This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [99]
“Whoa!” Michèle said, grabbing her and pulling her soaking wet body to shore.
“Time to go home!” Mama called again.
A guitar strummed. Another joined in. People were blowing on the mouths of empty beer bottles to make hollow foghorn sounds. Someone was booming a drum, and a tambourine jingled. Bruce’s harmonica jangled in reply.
“Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man,” Anner’s voice joined. “Play a song for me . . .” The rest of the sounds adjusted to follow the tune of her voice until soon the song turned into another. “I am just a poor boy, though my story’s seldom told . . .”
The light of June was like the loudest crashing music at the end of that song. “Lie-la-lie, boom, lie-la-lie-la-lie-lie-lie, boom, lie-la-lie, boom.” After this the light would still fill long days for the rest of summer, but it would get slower like honey. By July the fireflies would mate and extinguish, and the phosphorescence drift out to sea.
“Lissie, Heidi,” Mama called. “Time to go home.”
“Nooo, we don’t want to go!”
We ran across the road to hide behind the rose-hip bushes.
“Watch out for the poison ivy,” I called, but Heidi kept running into the darkness. I heard Mama calling, so I ran after her.
“Run, run,” I said. “Hide.”
A couple days later, we couldn’t stop itching.
“You got into the poison ivy,” Mama scolded. “Serves you right for hiding.”
“Stoppit,” I said, my tongue worrying a loose tooth, as Heidi trickled water from her bucket onto my sand castle in the sandbox by the woodshed.
“Stop, you’re ruining our home.” We often played make-believe for hours until something—hunger, fatigue, or irritation—jolted us out of the imaginary and back to reality.
We’d been to the July 4th parade in Harborside earlier that day with some apprentices to watch the bicentennial festivities, but the games and costumes had left us tired and overstimulated.
Heidi tipped the bucket toward the castle again.
“If you do that you’ll die,” I said in a singsong voice. I don’t know exactly when or why I started saying that to her, but I said it often that year, as her three-year-old precociousness began to get the better of me. It was the only threat severe enough to get her attention.
That day Heidi looked at me with those pale blue eyes. Something in her was always a bit of the prankster, as if she could afford to take life less seriously. She tipped her bucket forward, and the sand castle gave way beneath the flood.
“Oh, now look,” I said. “Our home is ruined!”
I hit the remaining lump of castle with my shovel, flicking wet sand in her face. She rubbed it off while backing away, then ran across the yard and out toward the gardens.
The path to Paul’s tree-house-in-progress led past the pond, a mystery of darkness after rain, hiccupping with frogs calling you to them. The frogs laid clusters of gelatinous sacs, each with a black dot in the center, attached to grass and twigs along the edges. The eggs hatched into hundreds of squirming pollywogs that became miniature frogs by the time the dimples of water-bug feet dented the water. Heidi and I often stopped to try and catch them when heading along the path to check on the tree house.
“Here we come, wittle froggies,” Heidi chirped as our bare feet sank into the cushions of sphagnum moss. The frogs lay half submerged at the line where water met earth, their knobby skin an iridescence of greens, yellows, and browns, rounded eyes unblinking. We stood on a shallow ledge where you could see through to the sandy bottom, the warm water up to the middle of my calves and to Heidi’s thighs.
“Catch me a frog,” Heidi begged. If we were too sudden, they sprang into the water and breaststroked out of reach. It annoyed me when I couldn’t catch one, cupping my hands on emptiness as the frog shot away. I wanted to feel the thump-thump as it jumped inside my closed palm like a beating heart.
“Stupid frogs!” I kicked the water, splashing Heidi. Some days she annoyed me, too, the reasons building a house in my heart. There was always the underlying grudge that she got to go with Mama last spring.