Listening for Lucca (5 page)

“We have an office?”

“Well, sort of.” I followed Dad downstairs to the bigger living room, the one to the left of the front door, to see that the back half of the room was set up with a large desk and some bookshelves stuffed with boxes of supplies. Dad pulled down a box and handed it to me. “This one is full of pens and ink refills. You should be able to find something that fits in there. I’ll go take care of those shelves.”

He paused in the doorway.

“Did you guys have fun at the beach?”

“Yeah,” I answered, a bit surprised by how serious he seemed.

“Did … Lucca have fun at the beach?”

“Yeah.”

“It seemed good for him?”

“Yeah, Dad, it did.”

“Maybe I’ll go … ask him … about it.”

Lucca marched into the room then, freshly scrubbed and in his pajamas already, even though we hadn’t had dinner yet.

“Hey, buddy,” Dad said. “How was the beach?”

Lucca looked thoughtful. He reached up his hands and Dad lifted him. Lucca snuggled against him.

“Come on, you can help me take care of these shelves,” Dad told him, carrying him out of the room.

I rummaged through the box, then took the ink cartridge out of the pen and compared it to cartridges until I found one that matched. I loaded the pen.

There was a notepad on the desk, so I scratched out the pen on it, forming big, loopy circles of blue ink. Then I started to write
My name is S
.

Except when I got to the
S
, I didn’t write out my own name. I wrote
My name is Sarah Elizabeth Alberdine
.

SEA! I turned the pen in my hand, studying it. What had made me pick these names for these initials? Maybe Sarah and Elizabeth were the first
S
and
E
names I could think of, and they were pretty to write out, but where was Alberdine from? It wasn’t something I remembered hearing before.

The funny thing was, I hadn’t spent time thinking about any of those names. I’d just moved the pen and that was what had come out, as if something other than my own brain was leading my hand. Or as if it hadn’t been my hand.

I took a closer look at the letters on the page. It didn’t even look like my handwriting.

The pen fell to the desk with a clunk. I held my hand up and flexed my fingers. There was the little mole, in its
usual spot on my ring finger; there was the faint scar across the back from a dog bite when I was three. My hand, definitely.

What was going on?

I shivered, probably from my wet ponytail dripping down my back. I jumped up, pocketed the pen, and went to join Mom in the kitchen, where it was warm and bright.

When I woke suddenly, heart pounding, it took me a minute to realize where I was. Lucca was curled up with me again, but I was in my own room—it was just my new room, in Maine.

I rubbed my face, trying to get rid of the aftertaste of the dream, and still had my hands over my face when I got down to the kitchen.

“What, up late partying?” Dad joked. He’s been teasing me about teenage behavior since the day I turned thirteen. So far I didn’t think I acted like a typical teenager at all.

“Uhh …,” I moaned, sitting down in one of our new, high island chairs. “Weird dream.”

“Strangely weird?”

“Yeah, I was at war, I think.”

“Want to tell me?”

I thought hard, then shook my head. “Nah, it’s too fuzzy.” I pressed my palms over my eyes. I’d lied: it was vivid, but I didn’t want to relive the details.

“You’ll forget it soon, then. Here.” Dad slid me a plate. “Cheesy eggs.”

“These were
your
cheesy eggs,” I pointed out as he handed me a clean fork.

Dad shrugged. “I’ll make more. What are you up to this morning?”

I scooped up a big bite. Mmm, cheddar and something else. “More exploring.”

“Good idea. Just check in at lunch so you can show your mom there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Deal.”

“We’re going out to look for a used car for Mom. We’ll keep Lucca so you don’t have to babysit. But we’ll stop in for lunch.”

“Where’s Mom now?”

“Working.”

Mom does writing and editing for journals and books. She’s an expert at a very specific thing: the sciences of paint chemistry and art preservation, restoration, and dating. She’s definitely more of a scientist, because she has to know a lot about chemical reactions, though she also knows a lot about art history. She does most of her work at home but likes to have alone time to do it.

She came into the kitchen, already dressed and with an empty coffee cup, so she must have been up for a while.

“Morning,” she said, running her hand down my ponytail. “Sleep well?”

“Yeah,” I said, catching Dad’s eye to tell him not to
worry her with the dream. He turned back to the frying pan and started pushing new eggs toward the center.

“Did you tell her about school?” Mom asked Dad.

He shook his head as I asked, “School? Already?” She certainly was down to business this morning.

“Calm down,” Dad said. “I only stopped by to get you enrolled. That’s all. You have two months.”

I let out the breath I’d been holding.

“We can go see how you like it, though,” Dad suggested. “Take a tour, get you familiar with the place.”

“No thanks.”

“ ‘No thanks,’ Siena?” Mom asked incredulously.

I lowered my eyes to my lap, and Dad spoke up quickly, lightly. “That’s all right, there’s plenty of time.”

