by Gae Polisner
He’s standing at the front of the class, right between Mr. Carter’s desk and the American flag. Maybe he’s supposed to recite a poem or give a book report. Or maybe he’s leading us in the pledge. But whatever it is, Lukas is frozen.
I was sitting in the front of the room, because, well, I always sat in the front row if I could, and I remember seeing Lukas’s face, his eyes blinking back tears.
And I remember thinking he looked like he was the most alone person in the whole world.
“Joy?” Natalia is talking to me, and by the way she’s saying my name, it must be the second time. Third. “Joy? Do you want to go in?”
“Oh sure.”
Inside, Mrs. Carter offers us iced tea, and though we just ate at the diner, it seems rude not to accept. Mr. Carter shows us around. “It’s a historic house,” he tells us. Everything he renovates has to be approved by the Port Bennington Historic Society, even the doorknobs and the shelves in the pantry, and you can tell by the way he’s talking, he’s really proud of it.
“He does all the work himself,” Mrs. Carter says, handing us each a tall glass, clinking with ice.
When we all sit down in the living room, Mr. Carter asks, “So what can I do for you girls?”
Natalia looks at me.
Wait, you’re right, Lukas. Now that I hear Mr. Carter’s voice, I remember.
It was a poetry recital, just like I thought.
Mr. Carter wanted us to be able to speak in front of people, clearly, slowly, and with intent. We got to dress up, if we wanted. I had memorized a poem about springtime or flowers or birds or something, and I wore my mother’s butterfly scarf. Lukas wore baggy suit pants that must have once been his brother’s and a too-long tie, loose around his neck, and he held up a giant, homemade, fake dollar bill. I don’t remember if Mr. Carter fed Lukas his first line, or if all of a sudden it just came to him. But now it comes to me like a punch in the stomach.
It was something about money. About a dollar bill.
And about being a son.
And some math. Like two is more than one.
It was a Shel Silverstein poem, and I thought it was so funny, I went home and I read it again and again. At least, I thought that was why I did that.
I feel my eyes stinging with tears.
“It’s okay, Joy.” Mrs. Carter comes and sits down next to me. She puts her hand on my back and gives me a little rub. “What can we do for you, sweetheart?” she encourages me.
I start. “Well, I was wondering if you could tell me anything about Lukas. The man at B&B’s told me he saw you guys fishing…that day….And I thought maybe you knew where Lukas was going next. I mean, what he was doing. Or, I mean, anything. I thought maybe you could tell me something.”
“About the scavenger hunt? About our tree?” Mr. Carter looks over at Mrs. Carter.
He knows?
You told him.
“About the whale’s eye? I think I can,” Mr. Carter says.
Mrs. Carter interrupts, as if she can see the excitement in my face and she doesn’t want me to get my hopes up. “But, of course, we don’t know if that’s where Lukas went. We don’t know at all. But I’m sure Paul can tell you a story, if you girls have a little time….”
I look at Natalia, who nods.
Yes, we have time.
Thinking about Joy and the islands makes me think about the night the three of us did the puzzle with Rand.
* * *
“Your grandpa loved to fish, too. That’s how your father knew all the names of all those little islands in the Sound,” Mom says, tapping the picture on the box of the puzzle we’re doing. “I bet he fished here, too.”
“Dad?” I ask, confused.
“No, your grandpa Antonio,” she says. “Before they moved to the States.”
The puzzle is of a place in Italy called Cinque Terre, which is what makes Mom think about Grandpa Tony, I guess. I never met him. He died young like Dad did, only not from cancer, but a heart attack. Not even Justin knew him. Still, Mom likes to talk about him, and there are pictures of Grandpa Tony and Grandma Vivi and Dad, and all our other relatives, on the wall that goes down the hallway from the living room. In one of them, Dad is young, and he and Grandpa Tony are standing in a boat, each holding up a beautiful silver striped bass.
One time, I caught Rand looking at the photos in the hall. Just standing there, staring at them, so I went over and stood and stared with him. After a while, he said, “You guys are lucky you have such nice stories about your dad and your grandparents and your cousins. All of my memories are [curse word]. Things and people I’d rather forget. Until you all, that is. I wish I was better at showing that.”
He’s showing it fine now, on this Friday night, when we’re doing the puzzle of Cinque Terre. He’s not out at a pub, drinking and hanging with his pals. Instead, he’s here with all of us.
“I love the way it sounds—Chinqua Terre,” Mom says, repeating it with a ch sound. “It means ‘Island of Five Lands’ or something like that.”
Rand and me both repeat it now, too, using the ch sound, plus rolling our r’s, all exaggerated like Mom did.
On the box lid, colorful houses of red, yellow, and blue are all stacked together on this super-high cliffside as if they’re about to slide down into the deep blue sea.
“We’ll go there on our honeymoon, how about it, Mel?” Rand asks, waggling his eyebrows at Mom. She rolls her eyes at him, but she smiles also. I think she’s happy this month, because Rand has been working hard to go to meetings and not lie about bars or drinking beers. He really does want to marry her, I think. Though this is the first time I’ve heard him say it.
