Lost on the Water
Page 18
“Yeah,” Alex said. “You about killed yourself to find me. Do you think we’d forget that?”
I smiled. “I don’t know if my grandma will let me have visitors.”
“We’ll stay until she lets us in,” Chris said. “And hey! I’ll try to talk Lamont into coming too. He might want to see you again.”
“I seriously doubt it,” I said.
“I’ll work on him.”
“Okay,” I laughed. We’ll see. But if it doesn’t happen, it’s been real.”
“See ya!” they both shouted.
We got in our cars, and the adventure came to an end.
I was pretty anxious about seeing Grandma, but the comfort of the vinyl seat was too hard to resist. Before we had been driving even five minutes, I fell fast asleep. The next thing I knew, we had come to a stop. Officer Willoby opened the door and poked at me.
“Wake up, sleepyhead,” he said. “We’re here.”
I opened my eyes and looked past his shoulder to where Grandma stood on the back porch of her house, wringing her hands and trying to catch a glimpse of me. I took a deep breath as though I were about to plunge into deep water and got out of the car.
16
Apologies and Truths All Around
I’d like to say Grandma acted just like Alex’s dad, all cool with the way things wound up and just glad to have me back. I’d like to say that she was all, “Good job finding that boy Alex. Because of that, I forgive you for running off without permission and scaring me to death.”
However, this was real life, and she wasn’t super forgiving. She was mad. Officer Willoby walked me over to her, and I put out my arms for a hug. To my shame, she didn’t reach out and grab me. She actually stepped back as if afraid I’d bite her or something.
“Grandma?” I said. “I’m sorry. I—”
“We’ll talk about it later,” she snapped at me. “Go inside and get clean. I’ve got some breakfast waiting for you, and then you can go to bed.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied, remembering the manners Chris had shown last night that the folks around here seemed to like. I nodded at Officer Willoby. “Thank you for bringing me home, sir.”
“No problem, Dannie,” he said. “Thanks for all your help this morning. We wouldn’t have found Alex without you.” I think he said that hoping to win points for me with Grandma. I don’t think it worked.
She asked, “He was found too? He’s all right?”
“Turns out he was hiding so his dad wouldn’t know he got lost trying to find the island.”
“Foolish,” she grunted. “Foolish and stupid.”
“Kids will be kids,” the officer tried.
“And they always get in trouble for it, don’t they?” she said back. “Thank you, Ted, for finding Dannie. I’ve got some coffee and biscuits inside.”
“Oh, no thanks,” he said, patting his belly as if it were full, which I knew it was not. “I better go finish up at the station, and I got a pretty wife who’d like to see me come home sometime.”
“Another time, then,” Grandma said. She pushed me toward the door, and I waved once more to Officer Willoby before going in the house. Grandma followed right behind me and slammed the door shut. Without a word, I did exactly as she had ordered. I grabbed some clean clothes and underwear and went into the bathroom to take a shower. Daring to take a look, I faced the mirror over the sink. What I saw made my stomach flip. All I thought was, my poor grandma. No wonder she was so pissed off. I looked half-dead. Dirt and grime covered every inch of me. My sweatshirt was full of rips and my hair was standing up in twenty different directions. Scratches ran from my right temple down my cheek. There were huge bags under my red-rimmed eyes, and my lips were cracked and bleeding.
While the water warmed up in the shower, I dug through the drawers under the sink looking for some ointment for my lips. I slathered them up really well before stepping into the stream of clean, moss-free water. The shower was nice and hot, and it felt fantastic on my muscles while at the same time stinging all my cuts and scrapes and making my sunburn scream at me.
I stood in there for a long time just letting it run over me and soothe all the aches and pains in my arms, legs, and back. I guess I was taking too long, because I heard Grandma holler that I needed to get on with it before using up all the hot water. Quickly, I scrubbed and shampooed my hair. When I stepped out of the shower, the bathroom was all fogged up, and I cleared the mirror with my hand to take a look at my face. I was still pretty dinged up on my forehead and my right cheekbone from when the boat hit me and my face dragged on the gravel in the lake, but otherwise, I looked like myself again.
I slipped on a clean, oversized T-shirt and some loose shorts and bandaged up my knee. Grandma had some warm biscuits with jelly waiting for me on the table along with a big glass of milk and another of water. “Eat as much as you want,” she said. “I imagine you’re hungry.”
“Starved,” I said through a mouth full of biscuit and strawberry jam. “These are delicious.”
“They’re just the store brand,” she said. “Nothing special. I didn’t go Betty Crocker on you and make them from scratch.”
I looked over the rim of my milk glass at her. Had she just made a joke? The tiniest hint of a smile was in the corner of her mouth, but she wouldn’t dare let it take over her face. So, after a good gulp, I said, “I know how to make pancakes from scratch. Dad taught me. Can I make some for you tomorrow?”
“That would be fine,” she said. Then she came over and patted my head. “Yes, I would like that.” She kissed the top of my head. “When you’re done eating, go get some sleep. I’ll be in my room.”
“Grandma?” I caught her before she walked out of the kitchen. “Did you tell Mom and Dad?”
