When We Believed in Mermaids

by Barbara O'Neal

My heart stings. It’s something we always said—the Bianci women need to be able to hear the ocean when they sleep. For a moment, I am unbearably sad that she will never know she even is a Bianci.

My heart freezes so hard I think it might shatter.

I find myself falling more and more in love, feeling as if Sapphire House might be the reason for everything. The children tear through the rooms, and it’s all I could ever want. I’m meant to be here. It was fated.

That ride, that single, easy ride on a tiny wave, made me a surfer.

I missed my real sister, the one who whispered with me, the one who used to be in my corner, but I couldn’t find a way to reach her. She had disappeared into another life, and I didn’t know how to follow her there.

You couldn’t keep Josie Bianci.

I sense my ghosts crowd around me as I slice each lemon and feijoa with precise care. My father leans on the counter, smoking, a bourbon in his hand. Dylan sits on the floor in tattered jeans, his hand in the dog’s fur. Somewhere is a baby, but sometimes I see her and sometimes I don’t. Maybe she found life when Sarah was born; I don’t know.

I miss him. I miss Kit. I miss Dylan. Sometimes I even miss my mother.

The perfection of now. Feeling even more terror, more fear, a sense of impending, inescapable doom.

“Just ghosts,” I say, the most truthful thing I can come up with.

Another lie stacked atop the others. So many of them.

What the heck did she do?!

And I want that little girl to tell her sister, to confess to Kit the awful thing that had happened. Kit would have killed him. Killed him.

I’ve never been particularly brave. Or good. Or wise. Or forgiving.

What did she think would happen if two little girls were left to wander through the forest of adults always filling the patio of Eden?

I’ve also transformed myself from a lost, drunken wanderer into a woman with purpose, a successful businessperson.

I escaped. Escaped the woman I became after Billy. I took myself back, made myself over, became a woman I am proud of.

I feel exactly torn in half—I want to find her, but that’s going to mean facing a lot that I’ve buried for a long time. Do I even want to find her, really?

and a ripple of warning moves through me. But there’s a built-in limit to this connection—we live on different continents and met on a third. That’s enough of a safeguard that I feel comfortable simply being myself.

and takes my free hand, opening the fingers that are slightly clenched. He smooths them flat, revealing the heart of my palm, and strokes the center lightly before he presses his against mine. It is somehow a thousand times more intimate than all the things we just did to each other. A hitch catches in my throat. “I think, mi sirenita, that there is more here than a fling.”

“We had our own little world, just the two of us—it was full of magic and beautiful things.”

Everyone loved her, but none of them loved her as much as I did.”

“Passion ruined my family’s lives. I make it a practice to avoid it.” “Love is not always destructive,” he says quietly, and slides a finger up my shin. “Sometimes love creates.”

“Tell me a time that love didn’t destroy what it first created.”

“See? Love found you.” “It broke my heart, though.” “Sure.” He lifts his shoulders. “Me too. But you don’t die. You just . . . begin again.”

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.

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.

I also knew the exact moment he would shatter if I didn’t shift the mood.

By then, he’d been with us for five or six years and was woven completely into our lives.

I turned my head, and his eyes were right there, pale and bright as moonlight, never eyes like a real person. “You have mermaid eyes.”

But I also loved him, so very, very much. He would have said his first loyalty was to his promise to me. In his own scarred way, he was trying to protect me. Dylan, Dylan, Dylan. So lost, so wrong, so misguided, but all three of the Bianci women tried to save him. None of us could.

“Or maybe,” she offers, “she was lost. Broken.”

With a visceral sense of loss, I remember how it felt as she slipped away from me, as if she had really become a mermaid and lived most of the time beneath the waves. It was the start of my great loneliness, and the memory is so painful even now that I have to shove it away. “She was so lost.”

“He was always a lost boy, our Dylan.

Josie—Mari—and her family look just like the one we made up. A sense of rage rockets through me. How did my loser sister, the druggie and alcoholic who stole everything I owned at a time I could barely feed myself, land on her feet like this? When I am— What? Alone. I am alone. With no family. No children. No husband.

If I start talking, it’s all going to spill out, the bad and the good, the ugly and the beautiful.

Josie tried to jump on the bike behind him, flinging her arms around his waist, and for one second, I hated her. She had caused this mess. She always made trouble everywhere, and now I would lose them both.

But for one second, I saw how alike they were, how lost. Dylan’s face bloomed with a bruise. Josie’s lip was still swollen. Each of them was so beautiful, like creatures from the sea, all limbs and fair hair and shining eyes.

and in his eyes were the stars that had fallen.

But it’s not about comparison, as my counselor used to say. My pain is my pain.

A lifesaver, I think, though she couldn’t save any of us.

let go. It’s a wordless, seemingly endless wave of emotion, and I’m helpless against it. It rolls out of me, unattached to any one thing but all the things, everything.

smelling their bodies like the perfume of happiness.

Again, I’m back at Eden, a child trying to hold the center of a dramatic and intense family.

“When I was little, she was the star of my life. I mean, the very middle of everything. My best friend, my sister, my—” I halt. “Your . . . ?” “My soul mate,” I finish, and a welter of tears swells in my eyes. I have to swallow hard to control them. “Like we’ve known each other always.”

“In Spanish, we say alma gemela. Soul twin.”

“it is time to stop thinking and feel.”

If I allow those feelings out, the spew will burn us all to pieces.

“Your quest is powerful. You needn’t apologize for the space it takes.”

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.

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