Lost on the Water

by D. G. Driver

  “I’m sorry for being a jerk,” he said quietly. “I hope you’ll forgive me and maybe think of me differently now.”

  “Chris, it’s all good now,” I said to him. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Will I see you again?”

  “My grandma still lives here,” was all I could say in response to that. I had no idea when or if I’d ever make it out to Tennessee again. I hoped I would.

  And I guess Chris did too, because he suddenly put his hands on my face and leaned in to kiss me. It startled me at first, and I kind of stiffened up. He pulled away from my lips but kept his hands on my face, his palms against my cheeks and his fingers in my short hair, holding my head up to look at him. He looked terrified and his eyes went back and forth from one of my eyes to the other as if checking to see what I might do.

  I relaxed. I stood on my tiptoes and pressed my lips to his. That’s what I did.

  Chris kissed me back. My first real kiss. The air around me felt hot and cold at the same time. My body felt like warm liquid flushed through it, and my heart pounded. Somewhere in the distance, I think I heard Alex cheering us on, but I have no idea what he was saying. No real thoughts occurred in my brain. Just feelings. Ones I didn’t know I had.

  After a long moment, Chris pulled away completely, awkwardly lowering his hands and finding his pockets. He kept his head down and peeked up at me. “Was that all right? I know you have a thing for Lamont…”

  “Who?”

  He laughed shyly.

  “I’ll miss you, Chris.”

  “Yeah, you too,” he said. Then he got on his bike, smacked Alex on the shoulder, and they rode away. I watched after them until they turned the corner. I was about to get on my bike, but then I saw the pharmacy across the street. I walked over there and stepped inside.

  This was where my grandfather worked all those years he and Grandma were apart. A nice older lady at the front counter said hello to me as I came through the door and a bell dinged to announce me. I walked up one of the aisles to the pharmacy counter in the back and stood there for a minute. The pharmacist organizing boxes and jars on the shelves saw me and came over. She was a fairly young woman, maybe late twenties, early thirties. Pretty, with long, dark hair and gorgeous brown skin. I wondered if she knew my grandfather. I bet she knew him better than I did.

  “Do you need anything?” she asked me.

  “No,” I said. I started to walk away, but then I stopped and turned back to her again. “Actually, I heard there was a Coke machine in this store, the kind with the real bottles. I don’t see it anywhere.”

  “That was Mr. Garrison’s,” the pharmacist said. We keep it back here in the office now.”

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed. I started away again.

  “Would you like one?”

  “Yes, but…” I felt silly asking, “Could I see it? Would that be okay?”

  I’m not sure what the rules were about kids being back where all those prescription medicines were stored, but something about the way I looked must have won this lady over. She opened the panel to let me through and had me follow her to my grandpa’s old office. Nothing of my grandpa remained in there. This lady pharmacist had made it her own, with lots of pictures of her family and feminine touches. In the corner by a file cabinet was the old-fashioned red Coke machine. It was really out of place with the more modern-looking room, and I tried to imagine the office the way it might have looked when my grandpa still used it. My mind failed to create a picture. I didn’t know Grandpa well enough.

  The pharmacist opened the glass door on the machine and pulled out two bottles. “Here.” She got the caps off using a bottle opener that was attached to the machine and gave a bottle to me and kept the other. It was cool in my hand, and I liked the thinness of the bottle compared to the plastic ones. “I just love these. Your grandmother said I could keep it when I moved in here. That was so nice of her.”

  “You know who I am?”

  “Everybody does. You were in the paper.” She leaned in toward me and whispered, “Sneaking off overnight and then finding a lost boy makes headlines around here.” Then she winked at me before tipping back her soda. I had never seen the local paper and didn’t know.

  “Oh, well, in California that’s just an everyday event,” I joked.

  She smiled and got one more bottle out of the machine. “Here, take another for later, and get yourself a piece of candy on your way out—on me. Your grandfather kept a great stock. All the kids in the neighborhood come here for treats.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem, sweetie.”

