Summer of the Gypsy Moths (8 page)

S
aturday morning, the phone rang and I jumped up.

The court deal was that my mother would call once a week. I'd asked her to try for Saturday mornings, so I'd be sure to be there. She'd missed half of them so far, it was true, but now here she was, Saturday morning. And I had so much to tell her.

Except it wasn't her. Just someone asking about a vacancy in August. “Sorry,” I said, and hung up hard.

I turned toward the southwest, where I figured my mother was.
Please call
, I willed into the air. I'd read that people who are really connected can hear each other's
thoughts sometimes.
Please call. I need you.

And the phone rang!

But no, it was only George. “I'm heading out soon—tide's in an hour. Just wanted to make sure you're all ready. Check-in's at three. Probably everybody will show up right on the dot—people don't like to lose a minute of vacation, you see.”

“Louise isn't worried,” I told him. Which was the truth, at least.

“Well, I'll come by next weekend for the trash. You need anything before then, you just—”

“We won't need anything,” I said, a little sharper than I'd meant to.

The line was quiet for a minute. And then George asked, “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” I said. Which was a really big lie. “I have to go now.”

 

At quarter of three, Angel and I parked ourselves on the grass under the
LINGER LONGER
sign. I had the master key, and Angel held Louise's planner, which listed who went in which cottage when.

“It's going to be okay,” I said, twisting the key around my finger. “Louise broke her ankle. We're here to let everyone in. That's all.”

“Sure,” Angel agreed. I could tell she didn't believe it any more than I did.

Five minutes later, a blue SUV with a New York license plate pulled in. Big as it was, it still looked ready to burst with vacation stuff—bikes and boogie boards and fishing poles on the rack above; suitcases and coolers and beach chairs pressed against the back windows. Two red-haired boys about five or six burst out first, followed by a woman who got out and did some stretches as her sons chased each other around with the badminton racquets.

“Here we go,” the woman sighed as her husband unfolded himself.

“Here we go,” I said to Angel. We got up and headed for the car, and just then a second SUV—this one with Ohio plates—crunched up over the shell driveway. From it spilled two more kids—a boy around seven and a tiny little girl, each of them with a cloud of black curls and overalls on. And a third car, an old white Volvo wagon, pulled in before we'd even said hello to the first family.

For the next hour and a half, Angel and I didn't stop. We told everyone that Louise was sorry not to meet them, but she'd just broken her ankle and so we were in charge. Nobody raised an eyebrow. We opened all the cottages except Plover and showed the three families around and answered a million questions and ran back and forth to the
supply shed for charcoal and grill lighters and extra lawn chairs and croquet mallets.

After the first big rush, Angel and I set ourselves up at the picnic table in our backyard, where everyone could see us in case they needed something. I thumbed through one of Louise's gardening magazines, and Angel lay back with her earphones on. One by one, the families drove out—to show their kids the ocean, to find the center of town, or to pick up groceries for dinner, I guessed. But by the time evening fell, they were all back. The parents lit grills and cracked open beers and sprayed bug repellent and turned on radios. The kids ran around checking out the cottages and each other. Within half an hour, you'd think they'd grown up together.

When the first hot dogs and hamburgers began to sizzle on the grills, Angel and I went in. We warmed up some tomato soup and spread peanut butter over the last of the crackers. Afterward, I went upstairs. I lay on my bed with my fists bunched under my chin and looked down over the cottages. There was something magic about them, the way they seemed to make everyone so happy. The kids hollered and chased each other through the yellow parallelograms of spilled window light. The parents laughed together quietly and then, at the same time, called their kids in. Magic.

A half-moon rose in the sky. The scent of burnt
marshmallows sweetened the air. And an emptiness welled up inside me. It felt like hunger, but it wasn't in my stomach. I wondered if Angel, in the next bedroom, was watching the families, too. I wondered if her heart felt like it was clenching around nothing.

B
y noon on Sunday, all three families had packed up their sunscreened kids, their coolers and rafts and towels, and headed out to begin their vacations.

