CHAPTER

5

It’s my mermaid.

She has a normal human body covered in torn jeans and black stomping boots and a slouchy black T-shirt with some band name on it. Her hair is black too, and her makeup is… well, it’s amazing. Light purple lips and darker purple eyeshadow that somehow all works together to look totally subtle and perfect. On top of all that, she has a bunch of tattoos. Familiar ones. Ones I know I’ve seen before. A million suns. Flowers. Stars.

“Hi,” she says.

Her voice is familiar too. Velvety and soft.

“I asked you to wait outside,” Kate says.

“I did.”

“You’re not.”

“Katie,” Dave says.

I think he motions toward me. I think Kate grabs my hand. I think a lot of things, but I’m not sure about any of them, because there’s a mermaid in my room. And this time, I’m pretty positive I’m not dead.

“Sunny,” Kate says. “This is Lena. She’s… she’s—”

“My mermaid,” I say out loud.

Lena lifts her dark eyebrows and smiles. “I’ve always wanted to be a mermaid.”

“Well, yeah. Who wouldn’t?” I say.

Lena smiles at that, but I don’t smile back.

“Are you okay?” Kate asks me, glancing at my monitor.

Okay seems like a silly word right now, so I don’t answer.

“Lena called me about a month ago,” Kate says. “It had been a long time since I’d heard from her. Years. The last number I had for her was disconnected every time I tried.”

“When did you try calling her?” I ask.

Kate winces. “A few times, after you got sick.”

The mermaid… or whoever… doesn’t say anything to that. She doesn’t even look down. She just stares right at me, totally still like a statue. I don’t think she’s even breathing.

“She wanted to see you,” Kate went on, “but you were so sick, baby. I couldn’t do that to you. Or her. I just couldn’t risk the stress on you and…”

Dave gets up and puts his hand on Kate’s shoulder. Tears run down her face, and I know I should hug her or something, but all I can hear is a month ago and called and Lena.

“I was trying to figure out how to handle it all when we found out you got a heart,” Kate says. “I called Lena when you went into surgery. I knew I had to.”

“I didn’t know you were sick.” Lena takes another step into the room. Her voice sounds so… real. “I never knew. I’m so sorry, Sunshine.”

Oh, Sunshine, I’m so sorry.

My dead-dream floats back to me. Lena, reaching out to touch my freckles, our matching jet-black hair. Matching eyes. Matching eyebrows. Matching mouths with the bottom lip just a little bigger than the top.

“I can go, Sunny,” Lena says. “If you’re uncomfortable at all, I can leave right now.”

I stare at her, still trying to piece together if this is all really happening. Whenever I think of Lena, looking at her picture night after night, she’s always just this story that never had an ending. A question mark instead of a period.

Lena and Kate used to be best friends. I know they grew up together in Mexico Beach, Florida. Kate brought me to Juniper Island after Lena gave me up.

I was in first grade when I started wondering why I was never allowed to call Kate Mom. I had foggy pictures in my head of a black-haired lady who used to sing a lot, but I could never really figure out if she was real or just some dream I had once. But I knew she wasn’t Kate and I knew Kate wasn’t my mom. Margot had a mom. All my friends had moms, but I didn’t. I just had a Kate, with her white-blond hair and blue eyes that looked nothing like mine.

One day I came home and asked Kate if I could call her Mom. I remember she set down the knife she was using to spread peanut butter over apple slices.

“No, Sunny, you can’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not your mom.”

“You are, though. You make me take baths and you bought me my favorite unicorn pajamas.”

She smiled at me, but her chin wobbled like she was trying not to cry. “That’s true.”

I scrunched up my brows, because nothing she was saying made sense. Moms took care of kids. Moms bought awesome and amazing pajamas. “Do I have one?”

“A mom? Of course you do. And a dad.”

“But he died.”

She ran her hand over my hair and nodded.

“But my mom didn’t?” I asked.

“No, sweetie. She didn’t. She was very sad, though, and she didn’t know how to get through it. She didn’t handle everything very well.”

