by Laura Tucker
“How come you’re friends with Linda?” Even as it came out of my mouth, I could hear that it was the wrong thing to say, and I started to apologize, but she stopped me.
“Linda’s all right. Anyway, as you’ve probably noticed, you don’t get to choose your family.” My face flushed, even though she smiled to let me know that it was okay.
Of course. Merle was Alex’s Auntie Em—Linda’s sister.
Alex wandered back over to me. “I’m ready to go,” he said, rubbing one bare foot over the other and looking off at the water.
“See you back at the house,” Merle said, still looking at the dramatic sky. I was sad to leave her. It was a relief to spend time with someone I didn’t have to act mad in front of.
Alex and I set off down the boardwalk, passing clusters of teenagers bundled up in jean jackets against the evening chill. Excitement crackled off them.
The walk back was longer than I remembered. Alex moved quickly, and I hurried to keep up. I’d been walking around SoHo and the Village by myself for a couple of years, but I had no idea where Alex’s house on the Island was. All the streets were boardwalks, and they all looked the same to me. I couldn’t remember the name of the street that their house was on; I didn’t know if the streets had names at all.
Alex walked quickly past little houses, private but set close together. Most of them had lights on in them now. I could hear people laughing and setting the table for dinner. Kids with hair wet from their showers hung off the front porches in pajamas and rode their bikes around slowly, trading candy. Alex waved and said hi to some of them. He stopped to talk to one boy for a while, but he didn’t introduce me, so I hung back.
Even if I lost him, I told myself, I’d be okay. The streets were laid out in a grid, like midtown. I’d know the house again, even if I had to walk up and down every one of those streets. Still, I was relieved when Alex turned the corner and I recognized a red wagon planter in the front yard of one of the houses. His house was on this street.
He was ahead of me when a flock of small black birds emerged against the streetlight. There were lots of them—too many—making fast, deep swoops almost to the ground. I hesitated, unwilling to walk toward the swarm, but they came for me anyway, fluttering so close I couldn’t stop myself from flapping my arms in terror.
Alex kept going, ignoring them and me.
“Alex,” I yelled.
He looked back, saw me standing stock still as the terrifying birds plunged around me, then turned around and kept walking.
“They’re going to smash right into my face!”
“They won’t hit you, dummy. They use sonar,” Alex said over his shoulder.
I was sick of not knowing what was going on. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I snapped. Alex didn’t stop.
“What kind of stupid bird uses sonar?” I shouted down the dark boardwalk at him. There were hundreds of these crazy birds ducking and diving, some of them so close I could feel the wind from their wings hushing my face.
Alex walked up the ramp to the door of the little house. The porch light was on behind him so that I couldn’t see his expression. I was sorry then that I’d been so pigheaded because, as mad as I was at Alex, I didn’t think I was going to be able to get through this insane corridor of birds all by myself.
His voice drifted back toward where I was standing. “They’re not birds, Ollie. They’re bats.”
Then the screen door slammed behind him.
I have never ever beaten Alex in a race, and I probably never will. But I can tell you that if he’d been running alongside me through the curtain of bats on the dark boardwalk that night, he would have gotten a workout.
SICK
Bats, apparently, are good to have around because they eat mosquitoes.
I can tell you: There were still plenty of mosquitoes on the deck that night.
Apollo had been right: It did get cold. But it was beautiful, too, especially after Linda and Merle lit tiny candles in glass jars and placed them on the round table, which was covered with a waxy blue-and-white-checked tablecloth.
I had planned not to eat anything as part of my silent protest, but I lost my willpower as soon as I smelled the food. Linda’s diet did not appear to be in effect. There were hot dogs, smoky from the grill, along with toasted buns and baked beans and sauerkraut and salad and grilled ears of corn with butter. I was so glad to eat something that wasn’t a peanut or pizza or leftover Chinese, I couldn’t stop myself from loading up a huge plate, and then another.
