by Liz Kessler
“I’m not going to do that, Mia. If you’re crazy, I am too. I’ve seen all this stuff as well.”
“OK.” I took a breath. “So, firstly, I think it’s got something to do with the boat.”
“The boat? How?”
“I sent notes to Dee on her dad’s boat, and if we’re right about Dee and Gran being the same person, then those notes were traveling back in time fifty years.”
“OK,” Sal said slowly.
“Then you and I went to Luffsands on the same boat and found ourselves in the middle of a storm — a storm that happened fifty years ago.”
“So the boat somehow makes you travel backward and forward fifty years in time?”
“Or maybe it’s the compass,” I said, thinking out loud.
“The way it went spinning like that,” Sal added.
“Exactly.” There was something in all this, but it was beyond the reach of my thoughts. I just couldn’t get my brain to add it all together into something that worked.
I shrugged. What did I have to lose? If I’d already lost my mind, Sal was there with me. “Look, I know it’s completely cr —”
“No, you’re right,” Sal said. “That’s what’s happened to Peter! That’s why he hasn’t come home to us. He’s gone back in time — and now that that man’s taken his boat, we’ve got no way of bringing him back again.”
“That man . . . Dee’s dad,” I said.
“Mia,” Sal said, so quietly her voice was like a wisp of wind ruffling a calm sea.
“What?”
“If Dee is your gran, and that man was her father . . .”
“Yes?”
Sal swallowed. “Then who is Peter?”
I was about to answer, but two things stopped me. The first was that I couldn’t make my brain piece together an answer. Or I could, but this time I knew that if I did, I was really going to go crazy!
The second was the sound of shuffling footsteps behind us.
I turned my head as the footsteps came closer. I looked up. Right in front of my eyes was the last person I expected to see, and the one who had been at the center of all my thoughts for a week.
I leaped off the bench and threw my arms around him.
“Grandad!”
He sat at the dining room table with his homework. His mom was upstairs, vacuuming. His dad was still in bed. His sister, Sal, was in the kitchen, getting a snack to eat in front of the television.
Logarithms. Whoever invented logarithms? And why? What job was he ever likely to get that would depend on his knowing how many times to multiply a factor of three?
Still, Peter had never handed his homework in late, and never been in trouble, so he persevered. That was simply the kind of boy he was — and everyone knew it. He was one of the few who was liked as much by the teachers as he was by his fellow pupils. And he wasn’t about to let a mind-bending equation change that.
So he kept his head down and concentrated on the mass of swirling numbers and formulas. If he got it all done now, he’d have the rest of the weekend to do what he wanted without it hanging over him.
But when he heard a soft “thud” coming from the hallway, his mind was sufficiently open to distraction that he was out of his chair in a flash.
He stood in the hallway and looked around. Nothing. He opened the porch door and looked down at the mat. There was something lying facedown on the floor — a magazine or pamphlet.
Peter bent down to pick it up. It was a travel brochure for a place he’d never heard of. “Come Fishing in Porthaven” it said on the front.
Fishing? Having lived in a city his whole life, fishing was not something that had ever entered his thoughts. In fact, he’d never even been on a boat! Where was Porthaven anyway? And who had delivered the brochure? The mail carrier had already come.
Curious, he opened the front door, expecting to see a teenager with a big satchel over his shoulder delivering the brochures to every house on the street. But there was no one delivering anything. The only person in sight on the street at all was a man with his back to Peter, right at the end of the road.
Peter watched him, registered that he seemed quite old, that he was wearing a big wool coat, that his hair was wispy and windblown, and that he seemed in a hurry to get away.
Just as the man was about to turn the corner, he stopped, as if he weren’t sure which direction to take. And then, very slowly, he turned back and looked down the road. His eyes met Peter’s. For the briefest of instants, the man and the boy locked eyes.
The next moment, Peter was struck by a blinding headache so fierce it made him scrunch his eyes closed and clutch his head. What was it? A migraine? Peter had never had one, so he didn’t know what they were like. All he knew was that he’d never felt pain like this in his life.
Still holding on to his head, Peter stumbled into the house. As he grew more agitated, a blotchy red rash crept around his neck. “Mom!” he called. Then he fell to his knees and waited for the pain to recede.
The mystery headache lasted for the rest of the day. Peter could do nothing that afternoon but lie on his bed in the dark.
No football. Football was the only reason Saturdays existed as far as Peter was concerned. But he had no choice.
He struggled down to join his family for dinner.
“This place looks absolutely heavenly,” his mom murmured, flipping through the brochure as she munched on an apple.
His dad frowned. “Can we afford it?” he asked. “Now that I’ve been made part-time and layoffs are looming, I could be out of a job by this time next month.”
“All the more reason to take a vacation now,” Peter’s mom insisted.
His dad leaned over to look at the brochure. “True enough,” he said. “And to be honest, I’ve always wanted to take a fishing vacation. What do you think, kids?”
Peter shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. He’d taken some aspirin but could still barely open his eyes without searing pain crashing through his head.
“I prefer horseback riding myself,” Sal said before getting up from the table and taking her plate to the sink.
