Water Steps

by A. LaFaye

  “You don’t look so frightened.”

  “I’m not.” I laughed, so shocked to even say such a thing, let alone feel it.

  “Well, good. I better call in the troops.” She headed back into the kitchen.

  Speaking into the walkie-talkie, she said, “We found her, Mr. Monahan. We found her.”

  Tylo answered back in a crackly shout, “This is me, Mom.”

  “Sorry.” Mrs. Bishop grabbed another walkie-talkie on the counter. “Mr. Monahan?”

  “Aye,” Pep’s worried voice came back.

  “She’s found her way to my house.”

  “Is she there, now?”

  She handed me the walkie-talkie instead of answering. Felt kind of jittery to tell him, “I’m here, Pep.”

  “Silkies be praised, you’re safe.”

  “Sorry I scared you. I thought you heard me say I was going to Tylo’s.”

  “You stay put now. We’ll sort that out later. Let me talk to Mrs. Bishop.”

  “Okay.”

  Pep had Mrs. Bishop call Mem and before I even had a chance to swallow the marshmallow Tylo’s brother Greg offered me, people started flooding into their house. And flooding fit because everyone showed up soaking wet in a gust of wind and rain from the lake-side door, the front door, a side door—Tylo and his dad, Pep, Mem, Aunt Rosien, and even a whole crew of people I didn’t know. They’d called out an army to find me.

  And now that they’d found me, they planned to kill me. Tylo kept hitting me with his bag, yelling at me for running off. Pep scooped me up and hugged me so hard a rib nearly popped out of my mouth. Mem kept squeezing me, then stepping back to look me over, then squeezing me again. I started to get a little dizzy. Aunt Rosien said, “Like to kill her parents for the worry of it.”

  Everyone shouted and talked and carried on. Mrs. Bishop made tea and ordered her boys to make cocoa—three spills, a marshmallow fight, and a stern shout from Mr. Bishop later, we all sat in their living room talking, a fire roaring and the stones of the fireplace heating up. Well, the Bishop boys did a little more kicking and threatening than talking, but I didn’t care. I sipped cocoa on a cushy couch with Mem and Pep sandwiching me, stopping to give me a kiss or a pat between sips of tea.

  Everyone expected a big adventure story, but I just said that I’d walked along the beach and got caught in the rain. That’s all that happened really. Or at least that’s all I wanted to say in front of so many people I didn’t know.

  “Got any salt?” asked a man with spiky little gray hairs in his mop of brown.

  Mrs. Bishop tried not to look surprised when the man sprinkled it in his tea and passed it down. Friends of Mem and Pep, no doubt. I began to wonder if everyone from Ireland had salt in their tea.

  From their hand-knitted jumpers and their baggy pants, the men who’d come in with Pep looked like they’d dressed out of his closet, and the clanking cups with the “slancha” salutes said for sure that they came from Ireland like him. Mates of his, I’d bet on it. So, why haven’t I ever met them?

  The ladies who’d arrived with Aunt Rosien had the same wild hair look. Their linen shirts, long skirts, and rope sandals made me peg them as nature lovers like her.

  The whole lot of them chatted all hunched over their cups, their voices pitching and rolling like waves. And when one of them called out a question, they all seemed to turn as one to answer.

  They looked so out of place in a living room of DVDs, Nikes, and slogan T-shirts. As they all got to talking about the lady of the lake who wandered the shores calling out for lost children with their mile-a-minute Irish accents, I saw a likeness among them, like a clan had come to visit. Maybe they were commune folks living in the nature they fought to protect.

  Leaning into Mem, I whispered, “Are these people nature hippies?”

  Giving me a squeeze, she said, “In a manner of speaking, they are.”

  The thought of all those folks living together in the woods made me think it was a bit like a summer camp for adults that lasted all year. I started to laugh.

  “That’s a bit rude, love,” Mem said, nudging me.

  But why would so many folks from Ireland come to a lake in New York? I’d heard there are more Irish and their descendants in America than in the whole of Ireland, but why would such a loyal nature-loving lot come here?

