Water Steps (6 page)

Whistling pulled me up short. I wanted to keep my tree fort private. A place just for me. The song being whistled didn't have the hop and the jump of one of Pep's tunes, and Mem's not one for woods—too many snakes and bats about for her. What if it was one of Tylo's rowdy brothers? They'd probably try to claim my fort. I had a serious need for some acorns myself, something I could pitch fast and hard to keep them away.

Then I caught sight of the whistler through the trees. From the clam-combed hair, I realized it was Tylo. Eh, he could see my fort. Just as long as he didn't tell his brothers about it. But to play it safe, I got down and headed out to the clearing to meet up with him.

“Hi there,” I said as he came closer.

“Hello.” He dragged his feet, a canvas bag snagging along behind him.

“What's wrong?”

“My brother Trevor caught me stuffing my green beans in my pocket. Now I have to help him collect leaves for his science project. He has to get a gazillion of them before he goes back to school. Scratch that. I have to find them all. He'll be at the beach all day.”

Sibling blackmail. Now there's one thing I'd never miss about not having a brother—

That lie hit me like a bolt of lightning charging right down into my feet. I'd had a brother. An older brother who would've caught me planting my brussels sprouts in the fern by the back door.

To let my brother Kenny know I would've done his science projects, carried his books, and even cleaned his nuclear disaster of a room—if it meant I could have him back—I decided to give Tylo a hand. After all, I knew my leaves.

Pulling off a pine needle, I said, “Here's a white pine to start things off.”

“Cool.” He rushed forward to grab the needles, popped them in a book in his bag, then rushed for a struggling maple. “Thanks for your help.”

Felt good to help him, a faint hint of the kind of things I could've done with my own brother. And Tylo turned out to be a cool kid. Even if he did have a
fairy tale obsession with threes. He fancied himself a spelunker and promised to take me to see his favorite caves—all three of them. He had a comic book collection big enough to fill three bookcases. He even had three brothers and three loose teeth (thanks to his youngest brother, Ben, who tripped him into a rock).

“It's okay, they're all baby teeth.” He pushed them with his tongue. “Do you think I could get enough from the tooth fairy to buy that special night film you were talking about?”

“You mean your mom and dad? The tooth fairy isn't real.”

I knew the score on fairies. All the fairy stories of my childhood had sent me in search of those little critters. I'd found a book about them at school. Told me everything from the myths about the hill-living baby-stealers to those famous doctored-up photographs that had people in England believing those little woodland pixie types might actually be real. Yeah, right. About as real as Gaylen Parker's sunset. Not only did that book show me how people could fix photographs, but it also taught me that all those magical, fantastic stories Mem and Pep had told me didn't have a word of truth in them.

Reading that book made me feel like I'd been
living inside a beach ball and someone sucked all the air out and left me with just a shrunk-up blob of plastic. All the possibilities of fairies and pixies and pookas just shriveled right up. That's why I preferred real, honest, taken-from-life pictures that showed what a person can see, hear, and touch. They captured the real world.

And that's what I wanted from Mem and Pep—the real truth about their childhood. But instead I get to learn the ins and outs of fairyland. They can keep it.

But Tylo seemed like the type of kid who'd still clap for Tinkerbell to say he believed in fairies. He stopped and squinted at me. “Does that mean you don't believe in any imaginary things?”

I walked past him. “Why would I, if they're imaginary?” That'd be like waiting up to catch Santa eating the cookies you've left when you could be eating those cookies yourself.

“What's just make-believe to some people is real to others, like those people who can see ghosts.”

“Mediums?” I laughed. “They're just pretending.”

“People aren't always pretending when they see imaginary things.”

I kept walking, searching for a birch tree, so it took me a minute to notice that he hadn't followed
me. I turned to see him standing there with the bag on his shoes, his head down, his shoulders all droopy like he'd just found out Santa Claus was a hoax.

Sad feelings are like a shrinking potion. When someone I like, even a new friend like Tylo, feels bad, it shrinks me up inside.

