Swimming at Night: A Novel (13 page)

The cheerful lady who ran the merry-go-round beamed when she saw them. “Ah, it’s the Sea Sisters!” They had earned this title because each year, after riding the merry-go-round, they’d play for hours in the sea while their mother sat on the shore with her book, drinking coffee from a polystyrene cup.

“What in heaven is this?” the lady said, pulling a small shell from behind Mia’s ear with a flourish. “And what have you got there?” she said to Katie, who glanced down at her red sundress to find a long white feather poking out of her pocket.

They chose two seahorses next to one another. Katie tucked her feet into the imaginary stirrups of the sapphire seahorse she’d picked, and shot up and down in a rising trot. Mia rode a sky-blue seahorse on the outside so she could feel the wind against her face as they spun.

“Girls,” their mother called, pointing her camera at them.

They stretched out their arms and linked hands, grinning, the glitter of sea caught in the background. The photo used to be pinned to Mia’s bedroom wall in Cornwall, but Katie hadn’t seen it in years. Written on the back, in Mia’s faded childish hand, were the words
“Sea Sisters.”

Now, with a trembling finger, she traced the rough edge of the picture. It had been torn in two: Katie’s image ripped from the photo and discarded.

How could you, Mia? Did you give up on us? Had we grown that far apart? Or did you rip me out after our last fight, hating me for what I’d said?
Questions circled like vultures, swooping down to claw through her grief. She shoved the torn photo into the journal and clapped it shut. Locating the aspirin, she swallowed two, then changed into a cotton dress, and left the hostel.

*   *   *

The anger was coiled tight and muscular in her stomach as she strode to Mick’s front door, the whitewashed walls dazzling her in the midday sunlight. She rang the bell and waited, exactly as Mia had done six months earlier.

When the door opened, she was prepared for Mick not to recognize her or to dismiss her with a weak apology. What she wasn’t prepared for was the way his whole face broke into a wide smile. “Katie!”

She remembered his voice. It was rich and deep and he let the second syllable of “Katie” float away from his lips, which made her name sound special. She searched his face for features she could recall from her childhood and found another memory in the roundness of his chin and the hazel of his eyes. He looked older than she would have imagined, the years etched in the
heavy lines across his forehead and the loss of shape to his lips, now just thin lines.

“You are so beautiful.” He smiled, shaking his head. “So like her.” For a moment she imagined he meant Mia and her anger softened as she wondered what he saw between them. Katie had given up wearing makeup since being abroad, and her hair was unstyled and hung loosely around her face. He reached a hand towards it: “Your mother’s color exactly.”

She flinched.

His hand dropped to his side.

Eventually she said, “Can I come in?”

“Yes, of course.” He stepped back, allowing her space as she passed, but his gaze followed her closely as she moved along the hallway, her sandals making hard clicks on the flagstoned floor.

In the kitchen a fresh bacon sandwich, half eaten, was cooling on a plate, the sweet meaty aroma filling the room. Katie positioned herself by the sink, with her arms folded over her chest. She felt the cool stainless steel through her dress.

Mick stood opposite. He was wearing a pair of beige khakis and a casual cotton shirt that had creased around his middle. It was hard to place him as the young man who had spun their mother across the red-tiled floor of their kitchen. “I was so sorry to hear about Mia’s death. It was tragic, desperately tragic,” he said emphatically. “I understand how difficult it must be for you—”

“You can’t possibly.”

“I just meant that having—”

“You didn’t come to her funeral.” She had been undecided about letting Mick know about Mia’s death. Their mother hadn’t wanted him to be told when she passed away, but Ed argued that this was different: Mia was his daughter. Katie eventually agreed and got
in contact with the last company Mick had owned who were able to provide a current number for him. She had called and left a brief message on an answering machine explaining what had happened. She didn’t know whether he’d get the message and wasn’t sure she cared.

“I am sorry, but it didn’t feel appropriate,” he said. “The flowers reached you?”

“Yes.” The morning of the funeral, an extravagant bunch of calla lilies arrived with a card. It was the first written word she had received from Mick in two decades. The card had said,
“Losing the two people you love most in the world is almost unbearable. My heart goes out to you.”
She had gotten rid of the flowers, snapping the thick stems in half so they’d fit in the plastic cylinder of her bin.

