Listening for Lucca (4 page)

I wanted to set up my collection, but I would need Dad to build shelves first, and he was out at the school. I hung up my posters of places I wanted to see one day: Stonehenge, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Colosseum, Machu Picchu.

I opened some of my boxes and hung clothes in the closet. I came across the pink shirt I’d bought with Kelsey—she had a matching one. Why had I even packed it? Why was I hanging it up now? But I did.

Kelsey used to like my dreams.

The first time we had a sleepover, I went to her house. We’d known each other only a couple of weeks, the first weeks of sixth grade, but they’d felt like long weeks. I’d shown up with a DVD and polka-dot pajamas, and at bedtime in her small apartment we climbed into her twin bed to sleep head to toe.

“Siena—you’re kicking me—you’re kicking me in the face!”

I woke to find Kelsey shaking my feet.

“Huh?”

It took me a minute to realize where I was.

“Bad dream?” Kelsey asked. She turned and crawled to have her head at the same end of the bed as me.

“No, it was okay. I was a pioneer, traveling with a covered wagon. But it was daytime. We got out to walk next to the wagon.”

“So you were walking on my face?” Kelsey asked.

“I guess so.”

Then she started giggling. And I started giggling. And her mom came by and knocked on the door. Our giggles immediately became silent as we pressed our faces into my pillow.

After we were sure her mother had walked away, Kelsey said, “Tell me more about your dream.”

And so I told her about how the prairie stretched on and on as if never-ending, the expanse of sky, the people walking with me who must have been my family.…

I realized she was sleeping and drifted off again myself.

At lunchtime Mom suggested I take my sandwich out on the porch. It was nice out there, with a breeze, and the water was a dull blue, very pretty, that faded into sky in the distance. She also gave me a tall glass of iced tea, which
helped me cool down. Then I went to tell her I was going for a walk on the beach, but she said, “Keep going in your room. We’ll all feel more free and settled when the house is in order.”

She
would, maybe.

So while I was itching to get outside and go to the beach again, I ended up stuck sorting my old toys and dolls. I wasn’t really sure where they belonged in my new room. I hadn’t played with them in years, but I couldn’t get rid of them. I left them in their box on the floor of my closet.

The top of the closet had a shelf. If I put the rest of my boxes up there, it would look like I’d finished unpacking. I wouldn’t need all my winter clothes out now, anyway. I got a chair from downstairs so I could reach.

When I slid the first cardboard box back, I heard the sound of something metal clattering along the wooden shelf. I shoved the box sideways so I could see what had made the noise. A thin silver cylinder lay along the side wall of the closet.

I pulled it out. It looked like a pen. How long had it been there? The clip of the pen had been engraved to say
SEA
. That was a weird word to put on a pen. Someone’s initials?

I took the pen over to the windowsill where I’d left my notebook, found a fresh page, and tried to write. It didn’t work … the ink must have dried up.

Mom appeared in my doorway. “Well, there’s
some
degree of order around here. Your room looks good. And I found all the cooking utensils, so I can make us a real dinner. How about we all go to the beach together?”

“Sure,” I said, setting down the pen. Mom lingered. I walked over to shut the door. “So I can change.”

I put on my bathing suit and found Lucca waiting in his at the top of the stairway. I covered him in a thick layer of sunscreen and put a little on myself, too. Mom came out of her room in her bathing suit, carrying our big striped beach towels.

Outside, we headed down the wooden stairway. We walked past the grassy dunes along the sidewalk and came out onto the beach.

“HAAAA!” Lucca screamed, throwing his hands up, and ran across the sand toward the water. He yelled again as he splashed his feet in. A look of shock crossed his face. He retreated and paused, thinking, then let out another yell and went tumbling back in, laughing.

I followed and dipped my toes in.

“It’s freezing!” I called to Mom.

“Maine water is very cold.” She spread her towel on the sand. “You’ll get used to it.”

“Why is no one else here?”

“There’s public beach parking about a mile and a half away. Probably most people go there. We get a nice stretch to ourselves, isn’t that wonderful?”

I set up my towel next to hers. “I’m going to have to sit here and get hot before I can go in. I wonder if those kids will be back today.”

“What kids?”

“The kids. The ones who were swimming yesterday.”

“I don’t remember any kids.”

“They were really noisy. You could probably hear them all the way up at our house.”

Mom was just looking at me, puzzled.

I felt even colder.

I
had
seen them, hadn’t I? I mean, they’d really
been
there, hadn’t they? I tried to remember what they’d been wearing, if their bathing suits were old-fashioned, but I didn’t think so. The girl’s had had a skirt, but lots of bathing suits for little girls had skirts.

My heart started thudding so hard my brain hurt. I closed my eyes and rested my head on my knees. I’d only
seen
things before, never heard them.

Just ’cause Mom hadn’t noticed them didn’t mean they hadn’t been there—maybe she’d been inside when I’d seen them. She’d been very busy yesterday. Phew. That was it, no need to panic. My heartbeat steadied and I took a couple of deep breaths.

“Will you help with my sunscreen?” Mom asked, seeming not to notice my brief panic attack. I took the bottle and poured some sunscreen into my hands. As I rubbed the lotion onto her back, we watched Lucca. The waves were gentle and small this afternoon, breaking around his ankles. He seemed so free and happy, running and splashing.

