51 pages • 1 hour read
Barbara O'NealWhen We Believed in Mermaids: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 15-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 15 Summary: “Kit”
Kit recalls a morning when she was seven. She and Dylan had spent the night on the beach. Josie was supposed to join them but hadn’t. Kit talks Dylan into showing her how to surf. When Josie joins them, she is devastated that Dylan taught Kit but not her and uncharacteristically cries until Dylan agrees to show her, too.
Kit prepares to surf at Piha. She thinks back on Dylan and recalls how much he smoked marijuana and drank around her and Josie. She thought at the time it was fun, but now sees it was inappropriate. As she surfs, Kit remembers what life had been like after the earthquake. Her mother rented a small apartment in a bad neighborhood in Salinas for them and worked at restaurants. Her mother was gone constantly, and Josie went out with her many boyfriends, so Kit spent a lot of time alone. She cooked and watched television until she could afford a computer and met friends over Prodigy, an online service that existed from 1984 to 2001. It was her Prodigy friends who convinced her to follow a path into medicine and helped her fill out college applications.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Mari”
Mari peruses some articles her friend sent about Veronica Parker, but the cyclone begins and her computer freezes. She goes into the kitchen to make chutney. As she does, she thinks about her parents and regrets that she can never share the good parts of her childhood with her children. Simon comes in and confesses some trouble he’s had at work and his concern that Mari has been hiding something from him. He worries she’s having an affair. Mari reassures him and suggests they watch a movie together with the children.
While everyone else sleeps that night, Mari recalls the summer the actor Billy Zondervan sexually assaulted her at the restaurant, close enough to the restaurant she could hear her mother’s laughter. Josie/Mari felt that she couldn’t tell anyone, though she suspected Dylan had guessed. As a mother, she questions how her mother could have allowed such a thing to happen. She can’t imagine allowing Sarah to be that vulnerable. She knows that event is the heart of the addiction she developed and doesn’t regret taking control of her life and changing it.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Kit”
Javier visits Kit during the storm, and they become intimate again. Afterward, they lie in bed and talk. Kit tells Javier how close she was to her sister but expresses a fear of commitment based on passion because she saw how passion destroyed her parents. Javier, however, claims that their relationship is more than a holiday fling. Kit confesses she was in love once at 17 with a boy named James. Later, they go swimming and Javier tells Kit about his home in Spain.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Mari”
As Mari inventories the items in Sapphire House’s pantry, she thinks about three items she was able to salvage from the destruction of Eden and her childhood home after the earthquake: a ring, a guitar pick, and a t-shirt. These items, the latter two that belonged to Dylan, always make her think of a bonfire she, Dylan, and Kit had one night. She remembers feeling jealous of the easy way Dylan and Kit had with each other. She asked Dylan about one of his many scars that night, and he gave her a playful lie. After Kit fell asleep, Dylan offered to tell her the truth about the scar if she told him a secret. He asked if one of the guests at the restaurant had hurt her. She nodded her head but wouldn’t give more information. When Josie/Mari began to struggle breathing because of anxiety, Dylan offered her his marijuana. He told her she was having a panic attack, and the marijuana would help. He also told her that his scars were from abuse. Mari looks back on it through adult eyes and wonders why Dylan hadn’t told her parents the truth.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Kit”
After Javier leaves the next morning, Kit calls her mother. They talk about Hobo for a few minutes, and then the subject of Dylan comes up. Kit asks what happened to him before he came to live with them, but her mother doesn’t know. Her mother expresses regret for not doing more for Dylan. When Kit ends the call with her mother, she calls around to a few surf shops. She finds one shop where the clerk recognizes her description of Josie and tells her that it sounds like Mari Edwards. He tells her that Mari is a local who is married to the owner of a group of gyms, Simon Edwards. Kit looks Mari Edwards up on the internet and immediately discovers several pictures of Josie with a good-looking man and two children. Kit is angry that Josie has an entire life she never told anyone about, and that in developing her backstory, she took a fantasy she and Kit had as kids. They saw a television show about a town in Canada, Tofino, and made up an entire family from Tofino who had a perfect life.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Mari”
Mari recalls the first time she walked in on her father with one of his many lovers, recalling how concerned the woman—a host at the restaurant—was about losing her job should Josie/Mari tell her mother what she saw. That was the day she lost respect for her father. Mari wonders if Kit knew about their father’s behavior, but thinks Kit was too interested in her studies and surfing to see it. She recalls how Kit and Dylan were always surfing together, how Kit was so much better at it than Josie. She recalls how desperately she wanted out of that house back then.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Kit”
Kit goes to Devonport where Mari lives, and as she walks up the sidewalk, she spots Mari coming toward her. She calls out and they embrace. Mari tells Kit that her family is close behind her and begs her to call her Mari and not to say anything about their relationship. Kit meets Sarah and is overwhelmed by how much Sarah looks like her. Sarah is impressed that Kit is a doctor and tells her about her experiments at home. Mari introduces Kit to Simon as a childhood friend, and when she introduces her son, Leo, Kit is surprised that Mari named her son after their father. Simon invites Kit to join them for dinner, but Kit claims to have plans. She exchanges numbers with Mari and leaves.