“Okay.” I shrugged. I didn't really believe him, but I had to say something to cheer him up. I thought about the article I'd seen on silkies in the town paper and I blurted out, “My parents say there are silkies in this lake.”

You'd think I'd lit a rocket in his shoes the way he came rushing forward all shouts and laughter. “They do? That's what I think, too! Lots of people around here joke about them. But I saw one three nights ago. Tried to take its picture, but the picture didn't turn out. If you used your camera and that film you're talking about, we could get one on film!”

His words blew up a balloon of laughter in my mouth, but I couldn't let it out. He'd know I thought he was a goofus.

Silkies? Even my leprechaun-loving parents didn't really think they lived in that lake. Those were just wacky stories people tell. Tylo probably just saw fish
jumping in the water, not a ship-guiding seal. I coughed to let my laughter out, then said, “If you want that film, you'd better talk to your brother.”

“Why?”

“Three teeth won't get you enough money to buy it.”

His eyes got so big his head kind of flopped back like they made it too heavy. He thought I was serious. A total goofus.

But I liked goofuses. How else would I put up with Pep? Giving Tylo a shove, I said, “Just kidding,” then headed on to find more leaves.

“Well, I've got to get that picture.” He shook his head. “My brothers just won't shut up about me seeing a silkie. They keep calling me ‘Gully.'” He turned to me. “That's for ‘gullible,' as in a kid so dumb he'd believe the moon is made of cheese.”

He kicked a tree. “I don't think that.” Picking at the bark, he said, “I saw that silkie, Kyna. I really did.”

His sadness seeped inside me and felt familiar. The kids at school made me feel that way all the time. What with my aversion to anything watery and a bobbing-for-apples mishap that I'm too ashamed to even think about, I knew the soul-squashing feeling of having kids tease you. I had to help Tylo prove to his brothers that he had seen something in that lake.
Maybe not a silkie, but something. So I said, “I could take the picture if we get the film.”

“Maybe I could sell a comic book. I have a few double copies I could part with. Do you like Spiderman?”

He followed me into the woods and we made plans to buy the film and take pictures of silkies or flopping fish or whatever showed up.

I
came home to find my Aunt Rosien sitting at our kitchen table, petting Kippers and sipping tea. “Afternoon to ya.” She held her cup up to me, her hair as red and curly as Mem's was gray and straight. Didn't look like Mem's sister to me.

“Afternoon.” I stood by the door, waiting to see what she'd do.

“Your pep's on the horn with his editor and Itha's getting all that paint off her hands. Stuff's toxic, you know. Kills the fish when they dump the cans in the water. Hate the stuff, myself.”

“Mem wouldn't dump it in the water.” Mem mixed her own paints to use as many natural things as she could.

“Right.” She sighed. Great, I'd annoyed her already. I figured I'd be better off leaving her alone, so I turned to go.

“What you got there?” She pointed at my hand.

I twirled the leaf I held. “Just something I picked with a friend.”

“If you were a fish, how'd you feel if I pulled off a scale?”

“What?”

“Same thing as taking a leaf, you know? It's a living thing, that tree. You couldn't wait until the leaf fell?”

Pep's comment about Aunt Rosien being an Earth Mother popped into my head. And she was really protective of her “child,” all right. I thought Mem and Pep were nature nuts. If so, then Aunt Rosien had to be a nature freak. I'd heard of people getting mad when you nailed a sign to a tree. And I do, too. Nails poison trees when they rust, but a leaf? Every tree has thousands. Like they'd miss one. But I bet a fish has that many scales, too. Would it hurt when you took one off? Like having your hair pulled out? I shuddered to think about it.

“What are you telling her?” Mem asked as she came in just in time to see me shudder. She rubbed my back.

“Fish are dying from paint cans thrown in the water
and trees don't appreciate it when you pluck off their leaves.” Rosien took a sip. An honest one, that aunt of mine. Maybe she would tell me true stories about Mem.

“Lovely. Nice to meet you too, Auntie.” Mem went to the stove for a cup of her own. “Don't mind her, Kyna. She'd tell the sun it shined too hot on turtles. Gave them tough skin.”

