by Gae Polisner
As soon as I hear my own words, I feel the familiar tugging at the corners of my mouth and the burn in my throat. Then it sticks right in the center of my chest, like a giant fist, squeezing and squeezing. It couldn’t hurt more if someone had taken a Wiffle ball bat and walloped me in the gut with it, which actually happened to me once in PE, by accident, so I know.
I feel my sister take my hand and loop her fingers in between mine, and the tightness in my heart eases up.
“Look up there,” she says. “It feels like we are moving, doesn’t it?”
I follow the tip of her purple nail polish into the air, to a gathering of white clouds off to our left, which are forming and re-forming across the sky.
“Well, we are.”
“I know, but isn’t that weird, how we can see it?”
“It’s not really weird. The earth is rotating east, slower than the clouds, which are being moved by the jet stream, also moving west to east, except in the Southern Hemisphere, where they would be…”
I’m too tired to talk anymore.
“They would be what?” Natalia sits up next to me. “They would be what, Joy?”
I’m really tired, like I’ve got a blanket of rocks over me.
My sister pokes me. “I’m interested. I am. Tell me. They would be what?”
I keep the back of my head resting in the perfect little head indent I’ve made in the sand. I stare up at the sky, at the light scattering in the way that makes it look yellow, later orange, then red, then deep scarlet. Lukas would know the wavelengths. He’d know the formula, the speed of light, the way sounds travel over the surface of water, how to use a compass and protractor and a nautical slide rule and everything else it takes to navigate in the open water.
How did you let this happen, Lukas?
How could you do this to me?
To you?
The sun is already edging toward the west, toward the end of today. It is almost the end of summer. I know this feeling so well, the way the sky looks, the way the air smells, the way the coolness slides in, along with the wide shadow that creeps across the sand, turning it from white to gray.
And when today is over, the earth will have turned another 366 times; 365 days will have passed. My birthday will be over, and it will be that much closer to Lukas’s, which he will never have.
“I miss him, Natty.”
“I know you do.”
I am so grateful she doesn’t say: “We all do.” So I go on. “Sometimes it hurts so much, I don’t know what to do.”
With that, Natalia plants her hands and hops up to her feet in one graceful motion. “Get up. Let’s get going. Let’s go find that tree.” She reaches her hand down to me.
“And if there’s nothing there?” I ask again, lifting myself up against her weight.
“Then there’s nothing there. And it won’t mean anything more than that. But who knows, maybe it’s the looking more than the finding.”
Now that the sun is out again, people are starting to file back onto the beach. A mom and her three kids, and somehow she is holding hands with all of them. A man and his son kicking a soccer ball back and forth. Two kids with a giant blow-up swan are running toward the water. It’s okay to be happy.
There’s still a good deal of daylight left.
The thing about morning is everything feels lighter and more hopeful. Mom used to tell me that when I couldn’t sleep. When I would toss and turn because I could hear Justin awake, late, in his own room.
He couldn’t sleep, so I couldn’t sleep.
Back when he used to take care of me.
Not like last night, when neither of us were talking to each other.
I made mac ’n’ cheese when I got home, and purposely didn’t leave any for him, like I normally do. Then I left Mom a note saying, Good night, I love you, and went to my room.
Before I fell asleep, Joy called, like always. To talk and make plans for today.
“The clue will be there early. You just need to find it,” I said. “Be prepared.”
I heard the soft whistle of her breath, the squeak of her bed as she changed position. “Okay, I will,” she said.
We were quiet for a minute, then I blurted, “Justin lied to me. Said he was fishing, when he wasn’t.”
“Really? Why? What was he doing?”
I swallowed back the sad feeling in my throat and picked the most direct words. “Drinking beers and smoking weed behind the library.”
“Ouch,” she said. “I’m sorry. Are you gonna tell your mom?”
“I don’t know.”
Joy didn’t judge me, or tell me what to do. “Natalia tells me some of her friends sometimes do stuff, but that doesn’t mean they’re all bad. He’ll come around, Lukas,” was all she said.
“I know.” I swallowed the upset feelings and let the thought that she was right settle into my bones. I wanted to believe her. Justin would come around. He wasn’t as bad as those other kids. He wasn’t like Rand.
“Lukas?”
“Yeah?”
“Come to breakfast in the morning. Everyone wants you to.”
“I’ll come for cake later, like I always do.”
“You should do both. They all said so. Mom, Dad, Izzie, Natalia. Davy. Everyone.”
“That is everyone—and a lie, because Davy barely talks.” She laughed, and I smiled. “Anyway, no thanks, Joy. Night.”
“Okay. I love you.”
“Wait. Huh?” I asked, but she was gone.
I hung up, too, and stared at my phone, but it couldn’t have been right, what I heard. It was only my tired brain playing tricks on me.
Probably what she said was Okay, but I’d love you to about breakfast, and my dumb ears were hearing things.
But what if?
My eyes go to the box on my desk that holds the heart necklace. What if Joy also loves me loves me, too?
