The Wanderer

by Sharon Creech

  And Sophie said, “Look! Look at that! Did you see her leap?” and then she went below deck. When I went down a few minutes later, she was juggling pretzel packets. She’s getting good.

  “Show me how to juggle four things,” she said. “Then show me how to accidentally-on-purpose bean someone and knock him overboard.”

  I figure she was referring to Mr. Know-it-all, Bravo-Romeo, Brian.

  Later she told another Bompie story. It went like this:

  Near Bompie’s house out in the country was a swimming hole. It was at a bend in a creek and was very deep. Big rocks and tree limbs jutted out from the side, and you could climb out on these rocks and tree limbs and leap into the water, whoosh! It was a dangerous place because there were also rocks and tree limbs under the water and you couldn’t always see where you might land. And because it was a dangerous place, Bompie was forbidden to swim there.

  But one hot, hot, hot summer day, Bompie really really wanted to swim. He wanted to leap into that cool water and float there until his skin wrinkled up. So he went down to the swimming hole and climbed up on one of the rocks and stood there looking at that cool water down below. Oh, it was hot. Hot, hot, hot. And the water looked so cool. And so Bompie jumped.

  And he hit that cool, cool water and it felt so delicious and down down he went and thunk! He hit something else—a rock? A tree? And thunk! He smashed against something else. And he was dizzy down there under the cool, cool water and whack! His head banged against something hard.

  And he was turning and twisting and all confused down there in the swirling cool, cool water, but at last he bobbed up and he climbed out and lay on the muddy bank until his head stopped hurting, and then he went home.

  “He got a whipping!” Brian said. “Right? I bet his father gave him one huge whipping!”

  “That’s right,” Sophie said. “And then—”

  “Wait,” Brian said. “Don’t tell me. Apple pie, right? His mother gave him some apple pie, right?”

  “No,” Sophie said.

  “What?” Brian said. “No apple pie? But didn’t she want to give him some apple pie because he was safe? No apple pie?”

  “No apple pie,” Sophie said. “This time it was blueberry pie. She was out of apples.”

  When she finished her story, Brian said, “Why in the heck does Bompie keep going in the water?”

  “What?” Sophie said. “What do you mean?”

  “If he always gets in trouble in the water, why does Bompie keep going in the water? You’d think he’d stay about as far away from water as he could get.”

  Sophie’s lips were pressed tightly together, and suddenly she looked so fragile to me.

  I said, “Maybe that’s exactly why Bompie keeps going in the water—”

  Sophie looked at me. Her eyes were bright and wet.

  “Maybe,” I said, “he’s afraid of the water, but he keeps going back to it because he has to—there’s something he has to prove—”

  “Like what?” Brian said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But if you think about it—if you conquered the thing that scared you the most, then maybe you’d feel—I don’t know—you’d feel free or something. You think?”

  Brian said, “Well, that’s stupid. If you’re afraid of something, there’s probably a good reason for it, and it means you should learn to stay away from those things. That’s what I think.”

  Sophie didn’t say anything. She went over to the railing and stood there like she does, staring out over the water.

  CHAPTER 33

  LIFE

  This morning, I woke up thinking: I hate the sea and the sea hates me. It was weird. I don’t hate the sea.

  Uncle Stew was in the galley when I went in to get something to eat. I don’t see him much. He’s usually sleeping when I’m awake, and I’m sleeping when he’s awake. So far, that’s been just fine with me.

  It was awkward being in the galley with him, just the two of us. I never know what to say to him. So I decided to ask him about Rosalie.

  “Did you ever meet Rosalie?” I asked. “The Rosalie that Uncle Dock told us about?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Uncle Dock liked her a lot, right?”

  “To put it mildly,” Uncle Stew said. He was fiddling with a stack of lists, crossing things out, adding new things.

  “So when Rosalie married someone else, Uncle Dock must’ve been upset, right? He must’ve had his heart broken, right?”

  “Something like that,” Uncle Stew said.

