“Why don’t you do your work after dinner?” The hammer clicked back on the lock and my mother slid into view.
For a full minute, I forgot I had to go to the bathroom at the sight of her. Dark hair floated down around her face, twirling into loose curls at the shoulder, making what had taken so long plain. Her eyes, which almost never saw makeup, were carefully lined with charcoal shadow, and a shimmer of gold brushed all the way to her brows. I couldn’t yank my eyes off her. But my father didn’t seem to notice. He turned away without a second glance, plodding down the steps; a thing I might have wondered more about had I not been frantically dashing for the toilet and barely six years old.
“Can’t,” I heard my father sigh, “I really have to get this done today. Maybe . . .” The front door thudding shut lopped off the rest of his thought. Through the bathroom window, I saw him cross the yard and flop into an old wooden Adirondack chair out back.
“Oh.” My mother’s whisper was barely audible, her feet statue still on the other side of the door.
When I finished, I scurried to the kitchen to find that my mother’s feet had not only gotten going, but were pacing about sixty miles an hour from the counter to the refrigerator. She had a sort of lost look in her eyes, stopping only to chop the heads off three stalks of broccoli with unjustified force. When she ran out of broccoli stalks to behead, she spun on her heel, going after a head of cauliflower, then a bag of carrots, peppers, and snap peas until there was nothing left to attack with a knife that wouldn’t buy her twenty-five years in the penitentiary. The notion struck me that if anyone got in her way, she would either march clear over the top of him, or freeze right up solid with no idea what to do.
Slipping through the front door, I followed my father outside, crawling up in the chair beside him. He laid his papers aside with a smile that poked the dimples in at his cheeks and made him the most handsome man alive. His fingers crept up to play with my hair, and over his shoulder I saw my mother in the kitchen window, watching us.
She looked at me and I saw it—the question brimming in her eyes that ached to ask by what magic I had persuaded my father to love me. In a matter of half seconds, it overflowed, quietly running down her cream cheeks in crooked, black smudges.
Even then I knew. I knew I had to hold tight to him or he might flit away. With his deep dimples and shaggy brown hair, he looked like one person, but he wasn’t. He could change in a single wink and he was always running toward you or away, depending on what corner of the earth the Nikommo were calling him to that day. If a person wasn’t willing to run with him, she’d be left behind.
Back in the control room I slid the journal over the control panel and let it settle in front of Remy, who studied it as if it might be rabid and ready to pounce. How did you know him?
“Who?”
I yanked the paper back, scribbled hard, and shoved it back at her because I knew she knew. My father.
“I grew up here. He spent summers here. It’s a small island.”
Her response sounded rehearsed, like my mother’s responses. I studied her carefully, reading her body.
Here is how you know if a person is fibbing or avoiding: it’s in the distance. A person who really doesn’t know, but wants to; they’ll lean right into a question and dig. It’s in our nature. A person who does know, but doesn’t want to, will pull away and pretend to be ignorant and nonchalant about the facts in the way a person might slowly back away from a cougar ready to strike.
How well did you know him? I tapped the tip of my pen to the page.
“I don’t know. He was the kid that lived down the lane. . . . Son of a green-nosed bastard! It’s fucking pea soup out here.” We had been sailing through dense fog the entire way to the mainland. Now Remy was squinting angrily through the white cloud wrapping itself around the Mirabel like an enormous scoop of melted marshmallow. “Seeing the damn wharf would be helpful in docking the ferry.”
That the Mirabel bumped into the dock without sending anyone over the rail is a flat-out miracle, and when the worst of the pitching settled, Remy cut the engine, looking out at the crowd waiting onshore. The mainland wharf was a carnival of vendors selling crab cakes, deep-fried clams, crawfish boils, and popcorn shrimp. Some booths doubled as a mini-mart for beach wares and tanning lotion. An entire tunnel of boogie boards lined one side of the dock where a boy with yellow dreadlocks leaned easily against the rail chewing gum.