Either way, this morning, I’m feeling surer. I will leave her the note with the gift. Even if the thought of it makes my hands sweat.
I roll over and glance out the lower part of my window, out the long, thin rectangle of glass where the shade isn’t pulled down all the way. Our apartment is quiet. Justin is still sleeping, and since it’s Sunday, Mom gets to sleep in, too.
Outside, I can see a section of the tree trunks of the row of silver poplars they planted all around this place when they built it, their white bark slashed by deep gray lines. They look like the tall necks of albino giraffes marching outside my window, on parade.
And suddenly I remember this game Mom used to play with Justin and me when we were little, called Head, Bodies, Feet. I haven’t thought about that in the longest time. We’d play lots of word games and puzzle games when we were stuck in the hospital waiting room, while Dad was having his treatments and surgeries. I don’t remember all of them, but I remember this one now.
Each of us got a piece of paper and had to draw a head on the top. It could be any kind of head: a boy’s; a girl’s; an old lady’s, with glasses and a pointy nose; a guy’s, with a crazy handlebar mustache and lunatic beard. Whatever came into your brain.
Then we’d each fold the paper down at the top, so only the bottom of the neck was sticking out, and pass it to the person on our right. That person would draw a body, then fold it down, with only the top of the legs showing, and pass it again, and the last person would add the rest of the legs and feet. At the end, we’d each open our complete drawing to see what kind of head was on what kind of body with what kind of feet.
And there was one where Justin drew the head, and I got the body, and Mom got the legs and feet, and when we opened it, Justin had drawn a giraffe’s head with a long orange neck, and I had put a dress on it, though you could barely tell what it was. And Mom had given it clown shoes. And in the middle of the waiting room, we all st
arted laughing like crazy. Mom was crying, she was laughing so hard. And there we were, all three of us, laughing our heads off, even though Dad was dying. And when we finished laughing, Mom turned to us, maybe more to Justin than to me, and she touched his cheek and said, “I promise everything is going to be okay.”
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling for a while, thinking about how most people hate to get up early, and a lot of times I do, too, but not when I’m going fishing, and not today because it’s Joy’s birthday.
I stretch and yawn, and even though I’m excited, for a split second I do think about hitting snooze, going back to sleep for eight more minutes. I don’t need to get to her house this early. But I’m awake now, so might as well. I need to hide the box, with the note and the heart pendant, too, and the earlier I get it there, the earlier she’ll find the first clue. For sure, she’ll figure out it means Vincent’s Pizza, and that this hunt is bigger and better than any of our other hunts before. And that will build up the excitement so she can hardly stand it while she’s finishing breakfast and waiting for her family to set her free.
As we drive over the Bay Bridge toward the park that Mr. Carter told us about, I can’t stop my whole body from feeling the anticipation, no matter how many times my logical brain is telling it not to.
I’m okay.
Just like Natalia said, it’s not like anything will change.
The note will be there. Or it won’t.
But something else is pulling at me, knocking around in my insides, starting out like a whisper, like a song I sang all the time, but now I forget the words.
Remember?
Do you remember those times I was happy?
I do.
There is a perfectly square patch of lawn in the center of our apartment complex; it felt huge to us, with Lukas’s building—tall and imposing—on one side, mine on the other. There is just grass, surrounded by a low metal fence, like the scalloped collar of a dress. And a sign.
NO DOGS.
“It doesn’t say, ‘no kids,’ ” Lukas declared.
And so that’s where we planted our candy garden. I don’t think we really believed we were going to grow candy, but it’s not that we didn’t believe it. It was more like that kind of in-between, magical kid thinking, when it didn’t matter either way.
First we used Skittles.
I was nine, and two days older, and I had the authority. “You dig the hole, and I’ll drop them in.”
Red and blue and green were staining my hands. I dropped one into each little spot that Lukas uncovered, and I watched while he carefully brushed the mound of dirt back over the top and smoothed it all down.
I don’t know how long we had our candy garden. A few weeks that spring? I think we planted some Sour Patch and some gummy worms. Every day we came out and watered them, long after the candy had been washed away or been eaten by the squirrels.
Remember that day when we ran for our lives?
Remember when the super saw us digging in there and started yelling?
“Hey, you kids, get off the grass. Whaddaya think you’re doing?”
“Ruuun!” Lukas shouted. “Run.”
We leapt over the little metal fence, and we ran as fast as we could. We ran past the courtyard, out of the back gate, and down the path, past the elementary school. We ran all the way to the seawall, till there was nowhere else to run.
We ran to the end of the world.
“Oh man. Do you think Mr. Sweeny followed us?” Lukas asked, plopping himself down on the stone wall, and me right next to him.
We were out of breath and panting, and so excited that our toes and our ears were tingling. The stone wall was damp and cold, the ocean was spread out before us and blended into the blue sky above. The sun was new and belonged only to us.
