Keeper

by Kathi Appelt

  14

  Signe’s heart pounded. What on earth had happened? The floor was sopping wet, the bowl—her one single thing of her mother’s!—was cracked in two, the gumbo was burnt.

  How could Keeper have wreaked so much havoc in such a short time? Thirty minutes. Half an hour. It wasn’t that long. But it was long enough for the gumbo to boil over. Long enough for Keeper to break her wooden bowl.

  Signe pulled the pot of roux from the flame and turned the stove off. Without even looking, she knew it was a blackened mess. She popped the lid on it to keep the smoke down. Then she bent over and picked up the pieces of the bowl. They were greasy. She sniffed at one. It smelled like bacon. She scratched her head. Why bacon? She set the pieces on the counter and stared at them. Bacon?

  What was Keeper doing with bacon?

  Then she looked down into the large aluminum tub. There was only water. Not a single crab. All at once, Signe knew what Keeper had done. She had set those crabs free using bacon and her bowl.

  Signe sank into a kitchen chair and stared at Keeper’s closed bedroom door. The air in the kitchen was smoky from the burnt roux.

  What in heaven’s name had come over her girl?

  Then Signe’s heart pounded harder.

  How could she have left Keeper by herself? Keeper was barely ten, still a little girl, a little girl who believed in elves and fairies and angels…. And always, she believed her mother herself was a mermaid, and Signe had let her believe it. Keeper, Signe knew, believed in magic.

  But what, Signe wondered, did magic have to do with crabs exactly? As if the ruined gumbo wondered too, a single drop slid down the outside of the pot and hissed.

  15

  Now, in the deep, deep night, Keeper patted her pocket, felt the outlines of the wooden carving of Yemaya through her denim shorts.

  Yemaya. Who was she?

  According to Mr. Beauchamp, she was the grand-mère of all the waters.

  Yemaya, the big mama.

  Queen mother of the merfolk.

  Chieftess of the whales and sea snakes.

  Doyenne of the rivers and lakes and streams and bayous.

  Of all the merfolk, Keeper loved Yemaya best.

  Goddess of the deep.

  Yemaya.

  If you gave her a gift, she might grant a wish.

  16

  Wishes. Before today, Keeper had made plenty of wishes, like wishes on falling stars and wishes on rainbows and wishes on wishbones, all kinds of small wishes, like for Hershey’s Kisses with almonds and tie-dyed shoelaces. But now she needed a big wish, a giant wish.

  It had been a whole day full of mad, mad, mad, all starting with those crabs. Everyone, everyone in the world unto itself, was mad at her. All that mad had rattled the windowpanes, settled in the corners, rustled the curtains, made her skin feel sticky.

  As the evening rolled in, the only thing Keeper could think to do was hunker down in her bedroom with a plate of cheddar cheese bites and sliced tomatoes for dinner. It was a sorry replacement for the spicy gumbo, but Keeper knew not to complain.

  For hours the mad had swirled around in her bedroom air, chilly. Despite the warmth of the summer breeze drifting through her open window, Keeper’s feet felt like Popsicles. She opened her top dresser drawer to find a pair of socks, and that’s when she saw… the charm.

  Her mother’s charm!

  The charm was the last thing her mother had given her before she swam away when Keeper was three, seven years ago. For seven years Keeper had kept it in her top dresser drawer. Right beneath her socks. Seven years.

  Seven.

  A lucky number!

  “Yes!” Keeper had said as she lifted the charm out of the drawer. She had flopped down on the floor, lifted the bedskirt, and thrust it into BD’s face. “Look!” she said. BD touched the charm with his nose, then pulled back. The charm was freezing cold, colder than Keeper’s feet.

  “Seven years,” she told BD. “That’s lucky.”

  Suddenly, her thoughts were racing. The charm had been given to her by her mother, the mermaid.

  What could be luckier than a mermaid?

  Keeper knew exactly what: a mermaid mama, who would know exactly how to help Keeper get out of the boatload of trouble that she had caused.

  Exactly!

  And in that late afternoon and early evening of mad-in-the-air and no-one-talking-to-Keeper, Keeper made a majorly big realization.

