by Paul Mosier
The lifeguard ambulance brings me to the sidewalk and the street, and then they unload me and put me in the regular kind of ambulance you see everywhere. Summer tells the paramedics that I’m her sister so she can ride with me. The lifeguards know Summer and they know she isn’t my sister but they don’t tell the paramedics it’s not true.
I’m strapped in the back. Summer sits above me, still stroking my arm.
They blast the siren, which feels oddly unnecessary. Through the windows, from my back, I see open sky. Then we hit the streets and I see condominium towers and streetlights and trees.
I close my eyes. When I open them we’re at a hospital. The back door of the ambulance opens. Summer trots alongside as they roll me into the emergency room.
They take me right into a little room with curtains for walls. Summer and the paramedic from the ambulance answer questions from a nurse. Two people in white outfits slide me off the board and onto an adjustable bed.
Something that feels like a clothespin pinches my index finger. Summer pulls a sheet up over me. Suddenly I remember I’m wearing a shorty.
“What’s your name?” a young nurse asks. She’s wearing SpongeBob SquarePants scrubs.
“Betty.”
“Her real name is Juillet,” Summer says, “but I call her Betty.”
The nurse smiles. “Do you know where you are?”
“The hack shack.”
The nurse smiles again. She looks like maybe she knows how to surf, with strong shoulders like you get from paddling out, and highlights in her hair. She looks at the monitors, and so do I. I know from my mom being a doctor that I’m not absorbing as much oxygen as I should be. I feel like a starfish is about to crawl out of my lungs.
“The doctor will be right in,” she says.
I push myself up in the bed. I feel grains of sand beneath me, trapped between the bare skin of my legs and the cool sheets. Summer moves in and holds my hand. I cough once, into my hand, which brings on a whole fit of coughing. I look in my palm but there’s no starfish.
“Okay, let’s see what we have here.” It’s a familiar voice. I shrink beneath the sheet as my mom walks in with a half dozen ducklings—doctor interns—in tow. She picks up the clipboard with the chart.
“Okay,” she begins, reading from the clipboard. “Female, twelve years old. Blow to the head and seawater in her lungs. We’ll give a listen to her lungs and do imaging on both areas. Concussion protocol and guarding against dry drowning, which you folks will see enough of if you end up working in hospitals this close to the beach.”
Mom finally looks toward me, and her knees buckle in shock. The chart falls from her hands as she grabs hold of the counter to steady herself. An intern retrieves her clipboard. I avoid eye contact as she composes herself and moves in.
“Good afternoon, young lady.” She’s acting like she doesn’t even know me. Her fingertips trail over the throbbing pain of my forehead. “Can you tell me your name?”
“Betty.”
Summer leans forward. “Her name is Juillet but I’ve been calling her Betty.”
Summer doesn’t know it’s my mom—she must not recognize her from when she was in her swimsuit at Pinkie Promise on the day we first saw each other. But Mom is regarding Summer with amused curiosity. “Betty?”
One of the interns tips his head toward Mom. “That’s surfer slang for an attractive surfer girl.”
The numbers on the heart monitor get bigger, my pulse quickening. Summer’s been calling me Betty all month and I had no idea it meant that.
Mom looks back to me. “Do you know where you are?”
“At the hack shack.”
Again an intern leans in and interprets. “That’s surfer slang for a hospital.”
“And do you know why you’re here?”
She won’t act like she knows me, so I won’t look her in the eyes. “I went over the falls and got drilled. Swallowed a Neptune cocktail.”
Another intern leans to Mom, but she waves him away. “I think I get the gist of it. Do you have any pain in your neck?”
I shake my head.
Mom reaches to me with both hands. She massages the back of my neck, the sides. The feel of her fingers against my skin makes me think my eyes will well up with tears, but I’m not gonna let it happen.
“Any soreness here? Or here?”
I shake my head.
