, I rest against the tree. What I want is to go back in time and fix them all. Josie and Dylan and my mother.

I don’t want to ruin Mari’s life. I’ll go tonight to dinner, enjoy the children, and then leave her to it. I don’t know how to work out the business with my mother, who will want to be a grandmother desperately. I feel in my gut how much she’ll want that, and clearly I’m never going to give it to her. My mother. She’s suffered too. Why haven’t I ever told her that I’m proud of her, that I know how hard it was for her to change her life? She’s . . . remarkable, really. Why am I still holding myself aloof from the one person who has shown me that she’ll be in my corner no matter what?

The recognition washes through me like a soft wave. She’s in my corner.

The next wave brings the recognition that I don’t have to sort out all my feelings right now. There’s time. I’ll be kind to Mari and her family and keep the secret. I’ll also tell my mother the truth, and I’m going to let Mari/Josie know that too. They can work it out from there.

Eased, cradled by a mothering tree, I fall asleep in the middle of a park in the middle of a heavily populated city. At peace.



When I get home, I wash the red dress I’ve been wearing so often. With the jandals I picked up in Devonport, it’s passable. I consider braiding my hair, but thinking of Sarah and her wild mane, I leave it mostly free, only weaving the front part into braids to keep it out of my face on the ferry ride over.

I’d texted Javier earlier to ask if he’d come with me, and he solemnly agreed: It would be my honor. He answers the door with a phone to his ear and waves me inside with a mouthed Sorry and one finger held up. A minute.