It was hard for me to stay mad with such a full belly, so I settled for not saying much. I didn’t have to. Linda and Merle and Maggie talked about the people they knew on the Island—who was coming out over the weekend, who would be renting a different house that summer, which of the older kids they knew would be counselors at the camp Maggie went to. Linda’s face was still tense and tight, but she put her bare feet up on the table while we were still eating, which I could not imagine her doing at home.
Alex didn’t talk much. That was my fault. He didn’t look at me once.
After dinner, Merle turned off the Christmas lights strung on the fence so we could look at the stars. She showed me how to poke a marshmallow on a stick and hold it over the dying coals in the barbeque so that it turned golden brown on the outside without catching on fire. Then she smeared it off the skewer onto a square of chocolate waiting on a graham cracker. The toasted marshmallow was almost liquid inside, and when I made a sandwich with another graham cracker, it melted the chocolate.
They’re called s’mores because you always want some more. I had three.
Maggie fell asleep, still dressed, on a bed in the little room next to the kitchen while the rest of us were clearing the table. Linda washed; Merle dried. To be polite, I asked Linda if they needed help, but she shook her head, and the two of them started singing along with the song on the radio.
Alex and I climbed the narrow staircase to the room in the attic and turned our backs to each other while we were putting on pajamas. I got into bed and realized how tired I was.
Alex reached over and turned out the little white light.
The dark was extreme. There were no streetlights outside, and the smells of the bed were unfamiliar. I wondered if I’d ever be able to fall asleep.
It was then that I realized, to my horror, that I had not brushed my teeth.
Alex hadn’t brushed his, either, but it never bothers him like it bothers me. Ordinarily, I would have gotten up, even if it meant he’d tease me a little. But there was so much bad feeling piled up between us that I couldn’t make my legs move.
I tried to distract myself with all the noises I could hear. There must have been a million bugs out there. I could hear the ocean, shushing from a few blocks away, and the wind in the tree outside the little window, and something in the front yard that might have been a frog.
Nature is loud.
Apollo had told me that Alex had done the right thing, which really meant that I’d done the wrong thing by not telling. I’d thought I could fix it if I had more time. But what if not telling had made whatever was happening with my mom worse?
I rolled over. Alex’s legs were bent as if he was running, and he had one arm thrown over his head. Even when he was sleeping it looked like he was moving.
I felt a pang. I didn’t want to be mad at him anymore, and I didn’t want him to be mad at me, either.
Like I needed one more thing to feel bad about.
* * *
Ten minutes later, I had run out of distractions.
I had to brush my teeth.
I slipped out of bed, as quietly as I could, snuck my toothbrush from my duffel, and tiptoed to the top of the stairs. I could picture the little bathroom, the sink the size of a dinner plate and the mirror above it so crazed with black marks I could barely see my face. As tiny as the house
was, the bathroom seemed very far away, with a lot of creaking wood in between. I tried to feel light as I moved across the complaining floorboards, focusing on the minty relief I’d feel once I got down there.
I hadn’t heard any sounds coming from downstairs for a while and assumed that Merle and Linda had gone to bed, but when I got to the steep wooden stairs, I could hear they were still moving around the kitchen.
I paused halfway down. Something was wrong.
The radio was off, and the easy rhythm between the two grown-ups had changed. I could hear Linda flouncing around, slamming cabinet doors and huffing the way she did when she was mad.
“You see the way she looks? Silent and starving, like something out of Dickens.”
I held my breath.
Merle didn’t say anything. A plate clattered loudly onto the stack as Linda built up steam. “Like a street urchin. Totally neglected.”
Merle still didn’t speak.
“I just can’t understand it. Graham jumping ship for another woman is one thing. But Doll is her mother.”
Graham was my dad; Doll was my mom. Linda was talking about me.