“Don’t touch the controls.” Remy wagged a finger my way and slipped onto deck. She wasn’t going to answer me, not really. I could feel the truth tingling through me. She knew what had happened to my father. She was retreating and it was the first time I had seen her back away from anything. Watching her make her way toward the ramp from the window, I remembered what she had said about nobody’s legs being built to run forever. I knew she was right about that.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When Remy finally dropped me back home exhausted and smelling of taxi fumes, Luke was not yapping to greet me. Inside, my mother’s voice filtered toward the entryway.
“Okay, thank you. Please call us if you see him.”
I stopped in the doorway feeling the hairs prickle up on my arms and the bottom give way in my stomach. Then a thought came back to me like a rush of water. That morning when I had run back to find my Yemaya Stone, Luke had been on my heels. I’d tripped right over him, but in my rush to the cliffs I hadn’t even paid attention. I’d just kept running. How many hours had I been gone?
“Maybe Izabella took him with her,” Grandma Jo said, her voice calm.
“No. She wouldn’t have brought him down to Herman’s with her. And they left straight from there for the ferry run. Remy wouldn’t have let her take him back on the ferry. He threw up the entire way over here. The police haven’t seen him. They said they’d keep an eye out, but . . .”
“It’s going to be okay. Dogs run. It’s in their nature. They can find their way home from a thousand miles away.”
“He’s not a dog; he’s a puppy.”
“Did you call the vet for the island?”
“Yes. He asked if Luke had tags and if he’d been vaccinated for rabies. It seems there are a lot of foxes on the island, and with Tom’s salt licks drawing them in . . .” Worry filled my mother’s voice. “What am I going to do, Mom? I don’t even want to think about how Iz will handle another loss. Shit!”
“It’ll be fine, Zo. Someone will find him.”
“And what if they don’t? The whole reason I got her that dog . . . What if . . . Any more loss and she’s going to disappear inside herself forever.”
“There are no other ‘if’s. They’ll find him and Izabella will be fine.”
I crept to the kitchen doorway in time to see Grandma Jo brushing back my mother’s hair with her hand. My mother was sitting on the edge of the counter like a teenager holding the phone in one hand. For a fraction of a second, I thought she looked like me. Maybe it was the way her hair fell down to hang off her shoulders, or the fact that I sat on the counter like that. Or maybe it was the tremble of fear in her voice that I might disappear and leave her behind. And for the first time in a very long time, I believed that she didn’t want me to. When she saw me, she slid down.
“Izabella! You didn’t take Luke into town, did you?”
I shook my head, trying not to cry.
Was he here this morning? After I left? My hands were shaking so hard it was difficult to write. She must have noticed the tears biting the corners of my eyes and my hand trembling because she quickly started repeating what Grandma Jo had told her.
“I don’t remember. I don’t think so. Okay, don’t panic. It’s okay. Dogs run all the time. He couldn’t have gone far; it’s an island—a very small island. Why don’t you go get Remy to pick us up in the taxi? Maybe he followed you to the pier. I’ll walk around here and look for him.” I glanced out the window at the darkening sky, remembering how scared he’d been during the storm. I’d made it across the bay twice without
retching but now felt like I might throw up. I was like a giant walking eraser wandering through the world making the things I loved vanish one at a time. “Go!”
By the time Remy answered the door she’d already changed into her tattered terry-cloth robe, her red hair exploding around her face like licks of flame. I pulled out my pad.
Luke’s missing.
She sighed heavily. “Do you know I haven’t even sat down yet?”
I looked at her pleadingly.
“Fine,” she huffed. “I knew that damnable animal would bring nothing but trouble from the moment he lost his lunch all over my boat.” She tried her best to be annoyed, but I could read a trace of concern on her brow.
Grabbing her keys, she did not even bother to get dressed before starting up the taxi and unlocking the passenger door. “I suppose your mother wants to tag along, too. Get in!”
The Purple Monster roared down the lane, stopping at the Booth House only long enough for my mother to hop in.
