When We Believed in Mermaids

by Barbara O'Neal

She’s an exact mix of our parents.

No, Josie was vaporized on a European train blown up by terrorists. Gone, gone, gone.

The hillside is unstable, with a reputation for being haunted, and all the locals know it. I have the descent to myself. But then, I know the ghosts.

I see the ghosts of all of us when we were happy—my parents madly in love, my sister bright and full of boundless energy, Dylan with his hair pulled back in a leather string, racing us down the stairs so we could build a fire on the beach and make s’mores and sing.

He said he didn’t want anything but Eden, and us, and the cove.

A million years ago.

My mother loved him to excess, far more than she loved us. His passion for her was intense, and sexual, and possessive, but is that love? I don’t know. I do know that it’s hard to be the children of parents who are obsessed with each other.

She had both my father’s enormous personality and my mother’s beauty, though in Josie, the combination became something extraordinary. Unique.

Instead, she made of her life a great ruinous drama, just like our parents, with a suitably catastrophic ending.

Resistance will break you. Kill you. The only way to survive is to let go. The world swirls, up and down, around, for endless moments.

She’s alive.

the wreck of what once was.

but she’s done the work. Every step of AA, over and over. She’s present and real and sad.

The sound of the ocean keeps her calm. It’s the thing we share, that hunger, bone-deep, for the ocean. Nothing else will do.

My heart literally aches, not metaphorically—a weight of memory and longing and anger press down hard on it until I have to pause, set down my fork, take a breath.

The breeze ruffles his hair, and I’m drawn, as always, into his vigorous, optimistic view of the world.

Some said he died of grief. Some of guilt.

The house might not be haunted, but I surely am.

Josie. Thinking of her in the times before she turned into the later version of herself, the aloof, promiscuous addict, makes me ache with longing. I miss my sister with every molecule of my being.

and we were mermaids with our mermaid mother.

She was the worst mother of all time. She was the best mother of all time.

The phone rang, and it was my mother, howling. I’d only ever heard that sound one other time, after the earthquake, and it is carved into my bones.

I wonder what would happen if the truth of my life came out. The thought of all I could lose sucks the air out of my lungs,

Josie Bianci is dead. I intend for her to stay that way.

Dylan loved Chinese calligraphy, practicing the characters for crisis and love and ocean that he found in a library book.

No tortured men. They always want saving, and given my childhood filled with broken people, it’s an impulse I have to constantly fight.

In some way, he filled my father’s desire for a son, and for a long time he doted on Dylan. Until he didn’t.

“No. My parents gave me an example I never want to emulate.”

In fact, I can’t bear to let people close enough for more than a five-minute relationship, never mind marriage.

We swayed and twirled under the wide, dark sky, our hearts bursting with love and wonder and things we barely knew existed.

Javier Velez has made my very, very short No Way in Hell list. Never. Nope. Nada.

What I won’t do is allow myself to have sex with a man who has the potential to genuinely stir my passions. Living through the war that was my parents’ marriage, then everything my sister ever did, including getting herself killed, taught me to steer clear of intense liaisons.

I do know. And it was the weirdest thing in the world to me, a lifelong, die-hard reader, but as soon as she was old enough to think for herself, she questioned things. If there were fairies in books, why couldn’t she see them in real life?

He’s teaching her to watch the sky, to read the wind and the waves. They are very close.

Kids know that life isn’t all sweetness and light. They know.

I think of Dylan, who seemed to come to us out of the sea and took himself back into it.

His eyes were the color of abalone shell, silver and blue and hints of violet, as if he’d been born in the sea.

A boy she took in and nurtured from that moment forward, as if he were a lost cat, with no explanation whatsoever.

Just a boy.

I think how small that phrase is. How true and unt...

One of the things I love about Hobo is that he is company at night, curling up against the crook of my knees or creeping onto my pillow to rest his face against my head, as if we are two cats. I ache for him at those moments, and I wonder where his mother went, what terrible things he endured before I brought him into my house and let him stay.

SOOOO CUTE OMG

Instead of rushing in with questions or comments, she waits for me to keep talking, a listening trick she learned at AA that would have made my childhood ten thousand times better.

Across the immense miles, I hear a blue jay cawing in my backyard in California. It reminds me acutely that I am a very, very long way from home with no one but myself to keep me company. The loneliness of being unmoored from my little patch of geography, without the cat and—okay, I admit it—the mother I am used to seeing every day is stinging.

How do you age a person who actually faked her own death and started fresh in a faraway land? Why did she do it? What has she done with the new life? How might she have spent the past decade and a half?

I’d missed her fiercely a hundred times in my life, but on those long, lonely days in Salinas after the earthquake, when she dived entirely into her dual addictions of surfing and getting high, I’d finally realized she was never really coming back to me.

Damn

Josie tumbled out of the truck looking like a creature from a Charles de Lint novel, an urban sprite or fairy walking amid the mortals.

Tears stung my eyes. By then I had my guard up with her, but within twenty seconds, she swept me into her realm.

“What would have happened to us without him?”

“Our parents were horrible, Kit. Why did they neglect us like that?”

“Why couldn’t we save Dylan?” When she turned that gaze on me, tears edged her lower lids, never quite spilling. “Don’t you miss him?”