“Ooh, look, they’ve got dates during spring break,” Mom pointed out. “We’d been wondering what to do then.”
Dad kissed his wife on the forehead and picked up the brochure as Peter finished his dinner and excused himself from the table. The pain was getting bad again and he needed darkness and quiet.
“Well, let’s not wonder anymore,” his dad was saying, heading for the phone as Peter headed back to his bed.
“Let’s go fishing in Porthaven.”
Grandad held me tightly for a couple of seconds, then took hold of my hands and pried them off his neck.
As I moved away, I saw that someone else had come out of the pub and was halfway toward us. Gran!
She was staring across at Grandad, her eyes as shiny as glass, her hands clenched together. He was staring back at her, too. Their gaze was like electricity: it almost crackled. Grandad stood as still as the statue on the promenade and waited for Gran to join us.
Then he wrapped his hands around hers. “Diane, I’m sorry I disappeared into thin air like that,” he said. “But I had to do it.”
Gran swallowed and nodded. She took one of her hands away from his. For a moment, I thought she was going to change her mind and walk off again. No — please don’t! Hear him out! I wanted to shout.
But she didn’t leave. Instead, she lifted her hand to his cheek and stroked his face. “I know that now,” she whispered.
Grandad tilted his head. “You know?” he repeated.
“You know what?” I added.
Gran turned to me, as if she’d only just noticed I was there. Then she smiled. “Everything,” she said.
“But —” Grandad began.
She put a finger on his lips to stop him saying any more. “I think in some part of me, I always knew,” she went on. “But I didn’t want to admit it, in case it made it all go away. In case it made you go away.”
Grandad wrapped his arms around Gran, pulling her close. “I love you so much,” he said, kissing her neck.
Which was the part where I kind of wondered if Sal and I should tiptoe away and pretend we’d never been there. I mean, obviously this was the best thing that had happened all week, but that still didn’t mean I wanted to watch my grandparents making out on the promenade.
I coughed gently.
Gran and Grandad moved apart a tiny bit and looked across at us. They both had the same look in their eyes. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it was as if their eyes held the keys to a secret world, a world that no one else knew about. Then Grandad nodded toward us. “Let’s sit,” he said.
Sal and I shuffled along the bench as they came to join us.
Flake bounced between the two of them, shoving his head into Grandad’s lap for a pat, then rubbing against Gran’s legs.
Still holding Grandad’s hand, Gran turned to me. “I always knew there was something odd going on,” she said.
“With what?” I asked.
“All of it. Pip turning up out of nowhere, and never really explaining where he’d come from.”
“Pip?” I said without thinking. It was so rare to hear Gran use Grandad’s nickname that I wasn’t sure who she was talking about for a moment.
“You know who I am, don’t you?” Grandad said, looking at me intently. “You know who I was?”
I nodded. “I — I think so.” For a moment, it felt too ridiculous to say out loud. What if I was wrong? No, that was silly. I knew I wasn’t wrong. “Peter?” I added in a squeak.
“I knew you’d have figured it out,” Grandad said with a hint of a smile. “You remember our conversation on the beach when you told me your real name was Amelia but your friends called you Mia?” he went on. “When I found myself stranded in Luffsands, it hit me that I could do the same thing. So I made a fresh start with a new name. My middle name’s Philip, so I decided to use that. Your gran’s pet name for me was Pip.”
I shook my head. My grandad — Pip — really was Peter. It was so much to take in.
Gran turned to me. “And then there was you, Mia, disappearing without trace,” she went on. “There were so many unanswered questions back then.”
“So how did you deal with them all?” I asked.
“I suppose there were too many other, more pressing, matters on my mind. After the storms and the move to the mainland, we all had to rebuild our lives, start again. I had Mother to look after. No time to sit and ponder a mystery that I would never get to the bottom of: the mysterious girl who came into my life only to disappear into thin air after helping to save my family’s lives.”
Suddenly, at least one thing made sense. The reason why Gran never talked about feelings; the reason she’d always believed in just getting on with things rather than lamenting and discussing everything. Because that’s what she’d had to do as a child. She hadn’t had time to sit around crying about it all; she’d had to hold her family together.
“Didn’t you talk about it to anyone?” I asked.
Gran shook her head. “How could I? They still took girls my age into what we called lunatic asylums back then, you know. It would only have taken a signature from my father and I’d have been locked up for life.”
I studied Gran’s face. Was she joking? “What about Peter?” I asked. “I mean, Pip. Couldn’t you talk to him?”
Gran smiled softly. “Ah, yes. So many times, it was on the tip of my tongue to ask. But you see, that was even more of a risk. To utter such questions to him and risk him thinking I was a crazy girl? No, I couldn’t do it. Not when I knew I was falling in love with him. Too much had gone already. I had no home, no Luffsands, no island.”
“You lost it all,” I said quietly.
“Almost all. I still had friends — in fact, I could see more of them now. But it wasn’t the same. They had no idea what I’d been through. Pip did. It was a bond like nothing I’d ever known, and Pip and my family and the other islanders were the only ones who shared it.”
At the word “family,” I suddenly realized something. Sal had been silent since Grandad had arrived.