“This seems good for him, doesn’t it?” Mom asked.

“Yeah.”

I finished with the sunscreen and handed the bottle back. I stretched out and leaned back on my elbows. It was nice here. A lot nicer than summer in Brooklyn.

Suddenly Lucca came running over, crying.

“What’s the matter?” Mom asked.

Lucca held out his toes and made a pouty noise.

“Maybe he stepped on something,” Mom said.

“Maybe a crab got him.”

“Let Mommy look.” Mom rinsed some of the sand off his foot with water from a water bottle and inspected it. “Seems okay to me.” She patted his back as he stopped crying. “Why don’t you get back out there?”

Within minutes, Lucca was playing and splashing again.

“The cold salt water probably helps,” Mom said. “If he has a cut, he’s not going to be able to feel it too much. But maybe he just stubbed his toe on a rock or something.”

When Mom was pregnant with Lucca, I was so excited about having a little brother or sister. And when he came, I loved him. It was fun to watch him discover certain things, but it seemed like he grew very fast, and sometimes I wished he would stay a baby a little longer.

But the way he did stay a baby was one of the most frustrating things about him: he could never tell us what was wrong. He could cry. If you said, “Tell me where it hurts,” maybe he would point to a place; if he was thirsty he would go get a plastic cup or open the fridge and point to the juice boxes. But he could never explain his feelings. In that way, we were shut off from each other. I knew loads of things he liked; I loved the feel of his small hand in mine when we walked somewhere; I’d helped him learn to brush his teeth and put on his pajamas … 
but even still, there was something about Lucca that was unknowable.

Soon it would be even worse. He was growing, and his problem would stand out even more. Would he be able to make friends? Would his teachers think he wasn’t smart? Would he be able to tell us what his day at school had been like?

“I can’t help but wonder …,” Mom started.

The usual conversation. She always started it that way.

Mom seems to think there’s some key to why Lucca is the way he is that’s her fault. Maybe it was something she ate while she was pregnant with him. Maybe it was something she
didn’t
eat. Maybe it was something she fed him or didn’t feed him. Maybe she didn’t talk to him enough when he was growing inside her. Maybe she talked to him
too much
. Maybe she didn’t read him the right books when he was a baby. Maybe, maybe, maybe …

“If there was something you did, the doctor would have told you,” I reminded her for the millionth time. “He would have been able to say, ‘Ah yes, women who eat hamburgers with cheddar cheese while they are pregnant get little boys who won’t talk.’ ”

“Mozzarella.”

“What?”

“With my burgers. I like mozzarella cheese.”

“Well, whatever, you’re not going to guess what happened. It’s not your fault.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I talk. Wouldn’t you have accidentally made the same mistake with me?”

“No. That’s the thing about accidents.”

Hmm. That was true. That was what made them accidents. They were random. Maybe one day choosing mozzarella over cheddar would matter; in a million cases, it wouldn’t.

Even though some of her worries seem far-fetched, I think I get Mom the most when we talk like this. Lucca is the one thing that makes her see what I see, about the world being unpredictable and inside out. Things that seem just fine can suddenly change. Like I can’t control the things I saw, and I can’t fix whatever’s wrong with Lucca.

Mom’s wrong when she thinks it was her fault, though. It was more likely my fault, for being a bad big sister.

I scrunched my toes in the sand.

The doctors told us that a kid might have selective mutism and be uncomfortable talking in certain situations, like at school. That’s not Lucca’s problem, because he doesn’t talk at home. But they also said that sometimes a kid could be bright, busy observing, and not talk much while he was waiting for his speech abilities to catch up with his big thoughts. In either case, the kid would start talking eventually. Because of this possibility, Dad seems to be a lot less caught up in the whys and whens than Mom and I are.

“I want you to have some more time to be Siena on her
own,” Mom said after a while. “Not worry about Lucca. Get out, explore the town. Make some friends.”

Lucca was rolling in the sand.

“That’s going to be a fun shampoo job,” Mom said. Then she turned back to me.

I got up. “I’m going to look around.” I didn’t want to sit and listen to her telling me I just had to get out there, that making friends would be a piece of cake if I let it happen. How could I explain that the more people knew about me, the less they wanted to know?

I got up and went for a walk, listening for the kids I’d seen and scanning the ground for left-behind things.

When I got back to the part of the beach near our house, Mom and Lucca had gone. I went up to the house and saw that the car was back. I rinsed off in the shower and put on fresh clothes and went to look for Dad.

I found him in his room hanging up pictures.

“Are you busy?” I asked.

“Not at all.” Maybe he was being sarcastic, because he seemed to be gently biting his tongue as he concentrated on checking the level, or maybe he didn’t even think before he answered me.

“ ’Cause I need some things,” I said.

“Oh?” he asked, lowering one of the frames slightly to the left.

“Yeah … 
Dad
.”

He turned as if just then seeing me. “Sorry, honey. What do you need?” His full attention: that was better.

“I want to put up the shelves in my room so I can finish unpacking. And I want some ink for this.” I held up the silver
SEA
pen.

Dad came over, took the pen from me, and studied it. “Where’d you get this?”

“Found it in my closet. But it doesn’t write.”

Dad disassembled the pen. “It looks like a standard cartridge. Let’s head down to the office.”