The Hidden Summer

by Gin Phillips

  “No,” I say quickly. “We go home at night.”

  “So your parents know you’re here?”

  “Umm,” I say.

  “Errrrr,” says Lydia.

  Gloria studies us. “So you’ll be staying for how long?”

  “For the summer,” says Lydia.

  “Well, welcome to the neighborhood,” says Gloria. “Would y’all like to see our place?”

  “You mean your putt-putt hole?” asks Lydia.

  “Same thing,” says Gloria.

  We’re confused and a little suspicious, but she seems friendly enough. Even sort of charming. And what are we going to say? No, we do not want to see how you’ve been living right next to us in underground aquariums without us even knowing? Yeah, right.

  We follow her out the door, and she makes small talk as we walk. She points out the bird nest at the top of an old light pole, and she tells us that the sprinklers come on every night at ten minutes past midnight. She has no idea why there are still sprinklers when there’s no one around to pay the water bill. But if we’re looking to take a good shower, she says, ten minutes after midnight is the time to do it.

  We come to the stairs leading down into Hole Nine, and, even in the afternoon sun, I can see a faint glow from the bottom. At our feet, I see the small curved shapes of the three openmouthed fish. As I watch the back of Lydia’s head bob down the stairs in front of me, it occurs to me that this could be some sort of trap. Gloria could have anyone down here waiting for us, hiding in the shadows and ready to spring. It would have been smarter to bring Saban. He’s a nuisance, but he knows when strangers are around.

  But the bottom of the stairs looks exactly as we remember it—empty aquariums, some bits of coral inside, lots of dust on the glass, and those painted symbols. I can’t see any signs of life. No criminals hiding in wait. No snakes weaving in and out of human skulls. Also, no beds or blankets or anything like furniture.

  “You stay down here?” Lydia asks Gloria.

  “Not exactly right here.”

  Lydia has stopped by the painted symbols again. She runs her finger over the purple circles. “Did you paint these symbols?” she asks. “Do you know what they mean? Is there something below us? Did there used to be tadpoles down here?”

  Gloria cocks her head like she can’t decide what to make of Lydia. Teachers sometimes give Lydia that same look—when she answers a question in class, she usually shouts out three or four answers at once, just to make sure she gets the right one.

  “I painted them,” says a voice behind us, and I know it’s Jakobe before we turn around. “And they’re not tadpoles.”

  He’s standing behind us, leaning against the glass. He’s got a half-eaten apple in one hand.

  “You painted the same signs on the tree where we climb into Lodema, didn’t you?” I ask, even though I’m sure of the answer. “And you did the chalk drawing on top of the castle.”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “So what do they mean?” asks Lydia.

  “I paint the best things,” he answers. “My favorite things about here. The green means rolling down the hills, and the purple is the blackberries, and the blue is the sprinklers at night.”

  “Why those things?” I ask.

  He takes a bite out of his apple. “Because they’re my favorite. What else would you paint?”

  I study Gloria again, her old jeans and clean gray T-shirt, and her eyes with smile crinkles in the corners. I notice that Jakobe’s wearing the same Chicago Bulls shirt he was wearing the other day.

  “You’re . . . homeless, aren’t you?” I say.

  Gloria shakes her head. She has silver earrings with little silver feathers dangling from them. They make a sound like bells.

  “We’ve just hit a rough patch,” she says. “We’ll be leaving soon.”

  “We could stay here forever,” says Jakobe hopefully.

  “I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” Gloria says. “But a golf course isn’t quite the same as a house. Now come on, girls, you haven’t met the whole family yet.”

  She turns and walks to the second set of stairs, the ones we’d used to exit the aquariums and climb back aboveground.

  “I think Lodema is much better than a house,” I whisper to Jakobe. He looks pleased.

  Instead of walking up the stairs, Gloria walks around them and stops at a dark corner, where I see nothing but shadow. She reaches toward the wall—at least it looks like a wall—and with a small movement of her hand, she opens a door. Soft light pours out of the door, and we hear someone say, “You back, Mom?”