They both laughed. Rosien nodded. “Aye, I did say that when I was a girl.”

Seeing her laugh made me imagine she'd opened a small door. I might be able to sneak through if I was careful. Maybe even learn what kind of things Mem said when she was little.

Sitting down, I prepared for a trade—a story for a story. I'd tell her about me, then maybe she'd tell me about Mem. “When we lived in an apartment, the landlord knocked a bird nest out of the air conditioner unit by our balcony. So Pep and I made a tree out of a coat rack and fabric-covered coat hangers for leaves and left all of the fixings for a new nest.”

Rosien leaned over the table to have a close listen in. “Did it work?”

“Yep, four babies.” I held up my fingers. “One of them had three brown spots on its head when it flew away. We had a pep bird with three spots on its head the
very next year.” Those little birdie families made it easier to wait to move back into my grandma's house. After the sea took my family, I had to live in a foster home for the six months it took Mem and Pep to get licensed as foster parents. Then came the long, drawn-out wait for the adoption to become final. With no will, it took nearly two years for the courts to decide Gram's little house could belong to Mem and Pep until I was old enough to claim it. After all, no one else could. Gram's only brother died in the Vietnam War, and she didn't have any other children besides my dad. And Mom was an orphan like me. At least I had Mem and Pep, and now an aunt. Even one as grouchy as Aunt Rosien was a good thing.

“Glory to the stars,” Aunt Rosien smiled and patted her knee. “Now that's a fine story.” She looked at Mem who came to the table with her tea.

“And it's true,” Mem said, smiling.

“Even better.”

I smiled to see that Aunt Rosien salted her tea like Mem and Pep did.

Stirring a little sugar into my cup, I asked, “So, did Mem rescue any animals?”

Rosien's face stretched into a smile of surprise. “Now how'd you know she did that?”

An animal shows up in our yard and Mem finds it
a home whether it has wings, fur, or scales. She even found a home for a blind, albino squirrel. With a record like that, she would've had to start young.

Mem blew on her tea, saying, “She doesn't need to hear any of that.”

“Oh?” Rosien asked, then nudged me saying, “Your mem would've started her own zoo for all the critters she dragged in—otters, seagulls, even brought home a three-legged turtle.”

I laughed, imagining Mem, all pigtails and pretty dresses, dragging home one animal after another. Leave it to Mem to be bringing home sea critters. I bet she combed every beach, the way she loved the water.

“Aye, our Mem thought Itha wanted a wee baby to care for, so she had our brother, Shannon.”

“A boy named Shannon?” I had an uncle?

“Wasn't no name for a girl till you Yanks started messing with it.”

Felt like I should apologize, but I said, “Where's Shannon now?”

“Ireland,” Mem jumped in, all smiles. “Lad's studying to be an oceanographer.”

“Cool . . .” Wow an uncle too? Man, I might even have a couple cousins, but they probably love the water like the rest of the clan.

Rosien grumbled into her tea, but Mem quickly said, “And what I'd like Rosien to tell us is how she made that jumper she's wearing.” Mem gave it a tug. A mossy green, it hung low at the cuffs and had a loose weave that made it “drape,” as Mem called it. What I'd like to know is why anyone would want a jumper that looked like drapes? It's not like you'd hang it in a window, right?

Besides, I wanted to know more about Mem's family, not how to knit. But Mem brought out the yarn and the two of them set to clicking their needles and chattering in Irish, laughing and teasing until I felt about as useful as a toe next to a thumb. Right about then, I decided it would be good to try my hand at mapping a few of the trails through the woods around the house. If I did a good enough job, made my own signs to mark the trails, maybe even cleared a trail or two of my own, I might just be able to finish that Get With the Land project after all.

But I didn't get much further than a few squiggly lines, because I kept thinking about little girl Mem traipsing home with her wee found pets. Why couldn't she share her true stories with me? Just ‘cause it's true doesn't mean a real story could hurt me. Could it?