  She had heard those crabs. No doubt about it. No matter how much practicality Signe invoked, those crabs had spoken to her.

  If Keeper could hear crabs, didn’t it stand to reckon that she could hear other sea creatures, too, like maybe mermaids? And if she could hear mermaids, wouldn’t that mean that mermaids could hear her?

  Exactly!

  And so maybe, just maybe, maybe maybe maybe, she could find the only grown-up left who could help Keeper fix the world unto itself.

  Her mother.

  And right there she started cooking up a plan. Her perfect plan.

  17

  Keeper’s perfect plan:

  A. Wait until Signe is sound asleep.

  B. Sneak out of the house with BD.

  C. Get into The Scamper.

  D. Wait for the tide to rise.

  E. When the tide has risen, untie the knot.

  F. Be extra sure that the tide is all the way up before untying the knot, or else the boat will go in the wrong direction.

  G. Once the knot is untied, row across the pond toward the channel.

  H. Go through the channel—it might be tight.

  I. Row to the sandbar.

  J. Find Meggie Marie.

  K. Tell Meggie Marie everything that happened on this horrible day, everything.

  L. Ask Meggie Marie what to do.

  M. Wait for the tide to turn back around.

  N. Row back through channel and across the pond.

  O. Tie up The Scamper.

  P. Sneak back into house.

  Q. Do not wake up Signe.

  R. Wake up early tomorrow morning so Signe won’t suspect anything.

  S—Z. Do whatever Meggie Marie says to do to fix everything.

  Keeper smiled at BD. She had worked it all out. The sandbar was famous for its mermaids; plus, it was the last place she had seen her mother. If she was going to find Meggie Marie, it would be on the sandbar. De Vaca’s Rock.

  Meggie Marie knew everyone who lived on Oyster Ridge Road. She would know how to fix things. She would know what would make Signe, Dogie, and Mr. Beauchamp happy again.

  Also, if Keeper took The Scamper, she would not have to break her promise to Signe, the one she had made when she was three, the night Meggie Marie swam away. And what promise would that be? The one to not ever, ever, ever go swimming through those waves again.

  By using the boat, Keeper could keep her promise. She would not be swimming. Nope. No breaststroke. No Australian crawl. No backstroke, either. None of that. She would be rowing. Keeper had not made any promises about rowing.

  It was perfect, perfect, perfect.

  “It’s perfecto!” Keeper told BD, who was still under the bed.

  To seal the deal, she wrote it all down, Steps A—Z, on a piece of notebook paper. Then she started to fold it up to put in her back pocket, but first she decided to memorize it, which was smart thinking because what if the paper got wet and all the ink washed off? And what if she got all the way to Step G and could not read Step H? Then what? Or how about if she mixed up Steps B and P? That would throw off everything.

  So, for the next few hours, she stared at the plan and learned each step by heart: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S-Z. And to make it even better, she memorized it backward too. Just in case.

  18

  And now, all these hours later, here she was. In the boat, the notebook paper in her back pocket, putting her perfect plan into action. And so far, so good. Steps A, B, and C had gone swimmingly. When she and BD had tiptoed out the kitchen door bare
ly an hour ago, BD hadn’t made a single sound to wake up Signe. Somehow, he even managed to keep his toenails from clicking on the hard floor of the hallway.

  Once outside, he had loped across the grassy lawn, right next to Keeper, quiet as a marsh mouse, stepped softly onto the wooden pier so as not to make any noise, then lowered himself down into the boat as lightly as a mosquito landing on a bare arm.

  Dogie’s boat. The Scamper.

  Keeper did not have permission to use Dogie’s boat, did she? “It’s okay,” she told BD. “We’ll be back waaayyy before Dogie wakes up.” She knew that Dogie got up early to go open the Bus in time for the usual surfers who showed up to rent his surfboards or to buy a bar of wax. Surfers were early risers. Keeper knew this.

  If her plan worked the way it was supposed to, then Dogie would never even know that she had taken the boat in the first place.

