I looked at all of them standing together, outlined on one side by the little bit of yellow light that filtered out from the house and on the other side by the silver light of the moon.
I thought about how if Daddy ever married Vicky, it would always be like this. Vicky and the boys would stay out here like Mom and I did. When Daddy came on the weekend they would be a whole family, and when I came, I would be a guest.
Harris stood beside Vicky, his hair standing up a little in the wind, his motor humming. “Well, Harris, it must be way past your bedtime,” Daddy said.
Harris didn’t even gun his motor.
“It is getting late,” Vicky said, sounding more helpless than ever. “I got up awfully early this morning.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean—” Daddy said.
“I always rub his back until he falls asleep,” Vicky said. “I ought to be there if he wakes up.”
“Once he’s asleep, he won’t wake up,” Daddy said hopefully. “The sea air and all.”
“You know what they say,” Vicky said with a little laugh. “Early to bed, early to rise.”
“Doesn’t leave much possibility for nightlife,” Daddy said.
Vicky looked at him the way Mom sometimes does.
“Well, it’s fine really,” Daddy said, sounding like somebody who’d lost a game.
“Ben, you were up so early this morning …,” Vicky began.
I knew how that speech ended. Ben was already on his way inside. Vicky went too, saying, “I want to wash Harris’s hands, that’s all. No baths tonight.”
“You mean showers,” Ben said. “No bathtub.”
“Ben!” Vicky said like she was shushing him.
After a moment I was alone with Daddy.
No one said good night to me. They’d probably already forgotten I was there. Of course, they didn’t really say good night to Daddy either. Not everybody was like my mom, who tried to make everyone feel noticed.
“Just you and me, Lex,” Daddy said.
“I’m going to bed,” I said. I could read my book all the way to the end. I didn’t want Daddy to spend time with me because everybody else had another place to be. He could only spend time with me if he thought of me first.
I missed Mom a whole lot right then. I wanted to call her. But there isn’t one place to stand in the shore house where everybody else can’t hear what you’re saying.
Plus I didn’t know what I would say.
Except that weekends at the shore were not going to be nearly as much fun as they had been last year. And even then, they weren’t all that great.
Here’s a horrible thing about boys. They leave toilet seats up and a person can fall in if she’s not careful, especially in the middle of the night.
Here’s a horrible thing about Ben. He walks around while he’s brushing his teeth in the morning, sort of foaming at the mouth. Then he leaves his toothbrush in the sink, still foaming a little all by itself. Horrible.
Somebody had pulled the table into the middle of the floor again so there was room for five chairs. Daddy came in from the deck and sat down at one end. Holding my breath, I took the chair across from the two together.
Vicky brought the frying pan over and put eggs on all the plates but one. She pointed to one of the two chairs. “Mack, you sit right here so you’ll be next to me.”
Whew.
He climbed up and looked around at everybody’s plates while he was sitting on his knees. He had toast and bacon. He revved his motor and pointed to the eggs.
“Are you sure?” Vicky asked him, and he nodded so hard his motor choked a little.
She sighed and moved one of her fried eggs to Harris’s plate. His motor settled right down. Vicky put the pan back on the stove and sat down. Ben came last and dove right in without waiting to see if we all had what we needed, if everybody was ready to eat.
Here’s a horrible thing about Harris. He doesn’t eat egg yolk with a fork. I watched because I wanted to know.
Really, he didn’t eat the egg at all. While he ate the toast and bacon, he did a little finger painting with the yolk. Vicky and Ben were busy comparing their flea bites, or maybe they were used to him.
Daddy tried not to see what Harris was doing. He kept his newspaper folded so it fit next to his plate, and he pretended to read. I knew he was pretending because he never picked it up and turned the page and refolded it the way he usually would if he was reading.
“I could cut that for you, Harris,” Daddy said when he couldn’t pretend not to see this anymore. “You could eat it with a fork.”
Harris’s motor didn’t hiccup.