  Maybe it had something to do with that governor of Vermont who tried to have the lake declared a Great Lake so it would get the same conservation funds as the rest of them? They might have thought it wasn’t getting the protection it needed. But I’m sure that could be said of plenty of lakes in Ireland.

  I figured their reason for being there wasn’t as important as the discovery that a small part of Ireland lived right there on the lake. Why hadn’t Mem and Pep told me?

  That would have made coming to the lake so much easier. If Mem and Pep wouldn’t go back to Ireland because I was too afraid to fly over the ocean, then they could at least have a reunion with the folks they’d known back home. I would have jumped at the chance to spend the summer with people who knew them before I came along. Lake or no lake.

  I’d heard my share of the banshee stories the lot of them were going on about, so I didn’t feel bad about asking, “What were Mem and Pep like before they saved me?”

  The whole lot of them started to speak with “well nows” and “you sure you want to hear about that rogue” and “my can I tell you a story” all in a bunch.

  They had my heart racing for some real stories, but Pep popped off the couch, saying, “We’ll save those tales for another night. We’ve overstayed our welcome with this kind Bishop family already. Heavens, it’s like they’ve been invaded by the Green Brigade this evening.”

  With the nearly matching clothes and the way they moved almost like they knew each others’ next move,

  I couldn’t help but think that Mem and Pep’s friends did look like a group of soldiers called out to rescue me. They could have been the Green Brigade—those Irish soldiers from the Civil War.

  “Good night, Ian. Keep to the jet stream, Morigan. Blessing to you, Gavin.” They all said their good-byes with kisses and well wishes like family. Had Mem and Pep lived in their commune? Were my parents real honest-to-goodness hippies?

  Wading through the sea of folks in his front hall, Tylo grabbed my arm and handed me a walkie-talkie. “Take this. You ever get lost, you call in.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “We have like a million sets. We could keep track of every raccoon in Clinton County if we wanted to.”

  “Thanks.”

  He blushed and started to sidestep and stare at his feet.

  Leaning over to be heard amongst the good-byes and thank yous, I said, “Spotting tomorrow night?”

  “You bet.” He kind of hopped. “You still owe me some Irish barnacles.”

  “That’s biscuits.”

  “Oh,” he smiled. “Good, because even if they are cookies, I don’t want to eat any barnacles.”

  “Good night.”

  “Night.”

  GROUND

  Mem and Pep herded me home. “Did you both live with those folks?” I asked as we left the lights of the Bishop house to enter the darkness of the woods.

  “Never mind that.” Mem gave my shoulder a tug. “What I want to know is what you were doing wandering off with a storm coming in?”

  “I didn’t see the storm. I just wanted to go to Tylo’s. I called into the house to tell you I was going.”

  “Since when do you tell us where you’re going rather than ask?” Pep wanted to know.

  “I . . . I . . .”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “But I did it. I walked on the beach.”

  “Don’t think you can distract us, young lady.” Mem tapped my head. “You can’t go wandering off without permission.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, you just remember that each night next week when you have to bid Tylo happy hunting.”

>   “No!”

  “That’s going light, if you ask me,” Mem said. “I could use a bit of help cleaning that house of ours from top to bottom.”

  “No way!” When Mem said “clean,” she meant sleeves up, knees down on the floor, scrub until you faint kind of clean.

  “And I could use a little help organizing all my files and shelving all my books.” Filing and alphabetizing until my eyes crossed? No, thank you.

  Tugging at Pep’s sleeve, I said, “Please no, please?”

  “All right then, you should be happy with no owl hunting or leaving the house with Tylo for a week.”

  “And I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Mem shook her head, “but no going down to the lake either.”

  “Okay.”

  Funny, but I felt a little bigger, like I’d walked through the woods alone for the first time. I’d never been grounded before. Never left Mem and Pep long enough to get into any kind of trouble. I felt bad for worrying them. Knew I’d done the wrong thing by not asking them if I could go, but I still felt pretty good for heading out on my own and for not going stone freaky when that storm hit. Hey, I’d even faced down my worst memory and come out walking on my own two feet. Grounded or not, it felt pretty good to take a step in the right direction.

