Red Kayak

by Priscilla Cummings

  Dad tossed the note back on the table and seemed resigned. “I know.”

  The next morning, before she left for work, Mom asked me to help her plant two purple coneflowers someone had given her at the nursing home.

  It was another hot day with no sign of rain. Cicadas hummed insistently in the trees, and the soil was dry as dust. While I dug two small holes with the trowel, Mom asked me how Mrs. DiAngelo was doing.

  “Well, her husband’s back.”

  “No! That’s wonderful!” Mom reacted. “Why didn’t you tell me? Gina must be thrilled.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “She didn’t seem all that happy yesterday.”

  “Why not?” Mom asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he still blames her for what happened.”

  Mom shook her head. “All I can say is that I’m glad you’re over there, helping them, Brady. Gina’s so sweet, and with a baby coming, I’m sure she appreciates your help.”

  Gently, I settled the first coneflower in the earth and packed the powdery dirt in around the roots. Mom handed me the other flower to plant.

  “Yeah, but I can’t keep working for them,” I said.

  Mom leaned forward, trying to see my face. “Why not, Brady? Did something happen?”

  “No,” I told her. A Big Lie. An enormous lie. Plus I was discovering that I couldn’t look my own mother in the eye any-more either. I finished patting the dirt down with my fingers, and while Mom watered the plants, I stood up, wiping my hands off on my jeans. “I just don’t want to be there anymore.”

  I shouldn’t have walked away so abruptly after I said that, but I did. Just up and left. Went inside to my room. And I was thinking the whole time that even if I changed my mind about keeping this whole thing quiet and told the truth—to whom would I tell it? My parents? The DiAngelos? The police? Would it be my word against J.T.’s and Digger’s? I mean, how could I prove it now that I’d gotten rid of the drill?

  Sitting at my desk, I picked up the old Orioles hat, the one I didn’t wear anymore because of Ben, and turned it in my hands. I thought of the red kayak, how I’d seen it sunk on the bottom of the river, and stared at the wall in front of me for—I don’t know, five, ten minutes. I knew I was teetering on some sort of edge.

  My wallet was on the desk in front of me. I put down the hat and opened up the wallet, then reached behind the hidden ten-dollar bill for the picture of Amanda. Unfolding it, I gazed at her smiling little face. “If you were here, what would you say?” I asked my sister. “I know you’d only be seven years old, Amanda, but you’d be smart like your cousin, Emily. You’d have an idea, I know you would.”

  Sitting there, holding Amanda’s picture, I heard a snuffling noise behind me and swung around.

  Mom stood in the doorway, a hand to her mouth. It was obvious she’d been listening.

  I braced myself for her to fall apart, but the amazing thing is—she didn’t. Quietly, she walked in, feeling for the end of my bed to sit on because she didn’t want to take her eyes off the picture in my hand.

  “Auntie Janet gave me this,” I quickly explained, “when I was up there visiting.”

  Tears had cropped up in her eyes. “I didn’t know…Brady…that you ever wanted a picture.”

  “Sure, I did,” I managed to say before my own voice cracked. “She’s the only sister I ever had.”

  It’s embarrassing for me to describe how we both caved in then and just had it out, crying and hugging each other. All those years we had both missed Amanda so much—and yet we never said anything! It still hurts some when I get to thinking on it, but I try not to go there. So let me just say it was one tremendous relief to get it all out that day with my mother.

  “It seems silly,” I said to Mom at one point. “She’s been gone so long.”

  “No. No, not silly,” Mom disagreed. “We can’t forget her, Brady. She’s part of who we are. She always will be.”

  She said something else, too. About how she had to stop blaming herself for what happened to Amanda before she could cope with it and move forward. Then she paused. I knew it was hard for her to talk about Amanda. “It was wrong for me to leave and not be here for you and Dad all those months,” she said. “I know how badly that must have hurt you, Brady.”

  “It did,” I readily admitted because I wanted her to know. I even told her how disappointed I was she and Dad didn’t let me go to the funeral. And how I could never go back to the National Aquarium because that was where Carl took me the day they buried Amanda.

