Looking for Red

by Angela Johnson

  looking for red

  looking for red

  ANGELA JOHNSON

  Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

  NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY SINGAPORE

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2002 by Angela Johnson

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster.

  Book design by Paul Zakris

  The text for this book is set in Garamond 3.

  Printed in the United States of America

  4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Johnson, Angela. Looking for Red / by Angela Johnson.—1st ed. p. cm. Summary: A thirteen-year-old girl struggles to cope with the loss of her beloved older brother, who disappeared four months earlier off the coast of Cape Cod.

  ISBN 0-689-83253-2

  ISBN: 978-0-689-83253-6

  eISBN: 978-1-43913-679-9

  [1. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 2. Grief—Fiction. 3. African Americans—Fiction. 4. Cape Cod (Mass.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.J629 Lo 2002

  [Fic]—dc21

  2001042846

  For Nancy Church, who will be missed forever—A. J.

  looking for red

  missing

  1

  When I was four, I could read the newspaper backward and upside down. I would stand and read the newspaper and not know I was doing it. Then suddenly everyone realized I was reading.

  It was something that just happened to me. It wasn’t strange or anything. Magic, almost.

  So my brother, Red, started putting me on the back of his bike so I could read the store signs as we flew by. It was speed-reading on wheels. He could never go fast enough. I’d scream, “Pedal faster, Red. Pedal faster.”

  And he would, laughing the whole time.

  It’s Red who I think of every time I pick up a book, ride my bicycle, or hear someone laugh. Everything was always him. He was always there, and we were always us.

  But then one day my brother, Red, just disappeared from us forever.

  You never know.

  Red.

  It used to be just me and Red. All the seasons along the coast, and seabirds, lobster breakfasts, and the beach all day. There were many summers and so many jars of shells that if I ever left the ocean, I would still feel it in my bones.

  But maybe it’s Red that I feel. Maybe that’s why I see him in the mirror and then I don’t. Maybe I’m not really here, but someplace else where missing brothers walk past dinner tables unseen.

  I’m lucky, though, ‘cause when the house is quiet and my heart is aching, at least I feel something, and I don’t have to leave here and go looking.

  2

  Once Red and I were caught offshore during a storm. We’d sat fishing in the little skiff that our dad, Frank, had fixed for us the summer before, catching so many porgies that both our buckets were overflowing. I remember my feet hung over the side of the Daisy Moon while Red told stories of sea monsters and how the old mapmakers used to think any place not charted on maps had dragons.

  Red knew all kinds of sea stories ‘cause he used to hang around Gloucester with Frank and his friends. Some, fishermen for a living, the others just living to fish. Frank would say that Red was learning the sea….

  Anyway, the Daisy Moon was rocking gently under a Cape Cod blue sky one minute, and about to capsize under ugly, dark skies the next. The following twenty minutes were some of the scariest of my life. Waves crashed and almost swamped us. Red pulled me into the middle of the skiff, tightened my life vest, and told me stories of mile-long fish that laughed and played water polo.

  I remember I held on to Red and buried my head in his chest, listening to his heartbeat. I remember the cold. I remember Reds calming voice.

  A calming voice at ten years old.

  Suddenly there was Frank in the motorboat towing us back to shore.

  I couldn’t get warm for weeks. My mom kept blankets all over the house and filled me with hot cocoa. Red watched and told me stories about the hot desert and how they’d actually found fish bones where there wasn’t any water that anyone could see.

  It took me a while, but I finally got warm.

  Red went back out the next day.

  I stood on our widow’s walk and watched as he pulled porgies out of the bay, waving to me. I worried that a storm would come up again, this time taking Red away forever and beyond.

  It’s seven years now since that cold, wet day.

  3

  My mom, Cassie, walks in looking tired.

  “Sometimes I wonder why we live by the ocean,” she says.

  Then she drags in two buckets and some paintbrushes from the hall and throws herself onto the beanbag chair. Her braids fall across her face.

  “Damn!” she says, closing her eyes.

  She falls onto the chair like I do; like she’s fourteen instead of thirty-five. Ageless. I think that’s what you’d call Cassie. It makes me mad because I feel so old. So very old.

  Sometimes I want Cassie to look tired and worn out. You know, like someone who can’t take one more minute of whatever it is that’s dragging her down. But she never looks that way. She never complains or feels like the end is coming.

  She told me this once.

  She said with a grin once that complaining and worrying was just not what she was about. And her eyes looked clear through me when she said that.

  What you see is what you get with Cassie. Always.

  “I love living on the Cape,” I say. “Why would I ever want to wonder about living anywhere else but here?”

  Cassie laughs and kicks the bucket over. It rolls along the floor and stops underneath the front window, which looks out onto the beach. She yawns and stretches out on the beanbag. In a few seconds she’s asleep.

