Water Steps (5 page)

Another bribe. Take a water step and we'll buy you a zoom lens. Get over your fears and we'll talk about our past. Sounded more like blackmail to me!

What was the big secret anyway?

I'd floated plenty of theories. Like maybe they'd grown up as Travelers, the Irish folks who traveled
in caravans and never settled in a home. Nothing wrong with that to me. I'd love to live in an RV and see the world. But a lot of people treated them badly, even accused them of being criminals. That got me to wondering if maybe Mem and Pep might be in the witness protection program for testifying against the Irish Mafia or something. I asked Pep about that last month. That's how he found out I'd been sneaking over to our neighbor Mrs. Pengetti's to watch TV. And I got grounded for a week. Too bad it wasn't for the summer. I could've stayed home.

Mem and Pep only let me watch educational TV, but movies can be educational, too. How else would I know about the witness protection program? They sure never talked about it on any Discovery Channel show I've watched.

No regular TV wasn't the only tough rule Mem and Pep lived by. We couldn't even use shampoo unless it had all natural products inside and said right on the bottle that it wasn't tested on animals. And I'm all for making sure animals don't get hurt, but a girl likes to eat a good Twinkie, drink a tasty soda, and watch a little TV every now and again.

I figured Mem and Pep did plenty of those kinds of things back in their kiddy days. That's why they don't
talk about it. They don't want me knowing they actually ate food that could turn into clear liquid if you put it in the microwave. That's right. Twinkies melt down into a sticky clear goo. No real food there. None. Yuck.

I bet that's what Mem and Pep had to hide. A normal childhood.

Pft. Wouldn't fool me for much longer. I'd track that woman down and get her to spill the beans—the jelly beans, the polyester pants, and the bright green apple-smelling, totally artificial shampoo Mem probably went through as a kid. She couldn't hide all that from me for long now that I had her Irish friend to track down and ask.

I
got up the next morning with a mission. I'd hike into Plattsburgh and see what I could find out about this Rosien. With a small town, it's easy to get the inside scoop on folks. They published just about everything in our hometown newspaper. The
Perryville Post
even announced who brought what for church picnics. Plattsburgh wasn't that small, but with a name like Rosien, it'd be pretty easy to track her down with a good word search. Too bad Mem and Pep thought the Internet was a way to catch fish or I wouldn't have to walk all the way to town to find some answers.

Grabbing my camera—a photographer's Swiss Army knife in the “always be prepared” department—I
left a note to say I went hiking. Actually, I was hiking. Just not in the mountains as Mem and Pep would suppose. To be honest, I'd prefer a hike in the mountains to trudging into town. I kept to the trees because these days traveling roadside is more dangerous than the chance of running into a bear in the woods.

And even though I'd rather be in my nice, safe downtown park on Clark Street far away from a lake, I had to admit that the ferny undergrowth and sky-scratching pine trees of upstate New York weren't half bad. With it being just light, I even heard an owl hoot—probably headed home for a day's rest. Started thinking a shot of an owl in flight might even top my purple hairstreak shot. What if I got it from above rather than below?

The idea almost had me ready to shimmy up a tree for a test run, but I had a mission. One that proved impossible. At the library, I searched the
Plattsburgh Register
online until my eyes blurred, found a Rose, a Rosie, and two Rose Maries, but no Rosien. Even did a Yahoo search of the phone listings in town. Not a one.

I tried “Ireland,” “Irish,” and “Immigrant” and all I came up with was a stupid Halloween story about the silkies in the lake. Sure, the article was a joke,
something fun for the little kids who still believed in fairies and silkies, but why print that kind of stuff in a paper? Newspapers are supposed to print the facts, not the fairy-tale nonsense Mem and Pep tried to feed me. I needed real answers, like who was this Rosien woman who came to our house the night before?

Not sure what else to do, I asked the librarian if she knew a Rosien.

“Row-sheen, you say. That's pretty,” she said. “But no, I don't know anyone by that name.”

A lot of help she was. I could've kept trying, but I was a little dizzy from all that searching and a lot hungry, so I headed home, hoping Mem and Pep had a big lunch in the works.

