by Gae Polisner
“And the whale’s eye?” I ask, not that I care, necessarily. I mean, not really. Because the hunt is pretty much set in my head, and it took me a while to think of the clues, and I already know where the rest of them are supposed to go. On the other hand, I do have a pen and a small spiral pad, if I really want to redo things. And it’s hard to resist what Mr. Carter is telling me. If not for the next clue, then for the one that will send Joy back home.
“…the knot,” he’s saying. “Right below where the split begins. And the way the bark around it bulges out above and below it, well, it creates a big old wrinkly lid. It’s nearly impossible not to see Moby Dick.”
“Moby who?” I ask, my eyes getting big with surprise.
Mr. Carter laughs. “Moby Dick. From the Melville story. He’s a very famous literary whale.”
“Oh right,” I say, even though I still don’t know.
We fish for a few more minutes, but I don’t catch anything, either. “Well, Lukas, I should get going now,” Mr. Carter says.
I walk Mr. Carter halfway back to B&B’s but then stop, explaining I should probably get on with the hiding of the clues.
“Indeed you should,” he says. “Ms. Fonseca is lucky to have you as her friend.”
“I was super-glad to see you, Mr. Carter,” I say.
He puts a hand on my shoulder and holds my gaze. “Sure thing. Me too. It was a pleasure to have this time with you, son.”
“Thanks again,” I call as I start to walk away.
The sun is high in the sky, a tighter, smaller ball of burning light. The air has cooled down a bit. It must be later than I think it is.
“Mr. Brunetti?”
I turn, surprised to see Mr. Carter still standing where I left him. I take a few steps back.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t ever be afraid to follow your heart.”
My sister swings Dad’s truck into the lot behind Greer’s Diner. The tires grind over the gravel; she steps on the clutch, flips the shifter into park, and shuts the engine. Most of me just wants to go home, crawl into bed, and feel sorry for myself. But Natalia seems to be ignoring that.
“Don’t we have to get back?” I slump down in the seat. I was hungry an hour or two ago, but that feeling passed. “Aren’t Mom and Dad mad at me?”
“I talked to them. I told them they had to lay off a bit. That you were fine, you just had some stuff you had to take care of.”
“Oh yeah, what stuff? What are you talking about?” I ask innocently.
Natalia and I both sit, facing forward, not looking at each other, but totally connected. That’s how it’s always been with my older sister. We can go weeks without saying much more than “When are you going to get out of the bathroom?”
But neither one of us is ever that far away.
I turn and look out the passenger-side window at a huge hill of dirt. At the top, trees are clinging for their lives. Just beyond that, the woods and the bus shelter. No, not the bus shelter. I must have that wrong.
It’s not right here, is it, Lukas?
“Isn’t that your friend Audrey, from school?” Natalia taps on the window.
“Yeah, that’s her.” I’m watching Audrey and her mom coming out of the diner, each of them holding their leftovers in Styrofoam containers, but their car is parked closer to the entrance, so she won’t see me unless I get out and wave or something, which I don’t feel like doing.
“Didn’t you used to play with her a lot?” Natalia asks.
“Play with her? I’m not six, Natty.”
We both watch as Audrey’s mom nearly drops her leftovers getting out her keys, but she deftly manages to unlock the car, and they both get in.
“I didn’t mean it that way. I’m just saying, you guys just used to hang out more, I remember.” Natalia puts her two hands back on the steering wheel and sighs. “Look, about Lukas, I know what you’re doing,” she says.
We did used to hang out more. Audrey’s car backs up and swings out of the parking lot. But, wait, Natalia couldn’t, she couldn’t know everything. She might know that Lukas and I did scavenger hunts on our birthdays, but she couldn’t know where I had been today or where I was going. Even I didn’t know that.
Unless she opened the envelope, the one Lukas slid under our front door, a year ago today. Unless she had read it!
“And, no, I didn’t read your note from Lukas, if that’s what you’re thinking. But I did see it. I’m the one that put it in your room, dodo bird.”
Natalia put the letter, the first clue, in my room?
Of course, how else could it have gotten there?
It kind of makes sense. That morning, the police rang our bell. They came inside. They told us what they told us. They asked my parents some questions. They asked me some things, of which I have absolutely no memory whatsoever. I don’t remember what the officers looked like or how many of them there were. Or if they were policemen or policewomen. Everything in my brain goes quiet after that, blank.
I never thought to wonder how Lukas’s note got into my room, onto my desk. My name on it. In his handwriting. The envelope I didn’t open. I stuffed it in my bottom drawer and never looked at it again.
Until this morning, of course.
My sister found it that morning, didn’t she? Natalia was the one who put it in my room.
“Where?” I ask.
“It was under our front door. I didn’t want it to get all trampled on, with all the…you know, people walking in and out.”
“Thanks.” I slouch down in the seat, pressing my knees against the glove compartment.
“I never opened it,” my sister tells me. “But I knew you would one day, when you were ready. So, yeah, nothing gets by me.”
“Not everything,” I say softly. “You don’t know how I scared him away.”
