by Gae Polisner
“What is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But I think there’s something down there.”
“Exactly,” I told him.
My mom had brought us to the beach that day, but we weren’t supposed to be this far down, on the other side of the seawall, the huge stone wall that keeps our whole town from falling into the sea.
Lukas dropped the stick. “I gotta just find out.”
Slowly, he lowered his hand inside, past his fingers and then up to his wrist. When he couldn’t reach any more, he lowered his whole body onto the sand, and his elbow disappeared, too. He stopped with half his arm still down in the hole, and he looked straight at me.
“I feel something,” he said.
“Be careful,” I told him.
“For sure, there’s something down here.”
I couldn’t much contain my fear, and my excitement. I didn’t offer much help, besides repeating, “Be careful. What is it? What is it? Be careful” over and over.
What grade were we in?
Fourth?
Fifth?
Then suddenly Lukas’s face contorted and twisted. His eyes popped open, then his mouth, and he let out a strangled yelp. With his arm still halfway down into the sand, his body began dancing around, his legs kicking out under him.
I didn’t hesitate. I grabbed on to his other arm, digging my fingers into the material of his jacket, around the skinny bones of his arm, and I heaved myself backward with all the strength I could muster. I pulled and I pulled.
And we both went flying backward. My hat blew off and sailed down the beach.
I never did find that hat again, you know.
We landed on our butts in the cold, wet sand, but Lukas was safe. I had managed to yank his arm out of the hole, and away from whatever horrible thing had caught on to him. I had saved him.
But when I looked up, he was doubled over, laughing. Oh, he was so pleased with himself.
“I hate you,” I yelled at him. Just to make my point. “I’ll never forgive you.” I headed for the stone steps leading back up to our apartment.
Lukas ran after me.
He was way faster.
“I’m sorry, Joy. I’m really sorry,” he said, the happiness still plastered all over his face. “But c’mon. It was a good one, right? You have to admit.”
Yeah, it was a good one. A doozy.
I am smiling now, just thinking about it, even thinking about it in past tense.
Maybe this tree is a heart and this bark is an eye, but there’s definitely a hole, a deep hole in this trunk, and if there ever was something in here, it would have been kept dry and safe, way down deep.
I have to reach really far inside, and it’s hard to touch, but I know I have to.
I know it’s time.
There are moments that change everything. Like the moment with Joy at the front of Mr. Carter’s room in second grade, when our school birthdays collided and I helped give out her tie-dye cupcakes.
Like the moment Mom and Justin and me all laughed at the giraffe-girl-clown, even though Dad was dying, which let us know, somehow, that everything would be all right.
Like Mr. Carter being at B&B’s and wanting me to sit and fish with him so he could tell me about the whale’s-eye tree, because before that story, I wasn’t sure about the pendant or actually being brave enough to tell Joy how I feel.
But now I am.
Now I know everything I’m doing is the exact right thing.
I grab the envelope with her name, and the box wrapped in red construction paper, which holds the note and the gift, and walk quietly out of my bedroom and down the hall.
But when I get to the front door, I stop in my tracks, the breath sucked out of me. There, too, waits a small, little moment that changes everything.
“It’s here. The clue is here,” I whisper to myself.
I feel it with my fingers, and I know what it is before I even pull it out. I feel the edgy tips of the paper, the same as the three others I’ve found. And right on the front, before I can even open it, will be Lukas’s handwriting.
Yup, that’s his handwriting, all right.
You made it to the last clue!
Timberland boots with the word PRO written on orange tabs on the backs of them.
Boots that clump, clump, clumped beside me so many times, going down to the marina to go fishing.
Sitting there by our front door.
Now, I mean.
This minute.
The thing that changes everything, sends my stomach into a knot, is a dumb pair of work boots by the door.
If they were other construction boots, maybe I wouldn’t have even noticed or paid attention or cared. Maybe I’d have thought Mom brought a date home, even though she doesn’t do that very often. Or maybe I would have thought one of Justin’s friends crashed overnight, sacked out on the floor of his room on the far side of his bed.
But the orange PRO means one thing only.
Because Justin and me used to make fun of it.
Him.
Rand.
Wearing those PRO boots. Especially when Justin was mad at him.
“I guess he’s a pro if his shoes say so,” Justin would say. Then both of us would bust out laughing.
He must be here. In Mom’s room. So, I’m not laughing now.
But what if he’s different?
You can’t believe him, Lukas, Justin had said. He lies. Drunks lie. That’s what they do.
But Mom made him swear.
What if that’s the reason he’s back?
He promised.
But I’m not dumb. My brain knows better. And Justin will freak if he sees him here.
