Keeper

by Kathi Appelt

  Still, she wished she’d checked the chart. Sometimes knowing how long you had to wait for something made the waiting easier.

  And Keeper knew about waiting.

  She jiggled her legs impatiently and felt the little carving in her pocket bump against her thigh.

  She hadn’t intended to bring Yemaya with her, but just as she was sneaking out of her room, she saw the little figurine, right there in a row with six others. Seven of them altogether. There was that lucky number again. Seven merlings. All of them given to her by Mr. Beauchamp.

  “I’ll bring you with me… for luck,” she’d said to them with her quietest voice. Then she scooped the six into a shoe box and put Yemaya, her favorite, in her pocket and slipped down the hall.

  Now Keeper felt BD lick her knees. “Enough with the stealth kisses, you,” she whispered. He thumped his tail against the bottom of the boat.

  BD had been only a roly-poly puppy when Meggie Marie left. Would he recognize her when he saw her? Keeper was counting on him to help find her.

  Meggie Marie.

  For seven years Keeper had waited for her mother. Often she had stood at the water’s edge and looked out, searched the tops of waves, scanned the horizon. But even though Keeper had waited for Meggie Marie, she had not needed her.

  After all, she had Signe. Signe with her spiky white hair and her practical ways and her ability to mend a seagull’s broken wing. But now, on this dark night, Signe was furious with her.

  Now Keeper needed Meggie Marie. Needing was stronger than waiting.

  “If we can’t find her…” Keeper let the sentence trail off into the damp air. Where was that moon?

  22

  Keeper and BD were not the only ones out in the deep dark night at that moment. Mr. Beauchamp and his one-eyed cat Sinbad were sitting on their porch, waiting for the moon to rise. The old man slumped in his rocking chair, his eyes closed in a troubled sleep. He and Sinbad had been waiting for this moon too, waiting for it to shine down on the night-blooming cyrus and urge their enormous blossoms to break open.

  Now the old man gasped for a breath as he slept. Sinbad rubbed against his master’s thin leg, pressed the side of his face against his bony shin.

  From where Sinbad sat, he heard the old man’s breath rattle in his chest. With each of the man’s raspy inhales and exhales, a deep lonesome inched its way just beneath the cat’s fur. He and Mr. Beauchamp had been together for such a long time, and now the cat knew that the old man didn’t have much longer.

  Sinbad blinked his one eye and hoisted himself onto the porch rail. He scanned the starry sky. Sometimes a blue moon, he knew, took her time. He raised a front paw and gave it a good lick. Then he looked out across the pond toward the spot where the small boat was tied up at the dock.

  Ahoy! What was this? From his perch, Sinbad could see the girl and the dog. Blow me down! thought the cat. What were the girl and the dog doing out this late? In the boat? Alone? Shouldn’t someone be with them? He looked around. There were no lights on in the other two houses.

  He looked out toward the pond again. The tide was coming in, lifting the boat higher against the dock. He hoped the rope held. Otherwise, as soon as the moon rose, the water would pull the boat and the dog and the girl with it, through the channel and straight out to sea.

  To sea? Sinbad had his own memories of seafaring, not all of them pleasant. He scratched the rail of the porch with his sharp claws. Maybe he should alert someone? Yes, that would be a good idea. The cat took a deep breath and prepared to let out a big meeooowww, when, from the corner of his one good eye, he saw a glimmer of light coming from the boat.

  Flick!

  What was that?

  Flick!

  There it was again. Had the girl struck a match?

  Flick!

  He blinked his eye.

  No. It couldn’t be. Not after all these years.

  Flick!

  But what else could it be? The glow was unmistakable. A porte-bonheur! It was hanging on a ribbon around her neck. Could it be the same one? Or was it another? Surely this was it. But how had the girl come to get such a lucky charm, for what else could it be?

  A porte-bonheur was extremely rare, and if this was the same one, it had been missing for a very long time. He slipped off the porch rail and curled up in Mr. Beauchamp’s lap. The worry in his belly loosened its grip a tiny bit. Maybe the girl could find… but no… it’d been too many years… it wasn’t possible… was it?… a dozen cat’s lives had passed since… still… it was a lucky charm… so maybe…

  Just maybe.

