Touch Blue (7 page)

O
n an island, silence usually means people are talking about
you.
Our phone hasn’t rung since we got home. The whole island’s probably hashing over how Aaron stormed off and about the Post-it note Mrs. Coombs found on the bookmarked page of “Taps.”

Go home!

Oops, you can’t. Right, orphan?

“At least he didn’t punch anyone,” Libby said to Mom and Dad when Aaron wouldn’t come down for supper.

“I’m going over there and have it out with Eben and his father,” Dad said, pushing back his chair.

“You don’t know if Eben did this,” Mom replied. “You let me handle it. You and Brett Calder’ll just make this worse.”

They argued about it until Dad stormed off to Uncle Ned and Aunt Barb’s house, and Mom went upstairs to talk to Aaron.

I think she did most of the talking, though.

When Mom came back downstairs, I went to my room and listened hard to hear how Aaron was taking this: Would he cry or throw things or even pace in the attic above my room? But I didn’t hear anything at all, and that felt sadder than if he’d been sobbing.

In the morning, Mom got a call from Mrs. Coombs, saying she’d discovered that Eben was at the bottom of that note. She’d gone straight over to the Calders’ house and given him a big piece of her mind and now he has to mow the whole cemetery as a punishment.

“I suspect that’ll set Eben straight,” Mom said after she hung up the phone.

I doubt it, though. I can’t imagine Eben’s a bit sorry.

Aaron doesn’t leave his room until I’m out working on my skiff. From under my fringe of bangs I see him coming. He’s frowning, not looking at all like he’s in the mood for talking. He takes a paint scraper, and we work in silence. I’m about half done with the scraping. Most of the boat looks shabby and old right now, but sometimes you have to make things worse in order to make them better.

Aaron chips at the paint so hard, he takes some wood off with it.

“Hey!” I say.

He does it again, and another sliver of wood flies off the hull.

“Stop it!” I grab for the paint scraper.

He pulls the tool away before I can get it. “This part’ll be in the water. No one’ll even know.”

“
I’ll
know!”

He lowers his eyebrows, but I don’t back down. “Look, I’m sorry Eben put that note in the music book. And I’m sorry if my family isn’t doing everything right, but we really are trying, and we want you to fit in here. Why didn’t you just crumple up the note and throw it away?”

“I showed up and I played — even though I didn’t really want to! Isn’t that
enough
?” He glares at me. “You went to that picnic because everyone knew you belonged there. I only got invited to play the trumpet!”

“That’s not true! You would’ve come with us, even if you didn’t play.”

“Right. I would’ve come with
your
family! And if you didn’t need me to keep your school open, I wouldn’t even be here.” He gouges another splinter of wood off my boat.

I snatch the scraper from him. “So what? That doesn’t mean it has to be awful or that we don’t want you. Everybody gets something for the things they do.
Even when people
seem
like they’re only thinking of others, maybe it’s because doing good makes them feel nice inside. Did you ever think of that? Those people are still getting something in return. Maybe we’re just more honest about it.”

Aaron huffs. “You have no idea what it’s like for me. Not being where I want to be, having everything I’ve known yanked away from me, over and over. Having people feel sorry for me or think I’m a bad kid because something bad happened to me. You can’t even imagine it.”

“Maybe not as much as you,” I say. “But since last winter, I’ve been imagining losing things that matter to me — having to start over at a new school, coming into the middle of everything where kids have made all their friends already. Having to learn all those people’s names, and I will have missed how they learned to do everything. And because everyone else
knows
, no one will think to explain it to me.”

“You mean like what happens to
me
every time I have to move? Except I have to do more than change houses and schools. I get dumped into a whole new family each time.”

His words smack me. “I’m sorry.”

“Forget it. When your skiff is ready, I’m —” He stops.

“You’re what?” I wait, but he doesn’t answer. “What do you mean when my skiff is ready?”

He still won’t answer, but he makes a fist so tight I see blue veins bulging on the back of his hand.

How could I have been so stupid? “I thought you wanted to work on this boat so you could do something with me.”

“I want my own home again — with my own mom. Why can’t you understand that? I thought you wanted to be my friend.”

I lay both scrapers down on the hull. “I do. But —”

“When they came and took me away that first time, the lady promised it’d all work out in a month or two.” He flicks at a stubborn paint chip with his fingernail. “What a joke.”

“But if your mom didn’t do what she was supposed to —”

“They made it too hard for her!” He picks up one of the scrapers and stabs the boat with the corner hard enough that it stays upright, stuck in the wood. “They could’ve tried something else or given her another chance. Mom didn’t give up — they did!”