“Who?” Natalia asks me.
The smell of hamburgers wafts across the parking lot and into the truck’s open windows; my stomach rumbles.
“Lukas,” I answer my sister.
Now I am remembering a little: it was a woman. A woman police officer, and I remember what the policewoman asked me. She was nice. She had long blond hair in a ponytail, like you wouldn’t think for a police person.
She sat down on the couch next to me and talked softly. “Do you recall the last time you two spoke?”
Of course, I knew. I would never forget. It had been just the night before my birthday. On the phone. I invited him over for breakfast, like I do every year, and every year he says, “No thanks. Cake is enough celebrating for me.”
It was hard for him to be around my family sometimes. There were so many of us. Davy and Isabel never left him alone, grabbing on to his legs and begging him to pick them up, toss them around, walk with their feet on top of his. I knew he worried about leftover feelings from when Natalia held on to stuff she’d heard about Lukas’s brother. I get it; stories can stick to people, especially bad ones, like pancake syrup on the kitchen counter.
But he didn’t need to be worried. Once they got to know him, my whole family loved him.
“Lukas is not his brother,” I’d tell Natalia when we were alone.
I knew that was true, but I didn’t really know anything about Justin because I never spent any time at their house. And not just because my parents were so overprotective, but I don’t think Lukas wanted me there. He didn’t like his mom’s boyfriend, Rand, and he never knew what stupid thing his brother was going to do.
Lukas was always trying to protect me.
And I scared him away.
“You could never have scared Lukas away,” Natalia tells me.
“But I did,” I say. “I may have told him I loved him.”
Natalia doesn’t turn to look at me exactly, but I can feel her whole body shift. She’s actually trying not t
o look at me, like she knows I might stop talking if she does.
But I want to talk. I’ve never told anyone what happened.
“It’s not what I was trying to say,” I begin. “I was trying to say something else.”
“Like what?”
“Like, when he said he didn’t want to come to breakfast, I was going to say something like, ‘Well, okay, but you know I’d love you to come.’ ”
“But that’s not how it came out….”
“No.”
If I stare really hard at that hill of dirt over there, it gets all blurry, until I can’t make out a tree from a rock from what is nothing more than a big sheet of Plexiglas-surrounded metal.
I remember sitting with you there that day. The rain.
The story you told me.
Natalia leans back against the headrest. “And what’s wrong with that?”
“He didn’t like me like that, Natty. Not that way. I mean, we were best friends. Friends. That’s all.”
The best thing about my sister is that she’s not my mom. Or my dad. She’s not going to try and talk me out of how I feel. Or tell me I’m wrong.
She just listens.
I go on. “It was probably so embarrassing for him, too. I don’t even know if he really heard me. Maybe he didn’t, because he didn’t say anything back. But you know Lukas, he never does. So maybe he did hear me.”
“Is that what you are upset about? That you told him you loved him, or that you think you did?”
Wow, well, now that I’m here, I might as well go all the way.
“No, it’s not that,” I say. “It’s not that I’m worried if he heard what I said.”
I stop a minute, because it’s really the first time I’m remembering any of this so clearly. “It’s like I’d be more upset if he didn’t. If he didn’t hear me. If I never got to say it…to him….If I never got to say to him…to tell him I love him.”
Natalia is nodding her head. “Okay, look. I say we go in and have a burger. It’s already one-thirty. Then you can tell me everything that’s happened?”
My stomach growls in agreement.
“Okay, fine,” I say.
We both get out of the truck and slam the squeaky doors shut behind us.
“So, hey, what did the other kind of pie mean, anyway?” Natalia asks me as we head toward the back door into Greer’s Diner. “Was it, like, pizza pie? Is that Vincent’s?”
But I grind my feet to a halt in the gravel. I smack my sister in the arm.
“Hey, wait a minute,” I say, hitting her again. “I thought you said you didn’t look in the envelope. You did, didn’t you?”
“I might have peeked,” Natalia says, and she starts to run ahead, across the parking lot.
I chase after her, knowing that when we get inside and sit down, I’m going to tell her everything about the waitress at Vincent’s and Thea and the Revo Rocket and how now I’m thinking maybe Mr. Carter knows something. Maybe he knows where Lukas was heading to next. And I am going to ask my sister if we can go find him.
I’m not ready to let this go.
Not yet.
what I’m thinking about now, on the way to the library after finding the whale’s-eye knot in the heart-shaped tree and planting the last clue there, is how Joy punched me that day in the rain when I tried to tell her about Execution Rocks. It was a few weeks ago, in the bus shelter behind Greer’s.
I don’t know why my brain keeps doing that, thinking about stuff with Joy, like a movie in my head that won’t stop playing.
* * *
“Cut it out, Lukas. That’s not true, and you know it.” Joy punches me hard on the arm, and I laugh, but she’s not laughing. “It’s not really called that, is it?”
“It is true, or I wouldn’t say it. I swear. That’s why they call it that. Or at least some people say.”