I walk to the window that looks down on the parking lot, my whole body shaking with sudden cold.
And, yeah, it’s there. His motorcycle, parked next to Mom’s car.
Anger rises, thick and sour in my throat.
I don’t want him here. Not for her and not for us.
Not if he’s going to leave us again.
Not if he’s going to lie.
I don’t want to be back to the place where people talk about us, about how he gets drunk and yells, and how he and Mom fight. How they can hear the fighting from outside.
But maybe he is different.
Maybe he’s sober.
He wouldn’t come back if he wasn’t.
Still, my legs shake.
My breath comes in short, shallow puffs.
I need to calm down and think.
My brain changes my plans.
I was going to go to Joy’s building and then come back here and wait. Wait for her to text that she’s ready. Wait to meet her at Vincent’s and set out on the hunt with her. But now, instead, I grab my bike and a sweatshirt from the hall closet.
I’ll drop off the clue and hide the gift and then ride out to the dock near the Point.
It’s still super-early. Plenty of time.
I’ll head out on the Angler for a while.
There I can think.
There I can breathe.
Maybe I’ll even make it to Execution Rocks.
That will mean something. Proof I can deal with this all.
I stare at the paper.
Clue #6
I missed two whole clues. I’ll never know what they said.
Lukas, did you send me to Mr. Carter?
I wait for an answer. When I don’t get one, I look down at the paper in my hands.
The world is a circle.
This tree is a heart.
↑ That very last word
Leads you back to the _____.
When you get there, go slow,
Though you won’t miss a clue,
&nb
sp; You may miss the best part
I planted for you.
I read it one more time to make sure I’ve got this right. Make sure I understand.
I do.
I know I do.
I know more clearly than I’ve known almost anything.
I turn around and shout to my sister.
I leave my bike outside and press the code into Joy’s building, and run up the two flights of stairs and down the hall to the Fonsecas’ corner apartment.
The building is so quiet on a Sunday morning at this hour. Sun floods in through the two high windows at each end of the hall.
Only one person walks out into the hallway, to empty a pail down the trash chute. “Good morning,” I say, like I belong here. By now most everyone in this hallway knows me, and wouldn’t care either way.
At the Fonsecas’ front door, my heart races, my brain skipping back to last night. Joy’s voice on the phone.
Okay. I love you.
Or Okay. I’d love you to.
Does it really matter which one?
It could, I remind myself. Because once I do this, it’s over. It’s done. My feelings for Joy will be clear.
Justin’s words from yesterday morning come back to me. Nothing ruins a friendship like declaring your undying love.
But Justin is wrong. She’ll always be my friend. My best friend. And I don’t need to lie, or pretend I don’t feel what I feel.
I slide the envelope with Clue #1 under the door, then wedge the red box with her name, and the note folded inside, into the branches of the fake potted plant outside it.
Once upon a time, there was a tree.
And the tree was a heart.
The world is a circle.
I’m not crazy.
This tree is a heart.
Because Lukas saw it, too, and now I am holding Lukas’s note in my hand, in both my hands, while we speed along Shore Road, with my sister holding fast to the steering wheel.
↑ That very last word
Leads you back to the _____.
When you get there, go slow,
Though you won’t miss a clue,
You may miss the best part
I planted for you.
Well, I’m not sure what that second part is, but that first part can only mean one thing.
To head.
Home.
These are the things we keep hidden under the planks of the old, abandoned dock near the Point:
The Angler, deflated.
Two oars.
Three fishing rods, one of them Chance’s.
The trolling motor.
Two old life vests that Mom made us promise to use whenever we go out (Chance brings his own if there are three of us).
A battery-powered tire pump that Chance gave us to keep here, which is way faster than the bicycle hand pump we had to use before.
I tap my sweatshirt pocket to be sure I remembered the extra batteries, in case. They corrode really fast out here.
I yank and pull, trying to get the Angler up and out of the narrow space, which is harder to do than it sounds, because when Justin is with me, he lifts the dock a little while I pull, but I can’t do that alone. And, also, the last few times we came out here together, we dug the ditch deeper so no one could spot our supplies from up top, accidentally.
When I finally drag it fully out and unfold it, I’m sweating like crazy. An army of spiders and crickets and water bugs skitters away, from where they got shaken from the damp, quiet nooks and crannies of the Angler.
I get that feeling, needing to escape.
Needing to just get away.
I take the stairs two at once.
I don’t have time to dig my key out of my pocket, or wait for Natalia.
I am pounding on my front door.
Anybody home? Let me in.
Inflating the Angler is a piece of cake.