  I drank my soda and ate a candy bar called a Charleston Chew as I walked around the square. Then I finally stuck the extra soda in the basket on my bike and started back toward Grandma’s. My parents were supposed to arrive soon from the airport, and I needed to be home for that.

  When I got back to Grandma’s, I helped her redecorate the house with pictures of Robert. We put up a lot of them in every room. I’ll never forget the look on my Mom’s face when she showed up that evening and noticed them.

  “Mom?” she said in a shaky voice, coming back from the bathroom. “Mom, what are all these pictures? Who is that boy?”

  “I’m not sure you have time for this story,” Grandma said to her. “You have a flight in Nashville to keep.”

  “It’s not until the morning,” she said. “We were just going to stay at the hotel overnight like last time. I’ve got a minute.”

  Grandma took a picture of Robert off the wall and sat down at the kitchen table. Then she patted the seat next to her for my mom to sit down too. I gestured to my dad, and he followed me to the door. As I closed the door behind me, I heard my grandma say, “This was your brother Robert.” My mom gasped, but I didn’t hear anything else because I left them to talk privately.

  I walked around the beach with my dad, and we skipped rocks while he told me about France. He described all the places they visited, and I remembered some of them from that movie with Tom Hanks and the secret codes. It sounded like a pretty neat place, and I thought I might like to see it for real someday. All the while he talked, my thoughts were on Mom, wondering how she was taking the news and if she would handle it better than I did.

  I told my dad what was going on, and he didn’t seem too shocked. When I was finished he just said, “Everything makes a certain amount of sense to me now.” He pulled out his phone and texted my mom that we were going to go into town and grab some dinner and bring it back. “Oleta doesn’t need to cook after all this. You know where to find some Chinese?”

  “I do,” I told him, and I led him right to the ‘built-up’ part of town where I remembered seeing a Chinese buffet. When we got back, Grandma and Mom were strolling through the house looking at all the pictures. Mom was in tears, but Grandma wasn’t. I was proud of Grandma for holding it together. She’d come a long way in the past few days, I thought.

  Dad cancelled their hotel reservations, and we stayed at Grandma’s that night, so Mom and Grandma could talk well into the night. I slept on the couch and Dad slept in Robert’s room. We woke up before the sun and drove to Nashville to catch our flight. Mom slept all the way home.

  Over the following year we saw Grandma a lot more than before. We convinced her to come out to our house for one long weekend in the fall, and then went out to Tennessee for Christmas and Easter. My parents didn’t plan a big European trip the next summer, so I convinced them that we needed to go to Grandma’s in time for the Fourth of July.

  My parents stayed this time, renting one of the neighboring cabins, and we had a blast having cookouts with the tourists using the other cabins and burning up in the summer heat during the Fiddler’s Jamboree Festival in the town square. They had all kinds of crafts and food, not to mention Bluegrass music, and my mom was in heaven. She bought gifts for everyone she could think of. We even drove to Nashville one day, and I suffered through a tour of the Country Music Hall of Fame.

  Dad, Mom,
and Grandma discussed it a lot, and finally the decision was made that they were going to let me go on the campout with Chris, Alex, and the others. I knew they’d let me go. It would have been pretty mean of them to bring me out here at this particular time of year and then not let me go. But oh, they made me suffer while they pretended like it was a tough decision.

  Chris and Alex had stayed in touch with me all year and made it a big point to see me whenever I came to town. Every time, we met at the pizza place and had another arcade challenge. Only now we laughed at the end of the game, and the prize was that whoever won got their pizza paid for by the other. One time, Jasper and Brian showed up, but Lamont never did.

  We never really declared ourselves as a couple, Chris and me. The distance and time between us made it hard to do that. I wasn’t dating anyone at home, and Alex let me know Chris was keeping single too. That made me happy. I let my hair grow out a little and began to dabble with mascara and lip gloss. For this vacation I invested in some tighter T-shirts and tank tops to show off my figure, which was a tiny bit curvier than the year before. Chris repeated his approval about every ten minutes, to the point that even Alex was telling him to shut up about it already.

