W
e were on vacation in Ocean City. Mom and Dad let us go down to wade, but we weren’t allowed to go in deeper than our knees. “If there’s an under-tow it can sweep you out to sea before you know it,” said Dad.
The water was cold at first, but then it felt warm. The surf flopped at our legs. We splashed each other and splashed strangers and ran through the water. Kids were screaming. Seagulls were screaming. Even the sun seemed to be screaming.
When I was finally ready to go back to the blanket, I looked around for Lily. She wasn’t there. I came out of the water and stood on the smooth, wet sand. I saw zillions of people, but no Lily. I
called, but her name got swallowed up in the noise. I looked out at the endless ocean. I didn’t see anybody getting swept out to sea.
I figured she went back to the blanket. I headed onto the dry, soft sand. There were blankets and umbrellas everywhere, but not ours. So I started wandering, looking. And after a while I just wandered. I liked walking through all those people, everybody having fun and laughing and running and shrieking. I knew Lily hadn’t found the blanket either. I
knew
. She was out there just like me, wandering, enjoying it all. We were doing it together. I mean, I couldn’t reach out and touch her and I couldn’t see her. But I knew we were together. She was with me.
So I walked up and down the beach, watching the people. I came to a little kid who was crying. He was lost. I took him to the lifeguard.
I never did find Mom and Dad, but they must have found Lily because I heard her yell, “There he is!” and they were running and screaming, “Jake! Jake!” Then they were hugging the breath out of me and Mom was crying. But not for long. She shook me by the shoulders. She shook Lily.
“What’s the matter with you two? You had us worried sick!”
“We were okay, Mom,” I said.
She wasn’t listening. “You
never
go off wandering like that again! How did we know the under-tow didn’t get you?”
“Mom, we did just like you said. We only went in up to our knees.”
“Why didn’t you go to the lifeguard? You know you’re supposed to go to the lifeguard if you’re lost!”
It was hard to look up at her because of the sun. I had to close my eyes. “Mom,” I said, “cool it. We weren’t lost.”
Lily poked Mom. “See? That’s what I told you.”
I think that’s the closest we ever came to telling our parents about goombla. But even if we wanted to, what would we say?
Mom. Dad. We weren’t lost because we were with each other. We can be with each other even when we can’t see each other. Even if we’re miles apart.
Who’s going to believe that, or understand it?
So I just said, “Mom, we’re
okay
. We’ll go to the lifeguard next time. Promise.”
Lily was grinning. I looked at her hand. Her fingers were crossed.
I have to admit it was pretty neato. I forgot all about being different.
W
hen we got home from vacation, we talked about it in our bunks that night.
“Were you ever lost at the beach today?”
“No. You?”
“No.”
“Ever
feel
lost?”
“No.”
Hey, we weren’t stupid. We knew what the word
lost
meant, at least if it had to do with something we owned. I lost my flip-flop. I lost my dollar. But we didn’t really know what it meant when it came to ourselves. We always felt as if we were together. As I was wandering around the beach that day, in and out of all those people and blankets, it felt as if Jake was walking right beside me. As if he
was poking me in the ribs and saying, “Look at that!…Look at
that
!”
I guess it had been that way all our life, but the beach day brought it to our attention. And suddenly we had this cool new goombla thing to share, like birthday nights at the train station. We were…The Neverlost Twins. So I didn’t hear any more of that slop about how different we were for a while.
And then, by fall, I started to hear the D-word again.
“We’re different.”
“No we’re not.”
Until The Great Snow-Fort War.
I
t was the first big snow of the year. We had a snow day from school. Lily and I decided to make a snow fort. We went up the street to the vacant lot where we often played. Of course, first we had to have a snowball fight. Then we thought,
Let’s make two forts and we can bomb each other.
So that’s what we did.
Just when I finished my fort, I had to run back home to go to the bathroom. I was in the bathroom when I felt something on my arm. I rolled up my sleeve. There was a bruise. I touched it. It hurt. But that wasn’t all. When I touched the bruise, it was like pressing a button. It spoke to me, one word.
Lily!
When I say it spoke to me, I don’t mean in the usual way. I didn’t hear the word. I felt it.
But I felt that word as loud and clear as I had ever heard a word. And somehow just that—
Lily!