Her thoughts snagged on another flower sent in tribute: the single orchid that came with a card reading,
“Sorry.”
She still had no idea who it was from and found it an odd message, more apology than condolence. Ed had photographed the flower on his phone, saying he’d show it to his mother—an expert gardener—who might be able to identify it. Katie pulled her thoughts back to Mick. There were many things she needed to say and, walking here, she’d ordered them into key questions as she did when interviewing a candidate for her recruitment work, beginning by making the interviewee comfortable and then building up to the pertinent, revealing questions.

As she opened her mouth to begin, Mick said, “Let me make us both a drink. What would you like? Something cold?”

She wanted to say no, but her throat felt dry and papery. “Water.”

He fetched two glasses and a jug from the fridge and poured their drinks, sunlight catching in the stream of water. He handed her a glass, suggesting they take them onto the deck. She refused. The gesture was too similar to the one he’d made to Mia; instead,
she took a quick drink and then set the glass behind her on the draining board.

“I did wonder if I might hear from you sooner . . . after Mia’s visit.”

She wouldn’t admit that she had only learned about it yesterday, so she said nothing.

“I’m sorry if it was a shock.”

“I was shocked at how you treated her.” Katie’s anger was beginning to uncoil, hot and swift. She grasped it. “Mia traveled thousands of miles to see you. She deserved more of a welcome.”

“She took me completely by surprise.” His palms opened to the ceiling. “I didn’t even recognize her—”

“I heard.”

“I would have liked things to have been different—”

“I’m sure Mia would have, too.”

Mick nodded, his head lowered. She saw tiny beads of sweat clustered at his hairline.

She was rushing, tripping him up before he’d had a chance to speak. She must slow down and focus on what Mia had come to Maui to find out: who their father was. In order to do that, Katie needed a question answered for herself. “Mick,” she said, her voice softening a note to draw him into her question. “What happened to Mia the night you left us?”

His head tilted to one side, an eyebrow raised. “Your mother never told you?”

“No.”

“But you remember the evening?”

“I remember Mia had an accident. I remember you were looking after her.”

He patted his hands against the pockets of his pants, looking
for something—a cigarette, she guessed—and seemed agitated when he couldn’t find it. He moved to the glass dining table at the edge of the kitchen and pulled out a chair and sat heavily. He interlocked his hands and rested them on the table. When he spoke, he focused on the space between his arms, which made his head hang—a man already defeated. “You need to know what happened that night? How I could have left? How I could have stayed away all these years? I’ll tell you—it’s right that you should know. But first, you need to understand that it’s never as simple as one event, one person, one decision.”

She waited.

“I never wanted to be a father.” He looked up to gauge her reaction, but she gave none, so he continued. “I enjoyed my life too much to give it all up. When Grace got pregnant with you, I think she believed she could change me. Maybe I hoped she could, too.” He glanced beyond the French doors at the sound of a lawn mower firing up.

“The night of the accident, your mother and I had argued over Mia. I’d been away a lot—you know I was in music?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes I used my work as an excuse to get away. I didn’t spend enough time with you or Mia.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Particularly, Mia.”

It seemed an odd remark, but Katie linked her hands together and let him continue.

“Your mother had arranged for me to look after Mia—the two of you were off on a trip somewhere.”

“Ballet,” she said. “We went to the ballet.”

“That’s right. Your mother and I fought before she left, and Mia—God, she always seemed so sensitive to anything like
that—screamed from the moment the front door closed. Maybe you’ll think me ridiculous, but it was as if she knew, just knew, that I didn’t want to be there.” He picked up his glass and took a drink.

“What happened?”

“I couldn’t stop her crying. I tried holding her, giving her a bottle, reading to her. Nothing worked. I thought I’d leave her for a few minutes, see if she’d settle herself. So I got a whisky and took it down to the bottom of the garden. It was the only place I could hear myself think.”

