Listening for Lucca (2 page)

I wasn’t sad about leaving Brooklyn. I’d liked my elementary school okay, but not the past two years of middle school. The kids seemed rough and swore all the time, as if it made you cool. But I knew that swearing all the time means you really
don’t
know when to use those words. Like
when your English teacher assigns homework. That’s not really a time to swear at her. Isn’t giving homework what teachers are supposed to do? I never really got along with those kids to begin with, and then things got a little bit worse. Basically, I turned into a big weirdo. Much weirder than kids who moan and groan about homework.

But it was unlikely I’d be any less of a weirdo in Maine.

Mom seemed to be hoping this move would be good for me; in fact, it was one of the reasons we were going. She’d always worried that I didn’t have many friends, but when I stopped having Kelsey over for sleepovers, she’d obviously noticed that my having just a best friend had changed to having no friends at all.

“We’re moving to your house,” she reminded me. “The one from your dream.”

I’d told Dad about my recurring dream because he likes to talk about that kind of stuff. He’d included Mom in the conversation. I’d told them about the house’s rooms, its layout, its large front door, its porch overlooking the ocean. Mom had said, “As long as this dream isn’t scary, we probably don’t need to worry.” Worry? That was a strange thing to say. Dad and I hadn’t been worried.

I kept having the dream but didn’t talk about it much anymore. But I guess they both remembered. When Mom and Dad went to house-hunt this past spring, Mom called me at Grandma’s to tell me she’d found “my” house.

“It’s just like it!” she’d said on the phone that night. “It’s amazing! I have a really good feeling about it. Dad and I are putting in an offer. Can I talk to Lucca?”

Putting Lucca on the phone is the world’s biggest waste of time, so I’d said, “Sure, oh, here he is.” I held the phone up into the air and listened to Mom mumble incoherently like Charlie Brown’s mom until she stopped and then I hung up.

“Siena …”

A hand was shaking my knee. My mother was turned around in the front passenger seat, trying to wake me up.

I stretched, stiff from the hours of sitting in the car. I took off my headphones and looked around.

“We’re here, sleepy. I didn’t want you to miss it.”

How could I miss it? Sooner or later I’d see the house for the first time. But I decided not to point that out—Mom says I make too many comments sometimes—and got out of the car.

It
did
look like the house I’d dreamed: big, wonderful, an old Victorian near the ocean. I walked across the front lawn, my feet knowing exactly where they liked to fall already. It was eerily like coming home, even though I hadn’t been here before.

“It’s a bit run-down.” Dad followed me, watching me look at the house. He seemed almost nervous, maybe wondering if I’d like it. “But with some fixing up it’ll be totally awesome.”

I thought it was totally awesome already, but I wasn’t about to tell my parents that. I ran my hand along the
banister of the porch steps, peeling paint sticking to my hand. It was gray-blue, but for some reason, I felt like it was supposed to be white. Like I remembered it being white. Maybe it was just hard to see the colors, in the dream.

Lucca tromped up the steps behind me, carefully holding on to the railing.

“Come on, buddy, let’s explore.”

Lucca and I ran all over the downstairs—four rooms and a bathroom with no tub—and all over the upstairs—also four rooms plus a full bathroom that was ten times the size of our old one.

My memories of the house I’d dreamed felt hazy, and I couldn’t tell if the layout was exactly the same.

But it did seem similar, I was sure of that. I hoped it was a good thing. Maybe I’d dreamed it because it would be a good place for us. Because we were meant to be here.

I followed Lucca out onto the porch to look at the water and remembered the next part of the dream, because it happened then, too: the feeling of goose bumps rising on my arms. I tried to shake them away. It was warm out, after all.

Dad was carrying things in from the car.

“You always said we couldn’t afford a big house.” Something I had always wanted.

“In Brooklyn we couldn’t. Plus we got a good deal on this one since it needs so much work. Why don’t you head upstairs and find your bedroom? Yours is the one with the window seat. Mom and I thought you’d like to read there.”

I ran back upstairs to look again. The room with the
window seat was nice. Way bigger than my old room. I stood and looked out the window for a few minutes. I could see the ocean, though I couldn’t hear it. And there were grass and trees between here and the water. Grass! And trees! My own grass and trees!

As I leaned on the window seat, staring out at the water, a cool breeze grazed my neck from behind. I rubbed it. Then it felt less like a breeze and more like that sense of someone watching you when you aren’t expecting it.

I turned around. I seemed to be alone in my room. There was no furniture yet to hide behind, so where would someone be? Even the closet was open and empty.

I jumped about a mile when Lucca showed up behind me.

“Whoa! Hi, buddy,” I said. “Do you like our new house?”

The doctor said it’s important to keep asking him questions, even if we don’t think he’s going to answer. One day, he might.

Lucca nodded.

“Good,” I said.

I should have asked, “
How
do you like our new house?” but then I probably would have gotten no answer at all.

After unpacking the car, Dad drove (drove!) to the grocery store. In Brooklyn I’d always had to help carry groceries home on foot. Dad came back with about ten bags of groceries to get us started. I unloaded everything into the fridge or the pantry, while Mom dug through the boxes the movers were bringing into the kitchen.

Mom seemed to think she needed to talk to me before
I disappeared without a lecture, which had been my plan. She didn’t even look up from her boxes when she said, “I know you want to explore the beach on your own—and that’s okay. Take your phone with you. Never go swimming alone and never talk to strangers, except families with kids.”

Bet that was important to her, that I knew it was okay to talk to other kids.

“Can I go now?” I asked, hoping her distraction would be to my advantage.