I look over at Justin to see if he heard, and his gaze shifts to me. He’s lying on the couch, playing a game on his phone, because he’s already in high school, and way too cool to do puzzles with us.
“Pine Island. Neptune Island. Pea Island,” he says, so it’s clear he’s paying attention. He sits up and continues to count off names on his fingers. “Captain’s. David’s.” He’s naming the islands Dad taught him, though I’m not sure why. It’s like even when Rand is trying, Justin has to remind him about all the stuff our real father did. “Schultz’s. And Execution Rocks, where the lighthouse is.”
I count them off in my head, too, but not out loud. I can’t help myself. Lots of people don’t even know those islands exist, right close to where we live.
“Tell me again, will you?” Rand says, standing up to stretch, then surprising me by walking over and sitting down on the couch right next to where Justin is. He pats Justin’s knee. “Seems I always forget one or two of them.”
“Not in the mood,” Justin says, going back to his game, but Rand stays there, anyway, because he gives Justin a lot of room to be mad at him for no reason at all.
* * *
The memory goes from happy to sad as I’m thinking about how Rand was trying and Justin had to give him a hard time. Then again, Rand started drinking again right after that, like so many times, so I guess Justin was right not to trust him.
I pass by Greer’s, happy to turn the corner to the library and not to think about Justin or Rand, or even me and Joy, right now and just focus on the hunt instead.
Clue #6 is already rewritten and inside the tree. So, only Clue #5, which I’ll hide in the library, needs to be fixed so it leads her there. On the bench outside the main entrance, I sit and take out the small spiral pad and my pen.
“Clue #5,” I write, tapping the pen to my forehead, then think, What will get Joy to the gazebo?
Music.
Where you hear music, I start, because she’ll get that fast, except, no, maybe not, because there’s also Spin Doctor’s, the used-record shop, plus the fancy Port Bennington concert hall. Or maybe she’ll think I just mean somebody’s radio in their car, or even the music room o
r auditorium in our school.
So I scratch that out, turn the page, and start again:
By the piers, on the lawn,
Near a shelter that’s round,
Where violins and harps
Sometimes make their sounds,
I scratch that out, too, because the rhyme is crappy, and try again:
By the piers on the lawn,
Near a shelter that’s round,
Where violins and harps
Make a nice summer sound,
Better. But not enough, because I still need to get her to the tree.
I add under that:
Look for the leaves
Of the heart-shaped tree
(I know it sounds corny
But it has a secret history).
And since I’m on a total roll with this good clue now, I add:
Find the tree, then its knot
that’s the eye of a whale.
Peek inside and you’ll find
A clue, without fail.
It’s a little longer than the other clues, but so what? Plus, it’s getting later than I thought, so I don’t have a ton of time to fix it. The library closes early on Saturdays.
I tear out the page, fold it into quarters, scrawl JOY on the front, and head into the nice, cool air-conditioning.
Sometimes out here on Long Island, in the summer, we get these little sun showers, which means that the sun is still shining everywhere, but all of a sudden, without warning, it’s raining. It can be hard, too, like pellets hitting you on the head. Or in this case, our windshield.
Natalia flips the wipers on, and they chase each other back and forth.
“Take my phone and text Mom. No, Dad,” my sister says. “Tell him we’re fine; we went for lunch, and we’ll be home in less than an hour.” She keeps her eyes on the road and nudges her bag toward me. “It’s in that little zipper part. See it?”
I dig in, feel around, find her phone, and do what she told me, but before I can finish swiping through all her new apps and sneaking a peek at her photos, her phone chimes back at me once, with a text.
“Dad,” I tell Natalia.
“What’s it say?”
“He says: ‘OK. Drive carefully.’ ”
“Good. Leave it at that.”
I am about to drop her phone back into her bag when it rings.
“Mom,” I tell Natalia.
“Do not answer it,” my sister says.
I start to object. “They’ll worry. Maybe I should just pick up and get it over with.”
“You texted, right? They know you’re with me, right? You’re thirteen today, aren’t you?” Natalia ticks off. “If you pick up the phone, Mom will guilt you into coming home. We won’t find this tree today, and we might not ever know if there’s something there for you.”
We wait for the ringing to stop and then for the inevitable beep of a voicemail.
“I’ll take all the blame,” my sister says. “I promise.”
I believe her. She’ll either take the blame, or they’ll be happy enough to dump it on her. That’s how it usually goes. It’s nobody’s fault, really. It’s just the way things are. She’s the oldest. She does everything first, and she gets in trouble for it first. Not to mention they’ve been tiptoeing around me all year. I figure by the time they get to Isabel and Davy, there won’t be any rules left at all.
The rain is already stopping, and now the wetness is like crystals that have fallen from the sky and glimmer on every surface. The gazebo that Mr. Carter told us about is on the other end of town, all the way back near the bait-and-tackle shop. It would seem I’ve crisscrossed almost all of Port Bennington in just over three and a half hours.
