It’s hard to believe that something as big & loud & perfect as the Quesadilla Ship can just disappear. It seems like once something is that big & important, it has to be there for good.
One moment, you’re days away from the best wedding proposal ever & a new place to live, a new future &
the next, everything’s gone up in smoke.
CHAPTER 14
ISLANDS ON THE LAKE
It’s five a.m. and I’ve been awake for more than an hour, my brain heavy with images of fire, Rosie’s angry face, and Uncle Carl’s apron hanging loose around his neck as he retreated to his apartment.
There’s a knock on my door.
“Jack?” Patrick says through the door. “Are you awake?”
I open the door and a light over the staircase puts everything in shadow. The cold hallway air makes me glad for the space heaters that appeared in our bedrooms a couple days ago.
“Wake up your brother,” he says. “We’re going to Lake Moser. And dress warmly. We leave in thirty minutes.”
* * *
• • •
Turns out, there was a small boat hitched to Patrick’s truck. So I guess we are going boating.
Now that we’re here, the sky is just beginning to lighten. The entire lake is surrounded by trees—almost to the water—except for a small parking lot near a dock and restrooms. We get out of the truck while Patrick gets the boat ready, making quick but deliberate movements as he takes off the tarp. He doesn’t look any happier than us to be out here.
Birdie walks over to a bench and puts the hood of his new black jacket up.
“Why are we here?” Birdie asks. “It’s so cold. And it’s a Monday.”
“You’d rather be at school?” I ask.
“No. But I thought that was the big problem with us living at Carl’s. We were skipping too much school.”
“I don’t think that was the only problem.”
I think of last night, when I secretly tried to call Uncle Carl and the phone just rang and rang. The answering machine never even picked up. Which means Uncle Carl unplugged his phone again.
“I’m just saying we need to help Uncle Carl and Rosie. We have to tell her that the fire was an accident. She’ll understand once we explain and then she won’t be mad.” He tugs on the collar of his jacket. “And I hate this stupid jacket. I’m never doing Norman another favor again!”
I’m about to say that I think Rosie’s feelings are more complicated than that when Patrick yells, “Okay, guys! Let’s go!”
Without saying another word, Birdie turns and walks down toward the water. I go too.
The boat is small, just a rowboat with a motor, really, and it’s wobblier than I’m expecting. I grip Patrick’s hand tight so that I don’t fall when I step inside. His arm is completely still. We both help Birdie into the boat, and then Patrick’s inside too, and suddenly the small motor roars to life and we are on our way, moving slowly across the water.
We ride for a while before Patrick cuts the engine. Cold silence follows. Hills of black-looking trees tower around us and there’s the big mountain, covered in snow, looming in the distance. I’m glad I wore my hat and jacket and I hate to say it, but I’m also glad that Birdie’s in the new clothes. Leggings and his purple jacket wouldn’t cut it out here on the water. He’s got a real pair of jeans on, along with a thickly lined jacket and warm hat that goes over his ears.
The boat slowly turns. Patrick takes a thermos out of his bag.
“Hot chocolate. You guys drink that?” He holds the thermos out and says, “You can share. Take it.”
So I do and I offer it to Birdie, but he shakes his head. I take a drink because I feel like my nose might fall off if I don’t take a small sip. As soon as I do, it reminds me of the hot chocolate Birdie and me bought at the bus station.
What a simple thing a bus ride seems now. It was just Birdie and me trying to get home.
But home is gone. We could go there, and the duplex might still be there, but there would be other people living there. Some other older lady, maybe. Next to some other family.
And now the Quesadilla Ship is gone too.
Patrick sips his coffee and looks out onto the lake.
Birdie hunches into a black-and-navy-blue ball and seems to sleep.
I drink the hot chocolate, feeling a little guilty, like I shouldn’t be enjoying it, but the heat goes straight into the center of me and radiates out. I hold the thermos cup under my nose like Uncle Carl does with his coffee in the mornings.
I wonder if Uncle Carl will ever plug his phone in again.
Suddenly, Patrick’s head shoots up. “Look!” he whispers, pointing to the sky.
It’s a bird, a big one, its wings are outstretched and it circles once, twice above us and then flies toward the other side of the lake before swooping down near the water and then into the trees. Its white head surprises me. I know exactly what kind of bird it is, even though I’ve never seen one in real life until today.
“A bald eagle,” I say, still looking at the trees where it disappeared.
Patrick nods.
He gets his fishing rods out. I look behind me at Birdie to see his reaction to the eagle, but he’s still curled up on the seat with his eyes closed.
Patrick casts the two fishing lines into the water on either side of the boat and hands me one. I don’t know what to do with it, so I just sit there, holding it like he does. I look into the trees, which are now turning from black to dark green from the rising sun. Maybe the eagle will come out again.
It reminds me of the first Wolf Day, and that one wild eye and how I stared at the darkness for a long time after it disappeared hoping to see it again.
“Shouldn’t we be in school today?” I ask.