  Speaking of the plan, it was good that she had memorized it because in all of this darkness, she surely couldn’t read it. Whew! Good thinking, as Signe would say.

  Keeper scanned the eastern horizon. “Where is the moon?” she asked the starry sky.

  “Woof!” answered BD. Keeper knew that if BD could find the moon for her, he would. He’d grab it right out of the sky and hand it to her.

  As Keeper sat there, she began to notice the noise of the tumbling waves on the other side of the sand dunes, a steady roar in the darkness. How could she have missed hearing them when they were always there?

  And where the heck was that moon? Just then a soft breeze lifted over and circled around her head. There, on the wind’s back, she heard it: Keeper. Keeper. She gripped the sides of the boat with her hands.

  “Listen,” she said to BD. The dog sat up and cocked his ears. The wind, as thin as paper, slipped by again.

  Her name, the one her mother had given her seven years ago, right before she swam away. Ever since then, in all that time, Keeper had not heard one single word from Meggie Marie, not one. She leaned into the sound. Keeper. Keeper.

  Then, just as quickly as it arose, the breeze vanished, leaving her name right there.

  19

  The Texas coast forms an arc, like a large rainbow, hugging the salty water of the Gulf of Mexico, laden with redfish and electric eels and speckled trout, cabbage heads and jellyfish and flounders. Right there, nestled between Galveston to the north and Corpus Christi to the south, right at the foot of a salt grass marsh, lies a narrow strip of quiet beach, isolated but for an oyster shell road that starts about ten miles inland in a tiny town called Tater.

  But long before Tater, perhaps fifty thousand years ago, maybe longer, maybe a hundred thousand years ago, or even a million, a family of oysters built themselves a bed a hundred yards from the shore. It was a perfect place for the little oyster family. The water temperature was just right, the floor of the sea was solid, and the waves were gentle. Word soon spread in the oyster community, and it wasn’t long before the small bed grew into a very large bed. Every year more and more oysters moved in, adding their newer shells to the older shells until the bed became wide and thick and also taller. As the oyster bed grew, the waves pushed sand and pebbles and grit up against it until it formed a long, narrow shoal just below the surface of the water. Over the centuries the waves pushed tons of sand and rocks and shells up against both sides of the oyster bed until it was completely covered over. The oysters eventually moved away and found other places for their beds, but they left behind their ancient shells, cemented together with all that sand and rocks and pebbles, creating a solid, permanent structure that geologists and oceanographers call a “sandbar,” even though it was more like a big underwater rock than a pile of loose sand.

  There it has rested, a hundred yards from shore, barely poking its noggin above the water. It is now known as De Vaca’s Rock, named for the moment Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca sailed all the way from Spain and bumped right into it, gouging a rather large hole in the bottom of his ship in 1528, almost five hundred years ago. As soon as the ship listed, Cabeza de Vaca gathered his men and chickens and goats and swam to shore, and just as he did, he was greeted by a gathering of the resident coastal tribespeople known as the Karankawa.

  The Karankawa tribe did not name the sandbar De Vaca’s Rock. After all, his was not the first nor the last ship to scrape its hull against it. The Karankawas knew the sandbar for its older purpose, a meeting place for stingrays.

  And tonight, this very night, the stingrays gathered there, just as they do each year when the midsummer moon is full, just as they had for thousands of years.

  How many stingrays were there? A hundred? A thousand? More? They were waiting for the moonlight to guide them through the narrow channel called the Cut, right into the middle of the pond, its bottom thick and silty, perfect for their purposes. There, between the blades of the marsh grass that grew from the bottom, they’d lay their eggs. And when they were done, they’d use the waning light to return to the blue-green gulf, where they would swim out to deeper water. It was a ritual that the moon and the stingrays had performed for thousands of years, maybe millions.

  Mermaids’ purses. That’s what their egg sacs are called.

  Mermaids’ purses.

  Though it’s not written in his captain’s log, some believe that the reason Cabeza de Vaca ran his ship onto the sandbar in the first place was because of a sultry mermaid. It’s easy enough to believe, especially when it’s documented, right there in Cabeza de Vaca’s own papers safe in a museum in Spain, where they’ve been for almost five hundred years, ever since he left the shores of Texas and arrived back in his homeland.