She watched as he found a forgotten cigarette in his shirt pocket and lit it hastily, a tremor noticeable in his fingers. He drew in a breath and then moved to the French doors, opening them and exhaling outside.

“I will never know how she managed it—God, she was only two!—but Mia somehow got herself out of that cot. I hadn’t closed the back door and she found her way into the garden. I’m ashamed to admit, one glass of whisky had turned into more. I didn’t even notice her.” He shook his head. “At the old house, you might remember, you could walk alongside it out onto the street.”

Katie nodded.

“That’s what Mia did. I’ve no idea why. Maybe she was trying to follow the direction of your mother’s car. Who knows?”

Katie hadn’t heard any of this before. Her palms felt damp. She couldn’t shake her sisterly concern for Mia’s safety—even though the worst had already happened. She unlocked her hands and pressed them against her thighs.

“There was a motorcyclist, a guy who turned out to be the husband of your mother’s dentist—something like that. The police said he was going fast. He wouldn’t have seen her until the last moment. He swerved. Came off his bike. As the bike spun free it glanced off Mia.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, remembering her sister in the hospital bed, white gauze taped across the gash in her temple, which would later scar into a silver crescent.

“The police came to the house.” He put out the cigarette on the door frame and flicked the stub onto the deck, pushing it between a gap in two boards with his heel. “It was very sobering. I felt . . . well, it’s difficult to describe how you feel when you know that you’ve put a child’s life at risk. The guilt is immense.”

The smell of the cooked bacon had lost the fullness of flavor and gone sour, greasy. Katie’s stomach turned.

“The police took me to the hospital, but I couldn’t face going into Mia’s room. I watched from the corridor when you and your mother arrived.” He closed his eyes, as if drifting back to the memory. “You both pinned yourselves to Mia’s side, squeezing onto her bed. You held her hand the whole time.”

Katie remembered that now. There was a tiny needle going into the fine skin on the back of Mia’s hand. She’d had to hold her fingers very carefully so as not to knock it.

“When your mother came into the corridor to speak to me—even before she’d said a word—I knew it was over.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “She had been a generous wife to me; she’d forgiven so much in the past. I think, in time, she might even have forgiven the accident. What she couldn’t forgive, though, was that I didn’t go to Mia’s bedside. She said, and I will always remember this, ‘If it had been Katie in that hospital bed, you would have been with her.’ ”

From the doorway, Mick looked directly at her. “She was right.”

Katie brought a hand to her mouth, astonished. He had voiced a suspicion of favoritism that she’d harbored even as a child, sensing a lack of love in the blurred memories of how he had treated Mia. She remembered that he would let Katie sit with him to
watch cricket, while Mia was always kept at a distance. He would occasionally laugh with Katie if she judged his mood right, but Mia’s gurgles and smiles couldn’t draw any warmth. She recalled her mother, so protective of Mia, threading her arms around her and telling her how loved she was, as if there was some doubt.

“That’s a terrible thing to say.”

He ran the back of his hand along his forehead, wiping away the moisture. “Perhaps a better man would have overcome his jealousies. I was desperate to love you both equally, I truly was,” he implored. “But I could never get past the fact that Mia wasn’t mine.”

Her world slowed down to contain only his last words:
Mia wasn’t mine.

*   *   *

The blood drained from Katie’s face and her legs felt weak. She gripped the edges of the sink behind her. “I don’t under—” but she did understand. She saw it all clearly now. “You are not Mia’s father.”

The surprise was his, too. “I thought you knew?”

She shook her head.

“But you . . . you said Mia had told you about her visit?”

“I read it. Her journal. She wrote that she came here—you sent her away.”

His eyes widened. “She came back—it was a few days later.” He put both hands behind his neck. “Jesus! I can’t believe you didn’t know.” He paced onto the deck, then turned back towards the doorway as if unsure where to anchor himself. “When Mia came here the second time she was angry. She wanted answers. I either had to shut the door on her again, or give them to her.”

A wave of nausea swirled in Katie’s stomach. She spun to face
the sink and took slow breaths through her nose. Somewhere within the house the shrill ringing of a phone began. Neither of them moved. When the phone stopped she turned to face him. “Am I your daughter?”