She didn’t look at me but continued down the hall to her room. “We’ll talk later.”
“Grandma!” I jumped up and followed her down the hall. She turned to me with an exasperated look on her face. I felt so sorry for keeping her from her bed and rest, but I had to tell her one more thing. “The rowboat sank.”
She took a sharp breath and put a hand to her mouth. No more than two heartbeats later, she lowered her hand again and said simply, “Did it now?” She cupped my chin with her hand and brushed my bruised cheek lightly with her forefinger. She nearly whispered, “You look so much like him.”
“Do I?”
“Yes.” A faint smile crossed her lips and this time it lit up her eyes—just a touch. “I’ll tell you about him, but not now. Now, we both need some rest. You’re not the only one around here who was up all night. Can I trust you to stay in your room and not run off?”
I rolled my eyes dramatically to express how exhausted I was. “Grandma, you might not see me again for two days, but I swear I’ll be right here.”
I slept hard with no dreams and woke about eight hours later. My muscles were stiff from being still for so long, and I had to stretch them out before I could even think about standing up and walking. I heard the television on in the living room, so I assumed Grandma was up already. I wet my healing lips with my tongue and forced myself to go out and see her.
I found her out on the couch with a talk show on TV, but Grandma wasn’t asleep. She had the volume down really low and wasn’t even looking at the screen. Instead she was thumbing her way through a stack of pictures from one of several old shoeboxes. I leaned against the doorframe and watched her for a couple minutes. Every now and then she’d find a picture she wanted, gaze at it for a long time, and then put it in a stack on the coffee table.
My curiosity got the best of me, and I had to know what the pictures were. I mean, I had a good idea they were of my mom’s brother, but I still wanted to see them. Only, I was afraid if I said something, she’d sweep them up real fast and bury them in the bottom of one of her boxes. If I came in quick enough, she wouldn’t have a chance. I strode into the room and went straight to the table, picked up the stack of pictures, and said, “Whatcha doing?”
I peeked down at the pictures in my hands. They were mostly square, grainy pictures. Some of them were old Polaroids. The one on the top showed a boy celebrating his fifth birthday. Well, there were five candles on the cake. It could have been his fourth birthday with an extra candle to grow on.
“Danielle?” Grandma said, putting out her hand. “Please?”
Reluctantly, I handed the pictures back to her without looking at any of the others. She put them on the couch on the far side of her and then asked me to sit down. I plopped down on the floor and leaned against the leg of the couch.
“I haven’t looked at these pictures since I came back here to live with your grandpa again. He still had a lot of them up on the walls then. I took them down and boxed them all up. It took me several weeks, because I had to go through them one by one. There was a lot of crying, and your grandfather was so afraid I was going to leave again. I didn’t, though. I stayed.” She looked at me. “But I had your grandfather put the pictures somewhere that I wouldn’t stumble across them.”
“Did he put them in the garage?” I asked.
Grandma nodded. “I hate that old garage. Always have. The spiders, ugh.” She shivered.
“Yeah,” I said. “I ran into a few of them.”
“I bet you did. I’m surprised that boat wasn’t covered in black widows.”
“I might have chucked the whole idea if it had been.”
She kind of half smiled at that. Then she fell silent as though trying to figure out where to start with her story.
I tried to help. “Grandma? Why hasn’t my mom ever told me about Robert? That she had an older brother?”
The biggest sigh I’ve ever heard came out of her as a thousand lies were about to be made right. “Your mom doesn’t know she had a brother.”
“How could she not know?” I couldn’t believe that.
“She was only four years old when Robbie died. I didn’t let her go to the funeral, and we left for California the next day. For a while she asked about him, but I avoided talking about him much. Over time, she stopped asking as often, and Brenda and I had convinced her that Robert had been a cousin. Eventually the questions ended, and I knew that she had forgotten him.”
“And Grandpa was okay with that?” I asked.
“Of course he wasn’t,” she said. “But he was here in Tennessee and couldn’t do anything about it. Your mom only spoke to him once a week on the phone because long distance was expensive back then. When she was a little older, I allowed him to start coming to visit her, but they never talked about Robbie. There wasn’t any point to it.”
“Why did you come back?” I wanted to know. “Why didn’t you divorce Grandpa?”
“I know it’s hard to understand, but I loved your grandfather. I loved him so much that it hurt me to be near him and to think of our family and what it was supposed to have been. I promised him that I would come back, but the years went by and I was so scared for your Mom. So scared something would happen to her.”
“Bad things happen in California too,” I said. “Trust me, Mom never stops reminding me of all the bad things that can happen to me when I go out.”
“I made her like that, I’m afraid.”
She spread out the pictures beside her and picked up one in particular and handed it to me. It was of Robert in his brand-new rowboat. His hair was blond, long, and shaggy like most boys from the 1980s. He wore a plain white T-shirt and jeans and smiled with so much energy and excitement. His expression reminded me of Alex yesterday on his first trip in his kayak.
I thought of Robert’s ghost last night in the rowboat, looking just like this boy in this picture.
