by Laura Tucker
A black lab, out for his morning walk, trotted up the dunes to say hello. Alex froze before taking off, leaving the big dog whining anxiously at the edge of the forest before his owner whistled him back.
We were playing The Game, the disappearing game we’d played for years at the playground next to the Met. No talking, to anyone else or each other.
When we hit a bare patch of beach with no people at all, we’d run quickly into the water, wetting our feet in the cold waves with the tiny birds. I didn’t feel bad anymore about walking on the dunes. Those OFF LIMITS signs were for grown-ups, trudging heavily through the sand, weighed down by their ugly coolers and plastic beach chairs. We didn’t move like that.
We ran for what felt like hours. Then, hot and tired, I bent over with my hands on my knees to catch my breath, and my stomach growled—the first audible communication that had taken place between us all day. Alex didn’t say anything, but when I was ready to go again, he’d turned around so that we were going back the way we’d come, all the way back to the little house.
Nobody was there. Maggie’s bed was empty. There was a half-drunk cup of coffee on the little table and nothing in the muffin tin. Still without speaking, Alex pulled a small pot off its nail on the wall in the kitchen, filled it with water, and put it on one of the burners, where it rocked back and forth on its warped bottom. After he put eggs in the pot, he laid soft slices of potato bread on the counter. I watched as he chopped a big pickle into little pieces with a steak knife and put them at the bottom of a blue metal bowl. He silenced the chipped white timer right before it went off and peeled the eggs hot, tossing them from hand to hand, too impatient to wait for them to cool. Mayonnaise, a handful of crushed potato chips, and, almost before I knew it, I was back in the dunes with a messy, heavy waxed paper bundle in my hand.
I squatted like Alex did to eat, wiping my hands on my jeans and my mouth on the shoulder of my shirt. All this without a word. After that, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to lie back, cushioned by that mat of fallen pine needles, and close our eyes against the afternoon heat.
I slept long and hard. When I woke up, Alex was already awake, lazily peeling the bark from a stick. He had waited for me.
And just like that—still without a word—whatever had been broken between us was fixed.
SLOW TIME
We stayed on the Island for three more days.
Monday morning, Linda called school to excuse our absences. “A family emergency,” she called it. True in my case, and more and more, it seemed like it might be true for Alex, too.
Linda didn’t seem to care what we did. The whole time we were out there, she didn’t mention protein once. She stayed up late with Merle, the two of them talking in quiet, urgent voices. They weren’t talking about me—I checked. Mostly, they were talking about Alex’s dad. A couple of times, it sounded like Linda might be crying.
Time moved differently on the Island. We ate when we got hungry, slept when we were tired. One day, I slept until eleven in the little white bed upstairs. Another night, Alex and I woke up while it was still dark and went down to the ocean and lay on our backs in the cool sand, looking for shooting stars. There were too many to wish on. We fell asleep on the beach and woke up with sunburns on the sides of our faces to the sounds of families setting up their umbrellas next to us.
That afternoon, it finally got warm enough to swim. We let the waves slam into us for hours. Afterward, we let Maggie bury us in the sand.
We ate ice cream every day, sometimes twice. The teenagers behind the counter gave us tastes of the day’s special flavors on tiny, flat wooden spoons. If they were bored, they’d even let us taste the regular ones, like chocolate and vanilla.
Alex and I walked down to the lighthouse and talked our way into going up to the top—242 steps—even though we didn’t have any money for admission. When we came down again, the lady at the desk gave us each a certificate and a lighthouse pin.
I got a postcard at the general store while Alex was buying one for his grandma and sent it to Richard. I didn’t sign it, but I made a pretty good drawing of a sea monster on the back so he’d know who it was from.
We saw the sunset every night, and I didn’t feel silly clapping when everyone else did.
The whole time, I drew. I drew a pile of UNO cards scattered on the deck, abandoned after Maggie caught Alex cheating. I drew a jellyfish Alex found on the beach that looked like a giant contact lens made of clear Jell-O. I drew two broken sand dollars and a piece of seaweed like a strand of beads. I drew Linda’s elegant feet in flip-flops with woven leather straps and the rusted red bike with the cracked white vinyl seat that Maggie had gotten too big for, and a forgotten yellow coffee cup with a daisy on it, wedged into the sand of the front yard.
I hadn’t forgotten about my mother. I did think about her, and about Apollo, and about my dad. It was just that the rest of my life—Greene Street; Apollo’s jars in a box, the colors trapped inside them; my mom’s bed—it all seemed impossibly far away.
I knew it was silly, but I felt like if that world, my world at home, was real, then the world on the Island couldn’t be.
And I really didn’t want that to be true.
* * *
Our last full day on the Island, it rained.
Merle and Linda put on giant yellow slickers after breakfast and disappeared into the mist. Alex and Maggie and I relocated to the front room, snug in the lamplight with only the screen door between us and the rain, to do a jigsaw puzzle. We finished it—another lighthouse—but there were three pieces missing.
Afterward, Maggie got up and made everyone tuna salad sandwiches with bits of celery and onion. At some point, she had turned into a bona-fide person.
