Nicholas grabbed his sneakers, pulled them on quickly, and spun down the spiral staircase. He almost stepped on Pistol, who was stretched across the hall at the bottom of the stairs. The dog lifted his head long enough to watch Nicholas disappear out the front door, and then returned to chasing the slow-moving rabbits of his dreams.
Knowing that he wouldn’t be able to see anything from the dock, Nicholas sprinted around the edge of the little cove to the sandy point of land that the twins had named Beach End, which came from We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, naturally.
The breeze was steady but light, and Nicholas had sailed enough to have a pretty fair idea of where the boat should be when he reached Beach End and looked down the lake.
There was, however, not a boat in sight.
The moon had ducked behind a cloud, and for a few seconds he thought the blanket of darkness that had been thrown over the lake was the explanation. When the clouds parted, though, no boat appeared.
What the …? Was I dreaming?
He stayed there for a few minutes, letting his eyes get used to the darkness, but it made no difference. He tried to picture in his mind the shoreline north of where he stood—was there someplace a boat could hide? There were no docks or moorings for a good half mile, much farther than a small sailboat could have traveled in the short time it took him to get from his room to Beach End. It seemed to have just … vanished.
* * *
July 14
Hi, Dad.
3:15 a.m.—the moon’s shining on Goblin and I’m wondering if you can see the moon where you are. Crazy, right? I know I should be in bed, but my brain is going, like, a million miles an hour. This place makes New York seem boring.
Nicholas
* * *
When Nicholas went down for breakfast in the morning, he found Nick already out on the porch, drinking coffee and reading the paper.
“Mornin’, champ,” said Nick. “Did you get some breakfast?”
“In a minute. I, um, wanted to ask you about something.”
Nick lowered the newspaper. “You saw it, didn’t you? The 2:53—that’s what I call it.”
Nicholas’s eyes widened. “How did you know?”
“Heard the screen door bang against the frame and looked over at the clock in my room. When I saw the time, I knew.”
“So you do believe in it?”
“Well, I believe that you saw a sailboat out your window. However, I believe that there’s a perfectly logical explanation for it. What happened when you got down to the lake?”
Nicholas shrugged. “It was gone. I thought maybe I dreamt the whole thing.”
“Do you remember anything about the boat?”
“It was a little smaller than Goblin, I think, but it did have a cabin. Normal-looking, I guess. I only saw it for a few seconds. Then the moon went behind some clouds and that was it.”
“Sounds about right,” said Nick. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Lillie never saw it again; you probably won’t, either.”
* * *
An hour later, as a delightful offshore breeze ruffled the water, Goblin paced impatiently at her mooring, like a dog on a leash waiting for its morning walk. But Nicholas and Charlie had turned their attention to Imp, which they had carefully lowered from the hayloft with a little help from Charlie’s teammates Zack Cooper and Ryan Crenshaw and the ancient block and tackle that Uncle Nick set up and operated. They were determined to finish the job that Nicholas’s father had started so long ago, even though it meant sacrificing precious sailing time aboard Goblin.
They set the boat upside down on some boards inside the barn and wedged a block of wood under each side to keep it from tipping every time they leaned on it. Uncle Nick supplied them with a shopping bag full of sandpaper and showed them how to sand with the grain of the wood, starting with coarse sandpaper and gradually using finer and finer grit. The wood seemed to come to life with just a few strokes, and the dull gray-brown surface quickly began to show signs of its original color and grain.
Zack and Ryan were supposed to stick around to help out with the sanding, but bolted when they realized that sanding was actual work.
“Sorry, Charlie, but I don’t do physical labor,” said Zack. “Helping you move the boat is one thing, but standing there with sandpaper in my hand and breathing in all that sawdust, which is probably toxic? No way.”
Nicholas scoffed under his breath, “And you called me a city boy.”
“Uh, have fun, guys,” said Ryan. “See you Saturday, Charlie. Softball game over at the field by my house.”
“You should come, too, Nicholas,” said Zack. “Don’t worry, you can be on Charlie’s team—that way you don’t have to worry about her striking you out again.”
“Hilarious,” muttered Nicholas as they hopped on their bikes and rode off.
“Don’t let Zack get to you. He’s like that to everybody. And if it’s any consolation, he can’t hit my curve, either.”
* * *
For the next hour, they sanded and sweated, and sweated and sanded, in the dim light of the barn. Hearing a noise in the back of the barn, Nicholas moved closer to Charlie and whispered, “Don’t turn around. We’re being watched.”
She grinned at him from across the hull. “I thought those little monkeys were being awfully quiet. Where are they?”
“Behind the tractor. They must have snuck in the side door.”
“I should, like, kiss you or something. Really give them their money’s worth.”
Nicholas laughed nervously. “Yeah, that would be … I have a better idea, though. You just stay here; keep sanding.” Then he added, loudly, “I’ll be right back. I need to get something from Uncle Nick,” and walked out of the barn toward the house. Instead of going inside, though, he ran around the barn to the side door, next to Charlie’s painted strike zone. He slipped inside without a sound and ducked behind a pile of old farm equipment about ten feet from the twins’ hiding spot, where he waited for the perfect opportunity.
