When We Believed in Mermaids

by Barbara O'Neal

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

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

“A mermaid house.”

Was not expecting that...

You hated me, and I hated her, so—who exactly was there to mourn me, Kit?”

“Don’t you see, Kit, that I had to kill her? I had to start over.”

“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,”

Everything was falling apart.

His silvery aqua eyes glowed in the twilight.

He was like a fairy who’d stumbled into the wrong land.

He turned around and left the hallway, leaving me with a crystal-clear understanding that the only guy I wanted then or ever was Dylan. It had always been that way. It would always be that way.

Touching him and kissing him was a million times more charged than I’d ever expected. It was like we melted together, and I slid under his scarred, wrecked skin and into the blood that still flowed in his body. He swam into my blood, into my soul, and I became something else, someone else. He showed me, gently and slowly, what it should feel like when somebody who loved you touched you in just the right way. I learned to have an orgasm for the first time, and it blew the pieces of my body out into the stars, bringing starlight back when they settled into my flesh again.

One night. That one night. The end of everything.

and became the mother I wanted so badly when I was five and nine and sixteen—present and able to listen.

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

I think of his scars, so many of them, and the way he made up stories for each of them.

What I want is to go back in time and fix them all. Josie and Dylan and my mother.

“I fell asleep in the arms of a fairy tree. She probably erased my anger.”

Both my husband and my son vie for her attention, while Sarah simply worships, rapt, at her side.

He looks at her as if she’s the sun, as if she might command flowers to bloom and birds to sing.

May this love find me!

says my polite little girl.

I'm undone

It pierces me, how much my daughter has wanted an ally, a person to look up to. Someone like her.

I can’t bear even one more teaspoon of emotion.

I allow myself to fall into the flow of it, allow it to carry me away into a world that’s more bearable than the one where I’ve caused my sister’s life to come tumbling down around her, where I might well have deprived two children of a family that was, until my arrival, perfectly whole.

Love does not need time.”

With moonlight and sea wrapping me in the same light as childhood, I remember another side of her, the one who so tenderly took Dylan in, who gave that lost boy a home.

“He looks at you like you created the earth and heavens all by yourself.”

“Because we both loved him like he hung the moon.” “And all the stars.”

“He really was like some creature from a fairy tale, cursed and blessed in equal measures.”

“I’m so sad. I’m as sad as I’ve ever been in my whole life, and I really don’t want to get up and go tell them that you’re dead because then it will be real and I will never, ever see you again.”

I bent over and tried to breathe against the pure, searing pain that washed through me, as violent as a riptide sucking me under. I didn’t know how I could live with a pain like that, which made me think of how many things he’d lived through, and I sat up. Swallowed.

The human body is a delicate, amazing creation. It takes almost nothing to completely destroy it, and yet it takes a lot.

I don’t know how to reconcile those two versions of him.

Maybe I don’t have to choose between Dylan as a villain and Dylan as my beloved hero. Maybe he was both. Maybe Josie was—is—both too. Heroine and villain. Maybe we all are.

“We abandoned you,” my mother says. “All of us, in one way or another. Me and Josie and Dylan and your dad.”

Simon chimes in, “You’re not alone anymore. We are all your family, and you can count on us.”

We’ve got you.

“What does mi sirenita mean?” “My little mermaid,” he says, smiling. “And gatita?” “Kitten,” he says, as if it’s obvious. The beach is empty of my ghosts, but I feel Dylan with me, laughing gently. “Those were Dylan’s names for me.”

Sooooooo sweet

“I know. Because we are twin souls, you and I.” “Alma gemela,” I say. “Can you have more than one?” “Of course! My friend who killed himself, he was one of mine. Your sister is one for you, and your niece.” He chuckles. “Yeah. Sarah for sure.”

I am alive. I am human. I am loved.