“Are you sick?” Pippa pushed her glasses further up her nose.
“No,” said Mr. Knuckles.
“Why’d you call him a kid?”
“He is kid,” said Mr. Knuckles. Then, as if to brush off any further questions, he said, “Why you wet? Why you drip my floor?” (Mr. Knuckles spoke the language of the island fluently, but when he spoke English, he often left words out.)
“Mud.” This was Toby.
“We found a big pond of it down by Pea Tree Beach,” Kim clarified. Mr. Knuckles knew the spot exactly and explained to them how it had gotten there. The same big floods that had destroyed the Wildlife Safari Park all those months ago had washed silt down the mountain, forming a murky pond at the mountain’s base. It had eventually evaporated until it was thick, glorious mud.
“You get dry clothes?” Mr. Knuckles asked. They nodded. “Okay, den. Use bathroom. Take off those. Wash ’em.” Mr. Knuckles again sounded like a grown-up. “What you waiting for? Go.”
Half an hour later they were dressed in dry clothes, seated on the laundromat’s plastic chairs, watching sudsy piles of their dirty clothing go round and round in the washing machines. They were also watching their favorite soap opera, Island Life, on Mr. Knuckles’s battered little TV. Though they hadn’t watched an episode in many months, the plot seemed not to have advanced very much. Layla was still torn between which of the twins, Jack and Kai, she should marry. Jack and Kai were still angry with each other over who Layla loved the most. Layla’s ex-boyfriend, Randolph, was still plotting to murder the twins.
“Wait,” said Pippa. “The doc’s going to put someone in a coma, which is a crime, so she can stop him from committing a crime?” Pippa loved the show precisely because it made no sense. Kim and Kimo loved it for the same reason—the characters in it behaved in such bizarre and incomprehensible ways. It was a source of endless bewilderment to them that the twins Kai and Jack would ever choose Layla over each other. They were siblings. Didn’t they know what that meant?
Toby, who had Penny on his lap, wasn’t interested in the show at all; for the same reason the others loved it, Toby found it boring. Who wanted to watch a bunch of stupid grown-ups doing stupid things? Instead he was flipping through one of Mr. Knuckles’s surfing magazines. Toby’s surf hero—Jackson Crunch—was killing it at Nationals and the photos of him shooting a tube were awe-inspiring. Penny had also plucked a magazine from the rack and was (literally) tearing through it, drooling and chewing on the pages as she went. When Toby saw this, he tried to take it away from her. But she clutched at it and shouted, “My do it!”
“No,” he said. “These are for reading, not eating.”
“My do it,” the baby said again.
And that’s when Toby saw what she was looking at: a photograph of herself.
My do it, indeed. The baby was in glossy color in the pages of the magazine. She was sitting on the grass, eating a picnic of baby food. When was Penny at a picnic? Toby wondered. And then it hit him like a dart: the grass wasn’t grass; it was a backdrop. And the picnic wasn’t a picnic; it was the photo shoot in Clarice’s office. Above the baby’s photograph in some kind of bubbly font was written the slogan Because your baby loves Baby Loves.
So Clarice had lied. The photographs of Penny weren’t part of a contest. The photographs were advertisements to sell Clarice’s Baby Loves products.
Toby quickly closed the magazine, only then noticing it was a copy of Baby Loves Magazine. Of course it was! He rolled it up tight and sat on it so that no one else would see it. The baby reacted to this betrayal, shrieking, “My! My!”
“Is she okay?” Kim had turned away from the TV to see what was going on.
“Yup,” said Toby, tickling the baby’s feet, deciding that he would not tell Kim—or the others—about the photograph. He knew that he hadn’t done anything wrong by going with Clarice; the baby had had fun and he had had fun. But the photo in the magazine, well, that was different. Clarice was using Penny’s picture when Penny herself hadn’t said it was okay. Not that Penny could talk. Still, Toby could talk, and he was Penny’s older brother, and Clarice hadn’t even asked for his permission to use the baby’s picture. Toby was so immersed in his thinking that he barely noticed the chime of the laundromat’s door, and it wasn’t until he heard the others gasp that he realized it had opened and someone had come in.