  STORIES

  Tylo showed up for owling the next night. All I had to offer him were shortbread biscuits and milk. After a little pouting and a mouthful of biscuits, he seemed just fine with that.

  “These cookies are great, Mrs. Monahan!” he said, doing the Cookie Monster spray with his crumbs.

  Pep tapped him on the head with the daily paper as he passed. “I made them.”

  “You did?” Tylo asked, swigging milk. “My dad tried making rice cereal bars once and he thought if he cooked the marshmallows until they got black they’d be like burned campfire bars. Didn’t work. We had to throw out the pan.”

  Pep laughed. Mem made a noise while washing the dishes—a warning Pep didn’t listen to at all. “Itha there’s grand at the cooking, but baking? Run out of the kitchen if you plan to live. That one used salt instead of sugar in making soda bread. Now, I like my water salty like any ocean-loving fella, but not my bread.”

  “You drink salt water?” Tylo asked.

  Pep took a swig of his tea, “Doesn’t everybody?”

  Tylo stared at me. I recognized the look. The are your parents for real? stare I got any time I brought a new kid home. With all their talk of salt water, fairies, and silkies, who could tell what was real and what was joshing?

  But Tylo didn’t seem to mind. He just wiped his mouth with his sleeve, then sat forward to ask, “So how many silkies have you seen?”

  Oh, no. Now he’d really find out how crazy my parents could be.

  Pep tilted his head a little, like he might have water in his ear, then said, “Did you say, silkies?”

  “Yeah, silkies. I’ve seen one. Heard more, but I just saw the one.”

  “Did you now?” Pep’s smile looked forced, like he heard a joke he didn’t like, but wanted to be polite.

  I’d expected Pep to go into his now-let-me-tell-you-this-about-that storytelling mode. Why didn’t he? Oh, right. He wasn’t into telling any stories that day. I’d been trying since breakfast to get him and Mem to tell me more about the friends who’d helped them in their search for me, but I’d only gotten, “Oh, they’re just old friends,” over and over.

  “That’s right.” Tylo pointed at me to tell them about our silkie spotting.

  If Pep knew about that, he’d start thinking I believed his fairy tales, so I body-checked Tylo and said, “I told him you know the story of how the silkies got into this lake.”

  Tylo stared at me, but I’d found Pep’s on switch. He got all chipper and set to telling, “Oh, of course I do. Every good Irish lad knows how the silkies came to Lake Champlain.”

  And off he went. I sat there listening, knowing the words so well they just flowed through my head like music.

  Why couldn’t Pep talk to me like that about the real past? About his own family? Mem had at least told me about Brida and her brother Shannon. But Pep hadn’t told me a thing about his childhood. Yet, I knew fairies stole children, pookas preyed on lost travelers, and brownies would never touch a shoe. I knew more about a bunch of mythical creatures than I did about my own dad.

  “Did you hear that, Kyna!” Tylo gave me a shove.

  “There’s a whole pod of them in the lake. We’re bound to get a picture of one. You’ll win that ribbon for sure!”

  Great. Now my parents were going to think I really believed in silkies. I’d never hear the end of it. But they just stared at me, Mem standing beside Pep, her hand on his shoulder.

  Mem sounded distracted, even distant. “How about a board game?”

  “Oh, right,” Tylo shook his head. “You’re grounded.”

  “Doesn’t mean we can’t have fun here.” Mem forced a smile, then led the way into the living room. We may have taken over Atlantic City in Monopoly and become a human pretzel in Twister, but Mem and Pep seemed to be pushing themselves to have fun. I kept wondering what had happened. Did they finally see something wrong with all their silly fairy tales now that a friend of mine believed in them?

  After Tylo went home, full of biscuits and goofy stories to tell his brothers, I said to them, “You know I don’t really believe in silkies. I just told Tylo I did so we could be friends.”