  Asleep and snoring.

  Frank says she slept while she was in labor. The nurses said they’d never seen anything like it. I hate that she sleeps that hard, that deep.

  But I get up to cover her with the pink Mexican blanket we got last year in California. Now all her braids fall across her honey brown face; it’s still moist from the outside humidity and sweat from whitewashing the fence.

  I sit on the floor beside her and listen to the waves crash against the shore, and listen for something I’m not going to hear, because that’s all in the time before now.

  I watch my mother sleeping like a baby and I am alone.

  Even though it’s calmer on the water today than it was yesterday, I worry. I watch from the windows as little kids splash in and out of the waves. But for one minute—just one—I want to drag them all off the beach. I want to bring them all in the house and keep them safe, because when you grow up believing in dragons and the great beyond, you believe that they can show up anytime, taking anyone. My visions of dragons never go away.

  Something I remembered.

  Cassie promised this old aunt she had that she would dance on her grave when the time came.

  I was so little when I heard Cassie say she would do this that I used to dream about spinning in the cemetery in a pink-and-white tutu. My hair would be pulled back in
a bun, and the tights I wore would sparkle as I spun and twirled over the markers. I was a baby then and did not understand.

  I’d sing, too.

  I would dance and sing for all those who couldn’t.

  I would be like Cassie, who loved her aunt. Who loved to dance on Saturday nights even though she was Pentecostal and thought she would probably go to hell—dancing.

  It is because of her aunt that Cassie doesn’t have any religion. She says people like her aunt Charity were Nirvana-bound the second the doctor smacked them. Hell would melt if somebody like her aunt Charity ended up there.

  I think she’s right.

  I feel she’s right.

  I know she’s right.

  But now I don’t want to dance in a tutu in pink. And I definitely didn’t want to sing. I told Cassie I didn’t want to sing or dance on graves anymore like she might. And when she asked me why, I wouldn’t answer.

  4

  I used to daydream that I could walk from the Atlantic to the Pacific in one day. I would start at our front door, heading west. I’d tromp down through the Delaware Water Gap and over the mountains. No problem.

  It wouldn’t be too hard to cross the Midwest. There’d be hundreds of miles of flatness, with me walking through it all, loving the plains. And when I got to the Rockies, I’d climb so very high I’d see California from them. I’d see the desert and smell lemons. Then I’d be there. The Pacific would be mild, blue, and smooth as I sat on the beach and let the warm breeze blow through me.

  But I’d miss the Cape, you see. I always do. So I’d have to walk back that day. I would walk barefoot all the way back because I knew the land now.

  The mountains and plains would be sure and friendly under my feet as I walked back home.

  I slurp soup and listen to Frank and Cassie talk about the new houses going up in the neighborhood. They laugh and drop spoons at the table when they talk about how our neighbor Jo is taking it all.

  Jo spies on the contractors. Change. She doesn’t like it.

  Cassie laughs. “When I last saw her, she was on the widow’s walk with a pair of binoculars. Looked as if she even had a picnic lunch up there.”

  “Do you think she’ll give in and go back into her house anytime soon?” Frank says.

  Cassie chews bread and says, “Don’t know. Everything’s been hard on Jo since she got arthritis. A couple of years ago she would have walked up and down the building site with a picket sign.”

  It was Jo who taught Red to fish. I watched that quiet afternoon as they sat in the skiff out in the bay for hours. Reeling and just looking out over the water. Hours and hours in the gently rocking boat ’cause time out there just doesn’t mean anything.

  At least that’s what Jo always says.

  * * *

  “Mike? Mike, you still with us?”

  I nod and drag my legs into a crossed position, pulling the beads on my ankle bracelet.

  Sometimes I forget my name is Michaela, ’cause nobody in the family has ever called me that. I relax in this position ’cause I can pull on the anklet, whose beads are sea blue and smooth.

  They used to be Red’s.

  When he was three, beads were the only thing he ever wanted from the toy store. Cassie was warned not to give them to him—he was too young and would swallow them—but Cassie ignored it all. She said his face lit up like he was envisioning magic. So every birthday she got Red beads. He never stopped loving them.

  He’d kept them in jars underneath his bed. We’d find them all through the house.

  One day after Red disappeared Cassie was sitting on the living-room floor knitting when she spotted one of Red’s beads. She looked like someone had punched her, and she started unraveling the sweater she was knitting.

  But no tears. Not one.

  She just vacuumed for the rest of the day.

  Frank left after the fourth vacuuming and walked down to the beach. I walked into Red’s room and pulled one of the jars from underneath his bed and hid it in the back of my closet.

  The next morning the rest of the jars were gone.

  No more sea blue smoothness waiting. No more Red to come back to it.

  “I’m still here,” I finally say.

