Mermaids of Glendale - a novel

Chapter 14

Home for Patrick O'Shene was a three-bedroom rancher in Somerset, off South Verdugo Road; the same house in which he and his wife Cassandra had spent their honeymoon years and later raised their children, Marina and Lorna. It was the home which Lorna now found herself parked in the driveway of, looking at the palm tree planted in the front yard, watching its fronds wave like pendulums in the evening breeze, counting back the years. Lorna exited her car, walked across the lawn and kneeled on the grass, placing her hand flat against the trunk of the palm tree. She remembered crashing her bicycle into the palm at age eight, breaking a toe and scarring the body of the tree -- the faint marks were still there from where a pedal had gouged into it.

“Lorna?” said her father. He was standing on the front porch. Lorna turned to face him, getting to her feet, letting time resume into the present.

“Hi, Dad,” said Lorna, walking across the lawn, up to the porch and into her father’s arms. “How are you?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” he replied. “Just fine. I’m glad you could make it over.”

“Is Marina here?”

“She’s in the backyard. Marina arrived about twenty minutes ago. She’s talking to Marjorie.”

Marjorie Kilroy.

Dame Kilroy.

Lorna thought back to the time shortly after her first transformation, when she had gone to visit her father at his pet store. Patrick had mentioned something about Marjorie. At the time, Lorna had thought it was because Lorna had told her dad that that was Dame Kilroy’s real first name. It hadn’t occurred to her then that Patrick had referred to her as Marjorie out of a sense of familiarity but it certainly occurred to her now.

“How long, Dad?” asked Lorna.

“A few months now, Lorna,” said Patrick.

“A few months?”

“Come on through the house, Lorna, please.”

Patrick opened the screened porch door and let Lorna lead the way into the house, past the living room with its memories of Christmas mornings and past the framed photographs in the hallway – another exercise in time travel, now with the four of them, and then the three, and then just the two when there was only Lorna and her Dad in the house; the time when Marina was is Mexico and Cassandra was in the wind.

The hallway opened into the kitchen. Memories here, too, of Lorna and Marina seated at the kitchen table in their teens. One evening in particular came to mind, when Lorna had her art supplies spread across the table, drawing dress designs for a school project while Marina talked on the phone and painted her fingernails. Mom had asked them to clear the table for dinner. Lorna and Marina had kept saying they’d do it in a minute, they’d do it in a minute.

That was the night Mom had collapsed to the floor, the night we knew that something was wrong with her, thought Lorna, remembering the spill of pasta sauce across the kitchen tiles.

The French doors off the kitchen were open and Lorna and her dad walked out onto the back patio. Marina was chatting with Dame Kilroy, who looked up at Lorna’s approach.

“Hello, Lorna,” said Dame Kilroy, standing up from the patio chair and taking a step forward. “So wonderful to see you, dear. How are you?”

Lorna knew she stood on a precipice, like a diving platform above uncertain waters.

“Hi, Dame Kilroy,” said Lorna. They kissed each other’s cheeks – Lorna giving in to Dame Kilroy’s exuberant European flair despite Marjorie originally being from Boise, Idaho. “I’m well, thank you.”