Summer by the Sea

by Susan Wiggs

  She sat back on her heels and tilted her face up to the clear blue sky. A trio of seagulls swooped over them, and Rosa looked away. Mamma used to have a lot of superstitions. Three seagulls flying together, directly overhead, are a warning of death soon to come.

  Until Mamma, Rosa had never known a person who died. She used to think she knew what death was: a bird fallen from the nest. A possum at the side of the road, buzzing with flies. She had grandparents who had died, but since she’d never met them, that didn’t count. They were from a place in Italy called Calabria, which her parents called the Old Country.

  One time, she asked Pop why he never went to Italy to see his parents while they were alive. You can’t go back, he’d said dismissively. It’s too much bother.

  Rosa didn’t really care. She didn’t want to go to Italy. She liked it right here.

  “What school do you go to?” asked Alex.

  “St. Mary’s.” She wrinkled her nose. “I think classes are boring, and the cafeteria food makes me gag.” When they had to say the blessing right after Second Bell, she used to give extra thanks for her mother’s sack lunches—chicken salad with capers or provolone with olive loaf, sometimes a slice of cake and a bunch of grapes. There was always a funny little message on the napkin: “Smile!” Or “Only 12 more days to summer!”

  “I like sports,” she told Alex, not wanting him to think she was a total loser. “I can run really fast and I like to win. My big brothers taught me everything they know, which is a lot. I play soccer in the fall, swimming in the winter, softball in the spring. Do you play sports?”

  “Not allowed,” he said, trailing his hand in the crystal clear water. “Makes me wheeze.” Then he was quiet for several minutes. Rosa watched the way the breeze tossed his shiny white-blond hair. He looked like a picture in a book of fairy tales, maybe Hansel, lost in the woods.

  He turned those ocean-blue eyes on her. “Your mom died, didn’t she?”

  Rosa felt a quick hitch in her chest. She couldn’t speak, but she nodded her head.

  “Mrs. Carmichael told me this morning.”

  Rosa drew her knees up to her chest, and as she watched the waves exploding on the rocks, she felt something break apart inside her. “I miss her so much.”

  “I was scared to say anything, but...it’s okay if you want to talk about it.”

  She started to shake her head, to find a way to change the subject, but this time the subject refused to be changed. Alex had brought it up and now it was like the incoming tide; it wouldn’t go away. And to her surprise, she kind of felt like talking. “Well,” she said. “Well, it’s a long story.”

  “The days are long in the summer,” he reminded her. “The sun sets at 8:14 tonight.”

  She rested her chin on her knees and gazed out at the blue distance. Usually she tried not to bring up the subject of her mother’s death. It made her brothers all awkward, and Pop sometimes cried, which was scary to Rosa. Now she could feel Alex staring right at her, and it didn’t scare her at all.

  “When Mamma first got sick,” she said, “I didn’t worry because she didn’t really act sick. She went for her treatments, and came back and took naps. But after a while, it got hard for her to act like she was okay.” Rosa thought about the day her mother came home from the hospital for the last time. When she took off her bright blue kerchief, she looked as gray and bald as a newborn baby bird. That was when Rosa finally felt afraid. “The nuns came—”

  “Like Catholic nuns?” Alex asked.

  “I don’t think there’s any other kind.”

  “Are you Catholic, then?” he asked.

  “Yep. Are you?”

  “No. I don’t think I’m anything. I want to hear about the nuns.”

  “They used to sit and pray in the bedroom with my mother. My father got really quiet, and his temper was short.” Rosa wasn’t going to say any more about that. Not today, anyway. “My brothers had no idea what to do. Rob went to Mamma’s garden, which she didn’t plant last year because she was too sick, and he mowed down a whole field of brambles using only a machete.” Rosa pictured her brother, sweat mingling with the tears on his face even though it was the middle of winter. “Sal lit so many candles at St. Mary’s that Father Dominic had to tell him to put some of them out to avoid starting a fire.”

  None of it helped, of course. Nothing helped.