“That’s the last picture we took of him,” she said. “It was right before he left to join the other boys. They all had rowboats back then. Your grandfather worked so hard on that boat.”
“It was a well-made boat,” I told her.
“Oh, that’s how he did everything. Sturdy and solid. He was good with his hands.” She took the picture back and stared at it a while longer. A tear formed in her eye and worked its way over a wrinkle to slide down her cheek. She wiped it away with the back of her hand. “You say the boat sank?”
“Yes,” I told her quietly. “I saw it happen.”
“I’m glad you weren’t in it.”
“Me too.”
“Do you think…?” She stopped herself and waved her hand in that dismissive way I had seen from her before.
“Do I think what, Grandma?”
“It’s silly. I’ll sound like one of the local kids, telling tall tales and such.”
I took her soft hand in both of mine, and she looked at me with such pleading eyes. “Grandma,” I said with a smile. “It’s all over. I know in my heart Robert is where he’s supposed to be.”
She began to cry outright then, but she pulled me to her for a big hug. She felt small and frail in my arms. I had never thought of her that way before, and it felt weird to be the strong one. When the spasms from her sobbing passed, she whispered in my ear, “I think so too, and I owe that to you. Thank you for taking him home.”
And I hate to say it, but I started to cry too. We cried together for a long time, and when we were done, she told me all kinds of stories about my mom and her long-lost brother. We ordered a pizza delivered and only stopped talking long enough to put our slices on paper plates. Somewhere around midnight, bleary-eyed and hoarse, we both decided to call it a night.
I never did hear my punishment, and I went to bed pretty sure that I was off the hook.
17
Finally Getting to See the Lake
It turned out that Grandma had a friend who was a pilot, and there was a small airport right near the lake. His name was Pete Ellington. He took us up in his Cessna. Two days after the whole business of me getting lost, Pete flew Grandma and me over the lake and all of the surrounding area. From up in the air, it was so gorgeous, and I could finally get a sense of how giant Center Hill Lake really was.
The flight made me apologize fifty more times to my grandma for scaring her so badly, but she never batted an eye at me about it again. We did wind up talking to my parents on the phone a couple times over the remaining seven days, and Grandma told them about me going out on the lake with friends. She fudged a bit about the rest, so my mom wouldn’t worry, and I promised to come clean about it all when we got back home to California.
Alex and Chris came by the cabin a couple times. We fished off the dock and skipped rocks. One afternoon we cleaned out Grandma’s garage and organized it for her. She rewarded us with ice cream sundaes. For my last day in Tennessee we rode our bikes to the pizza place where we had met and played games for a little bit before lunch. Purposefully, I played Pac-Man badly enough to allow Chris to get his initials back in the number one spot. I finally dared to ask them about Lamont, but all they would tell me about him was that he was busy. Football camp was about to start up, so he and Brian were spending most of their time getting ready for that. Jasper was spending all his time with Vivian.
“Aren’t you on the football team, Chris?” I asked. He looked like the type.
“No. Not me,” he confessed, his cheeks turning pink. “I had to quit ’cause of my grades.” Our friendship had come a long way in the past week for him to tell me a weakness like that. I made sure not to say some snarky comment and just nodded with concerned politeness like I’d seen my mom do when people told her troubling things.
Alex piped in, “I’m gonna help him get caught up this year so he can play varsity next year.”
“And JV baseball this spring,” Chris said. “I like baseball better anyway.”
“Me too,” I said. “Big Dodgers fan here.”
“Don’t let Lamont hear yo
u say that,” Chris told me.
“Doesn’t seem to be a problem,” I came back. “I mean, since he’s avoiding me and all.”
“What do you want him to do? It’s not like you two can have a relationship. You live in California. Plus, you did make him feel kind of, you know…gay. I think.” His cheeks flushed again. “I mean, you made us all feel that way a little.”
Alex looked down at the table and took a big bite of pizza as he nodded in agreement.
I smacked the table and squinted at them both. “Seriously? You’re looking at this—” I gestured to myself with my baggy T-shirt and makeup-less face “—and think it’s cute? Every single one of you thought I was a boy. Not one of you acted doubtful about it.”
Chris balked. “I mean, it’s not like we thought you were some tough boy. You’re tiny. You look like a boy who hasn’t started puberty yet. I was one of the people who didn’t think you should come because you looked too young and weak to handle it.”
“That is not why you didn’t want me to come,” I reminded him. “It was about my boat and ’cause I was a stranger.”
“Will you just shut up and take the compliment.”
“What was the compliment exactly?” I asked.
Alex laughed so hard, he almost choked on the bite of pizza he had just taken. He grabbed a napkin and covered his face.
Chris sneered at me. “You’re a dork, you know that?”
“Takes one to know one.”
We got off the topic of me after that and had fun talking about what we were all going to do for the rest of the summer. It got a little sad toward the end of lunch, because I was going to be leaving the next day and we weren’t going to see one another again. Alex gave me a hug before he got on his bike and promised to keep up with me through texts and email. Chris stepped up to me. He didn’t seem like the hugging type, but he stood so much closer than a person would if they weren’t going to touch.