Patrick reels his line in even though it was only out for like two minutes. “Yes, I would prefer you be in school. But it was important to get out of town today. Get some space from everything.”
“You mean space from Uncle Carl?”
He sighs and casts his line out again. “Carl needs some time alone. And it’s not good to be around him right now.”
“Are you sure he doesn’t need our help?”
“He doesn’t need our help, no. It’s not your job to fix him and I want you and your brother to stay away. And, look, it’s not that big of a town. People talk. It’s best for us to not be in the middle of all that at the moment.”
I’m about to remind him that he said running away doesn’t solve anything when I feel the fishing rod twitch. I look down at it and it twitches again and again. Finally Patrick turns around and all he says is, “Reel it in, not too fast.”
And so I do, and then out pops this spotted yellow fish about as long as a ruler.
“A brown trout,” says Patrick, leaning over to help me with the line.
Birdie sits up and rubs his eyes. “You caught a fish?” he asks.
“I caught a fish,” I say, and I suddenly think of the poem Mama used to recite by Elizabeth Bishop called “The Fish.” She liked to say a couple lines of it when we were out at a seafood restaurant and would always do it like she was reading Dr. Seuss even though the lines didn’t rhyme and the poem was actually pretty solemn. The waiters and waitresses always looked confused, which made the whole thing kind of embarrassing but also funny.
I don’t remember the words to the poem, but I do remember that the fish is freed at the end and I ask Patrick if we can throw the fish back. He nods and undoes it from the line and holds it out to me and I take it from him with both hands without even thinking. It’s slick, cold, and weightier than it looks. I hold it for a moment and then lower my hands into the water. The fish slides back in and quickly disappears. All of a sudden I have that rushing, roller-coaster feeling like I had with Krysten at the library, and before I can stop, my mouth opens and speaks.
&nbs
p; “Have you fished your whole life?”
Patrick kind of chuckles and then shakes his head. Maybe it’s what some people call scoffing.
“It was my mama who loved to fish,” he says, still looking down at the water where the trout swam away. “She’d come out to this lake on her own because Dad didn’t like the water and she knew she could be alone out here. She’d bring her coffee and whiskey and these rods. Sometimes me and Carl and our older brother, George, would go with her, but we knew she preferred to be on her own out here. She always came back with something for dinner.”
“You learned how to fish from her, then?”
“The very basics. I try to come out here on her birthday. I don’t really like to fish. It’s a whole lot of waiting around for hardly anything to show for it, but it seems like a good thing to do for her.”
“Is today her birthday?”
“No, but I didn’t go this year on her birthday, so maybe I’m just making up for that.”
He reels in his own line, fiddles with the hook and bait, and then casts it out again.
“Did she ever teach my mama to fish?”
“No. But your mama—she grew up separate from us boys.”
“Because she was a girl?”
Patrick pauses for a second and then says, “Maybe. But I think mostly because she was fifteen years younger than us. So she was separate and always did her own thing.”
I know that he is telling the truth. Even though I didn’t know Mama way back then, I could see how she was completely alien from her family.
Patrick continues, “Her and Carl were sometimes close. But even then, Beth was always going to do what she wanted, and it was me who was expected to pick up the slack when she screwed up or disappeared with friends or some guy.”
He opens his tackle box and the tingly roller-coaster feeling begins to heat up, starting at my toes. Patrick closes the box hard and says, “Just like Carl now—that fire should not have happened. He screws up and now there are pieces to pick up, problems to fix. Neither of them ever seemed to care that I’m the one who has to deal with it. ”
My whole body flushes mad and hot, the roller coaster replaced with a runaway freight train.
I set the rod down and turn away from him with my arms crossed. Birdie is still hunched over with his hood up, but from this angle I can see that he is awake, silently listening to the truth of what we are to Patrick.
**Observation #786: A Wild Animal
A wild animal got into Patrick’s backyard. It ruined the garden.
The rock borders destroyed.
The piles of good kindling & burn wood scattered.
The beds dug up.
Flower bulbs lay in wet dirt, looking like the small moldy onions Mama would throw away after forgetting about them in the bottom of our cupboard.
This morning, Birdie said: Did you see the garden? It’s destroyed. I think a wild animal got in & dug everything up.
I said maybe it was a coyote looking for an old buried rat.
What I didn’t tell him was that after he had gone to bed last night, I went down to get a glass of water & I saw Patrick from the window. He sat on a stump for a long time, frozen.
Then, he exploded in movement, throwing rocks, branches, tools. He slammed the shovel down on the dirt again & again & all of a sudden I remembered Mama doing the same to her own garden once and I got confused, so I took my glass of water back up to the bedroom & shut the door & crawled into bed.
CHAPTER 15
PICKING UP THE PIECES
Yesterday on the boat, Patrick never did say anything else about Birdie and me being problems to fix. He just told me to reel in my line and then he turned the boat’s engine on and steered us back to the dock. He spent the rest of the day in the silo shed until the middle of the night when I saw him destroying the garden.