That someone was Asha.
Only she didn’t look much like Asha. To Toby, she looked like Asha if Asha had swallowed a small planet: Pluto, say, or even Venus.
“What’s wrong with you?” The words were out of Toby’s mouth before he could take them back.
“Nothing’s wrong with her,” said Kim. “Congratulations!”
“Thank you.” Asha grinned.
“Why are you congratulating her?” Toby was staring at Asha and remembering the time he’d blown too much air into a balloon and it had popped in his face. He turned to Mr. Knuckles. “You need to get her to a doctor.”
“Doctor say she good.” Mr. Knuckles was grinning from ear to ear and moving from behind the cash register to give Asha a kiss.
“Tobes,” Pippa said, “Asha’s going to have a baby. She’s pregnant.” Pippa turned to Asha. “Why didn’t you tell us when we saw you the other day?”
“We only just started telling people, and I saw you at work,” said Asha. Then she imitated her boss. “No personal chit-chat on grocery store time.”
“But we didn’t even notice.”
“The counter was blocking your view,” said Asha.
“How could you block that?” Toby looked incredulous. “Do ladies always look that way when they get pregnant?”
Asha nodded and walked over to Toby so that her belly was at his eye level. “You want to feel her kick?”
“No thanks,” said Toby. “Penny kicks me enough.”
Everyone laughed at that, and then Kimo said, “Is it a girl? You said ‘her.’”
“Yup,” said Mr. Knuckles, straightening up and looking proud. It suddenly occurred to Kim that this was why Mr. Knuckles had been acting so strangely toward them earlier. He had treated them like kids because now that he was going to be a father, he felt like a grown-up.
“Her name right here,” Mr. Knuckles said, pointing to a brand-new tattoo on his shoulder that said Baby Girl.
“That’s cool,” said Kimo. “But that’s not actually her name.”
“It is her name,” Asha said. “Her father is insisting.” Asha rolled her eyes a little and gave the Fitzgerald-Trout children a look that said please talk some sense into him.
“Um, Mr. Knuckles,” said Kimo. “You absolutely cannot name a baby girl Baby Girl.”
“Why not?”
“Because every baby eventually grows up, and someday your baby is going to be in sixth grade like me, and she won’t want a name that will make her feel like a baby. And besides, you don’t want her to have the name Baby Girl on her graduation diploma.”
“Oh, right,” said Mr. Knuckles, giving a small satisfied sigh at the thought of his unborn daughter someday graduating from elementary school.
Kimo gave Mr. Knuckles a thumbs-up, happy to have helped him make a good parenting decision. That’s what I’m gonna do with my father, Kimo thought. When I break the pole vault record and he feels proud, then he will decide to give us the boat back and I will have made him a better dad. Kimo glanced at the flyer hanging above the cash register and it suddenly occurred to him that he had to make sure his father knew about the track meet. Otherwise, how would he know to show up?
“See, Hurley?” Asha was saying. “I knew they would be good to talk to about this.” She looked at the children. “Didn’t you guys name Penny?”
“We did,” said Kim. “Well, Toby did.” She told Asha that Toby’s inspiration had been the words Find a penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck.<
br />
“You know,” said Asha, “you four are just about the best parents I’ve ever met in my life. You take great care of Penny. I don’t know how you do it. We’ve been trying to get advice and reading a lot of magazines—there’s one around here somewhere, that Baby Loves Magazine…”
She stooped down to search the magazine rack, and Toby blurted out, “Forget the magazines. We can give you advice. Right, Penny? We know what we’re doing.”
“Mile,” Penny said.
“She’s saying that,” said Toby, “because she’s happy.”
“See,” said Asha. “That’s exactly the kind of thing we need to know. How about as soon as the baby’s born, we come to you for advice and you tell us everything you know about babies?”
“Yup,” said Toby. He couldn’t help feeling a sense of pride swelling in his chest. He’d always known a lot about taking care of his goldfish, but it was true, he knew a lot about taking care of his little sister too. Photo shoot or no photo shoot, he was a baby-care expert.