“The yolk sticks between the tines,” Daddy said as Harris squished some yolk together with some white. “A fork makes a real cool earth mover.”
I felt a little smile in my heart, but it wasn’t a very nice smile. It wasn’t about Harris, it was about Daddy. He wouldn’t be able to stand Harris for long.
“It’s important to learn to use your utensils,” Daddy said firmly.
Harris motored on as if he couldn’t hear a word. And then he went around the plate and, with a little garbage-truck-like roar before each bite, ate the toast and bacon.
I was beginning to like Harris.
“I thought I’d walk along the shore,” Ben said as he dropped his paper napkin on his empty plate. “Explore a little.”
“I can show you,” I said. I knew the shore by heart.
“I kind of wanted to go by myself,” Ben said.
I wet my finger and picked up bacon crumbs from my plate. I knew what Ben was thinking. He didn’t want to play with some little kid, especially a girl.
The table had gotten very quiet. Harris’s motor had died out.
“It isn’t exploring if somebody shows me, that’s all,” he said.
“I understand, Ben,” Vicky said. “But you’re Lexie’s guest.”
“No, he’s not,” I said, still not looking up. “He’s Daddy’s guest. If I’d known we could bring company, I would’ve brought some of my own.”
“Lexie,” Daddy said as if I was the one eating with my fingers. Well, I was, but not like Harris. I looked up through my eyelashes. Vicky looked at me in a certain way that knew a lot. It wasn’t at all a mean look. That look gave me courage.
“I’m going beachcombing,” I said to Ben. He looked the same as the night before, hair tuft and parentheses. No earphones. “It’s what I always do here. So I don’t want you looking at me like you think I copied you or I’m following you, something stupid like that.”
“Deal,” Ben said.
I didn’t know it could be that simple. I said what I wanted and he said okay. I tried to think why things had never seemed that easy before. I couldn’t figure it out.
“Nobody goes into the water until we’re out there with you,” Vicky said.
“I can swim,” I said. “I never go into deep water until Mo—somebody is watching.”
“Do what you always do,” Daddy said. “We’ll be out there sunbathing in a few minutes. I hope we don’t all have to draw up borders, like for territories.”
“We’ll get to sunbathing. There’s some work needed in this kitchen first,” Vicky said, looking right at Daddy. She didn’t seem all that Mary Tyler Moore after all. Her flea bites were worse. Probably the puffy legs didn’t make it easy to be chirpy.
Daddy laughed. “Okay, I guess it’s first things first.” This was new, the way he gave in. Like somebody who was just learning the rules and was still cheerful about his mistakes. “It’s the shore, Vicky. I get like a kid out here.”
That was what Mom used to say, that he got like a kid out here. But he’d never laughed when she said it. He’d never stayed to help with the dishes either.
I hadn’t quite finished my breakfast when Ben got up to go out. I pushed away from the table. This was still my shore. I got to pick which part of it was mine to explore first. I stopped at the bottom of the steps to scan the sandy beach both ways. I took my time. Mainly I had to
watch for messy spots.
Ben looked both ways like someone crossing the street in traffic.
He didn’t know what to look for. And I couldn’t really tell him. I never knew what I might find. There were always lots of seaweed and creatures like starfish and jellyfish and sea urchins. Well, not so many starfish and sea urchins actually washed up.
But there was always something interesting.
“I’m going this way,” I told Ben, pointing. I took the big rusty bucket I used for collecting and a shovel from a hook under the deck, right where I always left it. I poured a little water out of the bucket and I was ready to go.
I left him standing there. With that hair tuft and the parentheses, and wearing the baggy shorts over his skinny legs, he didn’t look much like an explorer to me. He looked like a Muppet who’d lost his skateboard.
I spent the first ten minutes walking straight away from the house, not looking at anything. Mostly I walked where the sand was still wet and almost solid under my feet, because I could walk fast.