After that, I hook the trolling motor on to the mount Rand made for it, and toss the oars in, just in case.
Overhead, the sun is trying to wake up and break out, but the clouds keep hiding it away.
I chuck one of the life vests in, too, shoving the other one, with the pump, back under the planks, and drag the Angler down the grassy bank toward the water.
There, I trace the edge of the far shore with my gaze, searching for the seven islands in the still-evaporating mist.
Mom would be so mad if she knew I was going out all alone.
I squint to see the lighthouse through the fog as I wade into the surf, give a last tug on the Angler’s rope, and jump in, using an oar to keep shoving us off, away from shore.
I need to do this.
To think.
Even Mom would understand.
It’s like this poster Ms. Picone, our English teacher, had up on her classroom wall last year. It was a picture of a rock jetty leading out to the ocean at sunrise. It said this underneath:
You can’t cross the water by merely standing on shore
and staring out at the sea.
So, I need to cross.
I need to go out to sea.
My dad answers the door. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
I push past him. I feel like a tornado entering the room, not caring what or who I bump into, until I realize I have no idea what to look for.
This is my house. There’s nothing here that I don’t know is here.
Other than the note, the first clue that was in my drawer.
“Jolie?” My mother rushes in from the kitchen. I can smell dinner, my birthday dinner. It’s always the same thing. Each one of us gets our favorite meal on our birthday, and even as we get older, we always pick the same.
Mine is mac ’n’ cheese, peas, and applesauce. But my mother makes it all from scratch, with three cheeses and potato-chip topping. She even makes the applesauce.
“Are you girls all right?” she asks. Natalia is a few steps behind me.
“She’s fine, Ma,” Natalia says. “We just thought Lukas might have…” She hesitates.
I didn’t want anyone to even say his name for so long. I had everyone afraid to talk about him in front of me. But that wasn’t right. It was exactly opposite. You need to talk about a person. Or they will disappear. You need to keep talking about them. That’s how you hold on to them.
By remembering.
“I thought there might be something here for me,” I interrupt. “From Lukas. Something he might have left. Something. Like a present or something?”
I look to my mother’s and my father’s faces.
“Nothing?” Natalia asks.
They both shake their heads.
“Come, sit down,” my mother says. “Tell us what’s going on. Natalia told us you girls were on a treasure hunt of some kind.”
So I tell them.
“A scavenger hunt,” I say. “Lukas made it for me, for my birthday. Last year. I never opened it. You knew we did that, right? All the clues. We’ve been doing it since we were little.”
A paper-clip bracelet.
A rock painted like a polar bear.
A Shrinky Dinks key chain.
“I didn’t know you were still doing it,” my mother says gently. “That’s so wonderful. And the clues brought you here?”
“Yes.” I describe each clue, the first one that I had hidden in my room for a year, then the pizza place, the peacock hat, the tackle shop. Also, the man in the white T-shirt and Mr. Carter. At which point, Natalia jumps in to explain how she made sure I had lunch. Finally, the tree shaped like a heart.
And the last clue.
Exclamation point.
Smiley face.
“I don’t think there could be anything here,” my father says. “Bu
t it was such a terrible morning. So hectic. So sad. Unless there’s something we are forgetting.”
We all remember that day, and slowly we all start taking turns to talk, sharing our memories. The police. What they told us. How hard it was raining that morning. How dark it was outside. The sudden winds that had come up out of nowhere from the east. Severe thunderstorms. A series of lightning strikes reported right over the water where they had found him. They knew what had happened, the police told us as we all sat right here, exactly where we are sitting now.
Past the moored boats, in the middle of the harbor, is the first time I look up again, and out toward the horizon. Before that, I was just watching the white trail of wake water. Now, out here, the islands are coming clearer through the mist.
I say their names aloud because it’s good for focus:
“Pea Island.
“Captain’s Island.
“Execution Rocks.”
I keep going, naming and repeating and searching the horizon, till I make it to the spot where the harbor opens up and flows swiftly out to the Sound.
“David’s.
“Neptune.
“Schultz’s.
“Pine.”
I cut the motor, thread the oars through the holders, and stroke on the starboard side only, making the Angler turn circles so I can take in the whole entire world.
The police had no questions for us. It was more of a condolence call. The other nurses at the hospital where my mother works knew Lukas and I were friends, and they asked the officers to tell us in person.
I remember.
The sound of the wind pounding outside our windows the rest of the morning.
The sound of crying. And that’s when my silence began.
But it feels better to talk now. And to listen. I had no idea how hurt and scared my parents were, not just by my grief, but by their loss, too. They loved Lukas. Of course they did.