Her hands withdraw from my skin. “Sit up for me and take a deep breath.” She unzips my shorty to expose my back. The stethoscope is cold against my skin. “Again. Once more, nice and deep.” She zips me back up, takes a step away. “Well, she doesn’t appear to be in any danger. First let’s get her feet up and her head down below her lungs. There’s some fluid in there, so that’ll help drain it. Then Tylenol and an ice pack for her crown, scans for her head and lungs, just to rule out anything serious.” The interns nod, make notes on their own clipboards.
The foot of my bed rises, the head lowers. Immediately it feels like my lungs are a shampoo bottle tipped upside down to get the last shower’s worth.
Mom hands orders to the nurse, who leaves. Then she addresses the interns. “Everybody take five. I’ll meet you in the break room.” The interns nod, scatter. Mom watches them go, then pulls the curtain shut and sits in a chair beside my bed.
“You gave me quite a surprise.”
I won’t look at her. “You acted like you didn’t even know me. Just another set of vitals.”
Mom clears her throat. “Well, protocol dictates that when a doctor cares deeply about a patient, they should allow another physician to administer treatment. I wanted to be the one to care for you, so I pretended not to know you.”
“This is your mom?” Summer’s eyes are big. “I didn’t recognize you in the hack-shack threads!”
Mom smiles. “You must be Summer.”
“I’m so sorry this happened,” Summer says. “Betty—I mean Juillet—has been learning so much. She’s really a strong swimmer. Maybe I shouldn’t be trying to—”
“You’re fine,” Mom interrupts. “Thank you so much for getting her here.”
“Summer’s practically a lifeguard,” I say.
“I believe it,” Mom says.
“So . . . will you still let Juillet hang out with me?” Summer asks.
Mom gives Summer a curious look. “Of course. Really, thank you for looking after her.” She puts her hand on Summer’s shoulder. “I’m assuming you girls told the paramedics you’re sisters?” Summer smiles sheepishly, says nothing. “If you’d like to stay with Juillet during her imaging, I’ll get a Lyft for us to go home afterward.”
“Yes, please,” Summer says.
After the imaging, after Mom discharges me, the three of us ride back to Fourth Street together. Summer and Mom chat like besties while I sulk, an ice pack against my forehead. The Lyft drops us at the cottage, and Summer says good-bye, says she’ll go back to the lifeguard shack for our boards.
Inside the cottage, the light is mellow in the front room. I lie on the couch, and the breeze and the sound of occasional cars on Fourth Street through the open windows lull me to sleep.
When I open my eyes, Mom is kneeling beside me. The sun has gone down but the light has not yet faded from the cottage.
“How do you feel?”
I think about it for a moment. “Stupid.”
Mom’s hand strokes the hair away from my forehead. At first it seems like she’s just stroking her daughter’s hair, but then I realize it’s because she’s a doctor and she’s looking at my forehead because I’m a random person with an injury.
“There’s some aloe on the patio. I’ll get you some to help prevent scarring on this forehead abrasion.”
She rises to her feet, walks toward the door.
“I didn’t want to go to the ER.” I say it rather loudly.
She pauses. “Well, I’m glad you did.”
I cover my eyes with my arm. “If you think I took a dive onto the ocean floor and nearly drowned j
ust so I could have a reason to finally see my mother on this stupid vacation, then you’re wrong.”
She stands there, quietly. “I’m not accusing you of that.”
“I would have asked to go to a different hospital if I’d known we were going to the one you’re working at.”
She clears her throat. She sounds thirsty when she speaks. “I thought it was understood that I would be quite busy during this visit. I’ve enjoyed being able to spend some time with you, but I am spending most of my time working and at the conference.”
She’s still. Somehow I know her face is tilted down. Then it turns up my way again. “When you came in, it was like I barely recognized you. You looked so healthy. All that playing in the sun and the water. And your speech.” I can hear the smile in her voice, and I lift my arm to see it. “It’s like you’re a different girl. A surfer girl.”
“I haven’t caught a wave yet. A wave has obviously caught me, but I haven’t caught it.”
“Well,” she says, “I just felt so proud of you.”