“Do you think Nicholas likes her?” Hayley whispered.
“Of course he does,” said Hetty. “He’s just too dumb to know it yet. Remember—Mom used to say that about Dad.”
Nicholas slid a few feet closer, smiling to himself at how clueless they were. Then he pounced on them, shouting “ARRGGHH!” and throwing a filthy blanket over their heads.
They screamed, trying to escape the trap, but Nicholas managed to keep them in custody long enough to tell them, “You know what else Mom used to say? Mind your own business!”
“Nicholas! Stop it!” Hetty cried as she poked her head out from under the blanket.
“You are going to be in so much trouble,” Hayley added, jumping to her feet with hands firmly planted on her hips.
“I’m going to tell Mummy,” said Hetty, returning to her British accent.
Nicholas laughed. “Mummy?” He added, in his own bad accent, “Well, when you ring Mummy, just make bloody sure you tell her about how you were spying on me.”
“We weren’t spying,” said Hetty. “We were just listening.”
“Oh, that’s different,” Nicholas said.
“C’mon, Hayley. Let’s get out of here and leave them … alone.” The twins stormed out of the barn.
“What was that all about?” Charlie asked when Nicholas returned.
“Oh, nothing. They were just snooping, like usual. Mom calls them the Snoop Sisters.”
“Are you going to get in trouble?”
“No. They won’t tell her, because they know they’re not supposed to be spying.”
“You hungry at all?”
The change of subject caught Nicholas off guard. “What? Uh, yeah, I guess. Let’s just try to finish this section, and then we’ll go in.”
They went back to their sanding, and were soon so caught up in what they were doing that they didn’t notice when Nick came in twenty minutes later. The twins, a few feet behind, stopped at the threshold, refusing to step inside the barn.
>
Nick ran his hand over the hull, took a deep breath, and smiled.
“Ah, nothing like the smell of freshly sanded wood. Almost makes me want to build another boat.”
“I’m just happy she’s only twelve feet long,” said Nicholas. “I can’t imagine doing this to Goblin.”
“And with only one arm,” Uncle Nick reminded him. “You can switch hands when you get tired. You two have done a great job. Let’s flip her over, and then you can tackle the deck and the inside.”
They rolled the boat up on one edge and then all the way over so she was sitting deck-side up. Charlie and Nicholas both sighed when they saw the expanse of un-sanded wood that lay before them.
“Maybe you two are ready for a break,” said Uncle Nick. “She’ll still be here tomorrow. Nice breeze blowin’ out there. Good day for a sail.” He raised his eyebrows questioningly.
Nicholas and Charlie looked at each other. They were both tired and a little sore from all the sanding, and a relaxing sail around the lake with a few stops for swimming thrown in would certainly be more fun than an afternoon of back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
Charlie spoke first. “I know it’s a beautiful day, but we still have a lot of work …”
Nicholas nodded. “Even if we finished sanding today, we need to buy paint and varnish and brushes, and then you have to show us how to do all that, and we have to put on how many coats?”
“Four or five, at least,” admitted Uncle Nick. “If everything goes according to schedule, you could be sailing her in a couple of weeks. Today’s probably the worst day. Lots of sitting around and waiting for paint to dry from here on.”
“Two weeks?” Nicholas said, sounding surprised and a little disappointed.
Uncle Nick put his hand on Nicholas’s shoulder. “No shortcuts, I’m afraid. Better to be patient and do it right the first time. So go ahead, you can stay and work. There’s fixin’s for sandwiches and iced tea in the fridge when you’re ready for lunch. The twins and I are going for a sail.”
“Yay!” cried Hayley and Hetty, who turned and ran toward the lake, with Pistol trotting along beside them.
* * *
As Nicholas and Charlie sanded (and sanded, and sanded) on opposite sides of the Heron’s deck, they returned to the topic of the letter.
“What should we do about it?” she asked.
“Do? What do you mean? What can we do?”
“Maybe I should tell my mom.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea. At all,” Nicholas said.
“Why not? Don’t you think she deserves to know the truth—that your dad never found her letter?”
“We don’t know that. And what good will it do now? It’ll probably just make your mom mad at us for reading it. It’s kind of personal, you know. And it’s ancient history. It’s not like they’re going to get back together or something like people do in the movies.”
“Maybe you’re right, but old people—like our parents—are always talking about ‘closure.’ ”
“What’s that?”
“I think it just means that they finally know the truth, and then they can stop worrying about whatever it was that happened.”
“You seriously think your mom has been worrying about why my dad didn’t write to her for thirty-some years?”
“That’s just it! I don’t know! Maybe she has. Maybe the only reason she married my dad is because she got tired of waiting for your dad.”
Nicholas was too exasperated to respond, which made Charlie smile.
“You’re starting to see it my way, aren’t you?” she asked. “What about your dad? Do you think we should tell him, too?”
“No!”
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“That’s not an answer. You know, I think I know what this is about. Your parents have only been divorced for a year, right? You’ve seen too many movies where these adorable, clever kids do something to get the parents back together. Look, I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but trust me, Nicholas: it’s not gonna happen. Life isn’t like the movies. When my parents got divorced, I used to spend hours planning crazy schemes to get them together. I’d get my hopes up and then I’d be disappointed when nothing happened.”