Merle spoke up, finally. She sounded exasperated, which is the effect that Linda has on a lot of people. “Leave her be, for God’s sake. She’s a good kid. We’ll get some food into her, fresh air, a little sun. She’ll bounce back.”
But Linda barreled right along as if Merle hadn’t said anything at all. “I wish I knew going to bed was an option. It sure must be nice to be an artiste. Maybe I’ll just ignore all my responsibilities—my children, my home, my clients—and wait for someone to roll around to pick up the slack.”
When Merle responded, her voice was pure acid.
“Doll is sick. You don’t think that woman would be doing something different if she could? All you can do is step in and hope that someone would do the same for Alex and Mags if you ever needed them to. Which, by the way? God forbid.” She might have said more, I don’t know, because I turned around, hoping to creep back up the steps without them seeing me, but as soon as I shifted my weight, the wooden step I was standing on let out an unmistakable creak.
There was a sudden silence below me. I couldn’t see them, but I knew the two of them must have been looking up at the bottom of the stairs where I was standing. I could imagine the horror on their faces. A drawing of the scene popped into my head, and I almost laughed at the image, the three of us standing frozen like statues, our mouths frozen into little shocked o’s.
I stuck my toothbrush in my mouth, taking some comfort from the little bit of minty paste left on it from the last time I’d used it. Then I turned and clomped my way back up the stairs to the little white bed.
THE GAME
When I woke up the next morning, I had no idea where I was.
Nothing I could see—the white-painted wood of the sloped ceiling, the patchwork quilt on top of me, the unfamiliar morning light filtering through the thin cotton curtains—made any sense, and for a second or two, I felt like I was falling through space and time before I landed back into myself.
I rolled over. Alex was lying on his back. He opened his eyes, looked at me, then pulled the pillow over his head to block out the sunlight. But after a minute or two, he swung his legs onto the floor, turned his back to me, and started getting dressed. I wasn’t sure what I should do, but as he headed toward the stairs he looked back for me impatiently, so I got up and pulled my jeans on fast.
Something had shifted between us. When we’d gotten onto the ferry, I’d been mad at him, madder than I’d ever been at anyone. By the time we went to bed, though, Alex had turned into the one who wasn’t talking.
When I got downstairs, he was in the kitchen, his hand in a tin on the counter filled with muffins. He grabbed one in each hand before moving toward the door and used his knuckles to throw open the screen door. Maggie, sleeping in her pretty bed near the refrigerator, didn’t stir.
Was one of them for me? I couldn’t be sure, so I grabbed another, pushing the sweet cake gratefully into my mouth. And I wasn’t sure if I should follow, but Alex bent his knee to stop the door with his bare foot a split second before it slammed closed. He was holding it open for me. Then he headed off down the boardwalk, the opposite of the way we’d gone the night before for sunset.
Neither of us was wearing shoes, and the weathered wooden boards were cool and wet beneath our feet. The small front yards we passed were mostly sand. WELCOME, spelled the seashells in one yard. LIFE’S A BEACH, read a hand-painted sign sticking out of a grassy patch in another.
We went up a hill. Alex picked up speed, making it tough for me to keep up. He knew it, too. And so I was puffing a little as we came over the rise of the hill, when I stopped dead.
The boardwalk ended at a short flight of stairs that led down to an empty expanse of sand.
Beyond that, there was the ocean.
I’d never seen the ocean before. I’d seen the Hudson when my dad and I woke up early and went to the meatpacking district for Dominican stew with eggs and toast alongside the club kids who’d been out all night. I’d seen the East River sluggishly passing under the Brooklyn Bridge when my dad borrowed his friend Leon’s car so he and my mom could take a trip out to the art supply store they liked in Brooklyn. I’d seen the bay when we crossed it on the ferry, and at the dock the night before. But I’d never seen the ocean. I’d seen thousands of pictures and postcards of the ocean, but not a single one of them could have prepared me for the way I felt looking at the real thing.
