Three Bird Summer (8 page)

“Wait! Wait!” a high, quavering voice called out. We looked up to see Mrs. Jensen trotting down the path from the house with a cloth grocery bag in her arms. She was breathless when she reached us. “I packed you kids a little picnic. I thought you might get hungry out there.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Alice said grudgingly.

“Yeah, thanks, Mrs. Jensen,” I said.

Mr. Jensen stowed the bag between me and Alice — underneath the thwart, the wooden bar that spanned the canoe in front of my seat. “There,” he said. “I think you’re set. Do you have your cell phone?” he asked Alice.

Alice patted the pocket of her shorts. “Right here. See you guys later.”

Taking her cue, I shoved off the dock.

“Good-bye! Have fun! Be safe!” her parents called as we made our way across the water.

I chose the shoreline route to start us off so we’d be out of their sight as quickly as possible. Unfortunately this meant passing my cabin again, which put me at risk of a sighting and an interrogation from Mom and Grandma when I got back. But if they had their noses pressed up to the windows as we paddled past, I couldn’t tell.

Neither of us said anything till we had rounded the bend, away from the docks and our families. Then Alice sighed and twisted around to face me. “Sorry,” she said. “My parents can be so embarrassing.”

“No problem,” I said. It had hardly been worse than when she’d met my Grandma.

“I wonder if you can justifiably complain that your parents love you too much,” she mused.

A pair of blue damselflies whirred past my shoulder and came to rest on top of Alice’s paddle. She held the paddle aloft and watched them linger there. When they flew off, she continued paddling.

“Do you think?” she asked.

“What?” I asked dumbly.

“That parents can actually love you too much?”

I hesitated. It wasn’t something that I had ever thought about before. My brain felt blank, and it occurred to me that Alice was moments away from realizing that I was a complete dud.

“I mean, do
your
parents love you too much?” she asked. “In that squeezy, suffocating, we’ll-have-a-fit-if-you-break-a-fingernail kind of way?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.” My parents didn’t seem to love me too much or too little. They were just . . . parents.

“You’re lucky, then,” Alice said. She gave a few especially strong strokes of her paddle, and we sped across the water. “God, I wish I had a brother or sister.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Do you have any siblings?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Where’s your dad?”

“Back in Chicago.”

She looked over her shoulder. “You don’t talk much, do you?”

I shrugged uncomfortably. Alice was turning out to be even chattier than my mom.

“Where are we headed, anyway?” she asked me cheerfully, as if she couldn’t wait to get started on a big adventure.

What I wanted to say was “How about home?” But I wasn’t brave enough to say that. Instead, I mumbled, “Wherever you want.”

She thought for a moment. “Can we paddle up the Potato River?” she asked. “I’ve heard it’s amazing. And I wouldn’t mind being away from my parents all day.”

The Potato River? Gone all day?

“OK,” I said reluctantly. This was going to be the longest day of my life.

I pulled the paddle into a draw stroke and got us turned back toward the middle of the lake. The wind felt stronger in this direction. By the time we were in the middle of the lake, the waves were sloshing against the side of the canoe, and we had to paddle with effort. It was exciting but daunting, too. I wondered if Alice and I were experienced enough to be out here on our own after all.

Once we reached the other side of the lake, the wind and waves quieted down and we could relax again. We slowly approached the marshy entrance to the river, where cattails grew in dense clumps, and the spaces between were covered with a mat of lily pads.

“Where do we go from here?” Alice asked. A canoe didn’t need much water to get through, but it was still important to choose the right route. Otherwise you’d end up stuck on mud or running into a wall of reeds.

“My mom and grandma and I went this way last time.” I pointed out a channel to the right, and we steered ourselves down it. The canoe made a soft swishing noise as we skimmed over the lily pads.

We pushed off the lake bottom with our paddles whenever we got stuck, and then the river opened up and the paddling grew easier again. At first there were a few houses with lawns that ran right to shore, and it almost felt like we were trespassing on private property. But soon we reached the wilder stretches of the river and settled into a smooth rhythm, even as were working against the light current.

“My parents never do this,” Alice said. “They’re not as wildernessy as your family.”

“I thought you went camping last week,” I said.

Alice laughed. “My aunt and uncle took us up north to an RV park. We had a big-screen TV!”