  He made a good-luck wish for the girl and the dog: Find the one who’s been missing. It was a good wish, as shiny as the cat’s good eye. Then he purred for the reluctant moon.

  23

  Just as Keeper let herself worry for just the slightest nanosecond about finding her mother, a better thought came to her. She had her lucky charm. And now that she thought about it, she also knew exactly why her mother had given it to her: So she will recognize me when she sees me!

  Exactly!

  And if the charm wasn’t lucky enough, Keeper had the seven carved figurines as backup.

  Mr. Beauchamp was an expert on the merrow, those watery creatures who are half fish or dolphin or seal and half human.

  “Find a body of water,” Mr. Beauchamp had told Keeper, “and you will likely find a merstory.” Keeper loved that. Merstory. The history of the merpeople.

  And Mr. Beauchamp was full of merstories, dozens of them, and he shared them all with Keeper.

  Mr. Beauchamp was not her real grandfather, but he might as well have been. He did all sorts of grand-fatherly things: told her stories, taught her how to play checkers, sang old sea chanteys to her. Things Keeper figured grandfathers did.

  And above all, he carved the merlings for her.

  As the boat rocked with the lifting tide, Keeper reached beneath the bench for the shoe box and lifted the lid. She had stuffed one of her old SHOP AT THE BUS T-shirts, a purple one, down in the bottom of the box so that her merlings would be cozy and warm. Even in the dark, she could tell them apart. Her fingers were familiar with each carving’s expression, each groove, each tiny scale.

  After all, she had found each of them before Mr. Beauchamp had carved them. It wasn’t something she learned. She just seemed to know. And why not? Shouldn’t a girl who was part mer herself know how to find the little mer spirits in the wood?

  She’d never forget the first one, a siren. She had been walking along the beach with Signe and BD, right at the water’s edge, when something bumped against her foot.

  “Yikes!” She jumped. She was afraid it was a crab.

  But when she looked down, she saw the thick chunk of gray wood. She nudged it with her toe. It was solid, scarred from its tumbles with the seashells and rocks that had likely traveled with it on its journey to this beach. BD sniffed it and barked. Toss it, toss it.

  BD loved to play fetch, and there was always plenty of driftwood for a quick game. But when she picked up this particular piece, she felt a buzz run through her fingertips. She moved it to her other hand. Yes. The wood was buzzing. She stared at it. It was heavier than most of the sticks and bits of lumber that usually washed ashore.

  “It’s got substance,” said Signe.

  Keeper looked at the wood again, then for some reason she couldn’t explain, she held it up to her ear. She caught her breath. It was humming.

  “A siren!” she said. Signe looked at her.

  “Keeper,” Signe said, “it’s just a piece of wood.”

  Keeper knew that Signe didn’t put much stock in merstories. Signe was all business. But Signe’s reasonableness didn’t matter to Keeper. She took the chunk of wood directly to Mr. Beauchamp, held it out to him, and said, “A siren.”

  The siren was the first merling that Mr. Beauchamp carved for her. After that, she found six others:

  1. Sedna, the goddess of the Arctic seas;

  2. the ningyo, all
the way from Japan;

  3. the Meerfrau, whose apron was always wet;

  4. Lorelei, who fell in love with stranded sailors;

  5. the rusalka, the trickster; and last of all:

  6. Yemaya… the big mama of all the waters—

  7. Seven in all with the singing siren.

  “Gifts,” Mr. Beauchamp had said. Keeper loved them completely, loved that they had found her on the beach, loved that she had found them in the wood, loved that Mr. Beauchamp uncovered each one with the strokes of his carving knife, loved that there were no two alike, loved that she was the only one in the whole wide world to have her very own tribe of merlings.

  She had spent hours and hours playing with them. She made sand villages for them, including castles and caves and even a mer-diner, where they could order up the itsy-bitsy clams that Keeper scooped out of the wet sand. At night she lined them up on the edge of the bathtub when she took a bath. She set them in a semicircle beside her plate at dinner. She took them with her everywhere, in her pockets, in her backpack, in a shoe box.

