Waiting for the Night Song

by Julie Carrick Dalton

  Cadie untied the rope from the birch branch. There were no seats or benches on the broad, flat bottom covered in leaves, twigs, and dirt. Cadie tossed her backpack in the back corner where about ten curled-up beer tabs huddled in a sandy pile. She inspected the various layers of someone else’s history, trapped in coats of paint: Dark green, sky blue, and white hid below the canary yellow.

  Friar pawed at the rock and whined as Cadie lowered herself into the boat.

  “Go home, boy.” Cadie leaned out of the boat and let Friar lick her face. She knew her dog would wait there until they returned.

  Cadie imagined the power of digging into the water with her paddle and changing the boat’s course with one pull. Her rain slicker shed the misty rain in beads. Her skin prickled with anticipation.

  “You can sit in the back, if you want.” Cadie offered the captain’s seat to Daniela, hoping she would decline.

  “If you want me to.”

  “No big deal.” Cadie tried to act casual. She wanted to sit in the back and steer, to control where the boat moved, but even more, she wanted to make this friendship work.

  They paddled by Cadie’s pier and past a seemingly endless expanse of woods that covered most of the peninsula where they both lived, known as the Hook to everyone in Maple Crest. A vastness spread out in front of her, all around her. Her familiar lake, her backyard, stretched out deep and wide with meandering turns, the surface shimmering with the lure of the unknown. The hugeness of space spread inside her, expanding her pores, her blood vessels, her lungs. Even the sky, which hung low with clouds, gave her the feeling she could reach up, peel away the gray, and see forever up into the deepness of space.

  Everything seemed different, silvery, as if she were seeing it in a mirror, through a mirror. They rowed past the remote summer cottages that could only be accessed by boat, until the shoreline opened up to reveal a cove off to the right.

  Cadie raised her eyebrows. Daniela answered with a tilt of her head aimed at the cove and guided them toward the opening. Tall evergreens, filled in with a flush of low bushes, lined the shore. Angular rocks rose from the open water of the cove, whether welcoming them or warning them to stay away, Cadie could not determine.

  They were the first explorers to enter the hidden cove, Cadie felt certain. Theirs were the first eyes to behold the giant pines draped in sinewy vines. She peeled her slicker off her sweaty arms and dragged one hand through the warm lake water. The rain had tapered off and shafts of morning sunlight sifted through the parting clouds. Everything sparkled—even her skin.

  Jagged slabs of granite hid below the surface. If they smashed into a rock or overturned, no one would know where to look for them. She gripped the oar tighter as they paddled deeper and deeper into the basin strewn with islands.

  The boat drifted close to the shore, and Daniela grabbed a low-hanging branch.

  “Blueberries. They’re everywhere.” Daniela pulled the boat in closer. She picked off a fistful and opened her hand to Cadie.

  As she sucked on a few berries, Cadie inspected the bush, about ten feet tall as it stretched over the water. Almost every bush along the shore hung heavy with berries.

  “We have to come back here with a bucket,” Daniela said.

  They ate handfuls of the berries until they needed to stretch to reach higher branches.

  “We should go to another bush,” Cadie said.

  “There’s plenty left on this one.”

  “We shouldn’t take all the berries from any bush. What if a bird eats here and we take them all? Birds fatten up on berries before they go south for the winter, you know. Or what if a weary, lost traveler stops here and is hungry, but we picked all the berries.”

  “Are you serious? Weary travelers?”

  “It could happen,” Cadie said.

  Before Daniela pushed away from the bush, a brown spider skittered across her foot.

  “Get it!” Daniela tried to smash the spider with the end of her paddle.

  Cadie grabbed Daniela’s wrist. The brown water spider’s legs stretched as wide as Cadie’s palm. It scuttled to the far side of the boat, dodging Daniela’s oar.

  “I’m not leaving that thing in our boat. What if it’s poisonous?” Daniela said.

  Cadie grabbed a few sticks from the bottom of the boat, lifted the creature, and released it on a branch of the blueberry bush.

  “Killing that spider could have messed up everything and we would never even know it.”