  “It’s me,” Gloria says. To us she explains, “This is an old maintenance entrance. When they needed to clean the tanks, they’d drain the water and then the cleaning crews could go in through this door.”

  She steps inside the door, and we’re right behind her. As soon as we step through the doorway, we’re surrounded by aquarium glass again.

  When we first came down here, we thought we were looking at two aquariums, one on our left and one on our right. But they aren’t two separate aquariums at all. It’s one big U-shaped aquarium—the two sides we can see from the staircases are joined by a glass tunnel that runs behind the walls. This back section is completely shielded from view.

  Unlike in the exposed parts of the aquarium, there’s no dust and trash back here. The floors are swept clean. There’s a sofa, a little refrigerator, and a couple of lamps. The orange glow of the lamps reflect off the glass walls. There are three twin mattresses with blankets and pillows on them. Against the back wall, the glass is wallpapered in posters. It’s square after square of pictures—the Eiffel Tower, an astronaut on the moon, a hummingbird drinking from a flower, a tiny island in the middle of a turquoise ocean, New York City, Mohammed Ali, a baby dressed up like a flower. It doesn’t look like you would expect a bunch of random stuff thrown together underground to look. It’s colorful and warm and cozy.

  “This is our place,” says Gloria. “Nell and Lydia, this is my daughter, Maureen.”

  One corner of a wall has a spigot on it, the kind where you could attach a garden hose. There’s a girl washing a dish in the stream of water. She stands up and grabs a towel as we walk in. She’s tall and thin and looks like she’s in high school.

  “Hey,” she says. “So you’re the girls Jakobe met at the clover patch. Mom said she was going to see if she could find you.”

  She walks over to us, flipping her short black hair out of her eyes. It’s cut like a boy’s, but with loose curls that flop over her forehead. Her skin is very pale and smooth like a piece of drawing paper.

  “Nice to meet you,” I say. “It’s really cool down here.”

  Maureen shrugs. “Mom’s good at decorating. She can always make something out of nothing. And that’s pretty much what we’ve got.”

  “We’ve got lots of stuff, Maureen,” says Jakobe with a frown.

  His sister ignores him. “How long have you guys been coming here?” she asks us.

  “About three weeks,” I say.

  “Why?” she asks, a little bit of a challenge in her voice.

  “Because we like it,” says Lydia, a little bit of annoyance in her voice.

  I jump in before Lydia can say anything else. “So how long have you been here?”

  “Too long,” Maureen says. “Since March.”

  “I don’t think it’s too long,” says Jakobe.

  “And it’s not permanent,” says Gloria.

  “It feels like it,” says Maureen.

  First of all, every time Maureen says something, there’s something about the tone of her voice that isn’t exactly rude, but it’s, well, not quite friendly, either. Second of all, I get the feeling this is a conversation that the three of them have had plenty of times already. I see Gloria give Maureen a warning look, a sort of be-nice-while
-the-guests-are-here look.

  Maureen turns back to us. “How old are you anyway?”

  “I’ll be thirteen in October,” I say.

  “So you’re twelve,” she says. “That means you’re twelve.”

  I feel Lydia tense up beside me, and I suddenly know exactly how to describe the tone in Maureen’s voice. It’s like at the end of every sentence, she’s silently adding “and you’re probably an idiot.” Gloria is flashing the warning look again. I know Lydia is close to calling Maureen an idiot (or something worse) out loud—Lydia’s not big on patience. But I keep my tone cheerful. I am the salesclerk announcing something over the intercom; I am the hostess at the restaurant asking how many people will be at your table.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Twelve. How old are you?”

  “Seventeen. I’ll be a senior in the fall,” she says. And you’re probably an idiot.

  “I’ll be in first grade,” says Jakobe, tapping my arm. His finger is sticky from the apple. “I won’t have to take naps anymore.”

