This time I don’t go up top but sit down inside and watch the city center recede. Businesspeople read newspapers, which bemuses me. It’s such an ordinary thing to do on such a breathtakingly gorgeous ride. A gaggle of teenagers talks too loudly. Tourists from every continent on Earth crowd the seats.
All I can think is, Josie, Josie, Josie.
I’m too riled up to do much of anything. My phone map shows me that the address I found is only a few blocks down the sea walk, but I’m buzzing with the kind of emotion that will do no good if I confront her.
To get a handle on myself, I walk up the main village street toward a path that leads to a volcano, trying to get enough oxygen into my system that I can stop hyperventilating. The walk works up a sweat, and the air is heavy and humid from the storm the day before, and within a block I’m feeling so overheated in my jeans that I have to stand still in the shade for a few minutes and let people pass me. I thought I could make the jeans work, but I’m going to faint of heat exhaustion.
Just ahead is a boutique with dresses hanging outside. Mostly they’re touristy T-shirts with New Zealand and Kiwi logos emblazoned across the front, but to my vast relief there are also a number of wrap skirts in soft cottons. Mindlessly, I grab one of the longer ones and hold it up to me, and it’s fine, hitting just at my knee. Taking it off the hanger, I test the wrap length, and it works too, so I gather three others in various chintzy prints and carry them into the store. “All of these, please,” I say, dropping them on the counter. “And . . . I guess I need some T-shirts.”
The woman behind the counter is a tiny English thing, with shoulders the width of a dragonfly, but she moves with a no-nonsense attitude. “Turn around,” she says, and measures a T-shirt against my shoulders. “You’ll want that rack over there.”
“All right.” I glance at the colors of the skirts—turquoise, red with yellow, yellow with blue, and a striped green and blue that’s really quite pretty. I toss through the shirts, find some that are acceptable, and add them to the stack.
“You’ll be wanting some jandals too,” she says.
“Jandals?”
She points to a wall filled with flip-flops.
“Yes.” I point to them. “Jandals,” I repeat. “Like sandals?”
“Japanese sandals.”
“Ah. Got it.” I select a pair, try them on, find the fit is fine. “Great.”
She rings me up. I pay with a card. “You can change over there if you like. But if I were you, I’d wear the medicine shirt. Everybody has the New Zealand ones.”
I smile. “Thanks.”
“Are you a doctor, then?”
“Yes. ER.”
“You’re not the one who saved that boy?”
For a moment, I’m so surprised I hardly know what to say. “Uh. The one who jumped off the pilings?”
“That’s him. They’re all talking about you, you know. Heroic to jump in and save him.”
I tuck my card back in my purse. “That was the ten years of lifeguard duties, not the ER,” I say. “Hope he’s doing all right.”
“Wouldn’t be your fault if he’s not. Lunatic.”
I head for the changing rooms. Peeling off the jeans is one of the best experiences of the day, and I tie the skirt with pleasure. The sandals are soft and squishy, the toe hold covered with synthetic velvet.
The whole normal interchange has calmed me. I take a deep breath, blow it out. In the mirror I look like someone else, with my wild hair tumbling down my back, and the high color of a lot of great sex and sunshine, and my bare legs.
Shoulders back, I wave at the woman and head out into the day, carrying a bag with the clothes in one hand and my city purse tossed crossways over my body. I’m fortified now. I can face her.
I cross the street and round a Moreton Bay fig that spreads arms out across a massive area. The trunk has many parts, making it look like a tree that would be populated by fairies. I can see my sister and me crouched on the beach, making tiny furniture for the fairies who lived around the cove, and stole sweets, and switched sugar for salt.
The thought makes my heart ache.
But there is only one reason I am here in this place at all. With the focus that saw me through twelve years of study, I shove away my emotions and look at my phone for directions. From here to my sister’s house is, by Google Maps estimation, a nine-minute walk, straight down the waterfront.
The houses must be the same era as the Victorians in San Francisco, and again I’m reminded of that city. Pedestrians stroll along the sidewalk, fit retirees in pastel golf shirts and white pants and mothers with children and—
I halt, sure that I’m imagining her. A woman walking toward me with my sister’s distinctive, un-self-conscious amble. She never walked fast enough for me, and it drove me insane.
She’s wearing a simple blue sundress and no hat even in this awful land of skin cancers, plus jandals like mine on her feet. A million memories tumble through my brain: sleeping on the beach in our little tent, that strange summer when Josie got so weird, the earthquake, the news of her death.
She’s alone, lost in thought, and I think she might have walked right by me, humming under her breath, until I reach out and touch her arm. “Josie.”
Josie turns, cries out, and covers her mouth, and for one long moment, we only stare at each other. Then she grabs me, hard, and hugs me, weeping. “Oh my God,” she whispers, her hand hard against my ear. I don’t realize until I feel her ribs moving against me that I’m hugging her just that tightly in return, tears running down my own face. She’s sobbing, her body shaking from shoulder to hips. I close my eyes and clutch her close, smelling her hair, her skin, the Josie-ness of her. I don’t know how long it goes on, but I can’t let her go, and I can feel her grip on me like a vise.
She’s alive. She’s alive. She’s alive.
“Oh my God, Josie.”
“I fucking missed you so much,” she whispers fiercely. “Like a kidney. Like my soul.”
I finally pull back. “Why did you—”
Josie looks over her shoulder, grabs my hand. “Listen. Call me Mari. My family is following me. They just stopped to buy something, and I wanted to get my steps.” Her grip tightens. “They don’t know anything. Give me a chance to explain to you—”
“Mom!”
The little girl is running down the sidewalk toward us. In wonder, I say, “She looks exactly like me.”
“Yeah. Follow my lead.”
And because I really don’t know what else to do, I turn with my sister, who says, “Sarah! I want you to meet someone!”
The girl doesn’t give me a toothy smile, just turns her face and looks up, waiting as Josie/Mari says, “This is my friend Kit, from my childhood. We were the very best of friends.”
“Like sisters,” I say, offering my hand, which feels like it should be shaking, to go along with the buzz in my ears.
“Hullo,” Sarah says, and I have no idea why it’s such a surprise that she has a Kiwi accent. “It’s nice to meet you.” Her gaze catches on my T-shirt. “Are you a doctor?”
“Yeah.” I touch the words. “I am. Emergency medicine. I think they call it something else here.”