The Hidden Summer (12 page)

“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 farther 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.

“Thanks,” says Lydia. “But I don’t think this afternoon works.”

“Mom said I could invite you,” he adds, like maybe that was the problem. “She says you can come have lemonade. She makes really good lemonade. It has cherries in it.”

You can tell by his voice that he’s impressed by his mom. Maybe everybody’s impressed by their mom when they’re six years old.

“That sounds great,” says Lydia. “But we’ve got some stuff we’d like to do today.”

“Like what?” he asks, looking back and forth between us.

“Exploring,” I say. “Checking out some things.”

As soon as I say it, I can tell he’d like to come with us. I can see him think about inviting himself along, and I wouldn’t blame him if he did. I’m almost sure I couldn’t turn him down, not with him looking at me with those big eyes. But he doesn’t ask. The hope fades out of his face, and for about a second he looks disappointed. Then the disappointment is gone, and he grins.

“Okay,” he says. “Maybe tomorrow.”

“Maybe,” I say.

“And thanks a ton for finding Saban,” Lydia says.

I can tell she feels a little guilty, too. We don’t really have a set plan for today, although we always wind up exploring one way or another. The truth is that we like being on our own. That’s why we’re here. We came to Lodema to get away from family. And now there’s this whole new family—a family that lives underground in an abandoned house for fish, that is—and they’re sort of invading our space just by being here. It feels like we should set some rules, draw some boundaries. I don’t want to be rude, but I’m not really interested in being best friends with Jakobe. No matter how adorably odd he is. Or how cute and chubby his cheeks are.

He doesn’t seem to need our company anyway. He’s tromping through the grass again, paying no more attention to us than if we were a couple of turtles he thought might be entertaining until we refused to come out of our shells.

“Hey, Jakobe!” I call.

He keeps swishing through the grass. “Yeah?”

“If I were a bird, what would you sing to get me to come to you?”

He stops. “What kind of bird are you?”

“Does that matter?”

“Sure.”

“Mmm, okay. I’m a sparrow.”

“Are you sitting out in the grass, right in the open? Or are you hiding?”

“I’m hiding,” I say. “Under a bush.”

“All right,” he says, narrowing his eyes. “That makes a difference. Some birds are easy—they just want to play. They want to be entertained. The hiders need more than that. They need to know why it’s worth coming out.”

The kid has clearly thought about this.

“Okay,” he says. “So you’re under the bush. You’re a small bird, but fluffy. I can hear you cheeping. . . .”

He swallows a couple of times and leans in closer to me. I feel like he’s about to reach out and touch me even though he’s still ten feet away. Lydia starts to giggle, but I can barely hear her over Jakobe.

“You have soft feathers . . . and small blinky eyes,”
he sings. It’s to the tune of “On Top of Old Smokey,” and his voice is clear and sweet.
“You think you’re safe if you stay in disguise/But you can’t fly if you stay where you are/So come out and see if you can land on a star.”

Lydia’s not giggling anymore. She’s smiling, but it’s a friendly smile.

“I’d come out for that,” I say.

“I don’t think birds can really land on stars,” Jakobe says, “but I also don’t think they know that. It sounds pretty good, doesn’t it, to tiptoe around on one? I bet they’d be fizzy.”

For the rest of the afternoon, I wonder every now and then if Jakobe is singing any birds out of bushes. If you’d asked me a month ago to name some talents, I’d probably have said dancing, painting, sports, baking . . . stuff like that. But out here at Lodema, there are different talents. Jakobe singing animals out of hiding places. Gloria transforming an underground aquarium into a beautiful apartment. Lydia’s coyote howling and bug finding and algae diving.

At first I just thought there were amazing things inside Lodema. I’m starting to realize that, actually, there are amazing things inside of people. Maybe all the wide-open space here makes it easier for those things to come out.

It’s getting harder and harder to come home every day. I’m usually climbing the fence and walking through the Wasteland just as the sun is going down, and as the light disappears, so does life at the golf course. It’s started to feel like my real life, and my life in the apartment is the fake one. The dream one. The apartment is mostly in the dark, with a black sky outside, and Lodema is in bright light all the time. I’m definitely awake there. I can see everything. Things get cloudier at home.

Tonight when I step into the apartment, I see three boxes piled on the kitchen table. That means one thing: board game night. Mom loves board games. Not the word ones, like Scrabble and Boggle, which I usually win. She doesn’t like the strategy ones, either—like Battleship or Labyrinth, which I always win. She likes board games that involve acting or singing or charades or drawing spaceships that everyone thinks are hats. She likes being as silly as possible.

“I never did grow up,” she says, grinning.

“No, Mom,” I say, because I know that’s what she wants me to say.

We play a game where you look at a word, then you draw a picture of that word, pass it to the next person, and that person guesses what the picture is supposed to be. You do that until you’ve passed it all the way around the table, and usually the final guess is nowhere close to the real word. Usually you’d want to play with more people, but we don’t need to because Mom is an absolutely terrible drawer. Seriously. She draws a cow, and you think it’s a spider; she draws pigtails, and you think it’s a squash. Once her word was “lemonade” and Lionel’s best guess was “a baby.”

She’s also a terrible guesser, although I think she’s bad on purpose sometimes.

I pick up the drawing pad and turn to my original phrase.

“This was a piñata.” I show my fairly decent drawing of a hanging piñata and some kids hitting it.

I turn the page. “And Mom guessed . . . a zoo? You guessed a zoo?”

“There are kids looking at an animal,” she says. “A horse. Or a zebra.”

Lionel has already cracked up.