  Daniela rolled her eyes. “How could killing one stupid spider ruin everything?”

  “What if that spider has thousands of babies, and her babies have thousands of babies. And a crazy, horrible virus carried by mosquitoes comes, but because there are so many spiders they keep the mosquitoes under control before the disease mutates into a plague that would wipe out the entire human race. No one dies, or even knows human beings were almost wiped out. All because of that spider.”

  “Yeah, well, what if your spider bites someone and he keels over and dies. But”—she paused, squinting and leaning in toward Cadie—“that person was destined to be president one day. And he would have prevented a nuclear war. But because he never got the chance to be president, we elect an idiot who hits the red button and we all die.” Daniela swooshed her arms up, emulating a mushroom cloud.

  “I’d rather accidentally cause something bad to happen because I did the right thing, than cause a disaster because I did something selfish.”

  “Fine. No killing spiders,” Daniela said.

  Cadie smiled and put her oar in the water.

  “Do you think we’d get in trouble if we got caught picking berries back here?” Daniela began rowing again.

  “No one owns the lake. If we keep at least one foot in the lake all the time, we aren’t trespassing, right?”

  Stopping periodically to gorge on berries, they paddled around the cove. Several small islands dotted the water, along with clusters of boulders above and below the surface. The cove unfurled into several smaller coves.

  “Do you know which way we came in?” Daniela broke their reverie after about half an hour.

  Cadie searched for a landmark, but the islands all appeared the same as they blended into the mainland. Every bush looked green. Every rock looked gray. She sank her fingernails into her thigh to fend off the mounting tears.

  “I think this is a big island and we’ve been going around and around it thinking it is the shore. Doesn’t that tree look familiar?” Daniela pointed to a birch tree jutting out over the water.

  Cadie squeezed the oar. The cut on her arm from the barbed wire ached. Cadie opened her mouth wide and slid her jaw from side to side.

  “I’m thirsty,” Cadie said.

  “Then drink some water.” Daniela pointed to the lake. “And we won’t starve either. We could survive on blueberries, you know. And live out here in Blueberry Cove like pirates. Plus, we’ve got your emergency bracelet.”

  Despite Daniela’s teasing, Cadie took comfort in the vision of living on lake water and blueberries.

  They stopped rowing and let the boat drift.

  Wind shushed through the billowy evergreen branches around her. The breeze from the woods carried the pithy smell of the underside of rotting logs, the breakdown of life into dirt where new life grew. Cadie loved hunting down mushrooms and monitoring the decay of fallen trees in the woods. She sometimes thrust her hands into the rotting wood and rubbed the damp, decomposing pulp between her palms, squeezing it like dough and scattering the crumbs to feed the forest.

  The familiar aroma of her woods and lake comforted her. But the longer they drifted, the more unfamiliar the world began to feel.

  “What if we sell these berries?” Daniela said. “That guy parks his truck out by the library and sells them for a dollar a box every morning. I’ve seen Angie buying them for the diner. What if we sell them cheaper and deliver them right to her?”

  “I could use the money,” Cadie said as she scanned the shoreline. She
imagined her boat loaded down with buckets of berries. “I want to buy a new bike seat. The plastic on mine is cracked and it hurts my butt.”

  “Let’s start tomorrow and take them straight to Angie.” Daniela bit her lip as she manipulated the rope. “We can say we picked them in the woods so no one finds out about the boat.”

  “If we ever get out of here,” Cadie said. If she didn’t call her parents at noon, the designated check-in time, they would worry. They would come home. And Cadie wouldn’t be there. They might think she drowned. Or got kidnapped. Or worse, she would get caught with the boat. Her stolen boat. Cadie wrapped the curled end of one braid around her finger, watching as the tip turned purple.

  She leaned back on her elbows and chewed on a strand of hair, studying the shore as if she were mapping the cove.

  “I don’t think it’s stealing if no one else is going to pick the berries anyway,” Cadie said.

  “We’re poaching, not stealing,” Daniela said.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Nothing. It just sounds better.”

