Remember Dippy

by Shirley Reva Vernick

  “I’ll invite Jo, if that’s what you mean,” he said.

  Of course that’s what I meant. “Thanks,” I said. “Call Reed too. We need all the eyes we can get.”

  “We going swimming?” Mem asked when I hung up. “I like swimming.”

  “A quick swim and a look around. C’mon everyone, let’s go.”

  “I’ll wait here,” Leesha said.

  “Why?” Mem asked.

  She fidgeted with her long black skirt, avoiding Mem’s eyes. “I don’t…I don’t have a swimsuit. And I burn easy. Besides, someone should probably stick around in case Johnny’s right about Linguini coming home by herself. You go.”

  I wondered what that was all about, but only for a second. I had other problems to solve.

  • • •

  A bunch of kids, more than usual, were splashing in the water and floating on inner tubes. The lake is really the only place to be when it’s this hot. Most people around here don’t have air-conditioning in their houses, so if you want to cool off, you have to go to the lake. I doubted Linguini would brave a crowd like this, even if she did want to escape the heat, and I promised myself we wouldn’t stay long.

  After a few minutes Mo, Jo, Patsy and Reed straggled onto the beach. Jo was wearing a cobalt blue bikini, and she looked amazing. I looked down at my bare chest and arms and decided I needed to start lifting weights.

  “Hi, Jo! Hi!” Mem grinned.

  “Hi. Hey, I heard about the ring,” Jo said when she reached Mem and me. She didn’t sound mad anymore; maybe it was because Leesha wasn’t with us. “That’s great.”

  “Yeah, Linguini really came through,” I said.

  “Came through what?” Mem asked. “Through the pipes?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Exactly.”

  “I could’ve helped, you know,” Jo said.

  “I thought you were, you know,” I stumbled. “You seemed kind of mad. But you can help us find Linguini now if you want. Did you hear she ran off when—”

  Jo wasn’t really listening anymore—she was gazing off somewhere behind me. I turned around to see what the fascination was. It was Dirk. He sauntered our way, nodded to Jo, and stopped in front of Patsy, who was sitting on her towel applying sunblock. “Hey Patsy,” he said, flashing his teeth at her.

  “Gotta go,” Jo said to us.

  “Jo,” I called when she was already halfway back to Patsy, then I caught up with her. I wanted to tell her she could hang out with us. That Dirk was a fool. That Patsy didn’t need a wingman. That she was allowed to have her own fun. What I ended up saying was, “I like your nails.”

  “Thanks,” she smiled. “Well, see ya.”

  I stood there for a minute, unsure of what had just happened between Jo and me. I mean, one minute she wants to talk, and the next minute she’s running off. Was I missing something here? Saying the wrong things? Not saying the right things?

  “You going in?” I heard Patsy ask Dirk.

  “Uh huh,” he said. “I’m training for the Habitat for Humanity triathlon over in Wilston. I’m gonna swim across the bay and back now.”

  “Across the bay? That’s gotta be half a mile each way. How can you do that?” Patsy asked, all syrup and smiles.

  “Easy. Every time I kick, I pretend it’s my father’s head. Same trick I use when I’m dribbling a ball. Wanna come?”

  “I don’t think so. We’re landlubbers, right, Jo?”

  “Okay,” he said, “maybe I’ll see you on the flip side then.”

  I thought Dirk was selling Jo and Patsy a story. Really, Dirk Dempster doing a fundraising event for charity? No way. Besides, Dirk might be a star on the basketball court, but he was no big swimmer. He was snookering the girls into thinking he was some kind of ironman. So I kept an eye on him, figuring he’d wait till we weren’t looking and then split for the hammock in his backyard. Even when he walked straight into the water and swam away, I assumed it was part of an act. But when he got out so far he disappeared from sight, I decided he was really going to do it. What a show-off. All he wanted was an audience. Well, what I wanted to know was, what gave him the right to spend the day impressing the girls when Linguini was still missing? This was his fault, and he should’ve been helping us look for her.

  At that point Mo was calling out, “Last one in’s a rotten golf ball!”

