by Eve Yohalem
“Don’t you think you should leave him on the boat?” Jules grunted.
“I would,” I huffed, “but he’d never stay.”
“Not even if you ordered him?” Jules said. “I thought Otis always did what you told him to do.”
We set Otis down, and I said, “Otis’s number one job is to take care of me. It’s one thing if I’m in the living room and he’s in the kitchen. But he can tell this is serious. Even if I tied him to the boat, he’d chew through the rope and come after us. It’s better if I just let him come.” Plus, I felt safer having Otis around, but I wasn’t going to admit that to Jules.
Jules’s eyebrows scrunched like caterpillars.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said, her eyes on Otis as she petted his head. “Just that it must feel really good to have somebody care that way about you. Even if he’s a dog.”
Otis cares about me more than he cares about anyone or anything in the world. My parents do too. Was there really nobody who felt that way about Jules? Not even her mom or Ed? For a second, I saw a different person, the girl with her mother in the photograph that Jules had shown me on the beach, only sad.
Thunder rumbled close by. The sky had turned gunmetal gray. A big storm would roll in soon. We hurried to put on our shorts and T-shirts.
“That way.” I pointed straight ahead.
Gardiner’s Point was so small that you could see the whole thing no matter where you stood. I got why they called it the Ruins. It was basically a big pile of rubble. No trees, lots of sand and broken boulders, and some big concrete blocks in random spots that looked like they’d rolled off what was left of the old fort, which wasn’t much.
Another thunderclap.
Jules jumped from rock to rock while Otis and I carefully picked our way along the path.
“I don’t think you should be doing that,” I said.
Jules took a long leap to the next rock. I winced.
“You worry too much,” she said. “I have excellent balance.”
“What if you fall and land on a bomb?”
Jules paused, foot in the air, and shrugged. “You only live once.” She jumped to the next rock.
“Jules.”
“Blue.”
“Fine, do what you want. But don’t blame me when… you know…” I stepped around a chunk of cement, sweating all over even though the temperature had dropped about ten degrees.
“I promise I won’t blame you if I get blown to pieces by a bomb.” Jules jumped. “Actually, which do you think is worse: getting blown up or dying by falling out of a plane?”
I kicked a piece of metal away from Otis. “Definitely falling out of a plane. It’s a slower death.”
“But with the plane at least you have a few minutes of free fall before impact, so you get to have some fun before you die.” Jules waved her arms up and down like an enormous yet graceful bird. It reminded me of flying around the Island Bowl parking lot with Nora the night before she left. What was Nora doing now? Definitely not tiptoeing through a bomb field on a spy mission—although she probably would have loved the idea as long as it was imaginary. Which this definitely wasn’t.
“I don’t think free fall is so fun if you know you’re going to die at the end of it,” I said.
“Maybe not.” Jules jumped again. “But it’s still better than a bomb and having no fun at all.”
“Fine.” I grabbed Otis’s collar so I could brush some pointy rocks out of his way before he stepped on them. “Which do you think is worse: eating a giant plate of worms right now or going hungry for a week?”
Jules didn’t even need a second to think it over. “Obviously eating worms now is worse. Hunger at any given moment isn’t anywhere near as bad as eating worms. Plus, you’d lose a ton of weight if you went hungry for a week.”
“You know that’s insane, right?”
She shrugged. “Insane for Sag Harbor, maybe. Not for LA.”
“Are you serious? I’m never moving to LA,” I said.
“I am serious,” Jules said. “And I don’t blame you.”
We’d reached the far side of the island. Jules stepped down from her last rock.
“There they are.” I pointed at the Windfall, about a hundred yards out. “Do you see them?”
Jules squinted at the blob on the water that was the Windfall. “Barely.”
I got out binoculars. Fitz and the crew were on the deck. Fitz was holding something over his head with his crew bunched around him. Dancing.
“Can you see what’s happening?” Jules asked.
“Yeah,” I said, fighting to keep my voice steady.