  “Mamma said it was a lucky thing, to be able to say goodbye, but it didn’t feel...lucky.” Rosa pressed the heel of her hand into the rock hard enough to hurt. Her mother had been too weak to prop up a book, so Rosa got on the bed and lay down beside her and read Grandfather Twilight, and it felt strange to be the one reading it.

  “She died on Valentine’s Day,” Rosa told Alex. “A week after my ninth birthday. All kinds of people came, and the neighbors brought food, but mostly it just spoiled in the refrigerator and then we threw it out because nobody was hungry. Some of the women got right to work on my father. They wanted him to marry again immediately.” She shuddered.

  “Mrs. Carmichael thinks he looks like Syvester Stallone. I heard her talking to somebody about it on the phone.”

  Rosa made a face. “He just looks like Pop.”

  The chill water sluiced in, breaking over Rosa’s feet and Alex’s checkered Vans sneakers.

  “Tide’s coming in. We’d better go back,” he said.

  “All right.” She stood up and offered her hand.

  “I can make it,” he said.

  As they headed back along the public beach, she glanced at the sky. It wasn’t that late yet. “Do you think we should hurry?”

  “No, but my mother doesn’t like me to be late for dinner. At least when we’re at the shore, we don’t have to dress for dinner like we do in the city.”

  “You mean you eat naked?” Rosa fell down laughing, landing in the sun-warmed sand.

  “Ha-ha, very funny,” he said, trying to act serious. But he fell down next to her, clearly not in a hurry anymore. They watched windsurfers skimming along, and families having picnics and feeding the seagulls. Alex found a piece of driftwood and dug a deep moat while Rosa formed the mound into a castle. It wasn’t a very good one, so they weren’t sorry when a wave sneaked up and swamped it. Rosa jumped up in time to avoid getting wet, but Alex got soaked to the skin.

  “Yikes, that’s cold,” he said, but he was grinning. When he stood up, he had something in his hand. He bent and washed it in the surf. “A nautilus shell. I’ve never found one before.”

  It was a nice big one, a rare find, not too damaged by the battering waves. Alex couldn’t know it, but it was Mamma’s favorite kind of shell. The nautilus is a symbol of harmony and peace, she used to say.

  “You can have it if you want,” he said, holding the shell out to her.

  “No. You found it.” Rosa kept her hands at her sides even though she wanted it desperately.

  “I’m not good at keeping things.” He wound up as if to throw it back into the surf.

  “Don’t! If you’re not going to keep it, I will,” Rosa said, grabbing it from him.

  “I wasn’t really going to throw it away,” he said. “I just wanted you to have it.”

  * * *

  When they got back to Alex’s yard and Rosa saw what awaited them, she closed her hand around the seashell. “I hope this thing brings me good luck. I’m going to be needing it,” she said.

  Mrs. Montgomery and Pop stood waiting for them, both their faces taut with worry and anger. Before either of them spoke, Rosa could already hear them. Where have you been? Do you know how worried we’ve been?

  “Where on earth have you been?” demanded Mrs. Montgomery. Rosa was speechless at the sight of her. She had flame-red hair and wore a straight white summer dress and white sandals. Her long, thin fingers held a long, thin cigarette. Mrs. Montgomery h
erself looked like a cigarette. A giant human cigarette.

  “What are you thinking, eh? I told you to stay out of trouble,” said Pop.

  “And you’re soaking wet,” Mrs. Montgomery declared as though being wet was the crime of the century. From her shiny white handbag, she took out a bunch of what appeared to be first-aid gear. “Honestly, Alexander, I can’t imagine what you were thinking. Come over here and let me take your temperature.”

  He dragged his feet, but submitted to her with the resignation of long habit. Mrs. Montgomery didn’t check for fever like a regular mother, by feeling with her hands. She stuck a cone-shaped thing in his ear and then took it out and read the number.

  “All right for you,” Pop said, marching Rosa toward the truck. “We’re gonna get you home, talk some sense into you.”