  And now here they were in The Scamper with her, Mr. Beauchamp’s gifts to her, which, if her plan worked, would now be her gifts to someone else.

  Just in case.

  “Double insurance” is what Signe would call it. Seven pieces of double insurance.

  Yep, her plan was a good one. Plus, to seal the deal, she had seven merlings. Seven gifts. For Yemaya. Big mama of the ocean. Of all the merpeople, Yemaya was the most important. The others were all unique in their own ways, but it was only Yemaya who had special powers.

  She wasn’t pretty like Lorelei, nor did she sing like the sirens, but Mr. Beauchamp had told Keeper, “If you give her a gift, she might grant a wish.”

  Between the charm and Yemaya and all those sevens, how much more luck could she possibly have?

  And not only that, she had her perfect plan, all written out, stuffed into her back pocket and memorized, too.

  “Cooleoleo!” she said, a word she had picked up from the surfers, one of her favorite words of all time.

  BD planted a stealth kiss right on her cheek.

  24

  But right now the perfect plan was stuck until the moon finished lifting up the tide. Otherwise, the boat wasn’t going anywhere. Keeper couldn’t keep her legs still. She bounced them up and down, up and down, up and down. She could tell that the water was rising, but not fast enough for her. She also knew that she had to wait until the tide was completely up, or else it would pull her in the wrong direction, right into the salt grass marsh, exactly the opposite direction of where she needed to go.

  BD whined, Please, let’s go home, please.

  He sincerely wanted to go back to his spot beside Keeper’s bed.

  “You know, BD, this is your fault too,” she told him. Then Keeper felt bad for saying that. It wasn’t really his fault, was it?

  But it was kind of his fault. He did, after all, chase the cat.

  “Sinbad’s fault too!” she announced. The cat was partly to blame, for sure. Darned old cat.

  Thinking about the cat reminded Keeper of Mr. Beauchamp again. Lately, he spent more and more time sitting on his porch with Sinbad, staring out at the water. He got up only a few times a day to eat and tend to his flowers and feed the cat. Once a week or so, Dogie drove him into town to get his groceries and cat food, but aside from that, he rarely left his house.

  “All the more reason for us to check on him,” Signe had told Keeper. And they did. Signe, Keeper, and Dogie all visited him every single day. Keeper took her merlings with her and listened to him tell her their stories while she watered his potted plants.

  But now the thought of Mr. Beauchamp made a ball of guilt clump up in the back of her throat.

  Mr. Beauchamp was the oldest person on Oyster Ridge Road, so old that he told Keeper he had forgotten his date of birth.

  “Barnacles!” he told her. “Old as barnacles.” Besides the merstories, he had taught her how to sing sea chanteys, which she in turn taught Dogie and which none of them sang for Signe, because, well, Signe, they knew, would say, “Is that appropriate?” and if Keeper were being honest, she would have to say that while she didn’t think anything was wrong with them, they did, she had to admit, have a few words in them that were even more supercharged than “stupid,” so it was highly likely that Signe would fail to admire them the same way that Keeper, Mr. Beauchamp, and Dogie did, so the chanteys were not sung for Signe.

  Mr. Beauchamp also showed Keeper how to care for the antique roses and the night-blooming cyrus that he grew in large porcelain pots on his porch.

  He told her, “Cyrus only bloom once a year, and only when the moon is full.” And then he would grow very still and stare out at the water, almost as though he disappeared somewhere inside his head. Keeper always knew not to disturb him when he did that.

  “He must have wonderful memories,” Signe had told her once, when Keeper had asked her why Mr. Beauchamp disappeared in his head like that sometimes.

  Every year, each July, they all waited for the full moon to cast her beams across his porch and urge the magical blossoms to burst open.

  Like Keeper, Mr. Beauchamp was waiting for someone, someone who might appear when the cyrus opened its huge petals and released its spicy scent into the nighttime air. And every year Mr. Beauchamp told Keeper, “This could be the year, mon petite!”

  And this year, especially, with Mr. Beauchamp looking older than the oldest of barnacles, Keeper had hoped that whoever he was waiting for would finally arrive, just in time for the blooms on the cyrus.