Angel and I stood at the window and looked out at the empty, silent yard.

“Now what?” I asked.

Angel shrugged. “Now nothing. Until they get back. Just normal life.”

Normal life. My old life, with my mother the past two years, hadn't even been close to normal. I'd been to four different schools while we bounced around Cape Cod, and
there'd been a couple of months in Oregon when I'd barely even been inside a classroom. The last time I'd had a normal life had been when we'd lived with my grandmother, and now that time seemed so far away, I was already forgetting it. This was my life now. I was a manager of the Linger Longer Cottage Colony.

As weird as it sounds, that first week there were renters, we fell into a routine. I'd get up early and make coffee, so the kitchen would smell like a grown-up was living there. I'd turn on the morning news Louise used to watch and open the curtains at nine the way Louise had, and pretty soon the renters would start banging on the screen door.

Once, Louise had told me that the hardest part of her job was answering their questions. Actually, the way she put it wasn't that nice. “Puh,” she'd said. “Those tourists must sit around all day thinking up ridiculous questions to bother me with.”

She was right about the number of questions, but I didn't think they were ridiculous. Sometimes it was a little kid, puffed with pride that he'd been trusted with such an important mission, but usually it was a parent. The adults always looked a little uncomfortable in their vacation clothes. The men, especially, couldn't seem to decide if they should wear socks or not, and kept looking down at their bare legs as if it was a shock to see their own knees.
I noticed that the mother from Tern glanced around the kitchen while she was talking, like she was judging Louise by how she kept her house. Because of that, I made sure to clean things up right away, the way she would have.

Once in a while, someone would ask how Louise was doing with her broken ankle. I wasn't a very good liar, so I came up with some tricky answers. “She's keeping off it,” I'd say. “She's not complaining.” They never asked anything more, just went right into the reason they'd come over. “What's a good beach for kids?” or “Where can we get a beach sticker?” And always a question about tides—after all, if you lived in a city in the middle of the country, how would you know that the tides go in and out twice a day, about an hour later each day? It made me happy, not irritated, to answer them.

Besides the questions, there were the emergencies. Every day, someone needed something right away—a raft repaired, a drawer unstuck, a rusted umbrella opened. “Stay right here,” I'd say. “I'll run up and ask Louise about that.”

And I'd run upstairs all right, but it was Heloise I asked for advice.

One of the twins got a splinter in his heel his parents couldn't get with tweezers. Heloise and I saved the day by taping a clove of garlic over it—the garlic drew the splinter out in a few hours. When Mr. Gull came complaining
about a clogged sink, I found a hint about pouring a bottle of soda down the drain. Heloise never let me down.

Finally, with all the questions answered and emergencies solved, the families left for whatever they were doing that day, and I was free to go to the garden to work.

That got harder every day. Louise hadn't marked her rows, so I had to figure out what each plant was before I could even begin to take care of it. And she'd apparently gone on a planting spree the week before she died—I'd look at a nice empty patch of garden one day, and the next there'd be a fringe of green lace poking up in a line, asking to be attended to. The best I could do about that was to yank up the things that weren't growing in a clear row, and hope they were weeds.

On the bright side, the vegetables were doing pretty well. The zucchini flowers were curling back to reveal miniature squashes. The tomatoes were green, but some were the size of golf balls. The peas had climbed all over the twigs Louise had stuck in the ground for them, and looked like they were slapping each other high fives for busting out of their seeds into such a great garden.

The blueberry bushes, though, were getting worse. According to Louise's gardening books, they should be thick with shiny, green, oval leaves and dotted with berries starting to turn blue. Instead, the leaves looked more frayed
each day, and the berries had definitely stopped growing.

I raked more mulch around them, watered them, and pulled more weeds. I started hoeing in the morning's coffee grounds when I figured out why Louise had saved them: I read that it made the soil more acid, the way blueberries liked it. I worked until I was sweaty and tired every morning, but nothing helped. I had promised to take care of them, and I was failing.