I looked over at Alex—are you seeing this?—but he’d stopped where the sand was getting darker to roll up the cuffs of his jeans. I guessed it was old news to him. Anyway, he wasn’t talking to me. The wide cuffs of his jeans combined with his strong, skinny arms sticking out from his white T-shirt made him look the way I imagined Huckleberry Finn.
I bent over to roll my own jeans, feeling the sand crunchy and cool under my feet, and then the delicious shock of the cold water as it rolled up and over my toes, scary white in the bright morning light. When the wave pulled back out, my feet sunk into the sand, so that with three or four cycles of the ocean, my toes were buried and I was rooted in place.
Alex was beside me, a little ahead. I don’t know how long we stood there watching the waves pull in and out over our feet, but it was a long time, long enough to get used to the cold. Then, abruptly, Alex turned his back to me and headed down the beach at the water’s edge. Again, he seemed to wait for a second so I could follow, and I didn’t know what else to do, so I did, a few paces behind.
We still had not spoken a word.
A woman and a man held hands with a happily squealing toddler, swinging him up and over the waves when they broke near his feet. A lady did tai chi like the old people in Seward Park. A man in a wide-brimmed yellow Curious George hat walked slowly, swinging a dark metal detector in front of him. I would have liked to ask him about the coolest thing he ever found, but Alex was ahead of me, and I hustled to catch up.
The beachfront houses thinned out after we’d been walking for a few minutes, and Alex turned up the beach to head into the scrubby forest past the dunes. I hesitated. City kids don’t have a lot of experience with forests. Plus, there had been a sign on the fence where we’d first come down to the beach: DUNES OFF LIMITS. I did not think that Linda, even the relatively new and improved Relaxed Beach Linda, would be happy about bailing us out if we got caught.
I dithered, unsure whether to follow or not, so that Alex was almost all the way up to the tree line by the time I broke into a run, I didn’t want to be left alone on that beach. The incline was steeper than I’d thought, though, and the sand softer. I couldn’t get any traction, and the sand kicked up uselessly behind me, like a dream where you’re running through quicksand. Embarrassed but desperate not to slip back to the bottom, I clawed my way up the last third, crawling on hands and knees.
When I got up there, breathing heavily, Alex was gone.
“Alex?” I said quietly, hating the quaver in my voice.
The forest wasn’t dark and foreboding like I had pictured it at all. It was quiet, though I could hear the lazy heaving of the ocean and the chattering gossip of the insects in the trees. The trees themselves were short and twisted, some of them growing almost sideways, a lot of them not that much taller than me. I liked the rusty mat of pine needles covering the sand, as well as all the colors I could find in the rough, peeling bark.
Forgetting about Alex for a moment, I put my hand out to touch a gnarled, ugly branch with knobby bumps, big and raw and swollen at the knuckles like Joyce Walker’s hands. My own fingers twitched, sketching those bumps in the air. For the first time since I’d left home, I felt like I could draw.
And then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught the faintest movement. Alex was there, leaning against a tree, his back to me.
“Hey,” I said, absurdly pleased to see him. But he was already moving again, deeper into the trees. “Wait up,” I said. He glanced back at me, then kept going.
He blazed a trail for us, vaulting over low, weathered fence pickets strung with wire and trotting between tall tufts of beach grass. I ran to catch up the way I’d thought about running in the car, like I was leaving something behind, my feet and heart suddenly lighter than they had been in weeks. Twigs and pinecones and tiny stones crunched beneath our feet, but we didn’t step on anything long or hard enough for them to hurt. We ducked under low branches, twisted and leapt over shallow roots, picking up speed as we went. The day was heating up, but the sweat on the back of my neck dried fast.
Occasionally, Alex would dip out of the forest, running at an angle along the very top of the dunes. There weren’t many people on the beach, mostly people walking their dogs or hanging out with their kids, but nobody looked up at us anyway. We were invisible.