  Mom closed her eyes. “I am so sorry, Brady.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her. Man, I couldn’t stand seeing my mom so sad. “Hey! I see enough fish around here every day. I don’t need to go to the aquarium!”

  She started to smile a little, so I did, too.

  “Do me a favor?” she asked in a small voice.

  “What?”

  “Don’t quit working for Gina yet.”

  How could I say no to my mom after what we’d both been through?

  “Good,” she said, then she took my hand. “Now come with me. I want to show you something.”

  Puzzled, I let her lead me into the living room, where she let go of my fingers and lifted the top of a crystal candy dish on the fireplace mantel. I knew there wasn’t candy in the dish, but Mom reached inside and picked up a little gold key.

  “Here,” she said.

  I opened my hand and she placed the key in my palm.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “The key to the trunk up in the attic,” she said. “Amanda’s trunk. There’s a scrapbook in it. Lots of pictures, some with you in them. Some toys you might remember. Anytime you feel the need, Brady, you can go up. You know where the key is now.”

  I stared at the key, then looked up at my mother. I loved my mom so much, I thought. It would just kill her to know what J.T. and Digger had done, and how it was all my idea….

  “Thanks,” I said, and I wrapped my arms around her so hard I thought I could never let go.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  It all came to a head a few days later, the evening Carl popped through the doorway twirling his car keys on his thumb. “Hey, Brady! How about a movie?” he asked. “We could grab a couple subs at the 7-Eleven and pick out a sci-fi at the video store.”

  Sounded pretty good, actually. Mom was busy canning tomatoes, and I didn’t see any sign of dinner. “Go ahead,” she encouraged me. So I swept my hat off the end of the counter and off we went in Carl’s car.

  I figured Carl was going to give me grief about not crabbing this summer and all those pots going to waste settin’ there by the shed. But he didn’t bring it up. He talked about Mindy for a while, how she was taking evening classes down at the community college. Then he told me about a couple of recent calls he had—an old woman calling 911 because she had a leaky faucet and a mother who called for help when her little kid stuffed black-eyed peas up his nose.

  When we walked into the video store, I was still laughing. I was not prepared to run into J.T. But there he was, smack in the middle of the science-fiction aisle. J.T. loved that stuff as much as Carl and me.

  “Hey there, stranger!” Carl greeted him. “How’s it going?”

  J.T. smiled wanly. I saw that he was holding a copy of The Invisible Man.

  Carefully, we regarded each other. It had been about a month since I’d seen J.T., and he didn’t look so great. He needed a haircut, and his eyes were red-rimmed and seemed kind of sunken.

  “How’s your dad?” I asked.

  “Still waiting for a kidney,” J.T. replied. “He’s on a list.”

  “I thought you were going to give him one of yours.”

  “I can’t be a donor,” he said, looking down. “You got to be eighteen.”

  All the time I was watching J.T., I noticed how his whole face had an odd pallor to it. Pale, I guess, like he wasn’t getting outside. Was he suffering because he didn’t know what I’d done with t
he drill?

  I felt sorry for J.T., I really did.

  “Things will be all right,” I told him, speaking slow. Our eyes connected. “It’ll be okay ,” I repeated.

  Carl lived with his mother, my aunt Tracy, but she was at bingo down to the church, so we had their house to ourselves. Carl threw a bag of chips on the kitchen table and poured us tall, icy glasses of soda—him a Coke, and me a Dr Pepper. Then we ate the subs right there, using the waxy white paper they came wrapped in for plates. I had ordered my favorite, a BLT, while Carl consumed a cold-cuts combo with hot peppers and onions. I’ll tell you, my cousin has an iron stomach. I watched him eat a grilled nutria once at my uncle Henry’s annual game cookout, and I couldn’t even taste that thing. If you ask me, those nutria look just like giant rats.

  The movie we rented, Blade Runner, was an old one. We’d seen it a hundred times, but we took our shoes off, put our feet up on the coffee table in the living room, and enjoyed the heck out of seeing it again. It did bother me, though, how those futuristic replicants with their limited, four-year life spans, desperately wanted to live longer. The whole movie was about getting “more life,” and it got to me after a while. I had to leave the room, but I know Carl didn’t notice. I told him I had to use the head.