I looked around in all possible directions, like a sentinel on guard, but there was no way Mr. Sweeny would have followed us this far. “No sign of him,” I reported.
You smiled a happy smile at me.
“That was a close call,” Lukas said.
“Whew.”
“Whew.”
“I’ve never run so fast in my whole life,” I said.
My chest hurt so good. My legs were shaking. I don’t think I’d ever been that happy.
I head right into the shower, careful to be quiet and not wake anyone. As the water streams down, I think about Dad, not that I can remember a lot. It’s always more like a feeling of him, from what Justin and Mom say, than my own real memories.
But I know Mom loved him for a long time. And that he loved her, and didn’t want to leave us at all.
I also think about how happy Mom seemed when she started dating Rand, because she had someone who helped her, and someone she liked to spend time with.
I think about Rand, too, and how excited we all were when he moved in. And how it took a while for Mom to say okay, he could, because she was looking out for us instead of her.
And when we first started seeing how much he would drink, it didn’t seem like a big deal. Not really. It was only when he started to sleep more, or lie, or get angry and mean and yell.
And then Mom was always saying sorry to us, like it was her fault Rand drank, not his.
“Sorry, I thought he would stop.”
“Sorry, he’s trying. He wants to.”
“Sorry, I think it might be better this time.”
But it would only get better for a short while, and then finally it got bad enough he crashed his truck. That night, Mom cried and thanked God she got a special warning, because neither me or Justin were with him.
That was the night she did it. Told Rand he had to leave.
“Don’t come back until you’re sober for six months, promise me that,” she’d said, and that was almost nine months ago.
And now things are getting better again. Mom doesn’t cry and miss him so much. We just need to find her another person to help her feel happy.
I grab the shampoo and lather up, and since I don’t want to think about all that anymore, I make the water hotter, turn my face into the stream, and think about the silver poplars instead. I know it’s weird how I pay attention to them, but I like to pay attention to the things around me, like fish and water and clouds. Like islands and trees. Joy says it’s one of the things she likes best about me.
And I’m thinking about how a lot of people around here complain about them, because they cause allergies and send saplings out like alien spawn, and so every spring, Mr. Sweeny slips a survey under our doors, asking if they should all be cut down and replaced.
You’d think it was a good thing, to have a lot of trees. But I guess some things can be good and bad at the same time. Some people just want grass and flowers more than they want to live in a forest of silvery trees.
On the way back to my room, I pass Justin’s room and can hear him snoring away like a lawn mower.
I backtrack and push open his door a little to look at him. It won’t matter, because even a bomb won’t wake my brother. It makes me happy to see him there, sleeping, because those bad kids stay out all night and he doesn’t, and even though he’s seventeen, when he’s asleep like that, it reminds me he’s still just a peaceful kid.
I think how it must be lots of pressure on him, about to be a senior and not knowing whether he wants to go to college or not, not knowing what he’ll do after. So, maybe it’s understandable if he needs to blow off a little steam.
And then I remember how when Rand left, Justin promised me he’d never be like him, only like our dad, because even though Dad’s gone, he knows he still needs to make him proud.
“Not that he can see us, exactly,” Justin said, “but I believe he can, sort of. Not with his eyes, but with something else.” He punched his fist to his chest then and rumpled my hair. “And he knows that we’ll bo
th be okay.”
I had only nodded because my words were pressed down by my tears.
“And that we’ll always take care of Mom,” he had added.
I had nodded, for sure, at that, too.
We are heading across the grass by the gazebo, where they have concerts in the summer, and we both stop when we see it, the only tree looming out so majestically from the manicured lawn.
Natalia gives me a push. “Go on,” she says.
It’s a real push, with her hands on my back. I stumble a little, but I start walking, focused straight ahead.
This must be the one, the right tree, the one Mr. Carter told us about. He did say the trunk splits into two limbs that are bowed out, and that there is a knot in the center, where the bark looks like a gray, wrinkled whale’s eye. Like that one.
This must be the tree.
I’m sure that’s how he described it, but now that I am standing here, I see something else.
Am I crazy?
I see a heart.
This whole huge tree, standing out in the middle of everywhere for everyone to see, from this distance looks like a giant heart.
I swear it does.
I turn around and look back, because Natalia isn’t following me anymore, but she’s standing there, watching, and nodding her head. When I get closer, right up to the tree, the heart disappears and I see the twisted knot, the hole in the bark.
The whale’s eye.
There are holes in the dirt and holes in fences and holes that are to dig and holes you should never blindly stick your hand into. But that never seemed to stop Lukas.
* * *
“I don’t think this is such a good idea.”
We were both squatting down, as close to the ground as we could, knees bent up to our shoulders, our bodies perfectly balanced on our feet. So we could get a better look.
It was a neatly round hole, about half a foot wide, deep in the sand, so deep we couldn’t see the bottom. Lukas was poking around with a stick. I remember it was winter. The beach was cold, the sand was hard, and the wind was biting us like someone was throwing tiny stones.