I passed up the bird footprints that would get washed away and several other things that looked interesting. Empty bottles, a wooden crate with a mermaid on the label, an oar.
I wanted to have as much of the shore as possible to call my own. I didn’t want Ben circling around and showing up four or five houses away and saying that was his territory to explore.
One boy I knew was really sneaky enough to do that, but he was back home in Baltimore. I didn’t know yet if Ben could be sneaky. I didn’t want to take chances.
There weren’t too many people outside. The water looked a little rough today. It rushed onto the shore, soaking in fast and leaving a white foam on the sand for a few seconds before that disappeared too.
I remembered I still hadn’t called my mom. I couldn’t do it with Harris putt-putting around. Worse, what if Vicky said something and Mom said, Whose voice is that? What would I tell her?
I still had all day to call, that part didn’t worry me. I tried to think of how I could get the house to myself. Maybe I could ask Daddy to take everybody outside.
When I looked back, I was about twenty houses away from ours. I could see Ben, still hanging around the steps. I relaxed and wandered into the surf, letting the cold water wash up over my ankles. The first splash felt like a shock. I got used to that fast.
I decided it was good enough being at the shore this morning, even if it wasn’t going to be Daddy and me. Wet sand scrunched up between my toes, and wind blew my hair all around, and the sun felt warm on my shoulders. I had my bathing suit on under my shorts and T-shirt so I could get wet if the sun got too hot.
Mrs. Brady’s little pink poodle barked at me. Apricot poodle, Mrs. Brady says, but that poodle looks pink to me. Its name is Prissy.
Mrs. Brady was one of the beach people who came back to their houses each year. She always got here before we did. And she walked along the beach every day.
A lot of the houses had different people each summer, some were different every week. Sometimes there were other kids to play with. It always took a few days to get to know everybody.
I found a starfish. A real starfish with one leg missing. Dead. It was still an interesting find. I shoveled some sand over it. And I found a bed of clams. The way to tell is by all the little holes in the sand where they suck in air to breathe.
When I was little, Daddy used to tell me that if I put my toes over the holes I would be able to feel them breathe—thoop, thoop, thoop—against my skin. I didn’t think I really could, but hearing those words, thoop, thoop, thoop, gave me such a thrill all over I could hardly stand it. I put my toes over the holes as I walked.
Finally, I’d staked out enough territory. I stopped trying to get so far from the house and I started to look for beach glass and anything else good that had washed up on the sand.
I came across this wonderful tangle of fishing line and hooks. The water had wrapped the whole mess around a piece of twisted metal and trapped one tiny perfect spiral shell inside like it was in an aquarium. When I shook it, the shell moved but it didn’t fall out.
I put it in my bucket.
I started back, going slowly now. It felt good to wander in and out of the surf, getting sand on my feet and letting the water wash it off.
I investigated every piece of trash I’d passed before. I kept a bottle that had writing in a foreign language.
And a thin wooden sign, a label really, that could be peeled away from the rougher wood of the crate. I got a splinter. It was worth it. The mermaid looked like one might really look, kind of fishy.
And a piece of driftwood worn pale and smooth during a long voyage from wherever.
All the time, I kept my eyes peeled for a hermit crab. I looked under everything, poking around in some disgusting stuff because, hey, what do hermit crabs like to eat, right?
No luck there.
When I got about halfway home, I saw Ben running toward me. He didn’t stop running even after he knew I had seen him. He was out of breath when he reached me.
“Shark,” he wheezed as he came to a stop.
“Shark?”
He nodded and took the driftwood from me. He was all out of breath and still willing to carry the heaviest thing to hurry me along. I was happy to have some help. I didn’t tell him it wasn’t likely he’d seen a shark. Or a dolphin.
When he got his breath back, I asked, “Why didn’t you go get your mom?”
“They went to the drugstore,” Ben said. “Mom’s bites are worse, she needs stronger medicine. You were so far off they figured they’d get back before you knew they were gone.”