  “We get it. She’s hot.”

  “It’s killing me.”

  “I see that,” Alex said, pointing at the video game. “You’re gonna lose,”

  “I know. She’s too distracting.”

  I blushed, and Chris grinned like a maniac.

  We were in the middle of our current game challenge when my parents came into the pizza place.

  “Oh, thank heaven for air-conditioning,” Mom said. “We might just have to stay in here the rest of the day.”

  “Shh, Mom,” I said. “I’m winning!”

  “Oh, right,” she whispered. She and Dad peeked over the shoulders of Chris, Alex, Brian, and Jasper, which was no easy task because they’d all grown at least three inches over the past year. “How do you know you’re winning?” she asked.

  “Shhh!” all the guys said.

  “Okay,” Dad said, “but we just thought we’d come and tell you that we just rented you a kayak from Taylor’s Tackle Shop.”

  Whier whier whier whier whier, went the music as my Pac-Man died a hasty death.

  “I win!” Chris shouted. “I am the king!”

  “Whatever,” Alex said.

  My parents sat at a table and the boys all crowded around them asking questions about the kayak. What kind? What color? Was it a fast one? Could I get it a day early to practice and get used to it?

  Dad just laughed at them as he answered all the questions.

  “I can’t believe Grandma said yes,” I said.

  “What convinced her were a couple things,” my mom pointed out. “She insisted that you stay with your friends the entire time that you are out there. There will be no going alone.”

  We all nodded and said our okays.

  My dad added, “You will have a walkie-talkie that I’m going to pick up tomorrow.”

  “All right,” I said. “And who will have the other walkie-talkie and stay in range?”

  “We will!” my mom said, beaming. “We rented a boat too, and your dad, Grandma, and I are going to hang out with the other parents that night. Doesn’t that sound fun?”

  We all looked at one another and shrugged. We weren’t sure if that would be fun or not. “I guess,” I said. “Whatever floats your boat.” Then we all laughed.

  “Oh, and a final rule,” Mom said. “No sharing a tent with Chris.”

  “Ooooh!” all the boys teased. Chris buried his face in his hands, so embarrassed.

  I scrunched up my face at my mom. “Not cool, Mom. So not cool.”

  “She can tent with Vivian,” Jasper said. “She’s gonna come this year too. Her folks said she could come if you came. I told them you probably would.”

  “And Natalie’s coming too,” Brian added, smiling proudly. I was happy the two of them finally got together. It took most of the school year, but the sports star finally gave him a chance. I’d heard all about it from the boys, and I was looking forward to meeting her.

  The next day my dad and I went to get our supplies. He loaded me up with everything that I could possibly use for the campout: a map of the lake, two flashlights and a lamp, bug repellent, snack food, water, hand sanitizer, a roll of toilet paper, a new sleeping bag, and a set of good-quality walkie-talkies. And then, just so I could be popular, he loaded me up with marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate bars for some s’mores.

  He went with the fathers and older brothers the day before the trip and helped set up the camp. When he came back to Grandma’s that afternoon he was beaming and talked nonstop about what a great camp it was going to be. He wished he’d grown up here and could have looked forward to something like this. Everything Dad said got me extra pumped up. Chris, Brian, Jasper, and especially Alex had Grandma’s phone ringing all day long.

  At long last, the morning came, and I met the rest of the boys by the pier. I shook hands with Natalie and Vivian. They seemed nice enough. While I expected to despise the beautiful Vivian, she wound up being super charming, and I understood why Jasper gushed about her all the time. I felt a tap on my elbow. I spun around to find Lamont standing behind me.

  “Hey.”

  “Hi.”

  “Glad you could come.”

  I searched his face to see if that was true. I couldn’t tell.

  “Thanks.”

  He stood there for a moment, like he was trying to decide what to say to me. I had a whole monologue rehearsed, but I knew I couldn’t possibly get any of it out. Finally, he said, “You look really nice.”