  I wondered, as I stared out my aunt Tracy’s bathroom window, if what had happened to Ben would hang like a bag of stones on my heart the rest of my life, dragging me down. And I wondered what it was doing to J.T. and Digger.

  Later, while he was driving me home, Carl asked if we were going down to the crab feast in Crisfield. His question surprised me because Crisfield is about a three-hour drive away. “I don’t think so,” I replied. “Why? Why would we?”

  “Why would you?” He turned and made a face like duh. “Because the watermen are plannin’ that big protest!”

  “In Crisfield?” I asked. “Crisfield’s in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Anybody who’s anybody in this state goes to Crisfield for that crab feast!” Carl explained. “Delegates, state senators—the governor. All the political pooh-bahs. And all those media people, too—the newspapers, TV. This is a big issue, Brady!”

  “Oh…” I was beginning to understand.

  “I just hope it doesn’t get nasty,” Carl said.

  “What do you mean? You think somebody might get violent?”

  Carl stayed focused on his driving. “Some of those watermen are pretty ticked off. I suppose anything could happen.”

  “Geez, Carl. You think Dad should go?”

  Carl rolled a toothpick around in his mouth. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “It’s a tough issue. The new regulations are hitting those guys hard. Crabbing’s their livelihood, Brady. Some of them, they don’t know anything else.”

  I felt bad that I’d been so wrapped up in my own troubles I hadn’t even thought about Dad. I knew he had mixed feelings about the new crab regulations because of what he said the other night when he got that message from Tink Bosley.

  When Carl stopped his car in front of our house, I told him, “Thanks. I had a good time.”

  He waved me off. “Don’t mention it. Let’s think about taking a little camping trip next month, okay? Up to the Catoctins, maybe?”

  “Sure—that would be fun,” I said before getting out.

  “Hey!” Carl called after me, leaning across the seat so he could see me through the open window. “Tell your dad to be careful tomorrow.”

  When I opened the kitchen door to the house, Tilly practically mowed me down she wanted out so bad. I glimpsed the back of Mom—she had her bathrobe on, her hair caught up in a big clip—and heard the clink of dishes in the sink.

  “I’m home!” I called in. “Takin’ Tilly out.”

  She turned around and smiled.

  I walked into the butterfly garden while Tilly went off to do her business, and spied a big toad making his way down the brick pathway in the moonlight.

  Like that toad, my mind was kind of hopping from one thing to another. My concern for Dad and that crab protest. J.T. and his dad. Me and the DiAngelos. I wondered what I would do when I quit working for the DiAngelos. I still didn’t want to go back out on the water, but I wasn’t old enough to work in the hardware store, or down at the 7-Eleven. And worst of all, I still didn’t feel right about what I’d done with the drill.

  Life just wasn’t moving forward the way it was supposed to. Not just for me, either. Because what if Mrs. DiAngelo never got over losing Ben? And what if Mr. DiAngelo never stopped blaming his wife for Ben’s death? And how were J.T. and Digger and I going to live our whole lives keeping all this a secret?

  Frustrated, I swiped at a daisy and nipped the blossom right off.

  Tilly nudged my leg and I knelt down to hug her around the neck. She gave me a bunch of kisses on the face, and I let her. I was thinking that I had to get hold of myself because I still had a lot of good things in my life: Mom and Dad and Tilly, high school and college, my dream of being an architect.

  Suddenly a movement in the darkness caught my eye. The toad had hopped up on one of the thick, flat-topped rocks we had set in the garden.

  “Tilly, look!” She started to lunge, but I had her by the collar. “Ah, leave him be,” I whispered as the toad sat still as a statue on his tiny moonlit stage. The toad’s rock belonged to the butterflies. So they could sit in the morning sun and dry the dew off their wings.