I stand and walk quickly to my bedroom, close the door behind me. I look out the open back window. In the distance, over the roofs and trees, down the slope, is the sea. You cannot see it, but you can feel it on the breeze.
I walk back into the front room. Mom is still standing in the same spot on the hardwood floor.
“Why did you feel proud of me?” I ask.
She looks up at me. “I just couldn’t believe this beautiful, adventurous young woman was the same girl I came to Ocean Park with a few weeks ago. You’ve grown so, so much.”
I go back into my bedroom, closing the door more quietly this time.
I like what Mom said.
I open the desk drawer, and stare down at the list of goals.
More exercise and fresh air.
Confront your fears.
Go outside your comfort zone!
MAKE A NEW FRIEND
LEARN TO SURF?
FIX FERN THING
GET CLOSER TO MOM
HELP SUMMER LIKE SHE HAS HELPED ME
The list keeps getting longer, but maybe that’s good. ’Cause while the list is getting longer, I’m getting stronger.
I close the drawer, then step toward the open window. I take a deep breath, turn my left foot outward, and assume the warrior pose. I bend into it, and I feel it—my strength, my balance, preparing for my eventual wave.
21
THE NEXT DAY, Summer and I are walking up the hill, skateboards under our arms. We’ve been at it again with the skateboard lessons, as Summer thinks the better I am at not falling off a skateboard, the better I’ll get at not falling off a surfboard.
It’s too steep to ride up the hill to Fourth Street, and I’m tired from our riding up and down the boardwalk all day.
Summer is in one of her quiet moods, which she’s been drifting into more and more of late. At least it isn’t as mysterious as it was before I met Hank. And I’m relieved at feeling pretty sure it isn’t because of something I’ve done or said, but thinking this, I feel guilty for being happy that it’s not about me. Because what it is about is much more serious or important than whatever I am.
We turn the corner onto Fourth Street, and reach the driveway leading to Summer’s house. She stops.
“Do you wanna see something?” She says it with a weariness.
I nod. I wanna see something.
She leads me down the driveway pavers to the door. Inside, the house is quiet. I follow her up the stairs to the second floor. Behind Hank’s door his day nurse, Maria, is singing in Spanish. But Summer leads me the other way down the short hallway, past the elevator to another closed door, which has her name spelled out with letters cut from aqua-blue construction paper. She puts her hand on the doorknob but pauses. She speaks quietly and without humor.
“Don’t laugh. Don’t make fun. Don’t judge.”
I shake my head. “Never.”
The door swings open, revealing her world, a world I can only love. The walls are covered with posters from surfing magazines, everything blue and aqua blue and ocean blue, and sea-foam green and golden sun. A pink surfboard ruined by teeth marks hangs above her open window, which frames her beloved Pacific, quiet in the distance.
But Summer is kneeling at the foot of her bed, pulling a shoebox from beneath it. She sits on the bed and motions for me to sit beside her. As I do, a photo catches my eye, in a frame on the nightstand. It’s Summer, maybe two or three years ago, standing beside a boy who must be Hank, the way he looked when he was full of life, athletic and handsome. They’re on the beach, grinning, standing beside their surfboards.
“It’s not like it’s the only thing that’s important to me,” she says.
I look from the photo to her face. “Surfing?”
She nods. “I’m not, like, totally one-dimensional.”
“Of course not,” I say. “But if you were, it’d be a case of you choosing really well.”
“Or it chose me.” She twists her lips, like she’s thinking of her fate.
“What’s in the box?” I ask.
“Just . . .” She can’t seem to finish her thought. So she takes the lid off and sets it aside.
The box is nearly empty. Just a few seashells laid across the bottom.
“May I?” I ask. She nods.
I remove the dry, beige form of a seahorse and hold it in my hand. It’s only as big as a cricket. Attached to it with a bread-loaf twist tie is a tiny plastic cowboy with a lasso, riding it.