“Well, what did they find?” Jules grabbed the binoculars out of my hands.
We were too far away to see what the Windfall had found, but it didn’t matter. We were close enough to see it was something that made them really happy, which meant it was something that probably came off a boat 350 years ago and not something like an old shoe. They were close to the treasure before and now they were even closer, and they were professional hunters with every piece of expensive gear known to humankind.
The rain started at last. Big fat drops.
Jules kept looking and looking through the binoculars until the drops slurred into sheets and she couldn’t see anymore.
The wind blew through our soaked clothes, and I shivered from the cold. Otis pressed his wet shoulder against my leg.
“There really is a giant treasure somewhere in these waters, isn’t there?” Jules said, turning away from the Windfall and her celebrating crew.
“No,” I said, rubbing my arms up and down. “I just made the whole thing up for the fun of it.”
Jules was just as wet as me, but she hardly seemed to notice. “Seriously, I’m being serious. Like ‘somebody else is wearing your dress on Oscar night’ serious. These professional treasure hunters have just found an object that could be from a boat that carried the Golden Lion payroll. But the sorrowful hound is on the opposite end of Gardiner’s Island from the Windfall. Tell me the honest truth. Do you still think we’re looking in the right place?”
“Absolutely,” I said automatically.
But the truth was, I didn’t know anymore. My gut still said I was in the right place, but my eyes weren’t so sure. Neither was my head. There were so many mysteries. Like how did a girl from Amsterdam end up with a boy from Java? And how did the payroll get from the Golden Lion in the Indian Ocean to whatever boat Petra and Abraham sailed across the Atlantic? And how did two twelve-year-olds get their hands on the treasure in the first place?
Jules pushed a wet clump of hair out of her eyes. “How can you be right if they just found something over there?”
My fingers sank into Otis’s soggy ruff and combed the dense fur. “Because,” I said, seeing it in my head. “Ships don’t always sink where they run into trouble. Sometimes they hit something and drift before they sink. The water near the Windfall at the northwest side of Gardiner’s Island is full of rocks and shoals—”
“What are shoals?”
“Shallow water. Like from a sandbar. Probably the boat hit something bad, something they couldn’t recover from. Maybe when they first hit, some stuff on the upper decks slid overboard. Then they drifted and maybe more stuff fell overboard until they finally sank near the sorrowful hound.”
“Are you saying the payroll could’ve gone overboard before they sank?”
“No. It wouldn’t have happened like that.” I closed my eyes and pictured a square-sailed wooden ship. “The payroll was heavy. It would’ve been in the hold at the bottom of the boat. It wouldn’t have just rolled off like a plate or a hammer or something on deck.”
“You’re saying this like you know, but you don’t. You’re just guessing,” Jules said.
Her hair flopped around her head like a string mop in the wind. Otis looked like a shaggy otter with ears.
“It’s more than a guess,” I said, my gut getting stronger by the minute. “It’s logic.
It makes sense that it happened like that. Plus, I have something the Windfall doesn’t.”
“What’s that?” Jules asked.
“Eyewitnesses. My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents were there. They lived through that wreck and they told me where to find it: In view of paradise, watched over for eternity by a sorrowful hound.”
Jules squinted through the rain at the Windfall for a few long seconds.
“In view of paradise,” she repeated. She looked at the Windfall a little longer, then turned back to Otis and me. “Paradise sounds good to me.” She smiled. “I’m with you and the hounds.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
True Fact: Medical-alert dogs can smell blood sugar, cancer, seizures, heart attacks, and strokes. Humans need machines to do all those things. (TF supplied by Dr. Greene, the vet.)
Back at my house I moved a pair of gardening shears and some work gloves off the dining room table and unrolled sea charts in their place.