  As their parents separated them, Rosa and Alex caught each other’s eye. Neither of them could keep from grinning. They both knew this wasn’t the end of their adventure.

  eight

  Summer 1984

  During the second summer Rosa and Alex spent together, she saw him suffer a full-blown asthma attack, and it made her weep with terror. She had never seen anything like it before. She had stopped thinking of him as being sick at all, because the medications and breathing apparatus kept his condition under control.

  But not always. On a bright August day, they convinced his mother to allow them to fly kites on the beach, something that—incredibly—Alex had never done before. Rosa showed up with a kite her brother Sal had sent from Hong Kong, where the destroyer he was serving on had made port. She and Alex spent an entire morning putting the kite together, then headed for the beach.

  At the long shoreline, isolated from the public beaches by a dense salt marsh, the wind was perfect for kite-flying. It blew strong and steady, a warm current up from the south. Rosa held the kite for Alex to launch. He got so excited and ran so fast along the beach that at first she had no clue there was anything wrong.

  “Go, Alex, go!” she called, waiting to feel the wind fill the kite so she could launch it. “Faster!”

  But he didn’t go faster. He stumbled as though tripping over a log, yet there was nothing but sand beneath his feet.

  “Hurry up,” she urged.

  He collapsed like a bird shot from the sky. His glasses flew off and landed in the sand.

  “Alex!” she said, dropping the kite. She plunged to her knees beside him and touched his shoulder.

  His face was turning blue and gray, like a ghost’s. The rattle and wheeze of his struggling lungs terrified her, and she burst into tears. “Oh, Alex, I don’t know what to do,” she said, feeling helpless and horrible all at once. She looked around wildly, but there was nothing in sight except a pair of blue herons wading in the shallows. “Tell me what to do.”

  He shook his head and groped in the pocket of his khaki shorts. He took out his inhaler and inhaled three quick puffs. His eyes looked bright and desperate, but his coloring didn’t improve and his wheezing grew worse. He couldn’t seem to get his lungs working right.

  Then he took something from another pocket. A black-and-yellow tube. He ripped open the plastic packaging and then, with his teeth, removed the gray cap from the end. Finally, in one smooth movement, he stabbed the black tip of the tube at his thigh and held it there for several seconds. He wheezed hard four times—in a panic, Rosa counted them—but then his breathing seemed to start working better.

  He slowly removed the tube and inspected the black tip. Rosa was horrified to see a rather large needle sticking out of it. The whole business had taken only a few seconds. In the strange aftermath, Alex lay weak upon the sand, and Rosa was still crying.

  “It’s okay,” he said, his voice soft and raspy. “I’m all right. Cross my heart and hope—”

  “Are you going to be able to make it back home?”

  “I need a minute.”

  Rosa started to scramble to her feet, but stopped when his cold hand touched hers. “No, wait,” he said. “The kite—”

  “You’re not flying the kite.”

  “I know. But...how about you fly it for me? I need to rest.” His voice was thin and pleading. “Come on, Rosa. She’s going to take me straight to the hospital. That’s the rule.”

  “Then I should go right now and get help.”

  “A few minutes won’t make any difference one way or another. I’ll be able to walk back if I can rest a little. The shot lasts twenty minutes, and I’m over the wheezing anyway. Fly the kite. Please.”

  “I can do that. But only for a minute.” She looked down at their hands—hers dark, his pale—and felt a wave of emotion moving through her. Then she gave him his glasses. Spying a mermaid’s purse in the sand, she gave him that, too. “For luck,” she explained, closing his hand around the small shell.

  It felt particularly important to get it right. Like if she didn’t, if she messed up, she would be letting him down along with the kite. It was a beautiful, one-of-a-kind kite, yellow with red streamers, and Pop had given her a brand-new spool of string to use. She refused to let Alex launch the kite, because he needed to rest. Instead, she planted it in the sand to catch the wind, and ran with the string shortened until the kite spiked up. Then she put on a full burst of speed and paid out the string.

  She could hear Alex saying, “Go, Rosa,” and that only made her run faster. Don’t let him down, she thought. Don’t let him down.

  She managed to hoist the kite upward until it took off as though it had a will of its own, and would stay up no matter what she did on the ground. Breathless from running, she brought the string spool to Alex.