  Mo was right—it was time to get wet. Mem and I threw down our towels and ran with Mo and Reed into the water, which wasn’t as frigid as it was the last time but was still plenty cold. Jo eventually came in up to her knees but only lasted a few minutes. After about half an hour of water war, handstand contests, and nerf catch with the guys (Mem mostly just watched and splashed around), we were all starting to lose the feeling in our feet, so we raced for our sun-toasted towels.

  “Let’s lie out for a while,” Patsy said as the rest of us dried off.

  “You just did lie out,” Mo said. “You want to wait around for Dirky Boy to get back, that’s all.”

  “Do not,” she insisted. “He’ll be gone for hours. I just like it out here.”

  “I’ll hang with you,” Jo said.

  “No way,” said Mo. “You promised you’d help look for Linguini. This is an all-hands-on-deck situation.”

  Way to go, Mo, I thought. Searching for Linguini was about to get a lot more interesting. Heck, doing dishes would be interesting as long as Jo was there.

  Patsy frowned over her sunglass rims and whined, “Jooooo.”

  “It’s the only way he’ll let me use his sleeping bag next week,” Jo said. “You do want to go camping, don’t you?”

  I watched Patsy staring down Jo and Jo looking torn, and I knew what I had to do. “Never mind about Mo,” I told Jo. “You can use my sleeping bag, no strings. We’ll be all right without you.”

  Jo seemed surprised. She peered at me with a half smile and a look of…something. “C’mon,” she said to Patsy, “it’s starting to cloud up, anyway. Let’s find the ferret.”

  Sweet. Maybe there was hope for Jo and me yet.

  “Let’s find the ferret! Let’s find the ferret!” Mem hooted, marching in place. “The ferret!”

  “Fine,” Patsy sighed, pushing her shades back up her nose. And so it was settled.

  After all that negotiating, it only took us a few minutes to scour the beach, where the only critters were a couple of seagulls, so we tied our towels around our waists and walked barefoot back to the house. Mem, eager to see if Linguini had made it home by herself, ran ahead of us. I started thinking about whether it was worth losing Linguini to get Niko’s ring back. Then I remembered that it wasn’t Niko’s ring that did this; it was Dirk. I wanted to tell Patsy she was crazy to give him the time of day. I wanted to tell Jo to stop wasting her time with the two of them. But I didn’t. I just kept walking.

  When we got to the house, we found Leesha sitting on the porch steps eating an orange Popsicle while The Weather Channel hummed through the screen door.

  “I’ve brought reinforcements,” I said. “Now we can spread out.”

  Leesha wiped an orange drip off her chin. “Dirk’s the one who should be spreading out. What’s his problem, anyway?”

  Patsy’s eyes narrowed. “For your information, Dirk’s in training, and right now he’s swimming across the bay.”

  Leesha rolled her eyes.

  “Hey,” I said, “you two haven’t even met. Leesha, this is Patsy. She’s Dirk’s friend.”

  “Friend?” Leesha said. “You actually talk to that, that…”

  “That what?” Patsy demanded.

  I was afraid this was going to turn really nasty, but then Mem appeared in the doorway and interrupted the skirmish.

  “That’s bad,” he said through the screen. “What’s bad?” Leesha asked.

  “Dirk. Swimming. There’s gonna be a storm. Unexpected strong winds moving in quickly from the Northeast, bringing torrential rains and severe lightning, with flash flooding in low-lying areas,” he quoted The Weather Channel.
“Dangerous riptides may develop. Marty the Meteorologist says stay away from water when there’s lightning, or you could get hurt.”

  Torrential rain? Severe lightning? Riptides? Dirk was probably in the middle of the bay by now. Even if he noticed the sky turning, he might not be able to get to shore in time, especially if he got caught in a riptide. He was a jerk all right, but we’d be even bigger jerks if we didn’t do something to help him. He could die out there.

  The first roll of thunder boomed overhead. Mem practically jumped into my arms.

  None of us said anything for a long moment. Finally Patsy moaned, “No—oh no, it can’t storm. It can’t.” Jo hugged her then.

  “All right, let’s not just stand here,” I said. “I’ll run over and tell his parents.”

  “No,” Patsy said. “His dad’s out of town somewhere, and his mom’s at work.”

  “Well, where does she work?” I asked.