“We’d be happy to give you advice,” said Kimo, who was busy formulating a plan about his own father. “The first few months are all about getting enough sleep for yourself while meeting the baby’s basic needs.”
“That’s right,” said Kim, but as she said it she felt a surge of unease. Should she be offering parenting lessons? Did she know anything at all about taking care of a baby? Now that she thought about it, Toby had been taking care of Penny much more than she had. When was the last time she’d sat down and really played with Penny or tickled her or talked to her? It was troubling to Kim that she couldn’t remember. And then suddenly it wasn’t troubling; Kim realized that she should be happy that she hadn’t been tasked with taking care of Penny recently. She had done her fair share of baby care, when Toby was a baby and before that when the baby was Pippa. If she was watching Penny less, it was because she had earned the right to focus on her own work. Whatever else happened, Kim had to pass seventh grade and that wasn’t going to happen if she got more Fs.
Pippa, for her part, was barely registering any of this. She was smiling at Asha and nodding her head, but what she was really thinking about was just how many pieces of scrimshaw she would have by the time Asha’s baby was born, and she was asking herself if by then she would have told her siblings about her collection. She didn’t know the answer to either of these questions.
“I’m counting on you,” said Asha, then she pressed a hand to her belly. “I’m gonna go upstairs and make myself a cucumber, cream cheese, and raisin sandwich. You guys want one?” Cucumber, cream cheese, and raisin? The children reluctantly nodded. It sounded awful, but they never said no to food.
Mr. Knuckles got to his feet. “Lemme help you,” he said, following his wife out the back door of the laundromat. The music on the TV swelled. Island Life was back from commercial.
“I bet Layla decides to marry Jack but gets to the altar and realizes it’s his twin, Kai,” said Pippa, turning her attention to the TV.
“Good guess,” said Kim. She noticed that the washing machines that held their clothes were done and got up to put the clothes in the dryer. Kimo followed her.
“I might go for a run,” he said to Kim as he shoveled the wet laundry into a dryer.
“Thought you were taking a break today. No working out,” said Kim.
“I was,” said Kimo. “But that thing…” He nodded to the flyer hanging over the cash register. “There’s a lot of pressure on me to break this record.”
“I know,” said Kim, “but you know it’s okay either way. It’s just cool that you’ve even gotten this close.”
“Thanks,” said Kimo, but as he said it, Kim saw something flash across his face, a shadow of an emotion that she didn’t understand. She moved her nose up close to his nose, fixing her eyes on him. “Is that all that’s bugging you? The track meet?”
“That’s it,” Kimo said, stepping back. He did not want Kim to know he was thinking about Johnny Trout. Kim, for her part, tried to follow the thread of his thoughts, the way that she had sometimes been able to do in the past, but she found she couldn’t get anywhere.
“I’ll meet you guys back at the Castle,” Kimo said, then he ducked behind the cash register and took down the flyer.
“You running to the school?” Kim asked. “To use the track?”
“Maybe.” Kimo shrugged, then he folded up the flyer and tucked it into his pocket. “I’ll be back before dark,” he said, running barefoot out the door.
He’s being awfully mysterious, Kim thought. Then she wondered, where is he going?
CHAPTER
12
Swoosh, swoosh, went the blades of Kimo’s kayak. His muscles ached pleasantly as he dug into the water and drove the nose of the thin blue boat forward through the waves. In front of him, the dark shadow of a lava gull played over the pale blue ocean. The curious gull was riding the breeze, lazily flapping its wings every minute or so. Kimo, on the other hand, was working hard, fighting offshore gusts that kept pushing the nose of the kayak out to sea. Using the foot pedals to guide the rudder, he aimed the boat parallel to shore. He was following the coastline, making his way from the downtown harbor—where he’d borrowed a kayak from Oshiro, the dockmaster—around the east side of the island to the little beach beneath the cliffs at Wabo Point.
