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Davina makes me breakfast as I pace. “He’ll find it,” she says. “I’ve never been so sure of anything, never.”
“Are your hunches always right?”
After her insistence on Sydney when I’m so sure about Paris, her intuition feels unreliable.
She hesitates. “Sure, I’m not infallible, you know.”
“When did you go wrong?”
I’m guessing it’s linked to running away, and she doesn’t want to tell me, so I know it was bad. It’s what bothers me about my own intuitive hits: that they’re nothing more than indigestion – not psychic, peptic – and that trusting them would be an act of folly.
“Since I’ve been here,” Davina is saying, “everything’s been fine, just fine.”
I press her again. “If this place is your refuge, what were you running away from?”
For a moment I think she’s going to tell me. Then she says, “Is that the phone?” just before it rings.
“Special delivery for Selkie Moon,” Alister says when I pick up.
“So quickly.” I try to keep breathing.
“I like to keep my promises.”
Except his promise to Genevieve.
“Where did you find it?” I whisper.
“Wait till we’re face to face. Be there in half an hour.”
“Alister. Is it...ruined?”
“You’ll see.”
When I open the door, I don’t know what the rush of elation is for – Alister or the dress. He stands there holding it, his blue eyes beaming out his own emotions. But he doesn’t move a muscle. The first move is mine to make. He’s a guy with a lot of self-control.
“I can’t believe you found it,” I gush, looking between him and the shiny bundle of fabric, trying not to snatch it.
“Can I come in?”
Davina’s in the shower, so I take him out onto the lanai. Now I know the dress is back, I’m savouring the moment when I can touch it. It’s always had the same effect on me. As precious as Gollum’s ring. Soon I’ll be pulling it on, no matter what state it’s in.
We sit on floor cushions facing each other.
“It was under a rock,” he says. “That cluster of boulders in the middle of the beach. Pushed deep into the sand, which is why we missed it when we were searching for you. But the police had dogs down there so I don’t know why they didn’t find it.”
I’m not really listening. He’s handed it over and my fingers are burrowing into the folds, while my mind is spinning through fragments of recollection. Something to do with a key. Was it in the pocket of the dress?
“It’s not damaged at all that I can see,” he’s saying. “Just smells of sea water. And not a lot of that.”
As I hold it to my nose, a sense of something wafts back. I remember peeling it off. Images strobe past, too fast to catch. Was that a candle flame?
I should be frustrated. This reunion might have come with answers, but just having the dress in my hands is enough.
At that moment, Davina emerges and I’m on my feet, racing past her into the bathroom. It takes only seconds to shimmy into the dress and step under the shower. I’m like a toddler who won’t let his sleeping rug go. Showering in it was the only way it was going to get washed.
When I rejoin them, Davina has made coffee. I’ve dried my legs, but the dress is still wet and glistening. Alister stares as I kneel down in a patch of morning sun.
“Just as well the paparazzi aren’t around,” he says. “You’d make all those fantasies real.”
His eyes are huge. It’s the look that told Genevieve he’d met someone, just before she slammed her door in his face.
Davina fetches a bathrobe and throws it over my shoulders. “In case one of those paparazzi is hiding in the bushes, you know.”
We giggle. Alister and I breathe out.
Davina’s got a question for him. “How many places did you look?”
“Just one. I went straight to that outcrop of rocks.”
“What made you start there?” she asks.
He looks at me. “A hunch. When Selkie asked me to look for it, I thought of those rocks.”
“You’d looked there before, had you?”
“Yes, but the police had already searched so I didn’t think of digging. And I was looking for evidence of Selkie herself. If I’d found her dress –” His voice catches.
“You might have thought she was dead.”
He nods.
“Good that you didn’t find it,” Davina says. “Or you and the boys might have given up hope.”
I sense that Davina wants to look at the dress – with her soul eyes – but the bathrobe was her idea, and the atmosphere between me and Alister is less charged since I covered up.
It’s time to talk about something else, which is never easy with Alister. Because he’s a competitor, we’ve vowed not to talk about our work. Other forbidden topics include paparazzi, Andrew, curses, psychic objects, sleeping rough. As usual, it’s quite a list.
Davina has some news of her own. She’s off to New York as soon as the last design is done. I feel suddenly bereft, as if everything I rely on is giving way.
Meanwhile, Alister’s offering her his apartment.
“I only offer it to friends,” he says when she declines. “And it’s better if it’s not vacant. You’d be doing me a favour.”
“Would I now?” She tilts her head and pleats her forehead. “Then I accept.”
***
It’s time for Alister to go. He offers to drive me to Makiki Heights, but I hastily say I’ll take the bus.
“Let me know when you’re leaving for Paris,” he whispers with his usual peck in my hair. “We’ll have a farewell drink.”
I nod. “I can’t thank you enough.”
“My pleasure.”
I watch him drive away.
Back in the living room, Davina inspects the dress. There’s a tiny tear in one of the seams, and she repairs it by hand since I won’t take it off.
“You won’t be wearing it day in and day out, you know.”
“Why not?” I’m only half joking. “It drip-dried pretty fast.”
“It’s just your reaction to losing it,” she says. “You can’t bear to be parted. But soon its effect on you will be the same whether you’re wearing it or not.”
“You’re the one who told me that I had to get it back.”
“For symbolic reasons. You needed to retrieve your mythical pelt, as a symbol of wholeness.”
Does that mean I disappeared because I took it off?