  “I, I don’t even know,” she spluttered. “I just don’t—wait, Dirk said she works at a—I don’t know—an art supply store or something. In Potsdam.”

  “All the way up there?” I said. “That’s forty-five minutes away.”

  Everyone started talking at once until Leesha, who had the loudest mouth in the group, shouted, “Stop it! We’re wasting time. Someone needs to call the police.”

  That seemed obvious once she said it, so I ran inside and called 911 for the first time in my life. The dispatcher asked me a hundred questions. I couldn’t answer most of them—like, where to reach Dirk’s parents. But I did know the exact point Dirk started from and the approximate time he set out, which the dispatcher said was helpful. I gave him Dirk’s address and my name and a bunch of other information, and he said they’d get a rescue crew right out. As I hung up, a jagged streak of lightning flashed past the window.

  Before we knew it, the rain hit. The lightning grew dazzlingly bright, the thunder ear-splittingly close. We huddled around the kitchen table, listening to the powerful sounds outside, wondering about Dirk and about Linguini too. Patsy stared unblinking out the window at the thick daggers of electricity ripping the sky. We all knew what she was picturing, and there was nothing we could say to make it better, so we didn’t say anything. Mem sat rigid in his chair, his hands twitching frantically, as if each finger had a life of its own. “Torrential rains and severe lightning, flash flooding and dangerous riptides,” he muttered again and again. I wanted to divert him from his worries, but it was pointless. Our imaginations were raging like the storm.

  Finally, Mem’s hands stopped twitching. He pushed back his chair, stood up and, without a word, started walking out of the room.

  “No, Mem, no disappearing,” I said. “Not today.”

  “I’m just gonna check on Jambalaya,” he replied. “Thunder scares her…scares them both.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Leesha said and followed him upstairs.

  The rest of us stayed at the table for a while, but the silence between us was suffocating, so I said, “C’mon, let’s turn on the TV.” We went to the living room and tried watching Pet Star, but the storm had ruined the reception. Instead, Mo and Reed settled into an Air Angler match, and Jo and Patsy sank like stones on the couch while I tried to lose myself in a magazine. We must have looked like a bunch of grim statues when Aunt Collette unexpectedly walked in a while later, dripping with rain.

  “Aunt Collette, what are you doing home?” I asked.

  “Remember called,” she said. “Come on, we’re going to the lake. I can take up to five of you.”

  “The lake—why?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, pulling off her drenched sweatshirt. “I just feel like that boy should have someone there, someone who isn’t a total stranger. And if his folks can’t be there, I will. Now, who’s coming?”

  I wasn’t sure that made sense, and yet it seemed like a good idea. Mo and Reed volunteered to stay behind, so Mem, Jo, Patsy, Leesha and I crowded into the car and, with the wipers beating a breakneck rhythm on the windshield, made our way to the lake. A fire truck and an ambulance were parked there, and we could just make out the rescue boat on the lake. Aunt Collette turned off the car and squinted out the window.

  “Now what?” Leesha asked.

  “Now we wait,” said Aunt Collette.

  “I hate waiting,” said Mem.

  “Me too,” I said. I’d never seen the lake this rough—choppy, churning—or this black. The whole sky ignited with the lightning. The rain pelted the car so hard it muffled the thunder. What if Dirk couldn’t stay afloat out there? What if he got struck by a zillion volts of electricity?

  After a while, Aunt Collette turned on one of her Dixie Chicks CDs. Every song felt like an hour, and the next hour felt like a week. Then something happened.

  The rescue boat stopped. A man in a wetsuit jumped out of it. We lost sight of him in the waves, so we couldn’t tell what he was doing. All of us pressed against our windows, but it was no use—we couldn’t see what was going on, not until he climbed back onto the boat with the help of the other man on board.

  “He-he’s alone,” Patsy spoke just loud enough to hear. “Why is he alone?”

  No one answered her.

  “If he went into the water, he must have spotted Dirk,” Patsy said frantically. “Why doesn’t he have Dirk?”

  “Wait, look,” said Jo, pointing out the window. “They’re leaning over the bow. They’re pulling on something. A rope.”