All the way there, I kept wondering, who was this Rosien? Not everyone gets their name in the paper, I guess, but it still seemed odd not to catch even one reference to her. That meant she hadn't been married there or gotten a speeding ticket or been to a town meeting or had a daughter win a ribbon at the Clinton County Fair Mem had told me about. A pretty secretive lady this Rosien. Maybe she talked even less about the past than my mem and pep. She might be a Traveler. They like to stay off the radar. Local folks tend to blame things on strangers they
don't understand. And I sure didn't understand why Mem didn't tell me she had a friend living up in Plattsburgh. Maybe that's why Mem and Pep really wanted to vacation there—a chance to see some of the folks from their old home. But how was I ever going to know if I couldn't find Rosien?

Not that I thought it'd do me any good, but I planned to ask Mem and Pep once I got home. When I walked into the kitchen, Mem looked like she'd had a “bout of the misties.” That's how she described crying. Like it wasn't nothing more than a bit of weather. But it made me sad just to look at her. Sidetracked all my thoughts of hunting down her Irish friend.

And the view from the kitchen made things worse. The room had more windows than walls and every single one of them looked out at that ripply blue lake. Gave me that tipsy, walking-a-rope-bridge kind of feeling, like the kitchen itself went out over the water. I inched to the wall and started pulling down the shades, so I didn't have to look at it.

Pep sighed, but started pulling shades from the other end of the room so I could join Mem at the table. Afraid my impromptu trip had upset her, I said, “You aren't mad at me for going hiking, are you?”

She touched my hand all kind, then slapped it.
“That's for leaving without asking.” She sniffled. “But no, that's not what's given me the misties.”

“Just in a family feud,” Pep said, pouring Mem a cup of tea.

“Ronan,” Mem warned as she dashed some salt into her tea.

Too late, he'd already “spilled the milk” as it were. There was no putting it back in the bottle.

“A feud with who?” I asked, slipping into my chair with thoughts on Rosien. Was she a relative? Even better. She'd know everything about Mem.

Mem and Pep echoed each other, both saying, to my surprise, that Mem had a sister named Rosien.

“You have a sister?” I stood up. “You never told me!” Never told me she had one. Never told me this mystery aunt lived in New York. So that's why we came to Plattsburgh. Maybe they'd had a feud, swore never to speak to each other again, but Mem wanted to patch things up. Maybe she wanted to ask Rosien to be my godmother!

Mem looked as flustered as I felt. She spun her spoon so fast she spilled tea onto the table.

Pep sat down between us, patting both of our hands, “Rosien's a package.”

“Package” in Pep language meant you had to take
the good with the bad. A person with kindness in her soul, but darkness in what she did.

What dark thing had she done that had made Mem cry? When she came to see me the night before, she didn't sound so thrilled with me. Was I the reason they didn't get on together? The idea made me feel like I had sand under my skin, all scratchy and wrong. “She doesn't fancy me then?”

Mem looked about ready to cry again, her hand even shook as she sipped her tea. I felt so bad for her, I wanted to cry, too. To get into her arms and hug her.

Pep turned to me and leaned in close. “Rosien's not one to fancy folks. And she got to prattling on about being meant to be a mother to the earth not to children. But not your mem, she's wanted to be a mum from the moment I met her.”

“On the rocks of a bay so blue, it made her gray eyes glow.” I smiled as I repeated a line from the story Pep always told me of their meeting. Mem even chuckled.

“That's right.” He looked over his shoulder at Mem. They smiled at each other.

I got up to go to Mem. Putting my hands on her knees, I said, “But it'd be nice to have your sister around, right?” I'd always dreamed of having my own sister, someone I could hang out with. A person who
would understand my fears. Help me when they closed in around me.

Mem nodded. “If she wasn't enough to make me want to stuff her tail end with rocks and see her sink to the bottom.”

Pep barked, “Mem.”