  I’m glad Jakobe is here. He has better conversation skills than his sister. But something happens to Maureen’s face when she looks toward Jakobe—it gets softer. Her mouth relaxes and the wrinkles in her forehead go away. For the first time since we walked in, she smiles.

  “You never took naps even in kindergarten,” she says.

  “I had to fake them,” says Jakobe. “Fake naps are worse than real naps. More boring.”

  “Jakobe is a man of action,” says Gloria. “You might have noticed.”

  Jakobe shrugs like he is very aware that he’s a man of action. He takes a few steps and hops on the sofa, tucking his feet under him. He seems very comfortable there, very at home. Part of me is impressed by what they’ve built here. And part of me, I admit, is disappointed that somebody else came up with the idea of living on a golf course. I thought I’d been really original.

  “How did you pick this place?” I ask Gloria.

  “I used to come play putt-putt here when I was a teenager,” she says. “I lost my job at the beginning of this year, and after a while, we couldn’t pay the rent anymore. It was a, well, stressful time. Somewhere around then it seemed like checking out the old golf course might be a fun break from, well . . .”

  “Life,” Maureen interjects.

  Gloria laughs, and it’s a pleasant, startling sound. It makes you want to laugh, too.

  “Life,” she agrees. “I brought the kids here one day, and we sneaked in to see what had happened to the place. A little adventure. And the more we snooped around, the more I started thinking that this could be a lot better than sleeping in our car at night. A free place to stay until I can find us something better.”

  “And that is how we came to live in an aquarium,” says Maureen, but the corner of her mouth is turning up now.

  “An awesome aquarium,” says Jakobe.

  “Couldn’t you get in trouble for being here?” asks Lydia. I do not think it’s one of her sharper questions frankly. We could all get in trouble for being here.

  Maureen sort of snorts and opens her mouth to answer, but Gloria puts a hand on her daughter’s arm before she says anything.

  “Actually, the possibility of getting in trouble is one reason I came looking for you,” says Gloria. “To get you to be more careful.”

  “She means that you need to quit stumbling around all over the place in the broad daylight,” says Maureen. “Making noise. Coming and going all the time. You’re going to blow everything.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I say.

  “I mean you’re going to ruin this for us,” says Maureen.

  “Maureen . . . ,” warns Gloria.

  “They will, Mom,” she says. “I may not want to live here, but it’s all we’ve got.”

  “Hey, you’re the ones who came to find us,” says Lydia. “We didn’t even know you were here.”

  “You’d already run into Jakobe,” says Gloria. “You were bound to figure out we were here.”

  “But why would that matter?” I ask. “Why are you so worried?”

  “There are occasionally maintenance people here for fallen trees or power lines or sewage system problems,” Gloria says, running a hand through her hair and making it stand up like a hedgehog’s. “Sometimes people from the city check out the property. You’re right out in the open, and there’s always the chance you’ll get caught. If that happens, we don’t want you to lead them to us.”

  “We don’t want to get caught, either,” I say.

  “But if you get caught, you just go back home,” Maureen says. “If we get caught, it’s much more complicated.”

  Once again, silence. And more silence. I think I hear a single cricket playing a little tune somewhere in the aquarium.

  CHAPTER 12

  OUR DOG IS SERENADED

  At first it seemed like packing bathing suits had been wishful thinking. Most of the ponds here are disgusting—muddy brown with a thick scum of algae over the surface. We call one Dead Man’s Lake, another one Mucous Lake, and a third one Mutant Alligator Lake. (The best fishing is at Mutant Alligator.) But the fourth pond, over by Hole Twelve, is pretty and pale green and free of algae. Go-for-a-Swim Lake. As you wade in, you feel soft moss squishing between your toes, but the water itself is clear in your hands.

  Lydia and I are doing the backstroke side by side. The sun is baking our faces. I feel a fish brush my leg as I kick.