  Mem glared at me. “Kyna Moira Monahan, what kind of friendship can be built on a lie?”

  “Just a little one. He had to have seen something in that lake. I’ll just take a picture of it and prove to him that it isn’t a silkie.”

  “You’ll do no such thing. You’re grounded, remember.” Mem spoke to me in anger, real face-twisting anger. I’d never actually seen her mad like that before.

  “Okay.” I felt like shrinking into my slippers and shuffling off to bed.

  Pep didn’t even try to lighten things up with a joke. He just kept putting the games away.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You should’ve thought of that before you ran off and tangled the Bishops up in this mess.”

  “Itha,” Pep breathed out a warning as he stood.

  Mess? What mess? I’d just said I would take a picture of a silkie.

  Mem stomped off, spurting something in Irish. Pep followed her, answering in the same language. I hated it when they did that.

  As I tromped off to bed, my thoughts started bumping around, trying to figure things out. What had Mem and Pep so out of sorts? Pep seemed awful nervous when I had tried to ask questions of his friends. Is that what started things in the wrong direction?

  I could see all those people in my mind. How they sat so close together, wore such similar clothing, and turned as one when someone spoke. They reminded me of something I’d seen—bright, fluid, moving as one, like . . . like a school of fish. The fish Grandma Brida used to love to watch. That set me to wondering. How’d she just sit there and watch fish underwater?

  Mem’s description of her childhood echoed in my ears, “Most days you couldn’t catch me out of the water.”

  And all the sea animals she’d saved. And me. She’d saved me. Pep tried so hard to save my family he nearly died. Practically living in water, saving people, born in Ireland . . .

  No. They couldn’t be. Silkies aren’t real. They’re make-believe. Silkies didn’t live in that lake or come onto dry land to hide their pelts and walk around like regular people. If they had, Mem and Pep would’ve died of sadness long ago.

  I mean, they’d been away from the water for a good eight years now. How could they live that long out of the water? That question sat me up in bed. Was that why they’d come back to Lake Champlain? To be with other silkies? To swim at night as seals, then return to the house as humans in the light of day?

  My parents couldn’t be silkies. That’d be like finding out your grandfather was Santa Claus. But the salt in the tea, the silence about their past,
the love of water, the protection of nature, it all fit.

  But if it fit, I didn’t. I’d kept them away from water. Made them live in a dry, dusty old house miles and miles and miles away from the ocean or even a lake. Was that why they wanted me to get over my fear of water so they could tell me their secret? Return to the sea?

  Would they find me new parents and leave me here?

  I wanted to cry out. To bring them running so they could hold me and tell me it would all be okay.

  “No silkies here,” Pep would say.

  “Just us Irish,” Mem would laugh.

  That’s right. I’d let my imagination run away with me. Mem and Pep just loved the water like I loved photography and walks in the woods, and I’d get that photograph of a dog or a jumping fish or whatever Tylo had seen in the water and prove it once and for all. There are no silkies. And my parents are just as normal and everyday as the bed in which I tried to sleep.

  But every time I shut my eyes, I could see Mem and Pep far out on the rocks, looking back at me over their shoulders just before they dove into the water and swam and swam, far away from me.

  PAST

  I woke up to find Pep perched on my windowsill, his feet in the chair next to it. He sat there writing fast and furious, like it might save a life. Seeing me awake, he said, “Now before you set your mind to thinking, answer me this. What would’ve happened if Mem and I didn’t let you go taking those water steps? Just threw you in a lake to make you learn to swim again?”

  The very idea had me scrambling against the wall, pulling the covers up against me, ready to kick and scream until he forgot any such notion.

  Pep dropped his notebook and jumped to his feet. “Hold on, now.” He looked frustrated, scared even. He cursed in Irish, I could hear the bite of it in the words. “I’d never do that, Kyna. You know that.”

  Catching my breath, I nodded, agreeing. Sure, Mem and Pep pushed me to get over my fear, but hadn’t they given me seven long years to do it?