“Oh,” I said.

“Definitely not wildernessy,” she said, shaking her head.

After about an hour of paddling and, thankfully, not much conversation, we passed a small island. On its banks were marks in the mud where other people had pulled their canoes ashore.

“Want to stop here?” Alice asked.

“Sure,” I said. I steered in with a hard stroke, sending the front of the canoe sliding onto the mud. Alice stepped into the water, sneakers and all, and pulled the canoe forward. Her parents may not have been wildernessy, as Alice put it, but somewhere along the line she had learned good canoeing skills.

We stowed our paddles and took off our life jackets. Alice was wearing a green tank top that showed off her strong, lean arms. I had a sneaking suspicion that her biceps might even have been bigger than mine, but I refused to look closely enough to find out.

We sat down on a rock. Alice peered into the bag her mother had given us.

“OK,” she said. “Forget what I said. I’m glad my parents love me too much.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“We’ve got sandwiches,” she said, pulling out four squares crisply wrapped in wax paper. “We’ve got cold drinks,” she continued, pulling out two water bottles glistening with condensation. “Chips, fruit, healthy vegetable matter. And best of all,” she said, reaching in with a smile, “Grandma Hattie’s mint chocolate-chip cookies!”

She offered me a sandwich, which I unwrapped and started eating.

“It’s a funny thing about those cookies. Grandma Hattie isn’t my grandma at all. She’s my friend Yolanda’s grandmother. But the cookies are so good, I might adopt Grandma Hattie.”

I wasn’t sure why Alice was telling me any of this, but at least it filled the space. I kept eating.

“God, I miss Yolanda,” she went on. “It’s so quiet up here! Don’t you think?”

I shrugged. “Sort of.”

“Doesn’t it get weird with just you and the ladies?” she asked.

I thought about how much weirder it was than Alice would ever know. A mother who spent so much time working and worrying she hardly seemed to notice she was on a beautiful lake. A grandmother writing notes to a dead man. But I shook my head. “Not really.”

“Really? You don’t need friends?”

She probably hadn’t meant to be mean, but her question stung. I put down my sandwich. “I didn’t say that,” I said. “I just don’t need to be surrounded by a bunch of popular kids to have fun.”

“Who said anything about popular kids?” Alice asked.

I shrugged.

“You think I’m popular?” she asked. She let out one of her big guffaws. “I would love for Tiffany Ellis to hear you say that. She thinks I’m a freak of nature!”

I looked at her, confused. Straight blond hair, blue eyes, long legs, toothpaste-commercial smile. Alice
had
to be a popular girl.

“Actually, I guess I
am
a freak of nature,” she said, almost to herself. She seemed proud of it. She smiled and took a bite of her sandwich.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

She put down her sandwich. “I’m a duck.”

“Huh?” I looked for some sign she was about to burst into that familiar Jensen laughter. But she didn’t.

“I’m a beaver. A Labrador retriever.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. For one very small moment, I was afraid Alice was about to reveal herself to be a total lunatic. It would be an uncomfortable paddle home.

“I have webbed toes!” she exclaimed.

I stared at her in disbelief. “For real?”

She nodded. “I suppose you want to see.”

“Well, yeah,” I admitted. It occurred to me that I’d never seen her barefoot.

Alice pushed off her left shoe. She wiggled her toes at me. They were different, definitely. The extra skin between them made her toes look a little short. But she didn’t look like a duck.

“That’s not so bad,” I told her. “I wouldn’t say freaky or anything.”

“Ha,” Alice retorted.

“It’s kind of, I don’t know, mermaidy,” I volunteered.

“Adam. We’re talking toes. Not fins.”

“But you look great. No one’s going to notice a little extra skin between your toes.”

She looked at me for a moment. I felt my face turn red. Out of kindness, I think, she looked away. She stared out across the water. “Yeah, well, try telling that to the flip-flop girls,” she said.

“Flip-flop girls?” I couldn’t help laughing. It seemed like a perfect way to describe the girls like Emma, Margaret, and Annie back home. “We have some of those at my school, too.”

“I hear they’re everywhere,” she said. “They’re plotting to take over the world.” Now she was smiling. She pulled her sneaker back on. “Back you go inside your cage, you little monsters,” she said to her foot.