“But you can’t run away with my skiff! They’ll just come find you and —”

“I should’ve known you’d take their side!”

“I’m not taking their side!” I say, even though he’s already walking away from me. “But don’t expect me to keep this secret, too.”

I grab the handle of his scraper and pull the blade out. As I’m smoothing over the cut in the wood, the screen door slams.

A
s I climb the steps to the porch, I hear Mom talking in the kitchen. “Aaron’s going through a hard time. I’ll play Monopoly with you instead.”

“But he
never
plays with me!” Libby whines. “I keep asking and asking, and he keeps saying no, no, no.”

I take a tiny step backward from the door. I want to tell Mom about Aaron’s plan to run away, but I want to do it alone.

“I said he could come live with us, but I didn’t know he’d hate me!” Libby says.

“I’m sure he doesn’t hate you, honey.” After a pause, Mom adds, “He’s not used to having little sisters. And he’s been moved around so much, it’s probably hard to believe he’s here to stay. Saying good-bye is always hard, Libby. Maybe it seems easier not to get too close to us, in case that happens again.”

I slump against the side of the house and stare out at my skiff. How can I ever launch it now? All this time, I was hoping Aaron’d be a boy version of Anne of Green Gables, but Gilly Hopkins came instead: angry and tough and not wanting to need anyone.

I liked that book,
The Great Gilly Hopkins
— all except the ending. In the book, Gilly had come to love her foster mom, but one day Gilly got mad and wrote a complaining letter to her birth mom. That mom came and took her back. Why couldn’t Gilly realize how good she had it before she threw it all away?

“I should have guessed that holidays are probably extra hard for him,” Mom says to Libby. “Seeing all those families together.”

“But aren’t we his family now?”

“You don’t forget people you love, even when you don’t see them,” Mom says. “Though in some ways it might be nice if he
could
have a visit with his mother. It’s easy to remember only the good parts of people if you never see them. Real people are much more complicated.”

Hmm. I turn to stare at the doorknob of the screen door.

“Maybe Tess will play Monopoly with you.” I hear a kitchen chair scraping as it’s pushed back.

Oh, glory! I jump over the porch rail to the ground. I don’t want Mom to catch me eavesdropping, and I sure don’t want to be stuck playing hours of Monopoly with Libby. Racing around the corner, I cut it so close that I graze my arm on the wood.

Touching wood is usually lucky, but this time it hurts, too. Though I don’t mind too much, because I need every bit of good luck I can get right now — even if it comes with some scratches. Holding my elbow to my chest, I open our front door and slip inside.

Mom said it herself — maybe it would be a good thing if Aaron could see his mother. Then he could find out that she’s not only made of the good parts he remembers. And his mom can see that he’s fine with my family and how we can give him things she can’t or maybe doesn’t want to. When Gilly first saw her biological mom again, she wanted to change her mind. The same thing will happen for Aaron, I’m sure as certain. Like Mom said: Real people are complicated.

I head for Aaron’s room. It’s weird to think I used to go up to the attic whenever I wanted and now I have to knock. No one answers, so I open the door. But when I climb the stairs to the attic, Aaron’s room is empty. His suitcase, his trumpet, his music stand, and the photos on his dresser are gone.

O
ut of breath from running hard, I’m relieved to see his red hair. Aaron’s sitting on his suitcase on the little scrap of beach beside the ferry landing. His trumpet case rests on the sand at his feet and he’s wearing his leather jacket, even though it’s past seventy degrees out. He doesn’t even glance at me as I walk over and lean against the big rocks beside him.

“Why are you down here on the beach?” I pant the words out.

Across the water, the ferry has left the mainland wharf and is about a third of the way to this island, its bow pointed toward Bethsaida.

Aaron frowns. “I don’t want to talk to anyone on the wharf. I want to sit here all by myself until the ferry shows up and then go home.”

“It won’t work,” I say gently. “The ferry captain won’t take you over across without calling Dad first.
An island kid can’t just get on the ferry by himself with a suitcase and not have to answer some questions.”

“I’m not an island kid.”

A winged shadow sweeps the sand. I look up to see an osprey soaring past, barely moving his wings, carried on air.

Aaron picks at the handle of his suitcase with his fingernail. “No one’s going to decide things for me anymore. I’m getting off this island and going home — even if I have to swim!”

I give him a tiny smile. “Salt water will ruin your trumpet.”

He glares at me — a look I’ve only ever seen him give to Eben.

The corners of my lips fall. “I’m sorry. You’re right. There’s nothing funny about this.”