  “So what did he do?” I asked. “Did he just forget about her or what?”

  Uncle Stew looked up. “Forget about Rosalie? Are you kidding? Why do you think we made all those stops—Block Island, Martha’s Vineyard, Grand Manan?”

  “What? Why? Wasn’t Dock just visiting his friends? Weren’t we just getting The Wanderer fixed?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure.” He shuffled his papers, restacking them neatly. “Listen,” he said. “Don’t tell Dock I told you what I’m going to tell you. He’s a little sensitive about Rosalie.”

  “I won’t tell,” I said.

  “Block Island—that’s where Dock first met Rosalie.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “And Martha’s Vineyard? Remember Joey? Well, Joey is Rosalie’s brother.”

  “Her brother? Really?”

  “And from Joey, Dock found out that after Rosalie’s husband died—”

  “Her husband died? She’s not married anymore?” I said.

  “That’s right,” Uncle Stew said. “So Dock found out that Rosalie went to Grand Manan to visit Frank and to see the whales—”

  “You mean our Frank—the Frank we met on Grand Manan? That Frank?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “But Rosalie? Where was Rosalie when we were there?”

  “Gone.”

  “Well, where is she?”

  “Guess,” Uncle Stew said.

  But I couldn’t guess then, because Uncle Dock came below, and Uncle Stew got very busy with his papers and made it clear that the subject was closed.

  I tried to ask Uncle Stew later, but he said, “I told you too much. Better let it be for now.”

  I said, “You sure know a lot about Rosalie. I thought nobody ever told you anything.”

  “Huh, huh, huh,” he said. “I still know a few things.”

  And so I’ve been wondering where Rosalie is, and maybe we’re not really going to Bompie. Maybe Uncle Dock is taking us somewhere else, in search of Rosalie. Maybe she’s in Greenland; I think that’s on the way. Or maybe she’s right back in the United States and Dock is going to decide he has to turn around and go find her.

  Uncle Dock worried me last night when I was on watch with him. I was steering, and he was standing on the foredeck, staring out at the sea. He turned around and looked at me, studying me for a minute, and then he said, “What’s it all about, Sophie?”

  “How do you mean? What’s what all about?”

  He sighed a heavy sigh. “You know. Life.”

  “You’re asking me?” I said.

  His lower lip puckered under his upper lip. I thought he was going to cry, and this would be shocking, because Uncle Dock is always such a steady, calm sort of person. You don’t expect him to be worrying about what life is, and you certainly don’t expect him to cry in the middle of the night on a sailboat.

  But then he strolled back to the aft deck and started puttering with some lines, and that’s all he said about life. I stared out at the water and up at the sky and had the strangest rush of feelings. First I was completely peaceful, as if this was the most perfect place on earth to be, and then suddenly the peacefulness turned into wide, wide loneliness.

  And so I started thinking about life insurance and how nice it would be if you could get insurance that your life would be happy, and that everyone you knew could be happy, and they could all do what they really wanted to do, and they could all find the people they wanted
to find.

  CHAPTER 34

  LITTLE KID NIGHTMARES

  I haven’t had much sleep because my father’s been badgering me, and Uncle Stew and Brian were arguing, and Uncle Dock yelled at me for leaving a line lying loose on deck, and it’s been raining and foggy, and the sea’s been heaving, and things keep crashing on my head.

  When I do finally sleep, Sophie wakes me, screaming, because she’s having nightmares, but she won’t say what they’re about. One time she told me about that little kid she knows.

  When the little kid was maybe three years old, the little kid went to the ocean. Maybe the little kid’s mother was along, too, but Sophie wasn’t quite sure about that. The little kid lay down on a blanket (it was blue, Sophie said), and fell asleep.

  Then there was water, water, pouring over the little kid; it looked like a huge black wall of water. The little kid’s mother grabbed the little kid’s hand, but the water wanted the little kid and was pulling, pulling, and the little kid couldn’t see and couldn’t breathe.

  Whish! The little kid’s mother yanked the little kid upright.