—told me she was in trouble.
I didn’t even roll down my sleeve or put my winter coat back on. I raced down the stairs and up the street. Before I got there I heard the screams. But they weren’t Lily’s. Then what I saw were two things: the roof of Lily’s fort was caved in, and Lily was sitting on top of somebody, mashing the kid’s face into the snow. The kid was screaming and flailing his arms and Lily was mashing away and riding the body like a bucking bronco. I didn’t have to be a genius to figure out the kid had to be Bump Stubbins.
So Bump finally manages to flail and scream his way loose, and he runs off a ways and turns and wipes his snowy face and splutters at Lily, “You’ll pay for this! Yer dead meat! Yer lucky I don’t hit girls. Yer lucky yer brother showed up! Yer luck—” Lily took a step toward him and he hightailed it outta there.
Lily had to stop laughing to tell me about it. She was inside her fort when suddenly she heard somebody yell, “Geronimo!” and the roof came
crashing in on her, followed by Bump Stubbins. Bump seemed surprised to find somebody inside the fort he had just body-bombed, but he didn’t seem especially bothered. In fact, when he saw it was Lily, he smirked and said, “That’s for choking me.”
Big mistake.
Before Bump knew what happened, Lily was scrubbing the snow, and his face was the mop.
When we finished laughing, we squeezed into my fort for a while, but that was boring. So we had another snowball fight and headed home. Along the way I remembered my arm. I told her what happened in the bathroom, how I felt something and touched the bruise and sort of heard her name. “See,” I said. I showed her my arm. I boggled—the bruise was gone. She looked at me, like,
Yeah, right
. And then her eyes got wide at me. She yanked off her coat and rolled up her sleeve and there it was—same bruise, same spot—only now it was on
her
arm. She wonder-said, “That’s where he landed on me.”
We rolled down our sleeves and stared at each other and walked on.
“Look,” she said as we came to our porch. A pair of sandals was sitting by the front door. Sandals? In the snow?
“Who’s here?” I said.
We went inside. Lily saw him first. She screamed: “Poppy!”
I
jumped into him so hard he went, “Ouff!” and fell back on the sofa. We swarmed over him, first with ourselves, then with questions.
“Poppy! Aren’t your feet cold?”
“Poppy! Did you find yourself?”
“Poppy! How long are you staying?”
I think the answers were “Freezing,” “Yep,” and “Till you kick me out.”
Poppy’s hair was still long but now it was white and tied in a ponytail. Dad brought him a pair of socks for his bare feet. “I guess I’ve been to too many warm places lately,” he said. “I forgot about snow.”
We talked and talked till my tongue got tired. We had pizza and chicken wings delivered, and we
could hardly eat we were talking so much. Relatives came over and we ordered more pizza and wings. Jake and I put on our sombreros and said
si
instead of yes whenever we got a chance.
When the visitors left, Poppy reached behind the sofa and pulled out a little green sack. There were two things in it, identical as usual. “They’re castanets,” he said. They reminded me of clamshells. He showed us how to hold them and make them clack. “Now you can sing and dance too.”
Poppy slept in the spare room. We sat on his blankets in our pj’s till after midnight. Mom had to kick us out.
We prayed for another snow day but when morning came, no luck. Poppy wanted to sleep in but we wouldn’t let him. We dragged him down to breakfast. Mom made waffles, a dead giveaway that these were special times.
Poppy walked us to school. He wore Dad’s socks under his sandals. We wanted him to come in. “You can talk about geography!” I said. “They’ll bring you a grown-up-sized chair,” Jake said. He laughed and said no thanks. He was waiting for us when school got out.
Poppy hates malls so we stayed away from them. In fact we didn’t go places much at all. He just wanted to stay home and play Monopoly and poker, and talk. “Good grief,” Mom said to me and Jake on the second night, “don’t you two ever run out of questions? Give your poor Poppy a break.”
“Poppy, did you ever get attacked by pirates?” (No.)
“Poppy, did you ever eat eels?” (Yes. And snakes and grasshoppers.)
“Poppy, were you a hippie?” (Definitely.)
After lights-out the second night I asked Jake if he thought it was okay to ask Poppy about Grandma. Up until then we were afraid to, like it was taboo. But I was getting itchy.