  I was glad he noticed. I certainly noticed how his shoulders had grown and that his face was a year more mature. I glanced over at my friends. Chris was watching me carefully. “Thanks,” I said again. “You ready for this?”

  “Always,” Lamont said. “See you out there.” Then he took off to get into his kayak.

  Mr. Taylor came out himself, instead of his son, and presented me with a red kayak off the back of his trailer. My dad helped him put it down in the water. I saw Mr. Taylor walk up to my Grandma and take one of her hands into his. I don’t know what he said, but it was with a smile and it made her cover her face with her hands in the most precious way.

  “Come on, slowpoke!” Chris yelled from his kayak. “Let’s go. We do not need you of all people lagging behind!”

  I scooted into my kayak and grabbed my paddle. My dad shoved me into the water, and I was on my way. All the kids were talking and laughing and in the best mood. It was going to be a great day.

  And that should have been the end of my story, but it wasn’t.

  18

  Just Not the Same Without a Ghost Story

  Hard to believe, but it only took an hour and a half to get to the island. Ninety minutes. That’s all. Funny how fast the trip is in a sleek, lightweight craft plus knowing where you’re going. That and we talked and joked so much the whole time that the hour and a half flew by like nothing. I had to check my new digital watch, which lit up in the dark—a nice feature, to convince myself that it for sure had been more than twenty minutes. It seemed so fast.

  The camp was fantastic! The beach seemed a lot bigger than I remembered it the year before. Granted it was still daylight, and last year I didn’t get there until after dark. The tents all seemed much farther back from the water. I asked Lamont about that because this was his fourth year coming on the trip.

  “It hasn’t rained much this year,” he told me. “The lake water’s low, that’s all.”

  Our parents had chipped in and got us all kinds of snack foods. We played horseshoes, had a skipping rock competition, and did a scavenger hunt around the forest. I didn’t win anything, but I didn’t figure I would, being the new person and all. We swam in the lake a bit and had even more fun making water balloons and throwing them at one another. Lamont broke everyone into two teams, and we had an all-out wate
r balloon war.

  Once it started getting dark, we lit the fires and sat down to roast hot dogs and make our s’mores. We argued a lot about what music to play. A lot of the guys were hardcore country music fanatics, but there were enough of us that wanted to gag at every strum of the steel guitar to put up a fight. Eventually, we gave it up and turned the machine off in favor of some good, old-fashioned ghost stories.

  Everyone took a turn, and I heard a lot of the same ones the guys had told last year while hiking through the woods. However, when sitting around the fire, they took their time and told the stories with flair. I was impressed at all the details people threw in to make the stories believable. Some of them gave me chills, but I didn’t let on.

  At long last, it was my turn. Alex had warned me that I would need my own ghost story, so I had asked around a lot back at home to learn a good Californian tale to share. I had finally stumbled across a pretty decent one, and I practiced it a lot in the bathroom mirror to make sure I got it right. Still, when all the guys looked at me with eager anticipation, a kind of stage fright took over. My mouth got super dry and all the words vanished from my thoughts.

  “Come on,” Chris said. “Or don’t surfers tell scary stories?

  “Shut up, Chris,” Alex said. Jasper slapped Alex on the back, proud of him for standing up to Chris. I smiled inwardly, because I knew that Chris didn’t really pick on Alex anymore to be mean. They had become best friends over the last year and did just about everything together.

  “Okay,” I said. “So, a long time ago, when California was still ruled by the Mexicans, this American soldier rode in on a horse—”

  “No!” Brian said, interrupting me. “We don’t want to hear that.”

  Jasper rolled his eyes at his brother. “What my rude brother means to say is, while we’re sure that your story is good and creepy, the story we really want to hear from you is about Robert Garrison.”

  “What?” I asked. “That’s your guys’ story. Not mine.”

  Lamont cocked his head. “Really? Ours?” He ran his fingers over his chin like he was thinking really hard. “Let’s see, he was your mom’s brother. You were in his boat for a whole day. You saw the boat sink.” He paused. “We all agree that you’re leaving something out of the end of that tale, and we want to know what it is.”