  Hand over hand, the men dragged on the rope. Finally, we could see that there was a person on the other end of it, a person who had to be Dirk. The men hoisted the drooping body onto the boat and lay it on the deck. Then they knelt down, and we couldn’t see any of them any more. Patsy started to cry, and so did Jo.

  Mem cleared his throat and asked, “Is he…?”

  …dead? Could Dirk Dempster be dead? It didn’t seem possible. I saw him alive just a few hours ago. People aren’t supposed to die before they get to high school. They’re supposed to live long enough to get their first car, travel the world, have grandkids. They’re supposed to be old and crotchety when they die. Not young. Not my age.

  “I don’t know, sweetheart,” Aunt Collette told Mem. “They might be doing CPR or something on him.”

  “CP what?” he asked.

  “They might be trying to help him breath, is what I mean,” she said. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  “I hate waiting,” Mem said.

  We didn’t have to wait long. In a few minutes, the boat started moving toward shore, and as it did, one of the men helped Dirk sit up.

  He was all right!

  Patsy burst into harder tears, and we all cheered. I never thought I’d be so happy—or happy at all—to see Dirk, but I was, and, funny thing, I somehow couldn’t wait to tell Mr. Boots all about it.

  “I think we’ve just witnessed a miracle,” said Aunt Collette, starting the car back up. “Come on, let’s go home.”

  • • •

  We were all back in the living room, all except for Aunt Collette, who went back to work, when a police cruiser turned into the Dempsters’ driveway. We crowded around the window just in time to see the back door open and a bare foot poke out. The foot was attached to a soaked, slumped Dirk Dempster. Sluggishly, the rest of his body emerged. He was wrapped in so many blankets he could barely move, but he was moving.

  Two cops escorted Dirk inside his house and stayed with him until Mrs. Dempster pulled in about twenty minutes later, at which point the storm was lifting. She screeched into the driveway, and when she shot out of her car, all we could see was a yellow streak as she hurtled into the house in her rain slicker.

  “I wonder if his parents know about his lake-swimming habit,” Mo said.

  “I wonder if he’s ever even tried it before,” pondered Reed. “I bet he was just showing off.”

  “I wonder what his parents are gonna do to him,” I said. “My mom would strangle me.”

  Patsy shudde
red.

  “What I wonder,” said Leesha, her forehead pressed against the window, “is if Dirk’ll ever find out.”

  “Find out what?” I asked.

  She pinched her lips together. “That we’re the ones who got him rescued. That Mem’s the one who figured out he was in danger.”

  Wow, now there was a good point. I didn’t care one way or the other whether Dirk himself found out, but I definitely wanted his dad to know. That would be TJ’s ticket to a zoning variance—and to staying in Hull! I had to make sure Mr. Dempster learned about Mem’s heroics, and if that meant telling him myself, I would. I’d do anything to make Mr. Dempster realize he owed us a big favor.

  As I thought my happy thoughts, I noticed Mem gazing glumly out the window. I knew what he was thinking: Linguini had never felt a raindrop in her life, much less a storm like this. “Anyone want to try the TV again?” I asked in a last-ditch effort to distract him.

  “How about the shopping network?” Mem suggested.

  “I didn’t know you watched that,” I said.

  “Don’t. But tired of the weather today.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “The storm’s over. Things are looking up. It’ll be okay.”

  He gazed at me like he wasn’t sure I was telling the truth. I wasn’t sure either. I mean, could we really expect a second miracle? More wait and see, I guess.

  Chapter 13

  Things nose-dived later that night. My bedroom ceiling sprung a pack of leaks from the rain. I woke up around 3:00 a.m. to a waterlogged blanket and the spatter of water dripping on my duffle bag. I padded across the soggy rug and trudged downstairs to try to get some shut-eye on the couch, but Aunt Collette had beat me there so I ended up on the living room floor. Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep. When Mem came down at the crack of dawn and turned on the TV, I crawled into his bed until Aunt Collette had to leave for work.

  The rest of the day was pretty wretched too. Mem and I traipsed up and down the drizzly, worm-strewn street a thousand times calling for Linguini. Every time we passed Dirk’s house, I wanted to pound on his door and tell him to get out here and help us. He owed it to us, to Linguini, to Mem.