  The sandbar was the last place that Keeper saw her mother, watched her swim away beneath a million stars. Just as gone as Cabeza de Vaca and the Karankawas. Gone.

  20

  Knee to paw, face-to-face, Keeper looked right at BD. “We can find her, boy. Easy peasy.” With that, a small bit of happy raced through her.

  BD pressed against her. Keeper breathed in his doggy smell, a mixture of Purina Dog Chow and Palmolive dish soap, the faint traces of his dinner and the bath she had given him a day or two ago, added to his own peculiar BD smell, something like garlic and sand and honey all mixed together.

  Over BD’s head she saw the outlines of the three dark houses, the only houses on Oyster Ridge Road. Resting atop their tall posts, they looked like shore-birds, their fat bodies standing on thin legs, tall enough to let the water slide beneath them during a storm.

  Her own house, the one she shared with Signe, was the closest to the pond. In the daylight it was painted haint blue, a grayish shade, more gray than blue, but now, in the darkness, it looked like no color at all. In her room her empty bed waited, the cotton sheet shoved to the end of the mattress. And in the next room Signe slept, unaware that her girl and BD were out there on the pond, the two of them in The Scamper.

  Thinking about Signe made that tiny bit of happy flitter a bit. “Shouldn’t the moon be up by now?” Keeper asked.

  “Moon!” she called, as if the sky could hear her. But there was no hurrying the moon. A girl who grows up with the tides coming and going knows that it takes the moon to pull the water out to sea. Which was where she needed to go. “Hurry up, you ol’ moon,” she said anyway. Step D was taking much longer than she had anticipated, and she still had lots of steps to go.

  She drummed her fingers on the boat’s sides, as if that might make the moon come up a little sooner.

  BD thumped his tail. Keeper stopped drumming.

  Farther along the bank, she could see the silhouettes of the sabal palms where Captain slept in his nest. Captain, their resident seagull.

  Captain!

  Another one of those wind gusts bumped against her. Some of today’s mess was his fault. Yes, the talking crabs had started it. But Captain had caused his share of the trouble too. And now he was surely fast asleep up there in his palm tree.

  Beyond Captain’s palm, Keeper saw the faint glow of the crushed oyster shells on the road
. She heard the rolling breakers of the surf on the other side of the sand dunes, the dunes that formed a rim around the Cut. The only thing that connected this pond to the gulf was a narrow channel, a ditch that sliced through the sand dunes and rose and fell with the tides, sending the water into the pond and then pulling it back out again. It was the pulling-back-out part that Keeper was waiting for.

  Collectively, the back-and-forth pond and the connecting channel were known by everyone on Oyster Ridge Road as “the Cut.”

  Everyone who mattered to Keeper lived here, along Oyster Ridge Road, with its dunes and salt grass marsh and oyster shell road and rolling surf: Signe and Dogie and Mr. Beauchamp. (They were all mad at her.) BD and Sinbad and Captain and Too—the beasts. (They weren’t mad at her.)

  The only one not here was Meggie Marie.

  For Keeper’s whole entire ten-year-long life, the world unto itself had been her home, her home with Signe and BD, and the long-legged sandpipers that scurried along the beach, and the sand dollars that lined her bedroom window, and the shrimp boats just behind the breakers, their nets like butterfly wings dipping into the water—everything she knew and cared about. And today she had ruined it all.

  21

  The darkness all around her was deep. Stars, even a sky full of them, don’t put out much light. Keeper’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness a little, but even so, she wished there were more light. Where, oh where, was the moon?

  If she had checked Dogie’s tidal chart before she came out here… but of course, she couldn’t have even if she’d thought of it, because even though Dogie said he wasn’t mad, she knew he had to be… all because of her and Captain and BD and, well, Too as well, don’t forget Too, he was also to blame.

  Of course Dogie was mad.

  Keeper sighed. So even if she’d thought of the chart, she wouldn’t have asked Dogie for it anyway, as she was quite sure Dogie didn’t want to see her.