Small as an Elephant - Jennifer Richard Jacobson [2]
He felt heaviness in his arms and put the hot dog down. Dang it! These were supposed to be the best three days of his whole summer. The ones that were going to make up for all the boring days he’d spent in their nothing-to-do apartment. Mom, in her exploding firecracker way, had borrowed equipment, read online reviews, made lists of all the best places to visit, circled maps, and even downloaded music for the car ride. She could hardly stop talking about Sand Beach, Thunder Hole, and all the other great things she wanted him to see on this trip.
Where was she? Why had she taken off when they already had more things on their list than they could possibly do? He could imagine her going off to get something — some last-minute thing they needed to make this trip absolutely perfect — and then meeting someone interesting. Someone who made art out of sea sponges, or wrote the messages in juice-bottle caps. She would be unable to pull herself away. “Can you believe it, Jack?” she’d say. “He sits in an office all day, thinking up what to write inside the tops of bottles.”
Yeah, OK. But why take the tent?
She would have some train of reasoning, no doubt: first she thought this, and then that occurred to her, but then . . . It would be one thought sparking another, until all the ideas burst into flames — or so it seemed to Jack. It didn’t even make sense to try and figure it out; he knew that by now. Sometimes he couldn’t even follow the thoughts after she explained.
And now a whole morning was shot. Well, he wasn’t going to just sit around and wait, not this time, dang it. She could go off and have her amazing time — he was going to have his own adventure. He was on Mount Desert Island, and he hadn’t even put his toes in the ocean yet. He’d change that.
He cleared off his table — leaving the newspaper for someone else to read — and walked across the street to where lots of people had pulled over to escape their cars and teeter along the tumbling, rocky shore.
The day was growing steamy, and the ocean air smelled like warm olives. Jack bounced from the dry, sea-worn stones down to the darker, seaweed-covered boulders below. As he did, he couldn’t help examining each group of tourists — the large family with the grandfather holding on to the shoulders of twin boys to balance himself; two girls in green camp T-shirts who stood outside their camp group, uninterested in the wildlife in a tidal pool; a bunch of older women sitting around a flat rock as if it were a table and sipping something from a thermos — all the while searching for his tall, willowy mother, her cropped blond hair. He didn’t bother to search the more remote edges of the beach; she hated being alone.
A boy about Jack’s age, eleven, but with shorter hair and a wide smile of bright white teeth, was tossing a Frisbee with his little sister. The girl’s long blond hair whipped across her face as she flung the disk into the air. Neither had much of a throw; the Frisbee kept smacking nearby rocks, sometimes getting wedged between them. It didn’t matter. It was impossible to run on this treacherous beach, and both of them laughed at the senselessness of the game. So did their parents, who were watching from stone chairs.
Jack wished he could be that boy, a kid who had nothing more to worry about than where his Frisbee landed. A boy who could make his parents happy just by playing a silly game.
Then he immediately took it back. His mom was cool. Real cool. Cooler than a lot of other moms. He promised himself he’d tell her that when she returned.
She definitely wasn’t on this beach. Should he go back to the campsite in case she was there? Nah, he thought. She’d know to look for me here. He’d stay, give her time to come down. He imagined her sneaking up behind him,