  “You should go to Jo’s. Talk and take her mind off this obsession with that building site,” Cassie says.

  “What’s wrong with her mind being on it? Nothin’ wrong with her feelings.”

  “You’re right.” Frank smiles.

  “Nothing wrong at all, Mike,” Cassie adds.

  I look at my parents and know that they are mouthing words they know by heart. You know the ones—don’t judge anyone, let people feel as they will.

  Yeah, they know the words.

  But I should still go to Jo’s to keep her mind off the new houses and get her to focus on something not so crazy.

  I watch Jo from our widow’s walk. Her short gray hair blows in the breeze. I kneel and watch her take the binoculars from her face. She starts laughing.

  I yell, “What’s up?”

  She waves at me and walks slowly back to the chair she dragged up to the walk.

  She hollers, “They can’t start up their heavy equipment.”

  “What happened?”

  She cups her hand to her mouth. “It’s probably the sea air. You never know about weather conditions around here. I’ve seen cars working perfectly just refuse to start up because of the salt air….”

  A gust of wind comes up and carries her word air away toward the water and out over the waves. I start to wonder if someone will step out of a door in England to go for a walk and suddenly hear, “air.”

  Would the word follow him on his walk?

  Could he imagine the word had been stolen by the wind from across the ocean from a gray-haired fishing woman who drinks tea on her roof and may be a saboteur of earth movers?

  He’d never know her or that she taught my brother to fish.

  I yell back to Jo, who’s sipping tea now, “The air up here can get you.”

  Then I turn toward the water and watch the sailboats glide on and out, and think about Cassie and Frank and how I never want to know words by heart when it comes to somebody else’s feelings.

  5

  Red kept frogs.

  Red kept frogs everywhere.

  He said frogs knew what it was all about and what was going to happen to all of us if we didn’t watch out.

  Frank would always complain to Cassie that Red watched too many nature documentaries and wild-animal shows. Said he was growing up loving animals more than people. Cassie said she didn’t see anything wrong with that.

  She liked animals a whole lot better than people because they didn’t hog two parking spaces when they’d bought overpriced cars, and didn’t force other animals at gunpoint from their homelands or use lawyers as flamethrowers.

  Cassie really meant the last part ’cause her family was full of lawyers. She wouldn’t admit it to most people, though. She loved her family when they weren’t being lawyers.

  That’s why she married Frank. He wasn’t a lawyer. He worked with his hands, and on their second date he told her he wanted thirty-two kids and twelve dogs. Thirty-two kids seemed like too much to Cassie, so she talked him down to twelve kids and six dogs.

  Cassie said she had to marry the crazy man, ’cause who’d even joke about wanting that many babies….

  Red would have said frogs never thought about how many tadpoles they’d have.

  People should keep blue beads out. On their floors. Around their windowsills, all over their houses.

  Cassie sweeps around mine now.

  Frank walks over them in his waders and work boots.

  I lie on my belly, eye level, and go into them. Living in a blue-bead world with air bubbles just dancing through my head. I could lie there for hours. I do.

  Frank sometimes puts my dinner beside me on the floor. I eat toasted cheese sandwiches and pickles in my blue marble world while Cassie and Frank talk and step ove
r me.

  When I stay the night somewhere else, I miss them, Red’s blue beads.

  I start looking for them.

  I say I am going to the bathroom or need a drink of water, but what I am really doing is looking for blue worlds in closets and drawers. Anyplace could be hiding the beads.

  I never find any.

  Not one.

  I want to ask my friends’ mothers where the beads are. Do they hide them when people come over? Are they trying to keep them from me?

  So one night at my friend Gia’s house I woke up way after everybody in the house was asleep and went looking.

  When Gia’s dad found me, I was crying behind the couch. Then I was screaming at him. How they could live in a house without beads.

  When Cassie came to get me at four that morning, Gia’s mom told her that I was sleepwalking. She told Cassie about the bead “nonsense.”

  Frank put a warm blanket over me just as the sun was coming up over the Cape. I fell asleep in our house with a ring of sea blue beads around me.

  6

  I stand on the beach sometimes and holler across the waves.

  And I don’t think anybody even pays attention anymore. I’ve been doing it for so long that I can’t remember when I didn’t. So it came to me a while back that if I scream enough, he’ll come back.

  Is there a boy walking miles away listening to me as my screams sink from the air down to him?

  One day, “Come back.”

  The next day, “Red.”

  The next one, “To me.”

  7

  I think it’s like walking barefoot in a room full of broken glass, when someone you love goes away.

  You have to get out of it, so you have to go on no matter how many jagged pieces of glass stab you. Some pieces hurt more than others. Some make you think you ain’t ever going to walk again. And you start saying to yourself, “What stupid person broke all this glass, anyway, and tricked me into the room?”