“Okay, here’s Gardiner’s Bay.” I pointed to a sideways-U-shaped body of water with Sag Harbor on the left at the base of the U and Gardiner’s Island (a.k.a. T-Bone Steak with Pointy Hat Island) on the right in the center of the mouth. “Here’s the Ruins”—I x-ed the tiny speck of land straight up from the tip of the T-bone’s pointy hat with a red pencil—“and here’s the Windfall.” I x-ed a spot just above the top of the T at the left end.
“What about the sorrowful hound?” Jules asked.
“He’s here.” I x-ed a spot on the left side of the bottom tip of the T-bone. If you drew a circle around the area near the hound, we’d covered maybe half.
“So you think the boat drifted from there… to there?” Jules said, tracing an arc from the Windfall to the sorrowful hound with her finger.
“Exactly.” I sounded way more certain than I felt, though. Whatever my gut was telling me, it was still just a hunch.
“So where do you think we should look next?”
I studied the chart and tried to see Petra and Abraham on their sinking ship. Which way was the wind coming from? What was the current like? Was there a storm? Could they steer? Were they scared? When did they realize the boat wouldn’t make it to shore?
Otis headbutted my leg.
Come to think of it, I did have a headache, and my hands were tingly.
Anything can affect a diabetic person’s blood sugar. Food? Check. Exercise? Check. Weather? Check. Being sick, taking medicine, time of day, nothing that you can figure out no matter how hard you try? Check, check, check, and check.
“High or low?” I asked Otis.
Otis bowed.
“We’ll be right back,” I said to Jules.
Usually I keep better track of my blood sugar. It’s like I have a computer program constantly running in my head that factors in everything I eat and drink and all the things I do. Not even Nora knows how much time I spend thinking about and dealing with diabetes. Only Mom and Dad know, because they’re thinking about it all the time too. And Otis, of course.
Otis and I went to the bathroom, and I tested. “Good low, Magoats.” I gave him his treat and texted Mom and Dad. “Get juice.”
Otis went to the kitchen and came back to me at the dining table with a juice box.
“You can do your diabetes stuff in front of me, you know,” Jules said, petting Otis’s back.
I busied myself with opening the juice box. Ever since that humiliating first day of sixth grade, the only people I did my diabetes stuff in front of were my parents and Nora. Did I want to include Jules in that club?
“It’s not like I haven’t seen you do it on the boat every day when you thought I wasn’t looking.”
It’s possible she had a point.
Keeping my voice as totally-casual-no-big-deal as possible, I said, “Otis just told me my blood sugar’s too low. The juice will bring it up.”
I held my breath. And then let it out when all Jules said was:
“Cool.” She held out her hand palm-up. “Now do me.”
People who don’t have to do it every day think testing is fun. I tested Nora’s theater friends once. They loved it, and I felt like a sideshow performer.
I unzipped my supply pouch and took out a flattish roundish machine about the size and shape of a good skipping stone. “This is a glucometer. It measures how much sugar is in your blood.” Next I opened a plastic vial and pulled out a testing strip that looked like the kind of match you tear from a matchbook, and a tiny plastic stick about an inch long. I snapped off the top of the stick, revealing a sharp metal point on the end. “I’m going to prick your finger with this lancet so I can get a blood sample.”
“Will it hurt?” Jules asked.
I jabbed the tip of her thumb with the point. “Nope.”
I squeezed out a drop of blood onto the testing strip. Technically, this move is called “milking,” but I wasn’t going to tell Jules that. The word even grosses me out and I do it at least seven times a day and once in the middle of the night. So far, though, Jules didn’t seem repulsed. She seemed kind of… interested. “You put this strip in the meter and drip a tiny bit of blood on the end. Wait five seconds and… one hundred and three.”
“Is that bad?” Jules asked.
“Your blood sugar’s perfect,” I said.
And it always would be. Unlike mine. Which is something I try not to think about, but sometimes—like now—I can’t help thinking about. Jules could eat a bowl of white sugar for breakfast and her blood sugar probably wouldn’t go over 150. She’ll never have to eat when she doesn’t want to or not eat things she wants, and no matter what she eats—carbs, protein, fat, whatever kind and however much—her pancreas will give her exactly the right amount of insulin she needs.