  “You know what, though?” Sophie said. “That little kid still dreams about a wave coming.”

  “You mean that little kid is still afraid of the water?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Sophie said. “The little kid loves the water, loves the ocean—”

  “But why does the little kid keep having that dream?”

  “I don’t know,” Sophie said. “Maybe it was something about the unexpectedness of it, the being safe and sound asleep and warm and happy, and then that wave sneaking up and trying to take the little kid away—”

  “Wow,” I said. “It’s as if the wave is haunting the little kid, like the little kid is afraid that the wave will come back—”

  “Maybe,” Sophie said. “Or maybe not—”

  All day long, Sophie acted weird. She’d stare out at the water and then rush below deck and then she’d rush back up, as if she was suffocating down below, and up and down she went, up and down. Maybe she was worrying about the little kid.

  CHAPTER 35

  THE BLUE BOPPER

  We’ve been at sea for a week and a half now, and The Wanderer has traveled over 1,300 miles. We are over halfway there, halfway to Bompie! We’ve gone through two time zones, so that our clocks are now two hours ahead of what they were when we left. There are three more time zones ahead. Each time we change the clocks, Cody says, “Bye-bye, hour!” Where do those hours go?

  We’re about 500 miles east of Newfoundland, and 900 miles south of Greenland. I keep expecting Uncle Dock to say, “Hey, let’s stop in Greenland” or “Let’s stop in Newfoundland!” and then we’d stop and he’d go off hunting for Rosalie. But so far, there’s been no mention of stopping.

  It’s been very cold the last few days, but it’s warming up as we near the Gulf Stream. Uncle Stew says the combination of the Labrador Current (the coldest current in the Atlantic, coming from the north) and the Gulf Stream (the warmest current, coming from the south) makes for “very interesting weather patterns.”

  “Which means what?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know, sudden storms, violent storms—”

  I can’t tell whether Uncle Stew is testing me when he says things like this—trying to see if I will get scared and cry—or whether he says these things to prepare me for what might come.

  I’m not going to show if I’m scared, and I’m not going to cry.

  Yesterday, when we came on the edge of a thunderstorm, Uncle Stew went into a flurry of shouting orders. “Turn off the electrics!”

  “Why?” Cody and I asked.

  “Do you want to be a humongous lightning rod?”

  Massive dark clouds hovered in the distance and a surge of wind whipped The Wanderer.

  Uncle Stew rattled off a list: “Radar!”

  Cody flipped it off. “Checkerino.”

  “GPS!”

  “Off-erino!”

  “Loran!”

  “Zap-o!”

  Uncle Stew shouted at Cody. “What the heck are you saying? Are they off or not?”

  “Off-erino!” Cody said.

  I didn’t stay to hear the end of it, because I was on watch. We were racing along and it felt so terrific, all that wind! We had our foul-weather gear on, so we didn’t mind the torrents of rain beating down as we plowed through the water. It felt as if we should have some loud, dramatic classical music sounding in the background. You feel as if every inch of you is alive and you are working hard to stay alive and the boat is helping you and you are helping it and everyone is in there together, and whoosh, away you go!

  We’ve been making contact with civilization nearly every night, and Cody has surprised everyone by becoming the ham radio king. There’s a ton of lingo involved, and you have to be on your toes at all times to know what’s going on. Our call number is N1IQB Maritime Mobile, and in ham radio lingo, you say it like this: November One India Quebec Bravo Maritime Mobile. It’s really cool to listen to Cody talking in what sounds like a foreign language:

  “This is N1IQB Maritime Mobile … November One India Quebec Bravo Maritime Mobile … Over.”

  Uncle Mo taught us these new bits today. It’s more code-talk:

  QSL = Do you copy?

  88 = Hugs and kisses.

  So here’s Cody on the radio:

  Cody: “Roger, this is N1IQB Maritime

  Mobile trying to get in touch with WB2YPZ

  Maritime Mobile, Whiskey Bravo Two Yankee

  Papa Zulu, over.”