  “It’s up,” she said.

  “It’s up,” he echoed, taking hold and watching with shining eyes.

  * * *

  The moment they got back, there was a big fuss, just as Alex had warned her. They tried to act as though nothing had happened, but Alex’s mother had an uncanny eye, and the minute she saw him, she said, “You were running on the beach, weren’t you?”

  “No, we just—”

  “You were running, and you started wheezing.”

  He stared at the floor as he held out the autoinjection tube for her to inspect. Her face turned hard as alabaster marble. “I need to get my purse,” she said. She brushed past Rosa as though she didn’t see her at all.

  Rosa and Pop stood on the porch and watched them go. Mrs. Montgomery hardly ever drove the car that was parked in the old carriage house, and when she gunned the engine, it coughed and wheezed worse than Alex. She didn’t seem to be a very good driver, either, Rosa observed. The blue Ford Galaxy lurched and shuddered backward out of the driveway, and the engine banged and backfired all the way down Ocean Road.

  “It’s so sad that he’s sick,” Rosa said to her father. “When he couldn’t breathe, I got really scared, like—” She stopped, not wanting to upset her father by mentioning Mamma. “Do you think Mrs. Montgomery is really mad at me?”

  “She is afraid for her boy.” Pop grabbed his pruning shears, ready to get back to work. “I think next week, you will stay with one of the neighbors.”

  “Pop, no.” Rosa panicked. The neighbor ladies—those who stayed home instead of going to work—were old and smelled funny and some even had chin whiskers. Worse, the widowed ones all wanted to marry her father. “Please, Pop, I’ll be good, I swear I will. Just give me a chance, okay, Pop. Okay?”

  * * *

  Returning from the doctor’s a couple of hours later, Alex seemed to be having a similar argument with his mother. “It’s no big deal, you know it’s not,” he said, banging the car door shut.

  Rosa came running from the yard, where she had been watching the koi fish feed on hapless bugs. “Are you all right, Alex?” she asked. “Hello, Mrs. Montgomery.”

  Mrs. Montgomery was inspecting Al
ex fiercely; she didn’t even seem to hear Rosa. “You’re not to do anything but rest,” she scolded. “You heard the doctor.”

  “Fine,” Alex said. “I’ll teach Rosa to play chess.”

  “I don’t think Rosa—”

  “I already know how to play chess,” Rosa declared. “We could have a tournament.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll do,” Alex said. “We’ll have a chess tournament.”

  Rosa was aware of Mrs. Montgomery’s stern disapproval, but she chose to ignore it.

  So did Alex. He had the key to his mother. She would rather put up with Rosa than say no to Alex. He showed her that he had kept the mermaid’s purse she’d given him. “I think it did bring me luck,” he said.

  He was good at chess, way better than she was. She was impulsive, he was deliberate. She moved by intuition while he applied his knowledge and intelligence. She didn’t bother looking ahead at things; he studied the board as though it held the meaning of life.

  Despite her poor skills, she managed to win a few victories. She improved quickly, and before long, she was asking about all the other interesting games stashed in a tall cabinet in the library.

  “Canasta and backgammon,” he said, then took down a long, narrow pegboard. “Cribbage.”

  She chuckled. “Sounds like something to eat.”

  “It’s a good game. I’ll show you.”

  nine

  Summer 1986

  By their fourth summer together, Rosa and Alex had fallen into a routine. From mid-June until Labor Day, they were best friends. Mrs. Montgomery objected, but as usual, Alex knew how to handle her. He had all these long arguments about how being with someone his own age helped him manage his illness, because being alone was stressful and made his lungs twitchy.

  Rosa couldn’t believe his mother bought that. Maybe a mother’s love made her putty in his hands. She was a severe woman but she adored Alex. She used to try to get him to invite other boys over, “other” meaning boys like him, summer people. Alex pitched such a fit that eventually his mother stopped trying. Rosa was just as glad about that. With the exception of Alex, summer people were snooty, and they seemed to have nothing better to do than work on their tans or shop. Pop said they were his bread and butter so she’d better be polite to them.