  Cadie pulled her sketch pad and a pencil out of her backpack and drew outlines of the shore, the islands, and the rocks surrounding the drifting yellow boat. Daniela watched, her head resting on her arms. Cadie turned the page and started a list:

  Never kill spiders.

  Keep one foot in the water.

  Never take all the berries from a single bush.

  Never tell where we pick the berries.

  “If we’re going to poach berries, we should have rules,” Cadie said. “The Poachers’ Code.”

  “What happens if we break the rules?” Daniela said.

  “Terrible, terrible things.” Cadie tried to make her voice sound spooky.

  “God, you’re so weird.” Daniela laughed in a way that assured Cadie her new friend would honor the rules.

  The boat drifted toward the opening of a smaller cove. If they couldn’t find their way out of the cove, they could spend the night on one of the islands, build a shelter out of branches.

  The sun emerged from behind a tree and blinded Cadie for a few seconds.

  “East! The sun’s in the east. We came from the north. We are at the north side of the lake. Right? Go that way.” Cadie pointed. Her muscles relaxed, but her hands shook as she paddled. She looked over her shoulder at the blueberry-saturated shore, almost regretting she had discovered a way out.

  Cadie longed to be found, but even more, she ached to be lost.

  The coves inside of coves twisted and contorted, but by aiming in the right direction, they found the opening where the wide swath of the lake greeted them. A soft rhythm of chirps, flutters, and clicks wound its way in and out of the trees, rising and swooping on the breeze as she rowed, humming in harmony with the forest and the lapping of water against her boat. She inhaled the airy particles glittering in the shafts of light until her lungs felt ready to burst.

  The rush of discovery dwarfed her residual panic. As they emerged from the cove, she couldn’t contain a triumphant laugh, which burst out in a hiccup and made Daniela laugh, a melodic ripple Cadie grew to cherish that complicated summer.

  “Do you want to spend the night?” Daniela asked.

  “Sure.” Cadie sank her paddle deep, every muscle in her shoulders and back tightening as she drew it through the water. She absorbed the momentum of Daniela behind her and tried to coordinate their strokes in the same rhythm. Her oar cut through towers of light littered with dancing, iridescent particles. The boat—her boat—moved at her will. The lake felt endless. The boat sailed through sky and clouds reflected deep in the rippling water.

  They were flying.

  * * *

  Cadie skipped the entire quarter-mile path through the woods from her house to Daniela’s, her sleeping bag and a backpack bouncing against her back. She balanced with sure feet over the log bridge spanning the creek separating her family’s property and Daniela’s.

  A spicy aroma wafting through the woods prompted Cadie to sprint the last few yards. The smell grew stronger as she climbed the porch stairs. Through the open kitchen window, she watched Daniela and her mother dancing with wooden spoons as pretend microphones. They sang along to the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” playing on a boom box on the counter.

  Daniela sang a line, her mother sang the next, and back to Daniela. Dolores Garcia danced in place, flipping something on the stove, turning sideways every few seconds to smile at her daughter as they sang. She wore jeans and a polo shirt with the Garcia’s Hardware logo. From behind, she looked like she could be a teenager.

  Daniela’s father, Raúl Garcia, saw Cadie looking in through the window. Cadie knew him from the hardware store. He smiled and twirled his finger at his temple to indicate his wife and daughter had lost their minds. He waved Cadie inside and greeted her by handing her a wooden spoon to sing into.

  “You like the Beatles?” She accepted the spoon from him.

  “Doesn’t everyone?” His eyes crinkled in the corners as he smiled.

  Pockets of stuffed dough sizzled on the stove, filling the room with the elusive sensation of Christmas morning. Cadie’s stomach churned at the earthy, savory aroma. A prickly eagerness stirred in her feet.

  Cadie knew the words, but her feet remained glued to the floor as Daniela and her mother danced. Raúl took Cadie’s hand and spun her around and around until she felt dizzy and her body forgot she didn’t know how to dance. Waning light outside made everything in the small kitchen glow with a golden sheen. Sunlight glinted off a set of rosary beads dangling from the curtain rod in front of the sink.

  Cadie sang loudly, not caring her voice was off-key. She danced with flailing arms, although she knew how uncoordinated she looked. Daniela laughed at Cadie, so Cadie sang louder and Daniela smiled in approval.