By noon each day, I would give up. I'd drag on a bathing suit, scrounge up something to eat, and head down the path to the beach.

I felt better when I got there. I don't know what it is about a beach—the drifty, fake-coconut scent of suntan lotion, the endless
whoosh
of little waves lapping the shore, or the way the sun beats down so bright and hot, you feel too baked to think—but when I was there, I could almost forget everything. I floated in the cool water, too tired to actually swim, then flopped down on a towel and read. I read a lot. Louise hardly had any books to choose from—she used to say she liked her stories on the tube—but I found a set of
Reader's Digest
Condensed Books in her bedroom, and those kept me going.

Although what I found out was this: The books were abridged, which I figured meant the
Reader's Digest
people put in little bridges between what they decided were the
good parts, cutting out whatever they decided was boring. The problem was, what if the
Reader's Digest
people and I didn't agree about what parts were boring? Most people would probably say, go right for the action: people fighting and chasing each other, or kissing, or lying about things. But my favorite parts were different. I liked it when two characters were getting to know each other. Just talking. It was best if they were inside a house, and the author spent a little time describing the room, so I could feel like I was there, too, sipping cocoa and watching the curtains billow in and out.

What I did about the
Reader's Digest
problem was this: Whenever I came to a part that looked like something might be missing, I made up something I'd like to be there. And I started to think, lying out there on my towel in the sun, that maybe I'd make a good author. One thing about any books I'd write—you would be reading about the cleaning-up parts of scenes. It drives me crazy how characters are always making messes and then the author doesn't tell about cleaning them up. Everybody eats dinner in books, but nobody does the dishes. People wrestle around in the mud and have accidents with blood, and nobody does the laundry. I just hate that.

The other thing I did out there on the beach was watch people. It's easy to do behind sunglasses. There were loads of families, old couples reading newspapers, and groups of
teenagers working on suntans, but what I liked best were the clammers.

They came at low tide and they worked on their hands and knees, digging dark holes into the sandbars, their wire baskets filling up beside them. Now and then one of them would sit back on his heels and call out something and the others would laugh; I never caught the words, but I liked it that they were teasing each other, making the time pass. Spinning their strands.

I got to recognize the clammers after a couple of days—mostly they were grown men, but there was one boy. He was almost as tall as the men but only about thirteen or fourteen, and he had ragged cutoffs and messy, sun-bleached hair. He stayed to himself, and every time I looked over, his shoulders were working steadily as he pitched clam after clam into his basket. When he finished working a hole, he filled it back in with sand, even though the next high tide would take care of that in a few hours. I understood that; I would do that, too. I wished I could tell the clammer boy that, but Angel had made me promise not to talk to anyone.

Angel. She was back to barely grunting at me, but every afternoon she had a chatty little soap opera review with Louise. I'd time my return from the beach for when she'd be watching the show, then go upstairs, pretending I wanted a nap. At four, when Angel went out to give her
report, I hung at the window to listen. Not much happened in that soap opera. Day after day, the characters just lied about the same stuff. But I liked the way Angel put things.

“That Elaina! What's she thinking anyway? Like her husband isn't going to notice one day? ‘Hey, honey, that's a
pillow
you've got under your dress!'”

Angel was starting to get involved with the show herself. “Poor Mrs. Hartford!” she went on one day, and you could tell she meant it. “Wouldn't you think she'd get a little time to enjoy the fact that her son's back from the dead? But no. They call her the heart of Spring Valley, but really, she's more like the woe bank—all the characters dump their troubles on her and go trotting off, leaving her holding a bucket full of misery. Today her niece called, all hysterical because her fiancé is in love with someone else….”

So that was the weekday routine: helping the renters, working in the garden, going to the beach, and listening to Angel's visits with Louise. In the late afternoons, the renters would get back and their questions would start again—not as many as in the mornings, but always a few. In the evenings, Angel and I watched television—Louise only got the basic channels and there was nothing good on because it was summer, but it kept me from what I dreaded the most. Finally, though, I'd have to go to bed.

And try not to hear the sound that wasn't there.