“And Alister needed a test,” she adds.
Here she goes again.
“The way he found it. In the right place, the first time he looked. He’s a treasure, that one.”
I tell her about Fleur and Deshi.
“That’s why he’s right for you,” she says.
“Because he’s already been hurt? So when I hurt him, he’ll survive?”
“No, you eejit. Not the way you mean anyway. That stepmam of yours filled your head with rubbish about yourself. No, Alister’s not afraid of strong emotions. He’s been to the bottom and hauled himself out.”
“His intensity reminds me of Andrew.”
“Because Andrew’s still in your orbit. That man’s shadow is blocking the doorway to the future. You can’t step through while parts of you are trapped in the past.”
I think of Rupert and shiver.
She’s not giving up on Sydney. Does she sense that I’m going to Paris? Now’s the time to tell her, but she’s keeping secrets from me too.
***
The large old-style condominium has harbour glimpses. It’s close to my office, and I tell myself the location’s a bonus as I stand on the brink of the next phase of my homelessness. After last night, my bruised body and spooked psyche are almost eager to curl up in a glass tank with a gecko.
Sylvie’s a widow whose husband turned their main bathroom into a reptile paradise. Now she continues his legacy by breeding house geckos. Glass tanks cover the floor and fill the bath, decorated with ferns, orchids, even a waterfall. In the bathroom it’s easier to manage the temperature and the humidity, she explains. And the noise.
“It can get a little loud at night,” she says.
No problem, that’s only when I’m trying to sleep.
“But their chirps and clicks are real cute. You’ll get so you can’t sleep without them.”
Maybe the antics on the dumpster lid won’t seem so bad by the end of the week.
Her bedroom has an ensuite so I don’t have to shower with the leaping lizards. And there’s more good news.
“Domingo from the pet store will be coming in every morning with their breakfast.” Live crickets. “Sweet boy, but his mommy wouldn’t let him stay here by himself. And I wanted someone like you in my apartment. You’re a little scaly yourself, aren’t you?”
“Oh, you saw that. I think mermaids might be amphibians, not reptiles.”
She laughs. “I did a background check on you of course. And your name rang a bell. But to tell the truth, you’re the only person who answered my ad.”
Sylvie doesn’t ask why I’m desperate enough to apply. She mentions the wild gecko that lives on the balcony and sometimes comes inside: “He’s harmless.” Then she shows me the traps in the kitchen to catch live cockroaches. “Open the bathroom door and toss them in any time. Or should I get Domingo to do it?”
It’s going to be a long week.
There’s still one more night of horror to endure on my office floor. This time the punching and banging and shouting and swearing make me curl up in the foetal position. Is someone being murdered? The flashing lights from the bar are flooded out by emergency vehicles.
When everything finally flips to an eerie silence, I drop off and dream.
I’m running a seminar in a private house. Not my house. I’m in the living room, reading aloud from my notes, but each participant is in one of the many bedrooms, unable to hear me even when I shout. They keep calling out that they’re not getting their money’s worth, but when they finally start moving to the living room, a gatecrasher races through chased by two giant geckos. They’re as big as lions and move with the same loping gait, their mouths gaping and their teeth dripping with saliva. The participants are screaming and scattering, and I’m presenting the seminar to an empty room.
***
When I move into Sylvie’s it’s so wonderful to climb into her big bed, I cry. The steady quacking from the bathroom will take some getting used to, but I remind myself it’s soporific.
As I’m dozing off, expecting sweet dreams, a sudden crack and a loud pitter-patter wakes me with a jolt. The garden gecko is attacking a cockroach on the wall just above my head. The noise of it being bashed to death is so graphic and so close that I escape to the sofa, where I spend every night for the rest of the week. My graduation to professional couch-surfer is complete.
I book my flight and prepare to travel, trying not to think about the night between Sylvie’s return and my departure. In spite of the nocturnal mayhem in her condo, the floor of my office isn’t any more inviting, and there’s always the danger of Derek finding out. I don’t know how long Rupert is staying – surely no-one could have him for more than a week – so the boys’ spare room may still be an option.
When Derek comes in early on Monday looking wall-eyed and sleep-deprived himself, I break the news about my travel plans.
“Paris,” he says, yawning. “Has it got anything to do with a missing sailor, a silver spoon and a ruined lipstick?”
“Nothing to do with Gaston,” I say, “but the spoon and the lipstick played their part. And my dream.” I give him an outline of the man with the bucket. “The buildings looked French and the sign said Paris. Andrew promised to take me there for my thirtieth birthday, then I crossed him on some trifle. I don’t remember what it was, but I refused to apologise. No apology, no Paris.”
“Textbook troglodyte.”
“Yeah. I found the strength to stand up to him, but it never occurred to me to go to Paris anyway. With this seminar offer, I’m getting the airfare as part of the package.”
“Perfect.” He’s not yawning now. “When do we leave?”
What would I do without Derek?
I worry that he’ll be abandoning Nigel to Rupert, but he says the man who can’t stop talking will be gone by then, to another cousin, this one in California.
Derek stirs up my excitement. We’re going to France. He thinks he can line up a writing gig with Lonely Planet, their new Loire Valley guide, and he happens to have a friend we can stay with somewhere along the famous river. More spare rooms – but it’s the region where Séminaires Tours is located.
I look at the calendar. By the time we return, Myrna will be almost ready to vacate my bed at Wanda’s and my quest to return home will be done.