Three Bird Summer (11 page)

“No,” I said. It wasn’t really a lie. I hadn’t actually seen Grandma behaving strangely, and I’d never heard her wandering around at night. I only knew about the notes, and Mom hadn’t asked me anything about those yet.

“She did seem better this morning,” Mom said. “She doesn’t even remember the dream now — or whatever it was.” She stood up. “Still, I’m going to call her doctor’s office and set up an appointment for when she gets back home.”

“That sounds smart,” I said, relieved to turn this over to a professional and even more relieved to have the conversation come to an end.

I OVERSLEPT
the next morning. While I pulled on a shirt and shorts, I noticed a new note sticking in the side of the mirror. Had Grandma snuck into my room during the night to put it there? The thought made me shiver.

This time, I didn’t even bother to read the note. I stuffed it into my pocket, grabbed a bagel from the kitchen, and headed outside.

As planned, Alice was waiting for me at the dock, but so was her dad.

“No trips to Superior today, sport,” her father said. “We’ve got a dentist appointment in town at eleven.”

Alice frowned. “Sorry,” she told me. “I forgot. But can we go out for a little while? The quilters are already here, and they’re telling knock-knock jokes!”

Mr. Jensen glanced at his watch, looking amused. “You can take a little spin if you want, but make sure you’re home in forty-five minutes max.”

That didn’t sound like much time.

“What if we met you in town?” I asked her father. “We can dock the canoe at Pullman Park. Then you two can go straight to the dentist from there.”

“Great idea!” Alice said, stepping into the canoe. “More time for paddling, and I won’t have to come back here at all! Sound good, Dad?”

He hesitated. “Well, OK. I’ll meet you at the parking lot. Ten forty-five. You have a clock?”

Alice waved her cell phone at him. This time she wasn’t fooling.

We paddled out toward the middle of the lake. On weekdays, we didn’t have to worry as much about high-speed motorboats blitzing across our path, so we pulled our paddles into the canoe and let ourselves drift. A bald eagle flew overhead, and we watched as it dropped down, talons first, just a few feet away. It emerged with a flopping fish in its grip and flew off to a tall pine tree over on Grandma’s property.

“That eagle knows what he’s doing,” Alice said. “Look at your lakefront. It looks like the Canadian wilderness.”

I nodded. From here, our shoreline trees formed a dense green margin. You wouldn’t have guessed there was a cabin there at all.

“This place is awesome,” Alice said. She bent down and nudged a daddy longlegs off her ankle. It climbed back toward me along the inside of the canoe, then folded itself up just under the gunwale.

“How come your parents bought a house up here?” I asked.

“My mom said she thought it would be good for us. Dad gets so stressed out during the year: he’s a middle-school counselor.”

“Rough,” I said.

“And sometimes school is kind of intense for me, too. But, really, I think she just wanted to have another house to decorate.”

“She likes that kind of thing, doesn’t she?”

Alice nodded. “Antique stores, fabric shops, yard sales . . . She could spend an entire year in places like that.”

We stared at the eagle’s white head above the pine branches, bobbing up and down as it ate its prey.

“So what’s up with your dad?” Alice asked. “Is he ever going to visit?”

“Not this year,” I said.

“He doesn’t like it here?” she asked.

“He likes it pretty much,” I said. “But my parents got divorced last year, so he doesn’t get to come. I was supposed to visit him at some point, but it’s his busy time at work and I didn’t want to leave this place anyway. He gets that.”

“Bummer, though,” Alice said. “About the divorce.”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling like I’d said more than enough on the subject. “Should we go?”

We made our way through an inlet filled with lily pads and over to the grassy bank of Pullman Park. We pulled the canoe under a willow tree, then walked up the hill to a picnic table to wait for Alice’s dad. It was then that I remembered the note from Grandma.

“Look what I got,” I said. “Another note!”

“What’s the latest?” Alice asked with obvious interest.

“I actually haven’t read it yet,” I said.

I unfolded the paper and read it out loud.

“Wow, she’s kind of like a poet,” Alice said.

“You don’t think she’s just losing it?” I asked.

“Maybe that, too,” Alice admitted. “But I still like the way she writes.” She studied the piece of paper. “What was your grandpa’s name, anyway?” she asked.

“Randall,” I said.

“Randall?” Alice asked with surprise. “Randall doesn’t start with a
G
!”

“G?”
I looked back over the note, amazed that I’d missed such an essential detail. “Whoa, you’re right. She wrote
G
not
R
!” I stared at the note, like it was some kind of code that would somehow become legible if I just looked at it long enough. “I must have been thinking
G
for
Grandfather.
But she wouldn’t write that, would she?”

Alice shook her head. “That wouldn’t make any sense. He wasn’t
her
grandfather.”

“At least it’s not an
A,
” I said, relieved. “But who’s G?”

We sat in silent speculation.

“Guess what,” Alice said with a smile. “Granny has a boyfriend!”

“
Had
a boyfriend,” I corrected her. “Remember, she’s writing like she’s in the past.”

“Still,” she said. “She had a secret love! You should ask your mom if she knows who it could be.”

“Maybe,” I said. That didn’t sound like the kind of conversation Mom and I would have.