  And then, that very morning, in one fast, too-too fast, horribly fast moment, Keeper had taken her eye off of BD, who was as fast as a streaking bullet, even though Signe had warned her: keep an eye on the dog.

  So, really, it was all Keeper’s fault.

  And that wasn’t even all of what had happened that got her into so much trouble that morning. “Stupid crabs!” she stewed from her perch on the boat’s bench. And also, where the heck was that stupid moon?

  “Woof,” woofed BD. His tongue washed her knee again.

  “Shhhh.” Keeper shushed him. Her heart thumped against her rib cage in a chant: Hurry, hurry, hurry.

  25

  Boy, it’s dark out, Keeper thought. She could barely make out the dim outlines of the shaggy palm trees along the edge of the Cut. Captain was up in one of them, just yards away, snuggled into his nest. Keeper didn’t know anyone else who had a resident seagull. How great was that? And they’d had one for five years— ever since that night when Captain had crash-landed into their kitchen window. A storm had blown up, and the wind had caught him. Smack! He tumbled right into their windowpane, sending glass and feathers flying across the kitchen floor.

  Keeper had almost jumped out of her skin. “Yikes!” she hollered. Sssccccrrrrreeeeeeeeeeecccccchhhhhhhhh!!!! The seagull squawked and squawked. Keeper screamed again. And BD barked like a crazy dog, “Woofwoofwoofwoofwoof!!!” then stood beneath the kitchen table and growled.

  In the midst of it all, Signe, calm as always, managed to catch the bird by throwing a dish towel over him and tucking him underneath her arm. Then she held his beak shut with her hand and yelled at Keeper, “Find the tape!” Keeper quit howling, and after a brief rummaging through the junk drawer beside the washing machine, she found the tape, a sticky roll of gray tape that Signe called “duck tape.” Keeper lifted it out of the drawer. Would duck tape work on seagulls? She handed it to Signe.

  “Seagull tape,” Keeper said. Signe smiled, but she was still all business. Signe was always all business, which could be a good thing when you have a scared-to-death seagull tucked under your arm and a growling-like-mad dog under your table.

  That was the thing about Signe, Keeper now thought. Hardly anything ever ruffled her feathers, which was why today had been so, so terrible. Keeper looked back at the palm trees. All she could see were their quiet shadows. She couldn’t see Captain at all.

 
Keeper thought about that night again. Onee Signe had gotten the bird to calm down and shushed BD at the same time, Signe wrapped the gull’s damaged wing in a dishcloth and pin it so that he couldn’t flap the wing and reinjure himself.

  “There,” she’d said when she was finished, and handed the gull to Keeper.

  Keeper felt the bird shaking in her hands. She stroked his soft feathers and cooed to him. “Cooleoleo,” she said quietly, mostly because she didn’t really know what else to say, but also because the very fact that she was holding a seagull in her arms was definitely cooleoleo. And while Keeper held him, Signe took the duck (seagull) tape off of the seagull’s beak. Then she made him a warm bowl of oatmeal, which seemed to make his shivers ease up a little. Afterward Keeper set him on the floor and watched as he hopped underneath the table and settled right next to BD, which surprised everyone, including BD. From then on, Captain thought he was a member of the family. Family. This was something Keeper thought about a lot.

  None of the residents of Oyster Ridge Road were actually related to one another. Dogie was not her father, even though she wished he were her father. Mr. Beauchamp was not her grandfather, even though he seemed like a grandfather. And Signe? She was not Keeper’s mother.

  Still, Signe was right there, in Keeper’s earliest memories. Actually, Signe was in all of her memories. And yes, Keeper remembered bits and pieces of Meggie Marie. She remembered her long hair, so like her own and so unlike Signe’s short spikes. She remembered Meggie Marie’s voice. “Ch-ch-chiming,” that’s how Dogie described it, “l-l-like bells.” Signe’s voice was quieter, not at all like bells. And mostly, Keeper remembered that Meggie Marie was always laughing. To Meggie Marie, everything was funny, and she usually made everyone else laugh too, even Signe.

  Keeper remembered laughing with Meggie Marie.

  But Meggie Marie had left. And Signe hadn’t.

  Signe had stayed.