“What everything?”

“Being sad. And trying to do the best job she could with you.”

“She didn’t do a good job?”

Kate sighed and handed me my plate of apples. Then she grabbed an old book off her bookshelf and we went onto the porch. She pulled me into her lap on the swing. It creaked as we swayed in the salty air, and the ocean whispered a soothing hush-hush just over the rocks, like a lullaby.

Kate opened the book and took out a picture of a pregnant lady with long dark hair and bright, light brown eyes. My mouth fell open as my fingers closed around the glossy photo.

“She looks like me,” I said.

“She does. That’s your mom and that’s you inside her stomach. Her name is Lena and she loves you so much.”

“If she loves me so much, where is she?” I ask.

“She couldn’t take care of you anymore.”

“Why not?”

“She’s sick.”

“Like with a cold?”

“Not that kind of sick,” Kate said. “She’s an alcoholic.”

“What’s that?”

“She drinks alcohol too much and it’s not good for her. It makes her do things she shouldn’t.”

“Like leaving me at the grocery store?” In that tiny moment, my six-year-old brain flashed to a dingy tile floor and a blue-vested cashier asking me where my parents were while I wailed.

“Oh, Sunny girl,” Kate said, kissing my hair.

“So she gave me to you?” I asked.

“Sort of. Yeah.”

“She left me?”

“She’ll be back for you. She loves you. She’s getting help and she’ll be back.”

Kate pressed her face into my black hair, her arms so tight around me it almost hurt. We sat there in the swing for a long time, watching the ocean swirl while I stared at the picture of Lena. She was so pretty. I wanted to know her, but I wanted Kate too. I ran my fingers over my mom’s face and thought about what would happen to Kate when my mom came back.

Well, I never had to find out. I waited, year after year, for my mom to get better and come back, but she never did. I stare at that picture every single night so I’d know her the second I saw her, but it never mattered. So I made up my own ending to the story. Like I said, I’ve always had a killer imagination, even before my heart flaked out on me, and about a year after Kate gave me the picture, I decided that Lena was a mermaid. That she had to leave me because we were too different and she was too mysterious and exotic for a human girl.

I never asked Kate about my mom again. I knew she wasn’t actually a mermaid, but I didn’t want to know who she really was either. Because whatever the answers were, they all ended up being about the same thing—my mom left me when I was four and I didn’t hear from her for eight whole years.

And now, here she is. After all that nothing. After the heart she gave me shriveled up and got yanked out and replaced with a new one. Suddenly, my question-mark mom is a big old exclamation point.

My brain gets that it’s her. My brain gets that she was sick too.

But my heart doesn’t.

At least, not this one.

Because she could’ve called. She could’ve written. She could’ve visited, even if she had to leave again. And she never did.

I want to ask her why. I want to know. And I don’t want to know. It’s weird, wanting something so bad for so long and not wanting it at the same time. It makes me feel dizzy, makes my breath come too fast and shaky.

I scrunch down in my bed and roll over so my back is to my mermaid, to everyone. It hurts, the incision on my chest fiery and sharp, but I don’t care. My fingers itch for a pen and paper, because, wow, do I have some thoughts that I need to get out of my head, thoughts that would probably make a great whiny song if I could get the words to rhyme the right way. My brain fills up with all sorts of words like remember and lost and left and I grab on to all of them, holding super-tight so I don’t start crying right in front of everyone. No way I want to do that.

No one says anything. Eventually, Kate kisses me on the forehead and gets up from the bed. Dave follows her, because Dave always follows her, and then she starts whispering to my mermaid.

I stick my fingers in my ears and push until it hurts, until all I can hear is my brand-new heart pushing blood around my body, just like a heart should.

You’re nothing like I remember.

Maybe that’s because

I don’t remember much.

It’s all blurry,

like we lived underwater

before you left,

and you’ve just now come up for air.

How did it feel,

when I turned my back today?

Did your heart get stuck in your throat?

Mine beat strong, mine beat sure.

It doesn’t know you anyway.