  Ham net: “Roger, N1IQB, send your traffic, over.”

  We haven’t been able to get through to anyone we know yet, so we have to ask at the net for somebody in Connecticut we can leave a message with or make a phone call through. Cody says most ham operators on land can make a phone patch; they hook their phone up to their radio, call the number collect, and then you can talk to whoever you want by phone.

  The voices are distorted and unclear, but it’s like a miracle when it works, which has not been very often. We’ve tried to get through to my father, but without any luck.

  When Cody is working the radio, I get so excited. You really want to hear a familiar voice! But then as time goes on and you can’t get a connection or you can’t hear well, it makes me so annoyed that I wish we weren’t even trying. And it still feels as if we are cheating by being able to contact other people.

  I said as much to Uncle Dock, and he said, “What? You want to be cut off from everybody else? From the world?”

  “I didn’t say that. It’s just that we’re supposed to be doing this on our own.”

  Uncle Dock said, “Sophie, it’s not a bad thing to rely on other people, you know.”

  I’ve been thinking about that all day. I don’t know why it is that it seems important for me to be able to do everything myself and not rely on anyone else. I’d always thought that was a good way to be, but Uncle Dock made it sound selfish. I don’t get it.

  At lunch today, one of those rare occasions when we all happened to be awake at the same time, Uncle Dock said, “Hey, remember the time we found that rubber dinghy? You know, when we were kids—”

  Uncle Mo said, “Yeah! The blue one?”

  Uncle Stew chimed in, “Hey, I remember that! It was washed up on shore, right? And we claimed it as our own—”

  “And we named it—remember what we named it?” Uncle Dock said.

  Mo and Stew thought about that a while. Then Stew got a huge smile on his face—maybe the first smile I’ve seen on that face—and said, “I know! The Blue Bopper! The Blue Bopper, right?”

  Mo laughed. “Yeah! The Blue Bopper!”

  “And remember,” Stew said, “how we were so excited to get in it and we pushed it out into the waves and we were laughing like hyenas—”

  “And we were laughing so hard that we didn’t even notice—”

  “That we were being pulled out farther and farther—”

  Stew was c
hoking by now, he was laughing so hard. “And—then we realized—”

  “We didn’t have any paddles!”

  They were all laughing by this time. At first I was laughing, too, because they were laughing—it was very funny to see them all acting so goofy. But then I couldn’t figure out what was so funny about them being in a dinghy without paddles, and it gave me goosebumps, thinking of them floating, floating, helpless.

  “So what happened?” Cody asked. “How’d you get back?”

  “Hmm,” Uncle Mo said. “Don’t really remember that part.”

  “But we got back somehow,” Uncle Stew said.

  Of course I should have known that they all got back safely, because here they were telling the story, but somehow it wasn’t until Uncle Stew said that they got back that I felt this huge wave of relief slide over me.

  “And then Bompie—oh, boy!” Uncle Dock said.

  “What?” Cody asked. “Did he give you a whipping?”

  “Bompie?” Uncle Stew said. “Bompie never laid a hand on us in his entire life.”

  “That’s right,” Uncle Dock agreed.

  “So what did Bompie do when you got back?” Cody asked.

  Uncle Stew said, “He took us out to the shed and said, ‘See these here wooden things? These wooden things are called paddles. You might want to take a couple of these here paddles next time you go out on that ocean.’”

  It sounded pretty funny the way Uncle Stew told it, and they sat around on deck laughing a long time. I had to go down below because I couldn’t get that image out of my head, of them floating out in the ocean in the dinghy without any paddles.

  I went up the mast again yesterday, this time to the very top! The flag line broke and was stuck in the block at the top of the mast, so I tied a new line to my harness, and Cody pulled me up. The boat dipped and rolled and the wind raged, and it was all I could do to hang on. It was like a test between me and the wind, as if the wind were saying, Can you do it, Sophie? Bet you can’t! And as if I were saying, I can do this! Watch me! The hard things sometimes turn out to make you feel the best.