The sun beat down on Kimo, who was working up a sweat. Every few strokes he would wipe the beads of moisture from his forehead with the back of his arm, then glance up at the lava gull. Man, look how effortlessly that gull is flying while I’m working my tail off, he thought. A bright light flashed in Kimo’s eyes; he looked to see where it had come from and spotted a pod of dolphins riding the waves. Bursts of sunlight kaleidoscoped off their dorsal fins every time they leapt out of the water. Gulls, dolphins—everyone’s taking it easy today. Only I am having a tough workout, Kimo thought with a frown. And then he laughed, thinking how neither the gull nor the dolphins would be attempting to break any records, but he would! That was why he was going where he was going—because of the track meet the following Saturday, because of the flyer that was folded into a tiny square and tucked into his pocket, because he wanted to invite his father, Johnny Trout—who had a cabin on the cliffs at the very end of Wabo Point—to the big event.
The coastline bent in and Kimo steered the kayak around the corner. He knew he was close to the Wabo cliffs because there were more lava gulls now, plummeting from the sky into the ocean, diving for their lunches. The gulls nested in the porous cliffs above the Wabo beach, and when Kimo and his siblings had—for a brief time—lived in Johnny Trout’s cabin, they had watched the gulls hunt for fish and diligently carry them back to their nests to feed their chicks. During that time, Pippa had kept a notebook documenting the habits of the lava gulls, which she thought were excellent parents. My dad should poke his head out of his cabin and take a few notes, Kimo thought now. He could learn a thing or two from those birds. Maybe if he learned from them, I wouldn’t have to teach him.
He felt his stomach grumble and he wished that he’d waited to take that cucumber, cream cheese, and raisin sandwich Asha had offered. Maybe when I get to the cabin my dad will give me some lunch, Kimo thought, then he laughed again. Kimo would be lucky if his dad’s pet pig, Wendell, didn’t try to eat him for lunch. Picturing his last encounter with Wendell—or, more precisely, with Wendell’s teeth—Kimo had to ask himself, again, what the heck he was doing paddling out to Wabo Point. He definitely wouldn’t break the island record for pole vaulting if he was in the hospital recovering from a pig attack. But I have to risk it, thought Kimo. I have to invite my dad.
As the kayak approached the beach, the gulls began to shriek, warning each other about the intrusion. The waves rolled him toward shore, so Kimo stopped paddling and swung his legs out of the boat. Then, when he was close, he jumped down into the shallow water, found his footing in the sand, and dragged the
boat by its nose up onto the beach. A minute later he was grabbing the branches of the spice bushes that lined the path up the cliff and using them to propel himself up the steep incline. They released a wonderful smell, a mixture of nutmeg and cinnamon that made Kimo think of Christmas cookies. He knew that he was sweaty and that he probably smelled, and he hoped that the spice bushes would cover his scent so that Wendell wouldn’t sniff him out. For the first time since he’d paddled out of the harbor, he felt grateful for the offshore breeze; the wind would carry his odor away from the cabin and the pig’s nostrils.
But when he got to the top of the cliff there was no sign of the pig or of Johnny. They must be inside the cabin, he thought, and he crouched down, stealthing like a ninja through the tall grass toward the front door. When he got close, he saw that there was no car or truck parked near the cabin, so maybe Johnny wasn’t home, which meant Wendell wasn’t home (where Johnny went, the pig went). Kimo might be safe after all, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He stayed low to the ground, crawling through a cloud of no-see-ums that he had to bat away so they wouldn’t go into his eyes and mouth. Then he arrived at the side of the house where Johnny Trout had hung a wooden mermaid that had once been a ship’s figurehead. “Hey, you,” Kimo said, touching the peeling, faded paint on the mermaid’s tail. “Long time no see.”
Staying in a crouch, he moved to the window and pressed his face against the lower part of the glass. It was hard to see inside with the bright sunlight, so he shaded his eyes. If he squinted, he could just barely make out the shadowy features of the cabin’s big front room. There was no indication that Johnny or the pig were home. Relaxing for the first time since he’d reached the top of the cliff, he exhaled and straightened up. He would take a look around.
Shout Out for the Fitzgerald-Trouts Page 10