Maybe it hit him at the same moment, I don’t know. But just then, he turned to her, his eyes like pools about to overflow, and said in a whisper so soft it was like a wave lapping gently onto sand, “I’ve missed you.”
At that, Sal shook her head. Biting hard on her bottom lip, she turned away. Then she stood up. “I can’t handle this,” she said, and started off back to the pub.
“Sal, wait!” Grandad called.
Gran put a hand on his arm. “Give her a moment,” she said. “It’s going to take time.”
“I’ll go,” I said.
Grandad was standing, too. “No,” he said. “We’ll all go. They’re as much my family as you are, and I owe all of you an explanation.”
He reached out to help Gran up.
“Are you sure about this?” she asked.
Grandad’s face was as firm as concrete. “I’ve never been more sure of anything.” As I got up from the bench, he put his other arm around me. “This story has been locked up inside me for too long,” he said. “And now that it’s finally safe to do so, I need to tell it — to all of you.”
Sal had joined her parents, and now she sat squashed into the bench seat with them in the lounge. Her eyes were red, her face hard and closed like a locked door. Mom was there, too.
As soon as we walked through the door, Mom leaped out of her chair as if it were on fire. “Dad!” she screamed, and ran over to throw her arms around him. “Dad! You’re safe, you’re safe,” she said, over and over. When she pulled away from him, she had tears streaming down her face.
So did Grandad. But he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at Sal’s dad, who was staring back at him. His expression was very different from Grandad’s, though. I’d describe it as the way someone might look if a ghost walked into the room and politely asked if they’d like some coffee.
Sal’s mom turned to look at Grandad and instantly her face turned pale. “Bernard?” she said, her voice a cracked whisper.
Grandad took a step closer to them. “I’m not Bernard,” he said. His voice broke even more than hers had.
“Who’s Bernard?” I asked.
“My grandpa,” Sal replied woodenly.
“My father,” her dad said.
“He died fifteen years ago,” her mom added. “And he was the spitting image of this man.”
Gran had disappeared into the kitchen and was coming back out with a couple of teacups. She poured some tea from the pot that was already on the table, then she sat down next to Mom.
Grandad sat next to her. I squeezed in at the other end of the bench seat, next to Sal.
Sal’s dad looked confused. “If you’re not Bernard,” he asked, “who are you?”
Grandad took a deep breath, then slowly let it out. He held Sal’s dad’s gaze so firmly it was as though a laser beam connected them. “Dad, it’s me,” he said. “It’s Peter.”
I held my breath. I think everyone else did, too. The world held its breath and nothing moved; not the air, not a blink, nothing. Time stood still. Maybe literally. By now, I would have believed anything could happen.
Sal’s mom was first to break the silence. “Who are you?” she whispered.
Grandad cleared his throat. “It’s me, Mom,” he said.
“Don’t call me that!” Sal’s mom snapped. “You must be thirty years older than me. I can’t be your mother!”
Grandad nodded slowly. “I know,” he said. “It’s a lot to take in.”
Sal’s dad snorted. “Really? You think?”
Gran put a hand on Grandad’s arm. “You’ve had a whole lifetime, remember,” she said softly.
Sal’s mom stared at Gran. “Who is this man?” she asked, her voice as taught as a wire.
Grandad reached out for her hand. “Mom, please believe me. I —”
She pulled her hand away.
“How dare you! Coming here making fools of us at a time like this. Who do you think you are?”
“I keep telling you who I am,” Grandad said, a blotchy rash reddening his neck as his frustration grew. “Why won’t you believe me?”
Sal’s mom’s face turned gray. She was staring at Peter. “Your neck,” she said.
Grandad reached up to touch his neck. “What about it?”
“The rash,” she said simply. “That’s what happens to Peter when he gets agitated.”
Grandad met her eyes. “I know. I am Peter,” he said.
The room fell silent. Eventually, his mom spoke again. “But how?” she asked. “How is such a thing possible?”
“You really want to know?” Grandad asked.
“Yes,” Sal’s dad — his dad — replied firmly. “We need to know.”
“Well, it started a few months ago,” Grandad began. “The town council had made some brochures, trying to bring some tourism to Porthaven.”
“Brochures?” Sal’s mom asked. “The ones advertising the fishing vacation?”
Grandad nodded.
“Wait — Gran told us about those,” I butted in. “She said you acted all weird when they came around. And then you said you wanted to go away for the weekend.”
“I always suspected that weekend away wasn’t really a spontaneous romantic gesture,” Gran said.
“It was that as well,” Grandad said.
“But that wasn’t the main reason for it,” Gran insisted. “I realize that now. It was because of the brochure. You wanted to take it to your parent’s house, didn’t you?”
“You brought us that brochure?” Sal’s mom said. “But why?”
Grandad took a deep breath. He clasped his hands in front of him as he let his breath back out in a long, low whistle. “I . . .” he began. His face had reddened. As I looked at him struggle to get the words out, it hit me. I knew what he was trying to say.
“You had to give it to Peter, didn’t you?” I blurted out. “You had to deliver it to your younger self!”