After lunch, she brought an antique wicker sewing box from her room back to the rug, where Alex and I were reading through a pile of old comics we’d found stacked under the stairs. Interested despite myself, I watched over the top of my Archie’s Joke Book as she emptied the contents of the box onto the rough white rug.
She made neat rows of wooden spools stamped 15 CENTS PURE SILK, wound with thread the colors of gowns in old movies—periwinkle, moss green, seafoam, cerise. Next to them, she set out a strawberry pincushion, a silver thimble, and my favorite: a pair of delicate gold scissors made to look like a stork, the blades forming its long beak.
A red tin, the lettering long scratched off, held buttons; Maggie dumped them onto the carpet and started sorting them into matching piles. Most were ordinary, the white kind you see on a dad button-down, but some of them were treasures: a clear Lucite dome studded in rhinestones; an iridescent opal sliver with a gentle depression my finger could barely resist; a set of six made from dusty pink satin, each one padded and tufted like the back of a couch.
And a couple of ugly mauve ones, too—dead ringers for the old-lady buttons Alex had found behind the bushes in the park.
I nudged Alex’s leg with my foot. He looked up, annoyed at the interruption until he caught sight of the buttons.
Dropping his comic, he leaned forward to pick one up. “Hey! Where’d you get these? We found some like this in the park,” he said to Maggie.
Who started to shake with laughter.
Alex looked at me and then back at his sister. “Wait. What’s going on?”
Maggie only laughed harder, and as possible explanations poked out at me, I started to laugh, too: “She was there with us that day. You already forgot poor Rolando?”
Alex looked at Maggie like he was going to throw something. “Hold on. You set us up?”
“I didn’t mean to!” Maggie protested, bringing her giggling under control enough to explain. “I mean, I meant to leave the buttons. It’s a thing the pigeon lady does, when an animal she’s taking care of dies. Like a memorial.”
Ugh. It hadn’t occurred to me there might be a rotting bird under there; we’d use
d our hands to dig.
Alex’s voice was at least two octaves higher than usual. “But we dug it up! There wasn’t anything there.”
Maggie looked at him with contempt. “It’s illegal to bury animals in the park, dumbo. She drops the bodies off at a vet’s office,” she said. “Then she leaves a ring of buttons where she found them. That bush was where I’d found Rolando; I thought leaving the buttons would make me less sad.”
Alex glowered at her.
“But then you guys found them and got all sleuthy about it,” Maggie said, failing to keep the amusement out of her voice. “And that did make me less sad.”
I thought Alex might explode.
“‘Let’s secure this perimeter, folks,’” Maggie choked out, imitating Alex in Official Detective Mode. “‘We gotta maintain a clean chain of custody on this evidence!’”
I may have snickered a little; her Alex imitation was almost as good as my trademark Linda.
Alex jumped to his feet, disgusted with us both—embarrassed, too, if I had to bet. He threw the screen door open and headed out into the drizzle, his bare feet smacking the soaked boardwalk outside.
The screen door swung back behind him, hung for a moment, then slammed shut.
Maggie yelled after him, “You should have let me play with you guys! I would have told you, if you’d let me play!”
She shrugged one shoulder at me then, a wicked grin splitting her funny, freckled face.
“Probably.”
THE WALK BACK
The sunset was gorgeous that night. Merle told me that it always is after it rains.
I watched her and Maggie teasing each other down the boardwalk on their way back to make dinner, and realized that I didn’t want to go home. I made Alex stay down at the dock until it was almost dark, but eventually, his growling stomach drove us back toward the little house.
The walk back had become easy; I couldn’t believe it had ever been unfamiliar to me. There was the house with the rainbow flag, the light green house with the fishing poles out front, the dark blue one with the fat orange cat in the window whom I had not been able to befriend.
I was wondering how I could feel the grain in the worn boards of the walk beneath my bare feet when Alex, a couple of steps ahead of me, gave a quiet “Hey” and stopped so quickly that I practically plowed right into the back of him.
I opened my mouth to protest, but he shushed me with his hand.
We were standing in front of a parcel of land without a house on it. The greenery had gone wild, and the only thing I could see were tall green fronds, like stalks of corn. But Alex was looking intently into the lot and didn’t move, so I didn’t, either.
It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. When I could see, there, right in front of us, was a deer, so close I could have reached right out and touched her.
She was still and silent and watching us, ready to run at the slightest noise or sudden movement. But not running, not yet.
“Baby,” Alex breathed, so quietly I almost didn’t hear. For a second, I thought he was teasing me, but then I saw her. In fact, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen her right away, but I guess I was too distracted by the giant deer right in front of us to notice that the deer was in fact two deer, and that one of them was a little tiny baby deer, with white spots on her butt like Bambi.
The baby stopped eating to look up at us. Her nose twitched, and her ears and little fuzzy tail were going crazy. But after two seconds she put her head down again. The mother was still looking at us, chewing at the grass still in her mouth every once in a while, trying to decide whether or not we were something to worry about. Ultimately, she put her head down again, too.