A hummingbird darts through the open window and hovers above me, as if he’s curious about the contents of the box. He nods, satisfied, then zips back out the window into the open sky.
I put the seahorse back in the box and remove a sand dollar that’s bigger than a silver dollar. It’s more the size of a silver-dollar pancake, but with its tiny design imprinted on it.
There is also a perfect crab claw, bleached white by the sun.
A few shells too perfect and rare to find on any beach.
A tooth that obviously came from a shark, maybe even left behind in the flesh of Summer’s butt when she was attacked.
A piece of light blue sea glass, which I lift and hold against the light of the window.
“That’s the color of the sea when I dream of the sea,” she says.
One item in the box I do not touch—a lock of hair, held in a small plastic bag. It’s the same golden color as Summer’s, but I know it isn’t Summer’s.
Each object is a story, but a story Summer isn’t able to tell. Not with her voice, anyway.
I realize how dearly I wish to be associated with something in the box. Like, here’s the sand crab you threw up when you wiped out. Or here’s the bottle cap you stepped on. Immediately I feel guilty for wanting to be in the box. I don’t feel like I could be associated with an object holy enough to belong in there. Here’s your name printed on a grain of rice in a minuscule jar with a tiny cork on top.
“I’m sorry I kept Hank a secret for so long,” she says.
I put the sea glass back into the box. “It’s okay. I understand.”
“So that’s it. My box of secrets.” She looks from the box to the open window. “I’ll try not to keep any more secrets from you.”
“Me too,” I say. As I say it, I wonder what my secrets are, and whether they’re as bright and beautiful as Summer’s.
Later, in bed but not yet asleep, I think again about the box beneath Summer’s bed, imagining stories for each shell and object inside. I also wonder why I don’t have such a box myself. And I think about what Summer would put in the shoebox if she lived in Lakeshore instead of Ocean Park. I decide it would contain arrowheads and dead bugs and snail shells. She’d be a lake skater and a tree climber.
I make a mental note that I will become these things when I get back to Lakeshore. I will return to being these things. Skater of frozen lakes, climber of trees. I did these things when I was younger, before Dad left, and I can do them again.
&n
bsp; As I drift off to sleep, I wonder whether I’ll still feel this way in the morning—or, rather, a week from now when I’m back in Lakeshore. Whether I’ll still feel this brave without a fearless girl to show me the way.
22
I WAKE TO see Mom standing over my bed, smiling placidly.
I sit up. “What?”
She’s wearing her I’m-enjoying-myself clothes—a summer dress with the straps of her one-piece bathing suit visible on her shoulders. “Nothing.”
“Why are you here?”
She sits on the edge of my bed. “I’m not going into the hospital today. Remember?”
“No.” My thoughts turn suspicious. “Are you just doing this because of me wiping out yesterday?”
She shakes her head. “That was two days ago. And this has been on the calendar all along.”
“Oh.”
“So we get to spend the whole day together.”
I think about this. I decide against reminding her that last time we were supposed to have the whole day together, she ditched me before lunch. “I’ll have to tell Summer. We’re supposed to ignore alien orders at ten.”
“I’d love to ignore alien orders with the two of you, whatever that means. It would be nice to meet Summer under more pleasant circumstances.”
I smile weakly. Mom leaves the room, and I sit up, wondering how it will be to share Summer with her.
The smell of waffles toasting gets me out of bed. It was nice of her to start the waffles, but while I eat, Mom sits at the table reading something having to do with the hospital. Even on her day off she can’t leave it alone.
“So what is all this about disobeying aliens?” She’s looking at me over her glasses.
“Ignore alien orders,” I reply. “You’ll see.”
A short while later, Mom and I are shuffling down the sidewalk with our beach gear. She’s as pale as I was on the second of July, wearing sunglasses with lenses as big as drink coasters, and her flip-flops smack the sidewalk with every step.
“There,” I say, pointing down.
Mom looks at the section of sidewalk in front of us. “‘Ignore alien orders.’” She pushes her shades back up on her nose. “So what do we do?”