  Daniela dropped to her knees and leaned back like a rock star as she belted out the final I want to hold your ha-a-a-a-a-and. Daniela pulled Cadie’s arm so she fell next to her on the linoleum. Sweat plastered Daniela’s hair to her face as she panted to catch her breath.

  “Are you hungry?” Daniela asked.

  “I am now.”

  “Can we have some?” Daniela looked up at her mother and batted her eyes with her lower lip pouting out.

  “One each.” Dolores wagged her spoon at the girls, smiling to reveal a deep dimple in each cheek. “Just one.”

  Daniela grinned and whispered in Cadie’s ear, “She’s only letting me have one because you’re here. She never lets Dad and me have any.”

  “Who are they for?”

  “She makes dinner for the kids of some of the farm workers every Monday night while their parents take English classes. Dad and I have to eat spaghetti.” Daniela pulled Cadie up. “You should come over every Monday so I can have one.”

  Dolores handed each girl a plate with a sizzling bundle. “Have you ever had a pupusa?” she asked Cadie. “These are exactly like the ones my mother used to make me.”

  Cadie shook her head.

  Raúl came up behind Daniela and snuck a bite off his daughter’s plate. “My wife makes the best pupusas in all of New Hampshire.”

  “You mean the only pupusas in New Hampshire,” Daniela said with her mouth full.

  “No más.” Mrs. Garcia slapped her husband’s hand away as he reached for his own pupusa. “Son para los niños.”

  Melted cheese and spiced meat she could not identify burnt Cadie’s tongue as she bit into the crusty dough. The pepper made her eyes water, but she couldn’t stop eating until she scarfed down the last bite.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Garcia,” Cadie mumbled, her mouth still full.

  “Mrs. Garcia sounds like someone else’s name. Like an old lady.” Dolores tapped the straight end of her spatula playfully on Cadie’s head. “Tía. In this house you call me Tía.

  “Tía,” Cadie repeated, the word crisp and light on her tongue. Cadie had never seen Dolores Garcia act playful when she worked in the store, or when sh
e volunteered in the school library. She usually seemed quiet and reserved, although her tone could turn sharp without warning. Cadie acted extra polite on days Dolores ran the library so she wouldn’t get scolded for talking too loudly.

  Dolores hummed as she layered the steamy pupusas between paper towels in a large, flat box.

  “I’ll carry them to the car for you.” Raúl tried to pick up the box, but Dolores nudged him away.

  “Ha. You’ll eat them. I can carry them myself.”

  “Stop being stubborn. You’ll hurt your back again,” he said.

  “What’s wrong with her back?” Cadie whispered.

  Daniela shrugged. “It always hurts. Doctor said she might need surgery.”

  Raúl stood in the doorway watching Dolores drive away. He stayed with his hand on the doorknob, unmoving long after her car disappeared. Daniela’s eyes darkened as she watched her father stare out the window. Cadie pressed up on her toes to look over his shoulder to see what he stared at. Dusk tinted the woods with a gray-green light. Nothing moved outside.

  Raúl’s shoulders drooped and Cadie realized he was no longer in the room with them. Whatever he was watching—or thinking—had taken him far away from the kitchen.

  5

  THAT SUMMER

  The first time they saw the Summer Kid, he sat in an aluminum lawn chair with a sagging mesh seat on the end of a spindly gray pier. His fine, blond hair reminded Cadie of a baby shampoo commercial as it flopped over his eyes. He sat curled up in the chair, one knee bent up, leaning against the aluminum armrest. About their age, maybe a couple years older, he looked wispy, like the wind might blow him away.

  Daniela and Cadie slowed their paddles to quiet the splashing as they approached. “No witnesses,” Daniela whispered as they glided past.

  The boy sighed and puffed his long bangs out of his face. Out of the corner of his eye he found the boat and turned his head to meet Cadie’s stare. He startled in his chair and almost tipped over. Cadie waved, or tried to, but she held the oar in both hands and the attempted greeting ended up more like a convulsive splash of the paddle.