“So where’d you see this shark?”
“Wait, you’ll see.”
I dropped my bucket under the deck and out of the sun once we reached the house. I took the mermaid label and the fishing line piece upstairs and set them on the shelf with my collection. The bottles and driftwood could wait.
“Hurry up,” Ben called to me.
“I’m coming.”
We walked for five minutes in the other direction, going around a little bend in the land. Until last year, Mom never allowed me to walk out of sight by myself. We’d always walked this way together.
There was this one little section of shore behind a ridge of land. When the tide went out, some water got caught there, making a pool. When I was little, too little to go out in the water because it felt too rough, I played there every morning while Mom lay on a towel in the sand.
By the time we reached the tide pool, I knew what we would find.
“It’s a shark,” Ben said, stopping not too close to the edge. It swam slow circles around the pool as we watched. “A real shark.”
It was a sand shark. No big deal. Then I remembered how excited I’d been the first time I found a sand shark. It was a big deal. A really big deal. Like the most exciting weekend I had all summer.
I didn’t tell Ben. I didn’t want to spoil it for him. Besides, it was a pretty big sand shark. As the shark swam around and around, the fin rode the water like a sailboat. “Wow,” I said.
“Yeah,” Ben said. “Lucky we found it before somebody got attacked or something.”
It was big, but it wasn’t that big. If we got Harris to lie down next to it, they’d probably be the same size. Except Harris would be wider.
It occurred to me that Ben might think I didn’t know a sand shark when I saw it. He might be playing a joke on me. I squinted at him because he stood so the sun was in my eyes. He looked serious.
I said, “Maybe we should let it go.”
He looked at me like I might be crazy. “Free the shark?”
“Free the shark,” I said.
“Who-oa.”
I waited.
“How?” he said. “I mean, my mother will never forgive me if I let you get chewed.”
I was glad to hear it. “I guess we ought to dig a canal,” I said.
The look on his face told me everything.
I could see he tho
ught it was a pretty good idea, although he didn’t say so. In fact, I liked it better that he didn’t feel like he had to say so.
I could see he hadn’t expected me to come up with a good idea.
“We’ll have to leave a kind of dam for the water,” Ben said, beginning to take charge. “So the really dangerous moment is when we open the pool to the canal.”
I looked at the sand shark lazily cruising the pool. I didn’t think we were in too much danger. Ben and I started to dig. We could have gone back for shovels, I guess, but this frenzy to free the shark gripped us both. We dug with our hands, with clamshells, and with a piece of driftwood that was shaped like a big flat sandal. It was hot work.
We dug for a long time and two people walked by. Both times, it went the same way.
Ben said, “Quick, stand so she doesn’t see the shark.”
“It’s only Mrs. Lee.”
“Stand with your back to the pool,” Ben said, “and try to look natural.”
“Why?”
“It’s a shark, that’s why,” he said. “It isn’t like people love sharks. They might kill it.”
“Some might,” I agreed. Sand sharks make pretty good eating. I didn’t want to see that happen to this one, though. I’d begun to feel the way I’d feel toward a stray dog, like we had to protect it. “Mrs. Lee wouldn’t kill it, though.”
“Wave,” he said, because Mrs. Lee was waving.
Ben did this because he was brave and still hadn’t figured out that the shark wouldn’t try to eat him. I did it because I didn’t want someone to come up to Ben and say, “Oh, it’s a sand shark. They hardly ever bite.”
“Don’t back up any more,” he said. “You’re getting too close to the pool’s edge. Sharks jump out of the water, you know.”
I waved long and hard at Mrs. Lee. It was a break from the digging. I couldn’t work as hard as Ben. I didn’t want to admit maybe I couldn’t work as long either.
When he went back to digging, so did I. After a while, we were close enough to the ocean that each time a wave washed in, water filled the end of the canal and wet our legs. The water drained quickly as the wave slid away, leaving us feeling cool enough to keep on.
Lexie Page 4