“Are you going to write her back?” Alice asked.

“What? Who?” I asked.

“Your grandma! You should write her back. She asked for messages,” Alice pointed out.

“No way!” I declared. “I don’t even want to read these anymore. They’re starting to give me the creeps.”

“Oh, come on,” Alice said. “It’s so sweet. And mysterious.”

“Easy for you to say,” I said. “She’s not leaving them in your bedroom!” I folded up the note and stuffed it back in my pocket.

“By the way, don’t feel bad that you didn’t pick up on that clue,” Alice teased. “You didn’t go to Camp Watson.”

“Yeah, yeah, show-off,” I said. “Anyway, can we change the subject? I really don’t want to talk about my grandmother’s love life anymore.”

“I think it’s cute,” said Alice.

“That’s because you’re a girl,” I told her.

“Yeah. So?” she said.

Just then a car pulled into the parking lot. We looked over, thinking it might be Alice’s dad. But instead of the Jensens’ Subaru wagon, it was a shiny SUV. Four high-school girls in sunglasses spilled out, tennis racquets in hand. Three were blond; they all had long, straight hair in ponytails and wore shirts and shorts in pastel colors.

“Ugh,” Alice said.

“What do you mean, ‘ugh’?” I asked. “They look just like you will in a couple of years.”

Alice shot me a look. “Oh, come on.”

“Seriously,” I told her. “You give me all this Camp Watson geek talk. But I bet you’re a total tennis star!”

“What’s wrong with tennis?” Alice said, somewhat defensively.

“Wait — you really are, aren’t you?” I said incredulously. “You’re an all-star, popularity-contest-winning tennis player!” I’d meant to be teasing her, but it hadn’t come out that way.

“I’m not!” she exclaimed. “What are you so worked up about?”

I shrugged. “Every time I see a pack of girls like that — dressed all the same, peering around with their hotshot sunglasses — it creeps me out,” I said.

“I’m not a pack of girls,” Alice said. “I’m just me.”

“I know,” I told her, feeling suddenly foolish. “Sorry.”

Alice looked like she wanted to say more, but just then her father’s car pulled up. “I guess it’s time for my appointment,” she said. “You OK getting the canoe back by yourself?”

“Sure,” I told her. I might not have been any stronger than I was at the start of the summer, but at least I could solo paddle pretty well now. “Have fun with the tooth doctor.”

“Actually, I’m kind of nervous,” Alice said with a grimace. “His name is Dr. Fear.”

“Wah-ha-ha,”
I said in my best ghoul imitation, which made her grin.

They drove off, and I walked back to where we’d left the canoe. I stowed Alice’s paddle and life jacket and then started the long trip home. There wasn’t any wind, and the water was smooth and calm. But it just wasn’t the same canoeing on my own.

THE NOTES CAME
in waves. One morning I’d find two squeezed side by side in the mirror, and another the morning after that. Then a week would pass with nothing. Grandma had a few more confused evenings, but if it hadn’t been for the notes, I might have thought it was just typical old-person stuff. I was tempted to ignore the notes, to toss them in the trash without reading them and pretend that everything was normal. But Alice wouldn’t hear of it. She kept the entire collection, reading and rereading them for clues about who the mysterious G was. I told her to stop wasting her time, that whoever he was, he was an old man by now — maybe just as forgetful as Grandma. Either that or dead. No matter what Grandma wrote in those notes, I doubted she’d actually want to see him now even if she could.

There was only one note I didn’t show Alice right away. I found it in the mirror one night in July after Mom and I returned home late from dinner and a movie in town. Grandma had insisted on staying back at the cabin, saying she’d rather listen to her old records than see a loud Hollywood movie. She was already asleep when we got home.

As usual, the note blended words and ideas together in ways that made no sense to me. Alice always insisted that we just didn’t understand Grandma’s mind well enough — that if we could get inside her memory, the notes would seem much more coherent. But one thing was clear even to me: whoever G was, he wasn’t anything like my tree-felling grandfather. Not so strong? A little shy? G didn’t sound like Paul Bunyan at all. If anything, he sounded like he could have been a dock-sitter.

I tucked the note away in the back of my sock drawer, trying to sort it all out. If Grandma had been so crazy about a shy nature boy, why did she always tell me and my cousins we had to be tough and strong like my grandfather? And was Alice actually right all along about the reason Grandma left the notes in my mirror: did I remind her of this guy, G?

The thought made me a little embarrassed, so it took me a few days to share the note with Alice. When she finished reading it, she said, “Nature boy. Ha!” and gave me a knowing look. But thankfully she left it at that.

Then one day in late July, there came a note that I knew I had to show Alice right away. Sharing it with her would be like handing a dog a rib-eye steak. I made my way over to her place and waited impatiently for her parents to finish doing some work around the yard. As soon as they disappeared inside the house, I handed Alice the note.

Alice’s eyes widened as soon as she hit the magic word.

“Treasure?” she exclaimed.

“
Secret
treasure,” I said.

“What do you think it is? Gold? Jewels?”

I shook my head. “That’s the first thing I thought of, too. But let’s be real. We’re talking about Grandma and her teenage boyfriend, not a pack of pirates. It was probably a book of love poems or something lame like that.”