That got us both cracking up. “OK, that was weirder than your toes are,” I told her.

“That’s all right,” she said. “I kind of like weird.”

She ate three cookies and stood up. “Ready to paddle some more?”

I nodded. We packed up the remains of our lunch in the grocery bag and stowed it in the canoe. Alice had me climb in first. Then she lifted the bow and eased it off the mud, gliding the canoe into a few inches of water before stepping inside.

“Where’d you learn how to handle a canoe?” I asked her.

She pushed off the riverbed with her paddle. “Camp Watson,” she replied. “Camp of freaks.”

“Everyone has webbed toes?” I asked.

“I knew you were going to say that. No, it’s for girls like me who like S-C-I-E-N-C-E. We spend all day solving mysteries, cracking codes, splicing genes.”

“Splicing genes?”

“Just making sure you were listening,” she said.

“You still haven’t explained your boating skills.”

“This is Minnesota, Adam. If they didn’t teach you ten thousand lake sports at summer camp, they could be accused of child neglect. Even at Geek Camp.”

“I believe that, actually,” I told her.

We began paddling upstream, slowly now, with the laziness that comes after a good meal in the warm sun.

“So, what
do
you do all day?” Alice asked me. “Since you’re not watching TV or playing computer games.”

“I don’t know. Like I told your mom: swim, canoe, play cards . . .” It wasn’t a very exciting list. I was tempted to lie and tell her I was building a small sailboat or rewiring the cabin’s electricity. Instead, I confessed, “I guess I spend a lot of time sitting around. Lying in the hammock. Sketching comic strips — that kind of thing.”

“Ooh, comic strips! That sounds interesting,” Alice said. “Are you working on a book or something?”

“No, nothing that impressive,” I said. “But I invented this superhero for myself the other day, since I’m the only one at the cabin with a fully functioning brain.” I told her about how I’d come up with the idea for Memory Guy and the ways he would save people from their bouts of forgetfulness.

“Would he swoop in and help kids if they blanked out in the middle of a test?” Alice asked. “Now that could be useful.”

“Or cheating,” I said.

“Ha! Good point!” she said. “But I like this Memory Guy thing. It’s geeky, but it’s got potential.”

I couldn’t tell if she was being serious, but I accepted it as a compliment. We drifted into a comfortable silence again.

The river was quiet and empty along this stretch. We passed a green heron clinging to a partially submerged branch, eyes fixed and back hunched like a new kid at school hoping to escape notice. When I pointed this out to Alice, she said if he didn’t want to be noticed, he probably shouldn’t be wearing yellow leggings.

“Or a green poncho,” I added. “Actually, he’s dressed a lot like the kids in our high school’s marching band.”

“For real?” Alice asked.

“They wear green coats and yellow pants. School colors,” I explained.

“Spiffy,” Alice said. “Are you in band?”

“I’m learning trumpet,” I told her. “But I think I’ll stick with jazz band. They let you wear black and white.”

We could have kept paddling for longer; after a few more miles, the Potato River emptied out into Potato Lake. But when we hit a stretch of river so shallow we had to get out and walk, we decided it was time to turn back. Alice pulled the bow of the canoe around while I guided the stern. The cool river water bubbled in through the hole in my sneakers.

“My parents are probably approaching level-five worry by now,” Alice said.

“On a scale of . . . ?”

“Six.”

“Then maybe you should call them,” I said.

Alice shook her head. “I can’t.”

“Doesn’t your cell phone work out here?” I asked.

“I don’t have a cell phone,” Alice said.

“Yes, you do — in your shorts pocket,” I said.

“Good one, Memory Guy,” Alice said. “But, really, I just brought this.” She reached into her pocket with her free hand and pulled out a little pack of Kleenex. “It’s much more useful than a cell phone. And much quieter, too.”

I grinned. Alice wasn’t quite what I’d expected.

Once we were back paddling with the current, it didn’t take us long to reach our lunch spot. I spotted a couple of our footprints in the mud. As if reading my mind, Alice pointed toward them and said, “Aren’t those duck prints?”

“Ha-ha,” I said. But I liked the fact that we’d left our mark on the site, however impermanently. “We should call it Duck Island from now on,” I told Alice.