Alex and I stood as still as statues. I couldn’t believe I was close enough to a deer to hear it swallow. The mother was pretty rough-looking; her coat was kind of chewed up and she was really skinny. But the baby was perfect and downy soft, like something out of a picture book.
Alex and I watched, breathing in the smell of the green, wet earth. The baby nosed through the grass, looking for one kind in particular, ripping up mouthfuls when she found it. Every time the baby moved, the mother moved, too. She always made sure that she was between us and the baby, protecting her. I did notice that.
I watched them and thought about Merle saying my mom was sick. I thought about how sure my mom had sounded when she’d said that I would be better off without her. For the millionth time, I thought about the feeling I’d had when the knob to her room had refused to turn in my hand.
It had felt like she’d been locking me out. But what if the opposite was true? What if she’d been locking herself in?
Eventually, the deer worked their way through the patch of deliciousness in that yard, and the two of them walked off in search of more. They passed so close to us we could have bent our knees and touched them.
It was so dark by then that we couldn’t see much past the ends of our noses, but we watched them go, their silhouettes moving down the boardwalk until they were mere specks, and then gone.
And the last little bit of whatever had been so hard and mean in my chest went with them.
MAYBE
We left late the next afternoon.
It was not a happy car.
That morning, Linda had put on a full face of makeup for the first time since we’d left the city. While we were still on the Island, it made her look out of place; people barely wore pants there, let alone lipstick. In the car, it looked like armor.
Maggie had fled the little house at dawn to play in the ocean with her friends. Still wearing a damp bathing suit underneath one of Alex’s old sweatshirts, she fell asleep in the front seat as soon as the car started to move. Sweat and salt curled her hair; tearstains marked her cheeks.
That morning, I’d slipped the color study I’d saved from my model out of my jeans pocket and into her box of buttons. A little mystery for her to solve, someday.
Alex stared out the window in the back seat next to me, playing drum solos on his legs until Linda snapped at him. While we were waiting for the ferry, I’d gotten up the courage to ask him what was going on with Linda and his dad. “She’s not sure they’re going to stay together,” he said, kicking at one of the tote bags by our feet. “Not like it’ll make a difference, like he’s ever around anyway.”
I’d looked off down the dock at two seagulls fighting over somebody’s dropped bagel in case he started to cry.
An hour later, I was sitting next to him in the back seat, watching the fake green of the suburbs pass by and hating myself for getting sucked into the world of the Island as if it had been real. It wasn’t that I hadn’t wondered what would happen to me when I got home while we were there; of course I had. But every time the thought had occurred to me, I’d pushed it back down.
Like a bath toy, it was popping up again now. My mind galloped through the possibilities as if I could make up for those four careless days. There was no way they’d let me go back to living at home if my mom wasn’t better. So where could I go? Whatever was going on between Linda and Alex’s dad probably meant I couldn’t live with them—not that I’d want to; not that they’d offered. Richard’s parents didn’t have room for me, and they didn’t really do things outside the rules, which was both the good and the bad thing about them.
I chewed at a cuticle. Maybe I could live with Apollo for a little while. Linda frowned at me meaningfully through the rearview mirror, and I dropped my hand back into my lap. Except that Apollo was already more involved than he wanted to be in my family’s mess, which was probably why he had one foot out the door.
Four days was long enough for my dad to have gotten back from France. Maybe I’d walk in to find the apartment all tidied up, my mom sitting on a stool by the counter with a jam jar of red wine, waiting for a spoonful of his famous Bolognese. It was a nice thought, but I shook my head impatiently to clear
it, startling Alex out of his own reverie. We were getting close to the city, already driving past warehouses and burned-out buildings; there wasn’t time for little-kid fantasies of everything being okay. My parents weren’t getting back together. Even if she was out of bed, my mom would be mad at me for telling. And my dad, though he’d never show it, would probably be mad at me for making him come back from France.
And if he wasn’t coming back, then I’d need someplace to stay.
Growing more frantic with every mile, I sped through my options over and over again in case I’d forgotten one. But I hadn’t.
It was late afternoon and the sun was fading by the time we got back to the city, but I knew that wasn’t why the streets seemed so dark. I’d spent four days surrounded by a brand-new palette: whitewashed walls, sunlight sparkling on water and green grasses waving in sandy dunes. But here we were, back in the charmless grey, and I had absolutely no idea what would happen when I got home.
The dirty darkness was a shock, but the noise was even worse. The loudest sound I’d heard in four days had been the kid next door dumping his bike with a crash on his way back from the beach. So when a fire engine screamed past the car, with the heart-attack siren they use for real emergencies, I felt like I was hearing it for the first time.
Another fire truck hurtled past us, a minute later, with the same urgent wail, and I started to feel like they were giving voice to the desperate, trapped feeling in my chest.
“All right, Ollie,” Linda said, sounding fed up as she turned up Prince heading toward Greene. “Start getting your stuff together.”
Dread is a word that sounds like how it feels.
I reached down between my feet to shove the comic book I’d tried to distract myself with into my duffel. “Oh, for Chrissake,” Linda barked, braking so abruptly that my shoulder slammed into the back of her seat.