“That’s not what I think is going to happen,” Nicholas said. “I’m not some little kid, like Hayley or Hetty, you know. You don’t know anything about it, so just … drop it, okay? Jeez, like you’re an expert on my life or something.”
He put his head down and concentrated extra hard on the section of deck he was sanding so he wouldn’t have to look at Charlie, who was trying to make eye contact with him. What really annoyed him about the whole thing was that she was right, of course. He did still hope that his parents would get back together, even though he knew, deep down, that it would never happen.
“Nicholas.”
He pretended not to hear.
Why do you have to be such an annoying girl sometimes?
“I’m sorry, okay? I just don’t want you to have to go through what I did.”
Nicholas grunted, but still didn’t look up.
“And … for now, I agree that we won’t say anything to your dad. Unless my mom wants to. That would be different, right? Nicholas? C’mon! Are you ever going to talk to me again?”
He shrugged, still annoyed by her know-it-all ways, and still refusing to look at her. But Nicholas Mettleson had met his match in stubbornness. Charlie moved over to his side of the boat and started to sand the same spot he was working on. When he moved over a few inches, she followed him, smiling to herself all the while. After a few more attempts, he was frustrated enough to slam his hand down on the boat and look up at her.
To his credit, he tried to maintain his composure and stay mad at her, but it was no use. She looked back at him with the “strikeout smile” smeared across her face, and he couldn’t help himself—his own mouth betrayed him and broke into a smile. He shook his head in frustration.
Charlie put her arm around his shoulders as they went inside for lunch. “You’re a nice kid, Nicholas. Just don’t mess with me.”
* * *
Charlie invited Nicholas to dinner at her house that evening, and after they filled up on meat loaf, baked potatoes, and the first sweet corn of the season, Charlie led her mom into the living room and sat down next to her on the couch.
“What’s this all about, Charlie?” Franny asked, forcing a smile. “Oh no, you’re going to ask for a raise in your allowance, aren’t you?”
“No-ooo. Nothing like that. We … well, Nicholas, actually … found something that belongs to you. In the tower room over at Nick’s.”
“Oh?” Her face brightened instantly. “My ID bracelet? I got it for my twelfth birthday, and I lost it a couple of years later, the summer that … the last summer your dad spent here.”
Charlie shook her head. “Nope, not a bracelet. It’s a letter. That you wrote.”
“That I wrote? Why would there be a letter that … Oh my. The letter I wrote to Will.”
Nicholas then produced the letter from the right front pocket of his shorts.
“I’m sorry I read it,” he said, handing it to her. “I know I shouldn’t have. But when I found it, I didn’t know you; I didn’t know anything about you. It was just an old letter.”
Franny held the letter in the open palm of her hand and ran her index finger over the name “Will” that she had so neatly printed twenty-five years earlier. The corners of her mouth softened into a semblance of a smile, and her eyes glistened as memories came flooding back to her.
“Aren’t you going to read it?” Charlie asked.
Nicholas stirred uncomfortably in his chair. Clearly, Charlie and her mom had a very different relationship from the one he had with his parents. He couldn’t imagine confronting either of them on something so personal. It just wasn’t done in the Mettleson family. Private meant private, which is one reason Nicholas felt guilty for having read somebody else�
��s letter.
“I’m getting there,” said Franny. “Still mustering up my courage. I’m a little afraid of what I might have said. I was a lot like you, Charlie, when I was your age—very emotional. Not at all like the rock I am today,” she added with a laugh.
“Uh-huh. A rock. That’s just what I was thinking,” said Charlie. “C’mon, read it!”
Franny unfolded the letter as if she were handling a priceless document from a museum, and Nicholas noticed that her hands were shaking as she finally held it before her and began to read.
Just as he and Charlie had both done, when she got to the bottom, she went right back and read it a second time. Her eyes were shiny with tears, and Nicholas turned away, embarrassed to be caught in the middle of this very private moment.
“I should probably get going,” he said cheerfully. “Thanks for dinner, Mrs. Brennan. That corn was amazing. I have to admit, Charlie’s right about that—the corn in Ohio is better than in New York. See you tomorrow, Charlie.” He stood up to go.
“No, don’t go,” said Franny, wiping a tear away and reaching for a box of tissues. “Stay, Nicholas. I’m sorry. I guess there’s still a little of the old emotional me in here.”
“So here’s what we think, Mom: Will never got the letter.” Charlie explained her theory about Will’s parents arriving early and whisking him back to the city before he had a chance to check the secret hiding place one last time. “It makes perfect sense,” she continued. “Why else would he leave it behind? And the movie.”
“What you say is certainly possible,” Franny said, then gave a sad sigh. “His parents did come earlier than expected that day. In fact, I barely got out of Nick’s house in time. But I think there’s another explanation. Maybe he just wanted to forget about me. And the movie. That’s what got him into all the—”
“All the what, Mom? What happened?” Charlie pleaded.
Summer at Forsaken Lake Page 7