It’s almost three o’clock.
I don’t think I’ve been on my own, unaccounted for, that long before in my whole life. But it feels good. Kind of like being let out after being hidden away—even if I did the hiding myself—like the sky clearing, and the air smells so fresh.
“This is rainbow weather, you know?” I say, looking out the window and up at the blue breaking through. “After a rain like that. With the sun shining.”
“Do you see one?”
I twist my neck and try to look way up. “Nope. Too many buildings.”
“Let’s take Beach Road, then. It’s a little longer but it’s still the right direction.” Natalia cuts the wheel, makes a sharp left, and my nose bangs against the glass.
“Ouch.”
“That’s the spirit.”
I stay longer in the library than I mean to, because Love That Dog isn’t on the shelf, so I panic, thinking it’s checked out, which would screw everything up, since that’s where I need to put this next clue. Since that’s where the clue I stashed under the Revo Rocket reel sends Joy to. Once she reads it, she’ll know exactly where to look, and nothing else but inside that book will work:
So much depends
Upon a dumb blue car.
Too bad I made you
Walk so far.
That was my easiest clue, and also I laughed out loud writing it, because Love That Dog is both of our favorite book. Joy’s because she likes poems, and mine because I like dogs, and also it’s short.
We read it at the same time in fourth grade, even though we weren’t in class together, because our teachers opened the dividing wall between our classrooms for literature circles, and Joy and me got into the same circle. Ever since then, whenever we’re trying to decide on something and one of us says, “It depends,” the other will automatically ask, “On a blue car or a red wheelbarrow?” without even thinking about it.
It comes from the part in the book where the main character, Jack, has to write a poem and writes, So much depends upon a blue car, which comes from a famous poem about a red wheelbarrow.
Me: What are you getting for lunch today? Mac ’n’ cheese or a hamburger?
Joy: It depends.
Me: On a blue car or a red wheelbarrow?
Joy: Do you want to watch a movie at my house tonight?
Me: It depends on which movie. And whether Izzie will be choosing it.
Joy: And on a blue car or a red wheelbarrow.
Anyway, it turned out the book wasn’t checked out or missing or anything, just on display in the poetry section, but I had to ask the librarian, who figured it out. Then, when she got it down for me, she tried to walk me to the circulation desk to check it out. So I had to pretend I wanted to read it right then and there, and then she just watched me for, like, practically fifteen minutes while I sat in the kids’ section and pretended. But then I got lucky because she went on break, so I quick-slipped the book in its original alphabetical-by-author place on the shelf.
Now, as I head outside into daylight, the sun is still high in the sky, but something has shifted so you can tell it’s later, like the sun is working hard to hold on to the afternoon.
I weave my way down the wheelchair ramp, wishing I had my skateboard and thinking of all the days Justin and me used to zoom down this ramp and around the empty parking lot, back when he would still do stuff with me.
Halfway down the ramp, my brain stops thinking about that, because a short way down the hill by the basketball courts, I can hear laughing and voices, and one of them I recognize. Justin, with his friends, the ones he’s not supposed to hang around with.
Chance isn’t with him, and if they went to the Point, no way they’d be back here already.
I move closer and squat down behind a car and watch. They’re drinking, clear as day. Justin takes a long sip from a bottle and tosses it into the trees.
“Hey, Brunetti, you want a hit?” one of the guys says, holding something up, then walks over to him. My chest squeezes. I don’t need to stick around to see.
I stand up to walk away, and someone yells for me—“Hey, Lukas! Lukas, wait!”—but I don’t stop, don’t look back, not to answer or see my brother, hand shielding his eyes, squinting in my direction.
The sudden rainstorm had sent everybody rushing to gather their blankets and towels and umbrellas, their portable baby cabanas, their rolling fifteen-gallon coolers, and running to their SUVs and back to their summer houses. It’s a little damp, but now this whole stretch of beach is empty. Natalia and I have been waiting so long to see if a rainbow will appear in the sky that we’ve almost forgotten why we are lying here in the sand, with our hands folded behind our heads, looking up at the clouds.
“My butt is getting wet,” I say.
“I told you to grab a sweatshirt from the back of the truck to sit on.”
I stare up at the sky again. It’s blue, all blue.
“So, what if there’s no note in the tree?” I ask. “Hey, does that look like a dragon to you?” I point straight up, almost directly overhead.
“Why does everyone see dragons and bunny rabbits in the clouds?” my sister says. “No one ever says they see a chain saw, do they? Or a bar of soap. Or a toothbrush. And so what if it’s not there?”
“What?”
“The tree. The note,” Natalia says.
I think about that for a minute. It feels good to just be lying here, side by side. I can actually think and breathe.
It all happened so fast today. It’s almost like a year has gone by, flying up in front of my face. I think I need to slow down and just lie here for a while. Like one of those giant stop signs in the cartoons just showed up right in front of my face and said stop.
Pause.
Slow down.
Breathe.
“Well, if it’s not there, then that’s the end of that,” I say.