“No,” said Jake flat out.
“Why not?” I said.
“Because,” he said.
“That’s not a reason,” I said.
“Go to sleep,” he said.
So next night at dinner I said, “Poppy, was Grandma a hippie too?”
Mom and Dad stopped chewing. Jake glared at me. The only one who didn’t seem bothered
was Poppy. Not just his mouth but his whole face smiled, and he said, “I thought you’d never ask.” And we were off to the races.
“Let’s see…,” he said. “Grandma danced on the beach and she did sit-ins for civil rights and she marched against the war and she said stuff like ‘Far out’ and ‘Groovy’ and she wore bell-bottom pants and she drank carrot juice and her feet were always dirty…so…yeah, Grandma was a hippie too, just like me. In fact, now that I think about it, that’s pretty much how hippies came—in pairs.”
We didn’t have to ask more questions. Poppy just went on and on about his life with Grandma in California. They had lots of jobs, from waiting on tables to picking oranges. They were living over a garage when Mom was born. Mom laughed: “I was a hippie baby!” They named her Dovey, as a sign of peace.
It must have been a nice garage, because a year later they had another baby, Uncle Peaceboy. They lived over the garage till the kids were in high school. Poppy and Grandma got regular jobs and started to look more like regular people. They started wearing shoes and they didn’t dance on the
beach much anymore. “One thing I wouldn’t give up,” said Poppy, “my long hair.” He laughed. “Barbers hated me.”
When Mom and Uncle Peaceboy grew up and moved away, Grandma and Poppy junked all their shoes but their sandals. Poppy burned his one necktie and they went back to being big-time hippies. “Except nobody called us that anymore,” said Poppy, looking a little sad. “The war was over and so was the age of the hippies. We sort of discovered the earth. Everything from fish to snails was in danger. The air stank and the water was disappearing. I think we might have been the first of the greenies. That’s when your grandma started climbing trees.”
I
n the dark that night Lily hung upside down from her top bunk. “We gotta tell Poppy.”
I knew what she was talking about, but I pretended I didn’t. “Tell him what?”
“You know. About us.
Us.
Goombla.”
“It’s a secret,” I said. “We don’t even tell our parents.”
“Poppy’s different. You can tell a grandparent anything.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Go to sleep.”
She punched me in the arm. “I’m telling him. I
have
to. I have to tell
somebody
.”
I wasn’t surprised. Besides cheating and lying and confessing, she’s also the world’s worst secret keeper. “You better not,” I said, and went to sleep.
What I didn’t say was that I actually didn’t care that much. In fact, I had kind of been wanting to tell somebody too.
But we weren’t the only ones with something to tell. Poppy surprised us in the morning. He was at the kitchen table with our parents when we came down for breakfast.
“What are you doing here?” Lily asked him.
“Eating an English muffin with jelly,” he said. I guess you could say that was the truth but not the whole truth.
Mom and Dad grabbed their tool belts and headed out the door for work. And Poppy dropped the bomb. He told us he was leaving next day.
Lily squawked, “You said you’re staying till we kick you out!”
“I know,” he said. “I guess I lied.”
Lily threw an English muffin at him. “I don’t like you, Poppy.”
She didn’t stop grumping until Poppy hauled her onto his lap and made her laugh with funny faces. He told us that because he was leaving next day, Mom and Dad said we could stay home from school. And that’s when we told him. We told him
about the first sleepwalk to the train station and all the birthday-night sleepwalks since then. We told him about the day at the beach and Neverlost, and about The Great Snow-Fort War and The Bruise That Moved.
We told him about the time Lily yelled, “I’m stuck!” only it was me who was stuck in the backyard. And the time I yelled, “Stop!” when Lily was ready to chase a ball into the street five miles away.
We told him—well, Lily told him—her idea that “the rest of us” was born during that first sleepwalk to the station. We told him we know who we are now, but we can’t put it into words. We know we have a special thing, we told him, but we can’t even describe it to ourselves, so we call it goombla.
Poppy nodded and smiled. The only thing he said was, “Wow,” now and then. By the time we were done telling him, it was almost lunchtime. The breakfast dishes were still on the table and we hadn’t brushed our teeth.