“Grandma Jo is going to stay here in case he comes back on his own,” she said, climbing in the backseat with a box of Milk Bones and rolling down the window.
“Who the hell are you,” Remy snipped, “Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail of food home?”
“I don’t know. Just in case he won’t come to us.”
“He’s a dog. They come to dead carcasses, cat shit, and fire hydrants.”
“Well, I didn’t have any of those handy.”
Remy shook her head, setting her hair dancing.
“I don’t know where he would go.” My mother stuck her head through the window. I bit my lip, studying the darkness beyond. “Luke . . . Come here, boy! Luke!” She shook the box out the window.
“Well, my car still stinks to high heaven of poodle from this afternoon. If he’s any kind of dog at all he’ll follow the scent,” Remy said, barreling around the bend fast enough to send shells flying in every direction. “Besides, we’re on an island. He can only go so far before reaching water.”
I looked at Remy feeling my knees go weak. By 10:00 P.M., he’d already gone far enough that we could not find him, becoming the second member of my family to go missing from me on this island.
When there were no other side roads to bounce down, Remy dropped us off, promising to check the cliffs and orchard once more and call around the island in the morning. I felt my mother’s arm around my shoulders as she drove off.
“He’ll come back, Iz. Don’t worry. Dogs can travel thousands of miles to find their way home. It’s in their nature.”
I nodded, studying the moon overhead, fat and white as a winter frost, watching it shimmer and dance on the ocean below.
Come on, Be. Come dance with the moon. . . . I pinched my eyes closed, pushing the memory back.
From the front walk, I could hear Grandma Jo break out in song to Joan Baez on the radio: “May you build a ladder to the stars . . . and climb on every rung . . .”
My mother rested her head on mine, chuckling. “You realize she’s probably dancing around naked in there.” I couldn’t remember the last time we’d stood so close. Usually one of us was pushing away from the other like a ship avoiding a reef.
“You made it to the mainland without throwing up?” my mother asked.
I nodded, lowering my eyes to trace the edges of the bushes for some sign of Luke, but they were still and dark.
“Telly still using the BMW as a lounge chair?”
I bit the inside of my cheek and nodded again.
On the edge of the cliff, Witch’s Peak poked through the treetops like a cut of onyx in the moonlight, and I couldn’t say that it wasn’t a trick of light, but I swore I saw a shadow cross its tip, pause, and disappear.
“Let’s go in.” My mother turned for the door. “I’ll leave the window open and sleep on the sofa. If he doesn’t come back by morning, I’ll go back out and look for him.”
That night as I sat staring out the window, searching for Luke in the moonlight, an orange fox made her way toward Mr. O’Malley’s salt licks with her kit so near their fur touched.
Something from earlier that day came back to me. As Lindsey had stormed away with suds in her hair, she’d told me I was going to pay for what I’d done. Now images of her throwing rocks at the seagull were haunting me, and I was pacing the floor, trying to convince myself that nobody could be that evil.
I walked across the room pulling free the small blue satchel and did something I had not in a very long time: I prayed. I prayed to Yemaya, God, the Nikommo, and anyone else who would listen to keep Luke safe. A shadow on Witch’s Peak shifted, looking back at me—or maybe it was just a cloud passing in front of the moon. From a place deep and unexpected, a small sob broke out of me.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The next morning Luke was not back and my mother had just finished off a stack of posters that read, LOST SHAR-PEI PUPPY PLEASE CALL 335-9174. With Grandma Jo’s interference, my mother agreed to let me ride Remy’s bicycle into town to pass them out and look for him—though she would not have if she’d known where I was headed. It was already eight o’clock. In two hours, I was due to help Remy run a bake sale, so I needed to hurry if I was going to find Lindsey beforehand.
I straddled the candy-apple Schwinn, tottering back and forth and trying to recall the last time I’d been on a bike as I steered it out of the drive. At the end of the lane, I found Remy pinching back mums in her front garden. Mr. O’Malley was standing shotgun with a spade balanced in one hand, a pot in the other, and his pipe balanced between his teeth like the tin man in The Wizard of Oz. I pulled over to hand him a poster for the taxi stand, anxious to make it quick.