On the ferry back to her apartment, Kit thinks about Mari’s choice to name her son after their father. It is strange to her because Josie/Mari and their father were constantly fighting. She recalls a time when their father hit Josie/Mari. A few days later, Dylan found out about the fight, and he attacked their father. They fought, and their father kicked Dylan out of the house. Josie tried to leave with him, but he refused to allow it. Dylan disappeared for several days, and then they were notified that he’d been in an accident.
Chapters 15-21 Analysis
Throughout the novel, O’Neal shows Kit resisting connections with people in comparison to Mari’s close connections with her new family under the façade of her new identity. She plays on this idea in this set of chapters as she shows flashbacks from both Kit and Josie/Mari’s point of view. Mari recalls being jealous of Dylan and Kit’s connection because they were very close, and their relationship was easy. Mari doesn’t feel that her connection to Dylan was as close or as easy. Despite Mari’s jealousy of Kit’s relationship with Dylan, both girls suffer from The Fear of Emotional Connection with Dylan’s death. Kit’s loss of Dylan along with other failed or lost relationships has jaded her approach to human connection, and Mari hides behind an alternate identity to avoid true connection.
Perspective is important in this novel because Kit and Josie/Mari saw the same event differently, resulting in different memories of their childhood. Kit recalls Dylan teaching her to surf as a fun, happy moment, but Josie/Mari recalls it as a traumatic event because it came on the heels of her first sexual assault. The fact that Dylan was the only person Josie/Mari told about the assault gives surfing a new meaning for Josie/Mari, creating a direct connection between her trauma and surfing. Meanwhile for Kit, surfing represents some of the positive aspects of her childhood.
Perspective also comes into play when Mari looks back on her confession to Dylan and his choice to not tell anyone. She wonders as an adult why he didn’t attempt to help her by reporting her situation to an adult, but as a child, she would have been mortified if he had broken her confidence. Kit looks back on Dylan with a more adult perspective as well, recognizing that his choice to use drugs and alcohol around her and Josie was a poor choice on Dylan’s part, but at the time, she thought it was fun. Mari does connect her sexual assault to her later drug use, yet she does appear to understand that Dylan helped her with the only tools he had at the time.
Infidelity becomes a minor thread throughout the novel when Simon first accuses Mari of it, and then Mari recalls catching her father in acts of infidelity. This theme suggests again how Kit and Mari were taught as children not to trust the adults around them, feeding into the themes of both The Lasting Effects of Childhood Trauma and The Fear of Emotional Connection. At the same time, however, Mari does have good memories of her father, and this presents a dilemma in which Mari must weigh the good and the bad of her father’s behavior. This parallels Mari’s struggle to reconcile her anger with her mother for years of neglect with her understanding that her mother was caught up in the same trap of addiction Mari herself struggled with. Mari also has good memories of her mother.
Kit and Mari’s reunion is a climax of the search Kit has conducted since arriving in New Zealand. It is meeting Sarah, however, that has the largest impact on Kit, and their similarities foreshadow Mari’s inability to hide the truth from her family for much longer. This moment is like the murder of Veronica in that it appears to be an ending but is actually a beginning that will take these characters on a journey of discovery with an unpredictable conclusion.