We told Poppy he was the only one who knew besides us. We made him promise not to tell Mom
and Dad. We asked him what he thought about all the stuff we told him. He grinned. “Well, as your grandma would have said a long time ago:
far out
.”
Poppy had recently gotten his driver’s license in California, so that night he borrowed Dad’s car and drove Lily and me to French Creek State Park. He didn’t tell us why. He did tell us there were two places where he finally found himself, and he was driving us to one of them. “French Creek State Park is where you found yourself?” I said. “Well, not exactly,” he said, and refused to say any more. This drove Lily crazy, of course, because besides being a cheater, liar, confessor, secret-spiller, and pumpkin seed–stealer, she can’t stand waiting. She bugged him all the way: Poppy this and Poppy that, until he growled, “Lily, zip it.” She did. Poppy is the only person who can make her shut up.
When we got there, Poppy drove through a parking lot and past some log cabins and down a skinny, winding road. He pulled off to the side, onto the grass. “Wait here a sec,” he said. He got out, looked at the sky, came back. “I think we’re good. Clear but no moon. Let’s go.”
It was really dark. No streetlights here. Poppy
took each of us by the hand. It seemed like we were walking onto a big flat field. Snow crunched under our boots.
After a while we stopped. Poppy said, “This looks good. Time to lie down, kiddos.” He made us lie down with him in the snow, one on either side. “Okay,” he said, “all you need to do now is open your eyes and let the universe pour in.” While we looked at the stars, Poppy started talking. His voice didn’t need to be loud. It was the only sound in the night.
“I was in Chile,” he said. “I hired onto a boat bringing fruit up to the US, but it wasn’t leaving for a week. So I rented a car and drove out to the Atacama. The Atacama is a desert in northern Chile. It’s the driest place on earth. Sometimes they find mummified people and animals there. It’s a natural mummy maker.” That made us laugh. We didn’t laugh again. From then on it was some of the fiercest listening I ever did.
“When I got there, I think maybe I finally felt like I was where I belonged. Like, without Grandma, my life was a match for the Atacama. Ha! Together at last, the two driest deserts in the world.
“So I got out of the car and just started walking. The sun was setting and next thing I knew it was night. I don’t know how long I walked with my eyes to the dry, parched earth. Ha.” He kind of laughed, but we both knew it wasn’t a laughy laugh so we didn’t join in. “Yeah, I guess I do know—about ten years. Anyway, I don’t know what it was. Maybe when you’re completely dry and empty, up is the only way to look. So I looked up.
“And I wish I could tell you how I felt. That’s why I understand when you say you can’t explain your special thing, your goombla. I looked up and for the first time in my life I wasn’t just looking—I was
seeing
. Suddenly the word
sky
seemed so flimsy. Useless. For one thing, I had never known there were so many stars up there. There’s no light pollution from cities out there in the Atacama, and just like tonight, no moon to wash out the starlight.
“But that was only the beginning, the wonder of that blizzard of stars. Something else was happening. With Grandma, my world was the earth. The earth of trees and oceans and people and sockeye salmon. Now the night in the Atacama
seemed to be telling me something: look…
look
…there is
more
. I saw a gusher of stars from one end to the other and I thought,
It’s the Milky Way! My galaxy!
I was filled with a sense that I belonged to something way bigger than I ever imagined. Than I ever
could
imagine. The ends of it were unreachable. I could travel at light speed for a million lifetimes and I would barely get out of the driveway.
“But you know what got to me most?” We were both too mesmerized to ask. “It wasn’t the sense of the vast endlessness of it all. It was just the opposite. It wasn’t that it was all too much for me to comprehend. It was that no matter how big and unimaginable it was, it was my home. My ultimate neighborhood. My hometown. It was where I belonged. And—here was the best part—so did everybody else belong. Everybody who is and everybody who ever was. I wasn’t alone after all. I was connected to it all. That star there”—he pointed—“it’s my neighbor…and that one…and that one…. And Grandma. For the first time in ten years I sensed her presence in something that wasn’t a picture or a memory. She was out
there too—but not really
there
, because everything is
here
. And that’s where”—he took my hand, and I knew on the other side he was taking Lily’s—“that’s where I found myself. There.” He brought our hands to his heart.
“Here.”