“Here’s a helper,” Mr. O’Malley murmured around the mouthpiece of the pipe, trying to hand over the pot before I’d even gotten my feet free of the pedals. I was just about to take it from him, only to be pulled up short by Remy.
“Don’t you take that!” she snapped, nearly taking my head off in the process. “The moment he reclaims his hands, he intends to light that pipe full of hell grass. Do you suppose I’ve been kneeling here so long my knees are broken to bits for no good reason at all?”
Mr. O’Malley gave her a soft kick in the rear end as I handed him a poster.
“He’ll be back, don’t you worry,” Mr. O’Malley assured me.
“Oh, Maynard Herman rang this morning, said the window will be ready this afternoon. Riley and his dad are going to set it, but he’s expecting you tomorrow to paint the frame. Then I’ll show you how to glaze it.”
Mr. O’Malley started to say something but instead broke out in a series of choking coughs that rattled all six feet three inches of him.
“Dad?” Remy relieved him of his clay pot then reached for his empty hand. She held it gently a moment before pulling herself to her feet and digging into his shirt pocket to pull forth a crinkled sack of pipe tobacco. He didn’t seem to notice as she pinched a wad between her fingers and tucked it neatly into the stack of his pipe. “Dad,” she repeated. “Here.” She struck a match on the toe of her boot and touched it to the bowl of his pipe, puffing on it three times so that sweet smoke spiraled out before poking it between his lips.
“What?” he answered, a big old grizzly bear pulled too soon from hibernation.
“If you’re not careful your lungs will clear. Then I will be stuck with you forever and never receive my rightful inheritance.”
Straightening myself on the seat, I shook my head at the two of them and waved goodbye.
“You’ll meet me at the bake sale by ten o’clock, right?” Remy glanced at me.
I nodded, making off down the lane.
It was early yet, but Remy had told me there was no school this week and I suspected if I found Riley I’d find Lindsey trailing him like a pesky burdock. He was probably already down at the docks.
The tires of the Schwinn made little trenches in the shell gravel, slowing me down until I hit the cobblestones of Main Street. Giving the handlebars a turn, I pulled down
the rough planks of Steamship Wharf and finally leaned the bike against the wooden sea witch.
Telly was busy checking the roster inside the ticket booth, and I could see Riley on the upper deck fiddling with a loose rail, but Lindsey was nowhere to be seen. Snatching the bike upright, I walked it back down the pier past the Anchor Diner and headed for Merchant’s Hardware. I set it in the bike rack that Lindsey and Carly had been sitting on two days earlier and laughing at me as I worked at Mr. Herman’s. It seemed to be their haunt.
But when fifteen minutes later there was no sign of them, I pushed the kickstand back up. I’d just swung one leg over the bar when the familiar pudge of Carly’s butt backed out of the White Whale as she balanced an ice cream cone in one hand and a glass of water in the other. She tilted her head, nibbling at the bottom of the cone before sucking the ice cream through it as if it were a straw, when the door opened again and Lindsey came through it carrying a cup of water. Tossing the Schwinn to the cobblestones with a clatter, I marched across the street stopping both of them in their tracks. Maybe it was the look on my face, which said I’d just as soon clobber them as look at them, or maybe they were too busy eating, but neither one said a word until I was in arm’s reach.
“Look, Carly,” Lindsey sang. “It’s the little janitor.”
Glaring hard at her, I took the missing-dog poster I was holding and shoved it into her hand. She glanced down at it and I was surprised to see her actually reading the words on the page.
“Ohhh. What’s the matter? Did you lose your puppy?” Lindsey dropped the poster, letting it flitter to the ground at her feet. Carly laughed, taking a bite of ice cream the size of my fist, which left a creamy smear of vanilla rimming her mouth. The fact that she was eating ice cream for breakfast said something about her, even if I didn’t know exactly what.
I picked the poster back up, shoving it at Lindsey a second time.
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