As he drives us to school, I sneak three looks at him: one at his face in shadow from his hat pulled low, one at his knuckles gripped tight on the steering wheel, and one at his shoulders tensed under his ears. When we get to my school, he only says one thing to me: “No going to Carl’s. You come right back to the house after school.”
And it’s the perfect excuse to avoid hanging out with Krysten, who tries to catch my eye all through class. I know she knows about the fire because of how much she loved Rosie’s truck. But I can’t face her right now. She’ll ask too many questions. Give too much advice.
Still, she follows me out to the parking lot as I speed off, but before she can say anything, I call out over my shoulder, “Sorry. Can’t talk today. My uncle wants me back right away.”
“Okay, but are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I have to get my brother and go home.” I walk through the school gate hoping she won’t follow since she has to wait for her mom.
She stays at the gate, but calls out in a loud voice, “I’ll call you! Maybe there’s something we can do for Rosie and her truck! I want to help!”
I say archipelago, archipelago over and over in my head, but it doesn’t help. The anxiety of having to answer her questions about the fire, and Uncle Carl and Rosie and Patrick, is too much.
I know she’s supposed to be my friend, but how do I add a friend to this kind of life?
Archipelago. Archipelago. Archipelago.
I stop and turn around just before crossing the street. “All right!” I yell to her. “Call me later. But I have to go. Bye!”
She nods and I turn and head toward town.
When I get there, Birdie is already at our meeting place, which is no longer the Quesadilla Ship. Now it’s just a giant asphalt hole. Birdie sits on the curb looking tiny in the truckless spot and I notice he doesn’t have a backpack. He has a plastic grocery bag instead.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Stupid Norman backpack didn’t help anything!” he shouts when he sees me. He stands up and starts walking toward the highway. “Norman and his ugly clothes are becoming a problem.”
“Why?”
He shoves the grocery bag at me as we walk and inside is Patrick’s black backpack with pink paint dumped on it.
“Teddy and his friend Mario did it. I guess they saw me in my outfit at the Quesadilla Ship fire. They said they knew I didn’t like wearing plain colors. So they added the pink for me.”
“Did you tell your teacher?”
“Mrs. Cross-Hams? Yeah, right. Don’t you remember that things always get worse when she’s involved?” He walks quickly and looks back toward town as we cross to the other side of the highway.
We walk along in silence and when we’re about to turn down Patrick’s street, I hear a skateboard and Janet’s voice cuts through the silence of the neighborhood.
“Hey dudes! Hold up!” And suddenly there she is. “Seriously, I leave town for two seconds and all hell breaks loose.”
“I thought you were in Utah visiting your aunt,” I say.
“Yeah, and I’m back now. But who cares about that, seriously, what happened to the Ship?”
“There was an accident,” I say, almost whispering as I think of that first pop and the fire that rose out of the pan.
“No kidding, I can’t believe it. Rosie must be so mad. I swear sometimes it seems like nothing can go right in this town.” She puts a hand on Birdie’s shoulder. “Mr. Bird, where are your sunglasses? I’m disappointed. And really, you guys kind of look like zombies. Why don’t you guys come to the trailer? I have a leftover pizza and you can tell me what happened to the Ship.”
Across the street is Patrick’s house. The driveway is empty, which means Patrick is still at work. Birdie looks up at me and for once he looks excited at the prospect of going to Janet’s.
And to be honest, Patrick’s shoebox is the last place I want to be. A place where we are just someone’s proble
m. Someone’s slack to pick up.
Anyway, who wants to live in a house with a yard all wrecked? It looks worse than it did before he started.
I don’t care about Patrick’s rule to go straight home. I have only one question for Janet.
“What kind of pizza?”
* * *
• • •
We spend the next hour eating warmed-up pizza, playing checkers, and talking about the fire.
“It’s the one crazy thing to happen here and of course I miss it by a couple hours.”
“It wasn’t entertainment,” I say. “It was horrible.”
“Of course! I’m not saying it wasn’t. But you know how it gets here. Like, no one talks about anything except when snow might fall and how long it’s been since it rained. Boring. Have you talked to Rosie?”
“No. She hasn’t answered any of our calls. Neither has Uncle Carl.”
Janet rolls her eyes. “No surprise there, I guess.”
I ignore her jab at Uncle Carl because I know she’s right and it makes me mad and sad at the same time. Because I want Uncle Carl to be reliable. I want him to be better.
It seems like Janet’s trailer is the only place on Earth Birdie and me can just exist.
“So you got back Sunday night?” I ask. “Short trip.”
“Yeah, not short enough.” She gets up and throws her pizza crusts into the trash can, then flicks a pack of cigarettes sitting on the counter. “And look who forgot her cigarettes again, wherever she is.” She takes one out but doesn’t light it. “We got home Sunday night and she immediately disappeared with Ross and hasn’t been seen since. Typical.”
It was Tuesday afternoon. “You haven’t heard from your mom since Sunday night?”
She shakes her head and looks at a lighter, which she spins on the kitchen counter.
Birdie and Me Page 13