“What’s yours?” she asked.
“Sixty-four. Which is too low, but the juice’ll fix it.” I poked the straw into the hole and slurped.
“Don’t you need to take insulin?”
“Insulin is for when your blood sugar’s too high,” I explained. “Carbohydrates are for when it’s too low.”
“Wait. You mean when your blood sugar gets too low, you have to eat carbs whether you want to or not?” Jules said “eat carbs” like someone else might have said “sacrifice baby animals.”
“Pretty much, yeah,” I said.
“That’s the worst.” She leaned toward me and sniffed. “I can’t believe Otis can smell what’s inside your veins.” She sniffed again. “I don’t smell anything.”
“Gee, thanks.” I pulled my arms in close to my body just in case.
“How did he get the box out of the fridge anyway?” Jules asked.
“There’s a rope on the door handle that Otis pulls with his mouth. We keep juice boxes and some other stuff on the lower shelves so he can reach them.” Raw meat goes in the vegetable drawer. Even Otis can’t open that. “Otis, bring Jules a juice.”
Otis loped off toward the kitchen.
“Otis, stop!”
He stopped.
“What’s wrong?” Jules asked.
Otis was walking funny.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
I got down on the floor next to Otis and ran my hands over his back left leg, the one he’d been favoring. He didn’t yelp with pain, but that didn’t mean anything. Otis doesn’t complain unless something’s really bad.
“Paw,” I said.
Otis gave me his paw and I inspected it. I didn’t see anything.
“Is he okay?” Jules asked.
“He was limping,” I said.
Here’s what I didn’t say: Maybe Otis sprained something or tore a ligament or pulled a muscle. He could have an infection in his leg. Or even hip dysplasia, which a lot of German shepherds get. But whatever was wrong with Otis probably happened at the Ruins, because he was fine before we went.
Which meant that whatever was wrong with Otis was my fault.
He needed to see the vet, but Mom and Dad wouldn’t be home for h
ours. Otis never waits a single second to help me; no way was I going to wait hours to help Otis.
“I have to take Otis to the vet, but I need someone with a car to drive us,” I said, trying to keep the flashing red siren of panic that was in my head out of my voice.
“And you don’t want your parents to know,” Jules said.
“That too.” They’d have to know Otis had been to the vet if it turned out there was something wrong, but if we went now and nothing was wrong, maybe my parents would never find out.
“I’ll get someone to come drive us.” Jules typed on her phone, waited half a minute, and said, “My dad’s massage therapist will be here in five.”
“Let’s go wait on the porch,” I said. “Come, Otis.”
He was definitely limping.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
True Fact: I can never be careless. Never.
Something sharp had cut Otis between two of his paw pads. Something like a piece of metal or a shell or a chunk of cement at the Ruins. The cut wasn’t deep, and Dr. Greene, the vet, said it would heal in a few days. But his paw was wrapped in blue tape halfway up his back leg. And no matter how many times I told him to stop, no matter how many chew toys and bones I gave him, Otis kept picking at it. He hated that wrap.
I didn’t take care of Otis and he got hurt. And the worst part was that he didn’t know it was my fault. While we were waiting for Dr. Greene, Otis alerted. Of course my stupid blood sugar decided this was a good time to blow past the juice I’d had at home and go high. Because there was no way Otis would stay in the waiting area with Jules while I dealt with it. No, he had to limp to the bathroom with me so I could test. And when I told him, “Good high, Otis,” his tail wagged as hard as ever—even though his paw was hurting him, even before I gave him his treat—because taking care of me is Otis’s favorite thing to do. I kneeled on Dr. Greene’s bathroom floor and told Otis I was sorry over and over and over again, and he licked the tears off my face and had no idea why I was crying.
After Otis finished with Dr. Greene, the receptionist gave me a bill.