“Is not.” She shivers, so I move closer, like maybe it will help keep her warm, which makes my shoulder accidentally bump hers. “And you’re creeping me out,” she says.
I move away quick but then realize she just means the story, not me, so I feel dumb, because I never used to feel so confused around Joy.
“Okay, fine, then. Go ahead and finish about the island. Otherwise, I’ll just keep wondering.”
I smile a little, because Joy can be like that: scared and curious, both at the same exact time.
“Okay, but only if you don’t punch me again.”
She nods, wrapping her arms around her chest, and shivers some more, but this time I don’t try to help because it’s the middle of July, so it’s not like she’s going to freeze to death.
The reason we’re soaking wet and up in the bus shelter in the first place is because Joy has some money to burn. “Mucho babysitting!” she had texted me earlier. “Let’s go to Greer’s!”
“Not me,” I texted back, because I’ve been saving all my dog-walking money for her birthday gift, but she wrote back, “It’s cool. I can pay for lunch.”
Then, a block from Greer’s, the sky had turned black and the clouds had opened up, raining down on us like Niagara Falls. Which is when I remembered the bus shelter that Justin and his friends helped the seniors move from near the school to up here as part of some senior prank this past spring.
“Up behind Greer’s, can you believe it?” He had come home at, like, four in the morning, waking me up, laughing and bragging about carting it up the hillside in the middle of the night. “You shoulda seen it, Lukulele. All the way up that hill. It was freaking hilarious.”
He was talking like that, all loud and crazy, making up dumb nicknames for me on the spot, which probably meant he’d been drinking, so I was worried he was going to wake Mom. And now that Rand was gone, she was back to getting no rest, working all kinds of double shifts.
“So, anyway,” I tell Joy, “at least that’s the way Dad told Justin the story about the island, and later Justin told it to me.” I lean out of the shelter to grab a stick that’s poking from some leaves and use it like a pointer to draw a pretend map on the Plexiglas window in front of us. “There are a whole bunch of little islands out there, but most of them are just green, no buildings or anything, and impossible to see from shore. But this one here”—I tap with the stick for emphasis—“is the one with the white lighthouse. If you look hard and squint, you can see it out there.”
“Execution Rocks.” Joy rolls her eyes a little, like she doesn’t believe me about the whole name thing.
“Right. Which is called that because they used to bring prisoners there to die.”
“By execution,” she says, shuddering a little.
“Well, yeah. But not exactly. What they’d do is tie them to the rocks at low tide. And when the water would come in—voilà!—no more prisoners to deal with anymore.” I toss the stick back out into the woods.
“Creepy and horrible,” Joy says. “They really did that?” There’s hope in her voice that it’s not true.
“Well, probably not,” I tell her. “In fact, if you google it, it says it’s only called that because of the jagged rocks that surround the island that get completely submerged at high tide. So the fishermen who don’t know about them can get their boats stuck if they’re not careful navigating out there.”
“That still sounds pretty dangerous,” Joy says.
“I guess. If you’re stupid and don’t know what you’re doing. And you don’t pay attention to the tides.”
“But you do?”
“Yeah, of course. I even have a tide chart on my phone.” I pat my pocket. “And if you don’t believe me, they give tours there. And you can rent the lighthouse for a sleepover. So there are boats going to and from that island all the time.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Okay, then.” She leans her head against my
shoulder, and my heart starts pounding so loud, I’m sure she’s going to hear it in the quiet.
Quiet.
The rain has stopped. My hands are sweating.
“We should probably go to Greer’s now,” I say, fast.
“Yes, okay, sure.”
She gets up, and we both start walking, but all the way to Greer’s, I can still feel the warm spot where her head was just resting on my shoulder.
Mr. Carter doesn’t look at all surprised to see me and Natalia standing on his front porch, but that’s just how Mr. Carter is. He’s one of those teachers who really like kids and teaching, and he remembers all his students, even ones from ten years ago. Like my sister.
“Natalia Fonseca?”
“Yup, it’s me, Mr. Carter.”
“And Joy?”
I nod.
When I told Natalia my plan, when I told her about the man in the white T-shirt and what he said about seeing Lukas outside his shop, she told me she knew where Mr. Carter lives. She’d been there trick-or-treating once. He had the best candy.
And if there was nothing to find out there, she said, we would find that out together.
We. She said we.
Maybe Mr. Carter could tell us something, my sister said. And then she used one of our mom’s favorite expressions: “What’s the worst that could happen?”
I wanted to tell her there were plenty of worse things that could happen, but I couldn’t think of any.
So here we are.
He shakes both of our hands, of course. “Would you girls like to come inside? My wife would love to see you two.” He smiles and adds, “Too.”
When Lukas and I were in Mr. Carter’s class together but before we were even friends, we waited at the same bus stop because we both lived at the Dolphin Garden Apartments. I don’t think Lukas spoke to me once that whole year. Now, as I stand here on Mr. Carter’s front porch, hearing his deep, familiar voice, a vivid memory forms in my head. It’s of the first time I really saw Lukas.