  Now that Mom and I could talk more about things, about Amanda anyway, I thought of asking her just how the garden helped her. I know she didn’t plant it just to keep herself busy, and I remembered that one time Mom told me butterflies symbolized hope. But did she mean hope for us? For her and Dad and me? Or hope for Amanda? Did she think Amanda’s soul could live on somehow? And if Mom believed that, then what about other kids who died? Like Ben. Could the little butterfly, asleep in our locust tree, drying his wings off on our rock in the morning, symbolize hope for Ben, too?

  I’ll tell you, I thought about things that night that never ever crossed my mind before.

  When I shook my head and looked away, I noticed the light was on down in Dad’s workshop.

  “Come on,” I said, clapping to Tilly as I headed toward the barn.

  Dad was sweeping the floor when I walked in.

  “Hey,” he said. “How was the movie?”

  “Good. It was fun.”

  A set of new hatchway doors for someone’s boat leaned up against my father’s workbench. He must have just finished them because he always cleaned up after he finished a project. Tilly sniffed the pile of sawdust, and Dad shooed her away with the broom.

  “Carl asked me if you were going to Crisfield tomorrow,” I said.

  Dad kept sweeping, and I wasn’t sure he heard the question.

  “No,” he said after a while.

  Pushing my hands into my pockets, I studied him. “I guess it was a tough decision, huh?”

  “Nah.” Dad wrinkled his nose. “Not so tough.” He swept his pile onto a dustpan.

  There was an old kitchen stool in the workshop. I pulled my hands out of my pockets, hauled the stool over, and sat down. “But aren’t the other watermen gonna give you a hard time now?”

  “I’m sure they will, Brady,” Dad replied as he dumped the contents of the dustpan into a big garbage can.

  I was confused, and Dad finally noticed. He leaned the broom against the workbench and brushed off his hands.

  “My mother—your grandma Ellen—she used to say to me, ‘Tommy, if you know right from wrong, then the answer is always right there, smack in front of you. It’s when you get to thinkin’ on it that you get in trouble. Because doin’ what’s right is not always the easiest thing.’

  “And there’s no doubt,” Dad continued, “it would be far easier for me to go along with the other fellers. Drive down to Crisfield tomorrow and hold up a sign. Raise hell with the governor for clampin’ down on us. And keep crabbin’ these waters till they ain’t nothin’ left!”

&nb
sp; He rested his hands on the edge of the workbench. “But I’ll tell you, Brady, it’s wrong. It’s the wrong thing for the bay. And it’s the wrong thing for me.”

  I stared at my father—astonished. “You’re going to give up crabbing?”

  “No, not give it up completely. But you said yourself, Brady, we have to respect the bay’s balance. Take the long look. Live more sensitively—”

  “I was just telling you what that scientist at school said—”

  “But you’re right! That scientist is right! And I’ve known it all along.”

  Then Dad said something that made me stop breathing.

  “It’s just that sometimes,” he said, “even when the right answer is smack in front of you, you got to reach deep inside yourself to act on it. You know what I’m sayin’?”

  I nodded, and I swallowed hard, too, because I understood perfectly. Only I was not thinking of saving the blue crab now. I was thinking about Ben. And Ben’s parents. I was thinking about reaching inside to do the right thing so they would know the truth. So Mr. DiAngelo knew it wasn’t his wife’s fault. So Mrs. DiAngelo would stop blaming herself. And so J.T. and Digger and I faced the world and admitted what had really happened.

  Dad plopped down noisily in an old chair and put his feet up on a toolbox. “But I am not gonna lose any sleep over it. No sirree. I got more work in this here shop than I know what to do with. One less waterman out there a couple days a week ain’t gonna hurt nobody.”

  He leaned back, putting his hands behind his head. “And I’ll tell ya, I won’t miss gettin’ up at four o’clock in the morning neither!”

  “Dad,” I said soberly. I got off the stool and stood. “If I were to ask you to do something really strange, but I said it was the most important thing in the whole world to me, would you do it?”

  My father kind of chuckled and said, “It depends on whether it was legal or not, I guess.”

  I had to grin. “It’s legal.”

  “Then—yeah, sure.” He brought his arms down and sat up. “If it was really important to you, son.”