Just the idea had me shivering. Most people could talk about drowning. Joke about it even. But not me. Just the thought of that choking water made me relive it. The wetness of it filling me, stretching my lungs, drowning out the air, and the black waves churning me around as I sank. Deeper and deeper with the pain of the fight for air crushing me. I backed into the wall as my lungs started going at full shutter speed, leaving me no air to breathe.

Mem scooped me up and ran for the front door. She knew a panic attack when she saw one coming—the kind that seized up my muscles and my mind, leaving me quaking and gasping for breath.

Outside the front door, she pointed up at the bushy pine trees. “Look at those trees. Hear the birdies singing. Think that breeze is blowing those clouds?”

I let the wind blow through my hair, took in the piney fresh air. Pines can't grow in water. I'm on dry land. Staring up into branches in the nice, dry sky. I
pulled in a good deep breath and imagined I could fly up into the branches with the birds. No more water. No more churning. No more sinking.

Pep came close, whispering into my hair, “That old lake ain't nothing. Just some of that blue Jell-O you Yanks love so much. Nothing more than jiggly blue Jell-O, so it moves with the wind.”

A lake of blue Jell-O. That made me laugh, but I cried too. Cried because Mem had a family. A sister who stayed away because of me. Would they be closer if I wasn't such a mess? Wasn't afraid of silly blue Jell-O water?

If only it were that silly. That stupid. That easy to swallow. Then I could make that fear just disappear down my throat.

I imagined myself drinking that lake down a gulp at a time, but my tummy filled up, my neck tightened, and still it looked as though I hadn't even taken a sip out of the thing. I couldn't even beat that darn water in my mind. How could I ever hope to do it in real life?

If I did, would Mem and Pep stop worrying about me? Would Mem patch things up with her sister Rosien? Could they go back to Ireland and see the rest of their family?

It hurt me in a
fist-around-the-heart
kind of way to
know that taking care of me took so much away from Mem and Pep. I wished I could take my biggest water step ever and just walk right into that stupid lake. But wishes are worth no more than a stone and stones make you sink, so there I stood, holding onto Mem's hand, staring at the trees, and wishing they'd never even heard of Lake Champlain.

F
inding out Rosien was a package who hurt Mem stomped out my ideas of tracking her down. She'd probably only tell me lies anyway.

And with my little freak-out, I just wanted to get away for a bit. Let the cold layer of fear in the pit of my stomach just melt away. Felt like disappearing into the woods to “recharge my batteries,” as Pep always says.

And Pep sure loved recharging in the lake. He'd pound away at an article for a couple of hours after breakfast, then come charging out of his new office shouting something in Irish. Mem laughed as he flew past and sped down to the dock. I closed my eyes, so I didn't have to see him jump in, but then I watched
real close to see him come back to the surface. Then I could let out the breath I'd been holding inside.

Mem preferred a quiet night swim herself. For breaks from the illustrations she had due come August for some save-the-world magazine, she knit. Kippers loved it. He sat at her feet and played with the yarn. But knitting is not my favorite hobby, really. Meant nice knitted afghans to nestle in by the fire, but it also led to jumpers for Christmas, scarves for birthdays, and more doll blankets than I've got dolls.

“Maybe you could knit Rosien a jumper,” I suggested as I left for the woods. Anything so that I wouldn't have to wear another one of those bulky, itchy things to school the first day after Christmas vacation. Last year, Bobby Clarkson said I looked like a mutant snowball.

To get my mind off itchy jumpers and mean kids like Bobby Clarkson, I headed for my tree fort, a great camera roost. I sat up there, belly down on the floor, elbows as a tripod and started taking shots—the sunlight streaming down onto the rocks, the woodpecker drilling for bugs, and the squirrels scrambling about in a nutty little scavenger hunt.

I love how photographs are like windows into a piece of nature. And no matter how the seasons change
in the place you captured in that window, you can look inside that picture and see just what you saw when you first snapped the shot. It's like you've stopped time. A bit of magic.

But real magic, not foolish leprechauns and fairies and silkies and all those other made-up things Mem and Pep talked about. Little kid stories I outgrew in kindergarten. Now I made magic of my own with a little glass, a little paper, and a good flash.