“Oh, but here, we might as well send it back before the choices are gone.” Mom handed me a blue piece of paper. “Eighth-grade electives for first semester. You need to pick one and we’ll send the form back to get you signed up.”

I scanned the list: Advanced Art, Photography, Newspaper, Beginning French, Drama, and Philosophy.

“I think you should take French,” Mom said. “You’d get a great head start for your language next year.”

I was actually kind of interested in all those things, but I immediately decided not to take French. “Philosophy.” Dad had said my problems were philosophical. Maybe the class would have the answers.

Mom sighed. “Do whatever you want. I guess the elective really doesn’t matter that much.”

Dad winked at me from behind Mom’s back. He was congratulating me on my choice, though Mom didn’t need to know about it.

I finished up my eggs.

After breakfast, I headed out to the beach by myself.

A few scattered houses perched above the rocks. Were they for year-round people like we were going to be, or just for summer people? Maybe it was the steep cliffs that kept this stretch of beach from being filled up with houses.

I found plenty of shells and sand dollars. Left behind by the ocean? Then I found a little shell that a creature had surely lived in recently. That was definitely abandoned. I pocketed it.

I could start another collection, of shells and smooth glass and stones. Maybe Lucca would like to do that with me.

I already had a bucket and shovel in my collection from a different beach, so I held on to any sand toys I found to give Lucca. Maybe we could build sand castles together. The shells and stones we collected could be decorations.

That sounded so fun maybe I was the one who was three.

Besides shovels and shells, I found:

A charm bracelet with two charms—a pair of ballet shoes and a poodle puppy.

A quarter and two dimes.

An adult-size water shoe with a rubber gripper bottom and mesh top. Had it been dropped as someone walked along? Or maybe someone had trouble in the ocean and her shoe washed up on the shore.

That made me shudder.

Why was finding a shoe different from finding a bracelet?

Maybe it’s just harder to imagine someone leaving behind a shoe. A bracelet could easily fall off.

But maybe the person had other shoes. Probably she’d been holding lots of stuff, like a towel and clothes, and had dropped it.

The car wasn’t there when I got home.

I set my new finds on the porch. They would have to be rinsed off before I brought them into the house. Wouldn’t want Mom getting on my case about collecting supersandy things.

We were also supposed to brush the sand off our feet before going inside, so I rubbed my flip-flops on the thick, scratchy doormat whose straw bristles reminded me of a broom. It was okay to go inside with your shoes on after you’d brushed them off. In Brooklyn we never wore our shoes inside. Shoes get too dirty in the city. We lined them
up by the door. Here, the dirt felt different—
clean
. Wholesome … as long as you didn’t track in extra. Plus the floors in the old house could give you splinters, so it was safer to have shoes on.

Another difference: it seemed to be okay to leave the house unlocked. The door had been left open for me.

I stood just inside the doorway, frozen. My family wasn’t home, and yet … it felt like someone might be there.

“Hello?” I called.

I listened closely, my heart beating hard. No answer.

Make a lot of noise. Keep busy.

I loudly stomped to the kitchen, opened the fridge, found what I needed to make a sandwich, and put everything on the counter.

I was sitting at the table eating when Mom and Lucca came back with several grocery bags.

“Where’s Dad?”

“He just dropped us off. He wanted to double-check everything for when the kids come. Can’t run soccer camp without soccer balls. Here, take care of this melty ice cream.” Mom slid a container and a spoon over to me.

“No prob,” I said, popping off the lid and swirling the spoon around the edges of the ice cream—black raspberry, my favorite. All that melted stuff isn’t the same after it re-freezes, so we always enjoy a taste of ice cream right when we get it home.

“Did you find a car?”

“I think we did. We’ll get it real soon.”

After the melted edges were gone, I put the ice cream in the freezer and went back to my sandwich. Lucca was taking fruit out of one of the bags and placing it gently, carefully, in a pyramid in a big bowl. Mom was unpacking everything else into the fridge.

“Mom, you don’t think this house is haunted?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Lucca knows what I’m talking about, don’t you, Lucca?”

Lucca nodded sincerely.

“Are you putting ideas in his head?” Mom jumped on me. “Are you making him afraid?”

“No. I can just tell he notices this stuff, too.”

“Lucca, what are you noticing?”

Lucca looked at the ceiling and moved his pointer finger in a circle.

“See, Mom?”

“You two must be in cahoots to drive me crazy.”

“No cahoots.”

“Look, this house is probably filled with stories. It’s been around for over a hundred years. Maybe it’s not ghosts like you think, but just a sense of the past. Of history. Maybe you should write some stories about our house and see if you feel better.”

Mom had no idea how much of a sense of history I had, how sometimes the images just flashed in front of me as if I were really present to see them.