Dad walked into the kitchen with Lucca trailing behind him, and Mom yelled, “Beds! We cannot sleep tonight without beds! Go upstairs and make sure the movers get all the beds in the right places!” Dad left without a word and I took the opportunity to do the same, slipping out the back door.

From our side yard, long wooden stairs led to a wooden sidewalk that passed through some tall grass and dunes out to the beach.

As I headed down the steps, a sense of independence surged through me equal to when I started taking the public bus on my own.

The late sunset meant that even though we’d been in the car for hours and hours, the beach was still hot and bright with sunshine. I took off my sneakers and socks. The sand felt damp and cool. The tide must have been going out. I walked a ways and then sat down to stare at the crashing waves, to listen to them.

After a while, two kids came along, a boy a few years older than me and a little girl who was about eight. They must have been brother and sister.

They didn’t look at me. Should I call out and say hi? But maybe they’d want to talk to me more than just saying hi, maybe even ask me to join them. My voice caught in my throat. I decided just to watch and see if they seemed nice.

The girl’s hair hung in wet strings just below her ears. Her bathing suit had a skirt. The boy was wearing swim trunks and looked like he played sports.

“How come you can play with me today?” the girl asked. “Where’s William?”

“He can’t come over today,” the boy said, his tone a bit heavy. “What about you, where’s that awful friend of yours?”

“Who?”

“Jezzie.”

“You mean our
cousin
?”

“Yeah.”

“She can’t play today, either.” The girl trailed her toes through the water, making deep grooves in the sand that turned into soft ridges as the water washed over them and back again. “She had to go to the doctor.”

“Her ears again?”

“I guess so.” The girl crouched down to pat her hands gently over the smooth sand. Then she stood up. “But this is her bathing suit. It’s mine now. Hand-me-down so
Mama wouldn’t have to buy me a new one. Why did you call her
awful
?”

“She just … she’s strange.”

The girl shrugged. “What should we play?”

“Big slimy sea monster.”

“How do you play that?”

“Like this!” The boy jumped into the water and stood up with seaweed stuck to his hair and arms. Then he took a big scoop of mud, slathered it across his chest, and howled in a monster voice,
“Arrgh! I’m gonna get youuuu!”

The girl shrieked and ran, but the boy caught up with her and dragged her back to the water. She kept shrieking, but she was laughing, too. Her brother swung her through the waves and she screamed with happiness, until it seemed like she could no longer breathe. The boy set her down and they started chasing each other through the shallow water, splashing as they went. They ran along the beach until I couldn’t see them anymore.

They hadn’t noticed me at all. Maybe I would have gotten along with them. Maybe I could say hi next time. Maybe.

I sighed, got up, and found my sneakers.

They don’t tend to like me, other kids. There’s something about me they think is very strange. I have to admit: they’re right.

It’s why I’d wanted to ignore the man on the bench in the park last night.

I’ve always seen people in odd clothes, which isn’t unusual in New York, so I never thought anything of it. But about a year ago Mom had been invited to a playdate for Lucca with her friend’s kids at the playground in Washington Square Park, and I went along. When we were getting ready to go home, I was standing in the archway at the end of Fifth Avenue, looking up the street, when it
changed
. The taxis and cars were gone, the modern buildings.… There were horses and buggies, and people dressed in gray and black and brown suits and dresses.

I’d swayed and closed my eyes, hoping that when I opened them, everything would be back to normal.

“Are you all right?” Mom was asking.

I looked at Lucca in his stroller; he was swinging his feet as if nothing odd had happened at all. Mom wouldn’t have believed or listened to my answer, so I didn’t say anything, and she decided I was faint with hunger and pulled us into a little shop for open-faced sandwiches.

I tried to forget the whole thing, but then it happened again. Only it was worse. Because I was with kids from school.

We’d gone on a field trip to the Natural History Museum on the Upper West Side. We went on a school bus and rode in the big semicircle loop where they have school-group drop-off. After we got off the bus, we stood around for a few minutes before they let us inside. We got a glimpse of the pretty park surrounding the museum and of the elevated train that ran up and down the next avenue.

The trouble was, when we were inside the museum and our guide was talking about the beautiful mosaics they’d put in the many levels of underground subway platforms for the museum stop, I raised my hand. “But the subway is aboveground here.”

The kids laughed at me. “The subway is
definitely
underground here,” someone said.

“But we
saw
it,” I insisted. “We saw it before we came inside.”

Everybody laughed harder. The tour guide exchanged a brief glance with my teacher. “It’s possible, honey,” she said to me, “that you once saw an old photograph. The
Ninth Avenue line used to run here along Columbus, on the other side of the museum, but it hasn’t been there for, oh … more than half a century.”

My cheeks burned. The tour guide changed the topic to science. Or, as the museum called it,
natural
history. Things that happened
naturally
. It wasn’t natural to have the present fall away and suddenly
see
history, was it?

After eating unnatural chicken tenders shaped like their ancestral dinosaurs, we were given an hour of free time. I sat by myself under the enormous blue whale in the ocean room in the half darkness, listening to its sad calls playing over hidden speakers, my ears still ringing with the kids’ laughter.

Kelsey found me and sat down next to me.

“The guide was probably right, you know,” she said. “You saw an old photo once before and
imagined
you could still see the train tracks outside. It could have happened to anybody.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “I
saw
it. I saw a moving train! And I don’t know if it could happen to anybody, but it happened to me. You never get it!”

Kelsey looked stung; she had only been trying to help, after all. She wandered off to stare at the fake elephant seals for an awfully long time. On the bus ride home, she didn’t sit with me. Nobody did.