A lazy wave comes up the sand. Aaron moves his things backward, away from it, but I point my toes to touch it. The water comes fast, circling my ankle before shrinking down the beach, rolling a clump of seaweed with it. A tiny white crab scuttles sideways on the wet sand, making footprints so light I can barely see them. He scurries past a fray of red-and-white rope, some kelp, a little green lobster band, and —?

A button.

It’s not much, but I want to give Aaron something. Before I reach down to pick up the button, I walk around it clockwise — once, twice, three times to take away any bad luck leftover from the previous owner. I go around one more time to put some good luck in.

The button was probably gold-colored once, but salt water has worn the shine off the surface and the tiny wreath of leaves circling the front. I shake it in my closed fist to bounce the sand away. “Here,” I say, holding it out to Aaron.

He doesn’t take it.

I lean close enough to drop it into his jacket pocket. “I made it lucky for you.”

He reaches into his pocket, and I hold my breath, half-expecting him to hurl the button away. Looking down at his hand, he runs his thumb over the button’s tiny leaves. “I just want what you have, you know. My own family. Even if it’s not perfect — it’s mine.”

He drops the button on the sand, like it’s trash. “They didn’t have to take me away from my mom. I could’ve taken care of her.”

Looking down, I feel discarded by him, too. “You were Libby’s age.”

“I could’ve tried! And I’m older now. I don’t need as much as I did when I was little. I could help her out
more.” He nudges a clump of rockweed at his feet. Underneath is a cluster of purple-blue mussels, still tightly closed. Reaching down, he untangles one from the seaweed. “I don’t know why I can’t even see her. I mean, how could that hurt anything?”

“Did you ever finish your letter back to her?”

He shakes his head. “I’ve tried, but I have to know for sure that she’s okay and ask her if she’s going to try to get me back. I can’t write that in a letter. I have to
see
her.”

I glance toward the ferry, close enough now for me to see separate colors: the blue hull, white wheelhouse, and the red benches on the upper deck. I’ll never talk Aaron out of this. As long as he has that string of hope dangling that he’ll be happier with his mother and that she’ll be everything he’s missing, we won’t ever be enough.

When I turn back, Aaron is heading for the water, his arm crooked, holding a pile of mussel shells against his ribs.

I move his suitcase and trumpet farther up the sand, out of reach of the incoming tide. “What are you doing?” I ask, hurrying to catch up to him.

“I’m saving these from the seagulls. They don’t have to die.” At the water’s edge, he throws a mussel. It
skims the surface before slicing into a wave. He pitches another, farther out.

I swallow hard. “I was thinking about the talent show —?”

He throws another mussel, harder. “I’m not playing for any island thing ever again!”

“Not even if your mom came?”

He pitches his next mussel, but not as far out. His shoulder closest to me lifts forward.

“That show is open to the public,” I say.

When he turns, I pretend the sun is in my eyes. I feel terrible that I’m setting him up to be disappointed in her — but it’ll be a good thing in the end. “She could just show up. Nobody here has met your mom — well, except
you
, of course. If she came, everyone’d think she was just a tourist coming to watch the show.”

“I don’t want Mom to get in trouble.”

“Don’t you think she’ll get in
more
trouble if you show up on her doorstep?” I ask.

He looks down at the mussels still piled against his chest. His hair swings forward, hiding his face. “I don’t even know if she
has
a doorstep. She didn’t say in her letter if she has a house or an apartment or if she’s living by herself or with other people. I’m afraid if anything bad happened to her, no one would even tell me.”

“Natalie has never mentioned your mom to me,” I say gently. “So it can’t be breaking a rule for
me
to invite her, right? You could give me her address off the letter she sent, and I could write her and give her the details. Then if she shows up —”

“She
will
show up,” Aaron says firmly.

“Then you can see her and she can see that you’re okay and no one needs to know or get in trouble.”

He looks out at the ferry, close enough that one of the passengers waves to us. “You’ll give her all the details about the ferry?” Aaron asks. “I don’t think she’d know how to get here.”

“Sure. I’ll send her a ferry schedule and a map.”

“Can I play whatever I want at the show?”

I nod, holding my hand out for a mussel. “Anything at all.”

He puts one on my palm. I run my finger over the shell, wiping the sand away. Aaron throws his last mussel far into the water. “Okay.” He turns and walks back up the beach.

As he picks up his suitcase and trumpet case, I throw my mussel into the water after his, as hard as I can — so far I barely see the splash.

“Today’s your lucky day, little one,” I whisper.