  “I’m going to touch the bottom,” Lydia says.

  She dives, and I watch her turn into nothing but a white-ish blur underwater. When she comes back up, she’s holding a clump of dark green from the bottom of the pond. I liked it better when I didn’t know what the algae actually looked like up close.

  I float on my back while she treads water, and for a while, the only sounds are splashing. I think Saban is chasing grasshoppers. We haven’t seen anyone else out here for a couple of days.

  I think about how if we actually lived on the golf course, we could take baths here. I’d bring shampoo and conditioner, and the suds would float across the pond. I don’t think the fish would mind much. It would be a huge, mossy bathtub. But at the moment we just swim and dive and feel the tiny silver fish weave around our legs.

  Our feet get filthy as we tiptoe back onshore—the mud seeps between our toes and the grass sticks to our wet skin.

  “Wanna splurge today?” Lydia asks. “A bag of chips? All I have is peanut butter and jelly and an apple from home. Mom needs to go to the grocery store.”

  The longer we’ve been here, the more free food we’ve found. The blackberry bushes are nearly done blooming, but we’ve found a couple of plum trees and a half dozen fig trees. And there’s always the fish, of course. It’d all be enough to live on, really, even if we didn’t have supplies from home. We’d get sick of fruit and fish, but we could do it. If we needed to. When you think about it, we’d have everything we need here—food, water, a place to stay. It would be possible.

  But Lydia’s right—chips do sound good. Better than figs.

  We usually treat ourselves to some gas station snacks once or twice a week. I’ve seen the cool girl at the cash register once more. Her name is Alexia. That’s all I know. Last time she was wearing earbuds and suggested I listen to something called “Disco Inferno.”

  “Where’s Saban?” Lydia asks, pulling on her shorts.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  We call for him, and, of course, he’s nowhere to be found. I swear, there’s a part of me that thinks I should have written that Camp Elegant Earth would not allow dogs.

  We call him again and again, listening for any sign of him—a bark, a rustle in the weeds, a splash in the pond. Lydia yells that she’ll give him a treat, and even that doesn’t bring him running. We wander for five or ten minutes, starting on the bank of the pond and working our way far
ther out into the bushes and the willows and oaks.

  “Saban!” Lydia calls again. “Saban! You want a bone?” (She doesn’t actually have a bone, but Saban doesn’t know that.)

  We keep walking and calling. Briars tear a long scratch up the side of my calf, and I watch a thin line of blood appear. Mosquitoes have discovered the back of my neck, and they think it’s delicious. I slap at them again and again, but more keep coming. All of a sudden we hear barking, then growling. Then what seems like singing. I look toward the sounds, and through the trees, I see Jakobe’s dark head. I hear him laugh and, as I make my way closer, he turns toward me. He has a white puffball in his arms.

  “You want him back?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “How’d you catch him?”

  “I sang to him,” he says.

  “You what?” I ask.

  Lydia ducks under a tree branch and runs over to Saban. Jakobe hands him over, and she kisses the top of his furry head before she glares at him. “Bad dog!” she says. “No treats. No treats.”

  “He wouldn’t come to us at all,” I say to Jakobe. “What did you sing to him?”

  He shrugs and takes a breath. When he starts singing, it’s the tune to “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” but he’s changed the words.

  “Come here, little dog, come over to me/

  I will scratch your belly good and teach you archery.”

  “Archery?” I ask.

  “Dogs like rhymes,” he says. “A lot of animals do. I can get birds and squirrels to come to me, too. Not cats, though. They aren’t musical.”

  He’s kind of an odd kid.

  “What are you doing out there?” I ask. “Just singing to animals?”

  “Nope,” he says. “I was looking for you two. Do you want to come over to our place and visit? It’s nice and cool. You don’t sweat at all in the aquarium.”

  Lydia and I look at each other, then back at Jakobe. He looks hopeful. I bet he gets bored out here all by himself, no other kids around.