The Hidden Summer (11 page)

I focus on the sound of bubbling oil. I think I’m close to realizing something, or connecting something. Something related to Memama or Marvin or both. There was some thought rolling around in my head that was worth holding on to. It’s like trying to remember the lyrics of a song—I’m close to getting it, but it won’t come.

I do have the sudden thought that Lydia said she was a little homesick.

I look over at her. “You’re home every night.”

“I miss air-conditioning,” she says. “And television. And all the food in the refrigerator. And my dad’s supposed to get home this afternoon. I do sort of like coming down the stairs when he walks in the door.”

I watch the fish. It’s browning on the bottom—I flip it over with the end of my knife. I finish cooking it without making any more conversation. When it’s done, we nearly burn our fingers pulling it apart. It’s flaky and hot and crunchy with the cornmeal. We eat until we can’t eat anymore—Lydia says this is way better than fish sticks—and we split a pack of raisins for dessert. Saban gets three fish all to himself.

When we stand up to head back home, we don’t bother putting our shoes on since it’s a short way, and we’ve worn a path through the grass. We hold our shoes in our hands and swing them as we walk.

“You know what we should bring tomorrow?” Lydia says, licking her fingers. “Wet wipes. My hands still taste like fish.”

She sounds more upbeat than she did earlier. Maybe she was just hungry. I feel good, too. Full and happy. I’ve got a leftover contentedness that might be as much about Marvin and Memama as it is about the food.

“Are you okay with being here?” I ask Lydia. It’s a question I couldn’t bring myself to ask her when she sounded homesick.

She swings an arm around my shoulder. Her hands do smell like fish.

“Sure,” she says. “It’s our biggest adventure so far, isn’t it?”

CHAPTER 11

A VISIT DOWN UNDER

Late one afternoon, we’re playing a game of slapjack in Lydia’s rocket ship, sitting in the chairs of the blinking control panel. Just when my hand has turned a deep shade of pink and Lydia’s a few cards from taking the entire deck, there’s a knock at the door.

A knock at the door. Of the rocket ship.

Saban growls under his breath, edges toward the door, and then starts barking his head off. We don’t try to shush him.

“Hello?”

It’s a woman’s voice. Saban barks even louder. He’s practically vibrating.

“There’s no lock on the door,” whispers Lydia.

I swallow. My mouth is suddenly painfully dry. My tongue feels twice its normal size.

“Is it the same voice we heard before?” I ask. “With Jakobe?”

“Maybe.”

Saban has shifted into a low, constant growl. I think this voice could also belong to the police or to whoever actually owns the golf course. This voice could be about to tell us that we’re spending the rest of the summer at a home for juvenile delinquents.

“May I come in, girls?” the woman calls again. She knocks more softly.

Lydia’s off the bed before I can stop her. She scoops Saban up in her arms, stalks to the door, and throws it open, holding Saban in front of her like a shield.

The woman at the door is small, and she’s smiling. Her hair is short and mostly gray and shining in the fluorescent lights.

“Hi,” she says again, calmly, like we’re walking into her classroom on the first day of school. “I was hoping to introduce myself.”

I walk as quickly as I can to the door, standing next to Lydia so that our shoulders are touching. Together, we’re blocking the door. This woman doesn’t seem threatening, but, as Jakobe says, you shouldn’t trust strangers.

“My name is Gloria,” the smiling woman says. “I live at Hole Nine.”

“You live at Hole Nine?” I repeat. I’m so close to Lydia that her hair is tickling my chin.

“For now,” the woman says.

Lydia and I look at each other. Surely she can’t be serious—if someone were living around those empty aquariums, we would have noticed by now.

“May I come in?” Gloria asks again.

We both step back. I don’t move my hand from my pocket. She moves past us, perfectly relaxed, and—in a way Memama would very much approve of—gracefully lowers herself into one of the spinning seats. She cocks her head at the looks on our faces.

“This would normally be the part where you tell me your names,” she says.

We do.

“It’s nice to meet you,” she says.

Then we stand there a while longer and stare at her. She smiles back and twists her chair from side to side.

“Please don’t look so stunned,” she says. “You don’t have anything to be nervous about. Yes, I live here. And you’ve already met my son.”

“Your son?” says Lydia.

“Why didn’t you talk to us then?” I ask.

“Well, honestly, I’ve been hoping that the two of you might give up. I thought you’d get bored and go away.”

She makes it sound like we’re in preschool. Like we might wander off after a shiny toy.

She holds her hands up in an apologetic way: My annoyance must show.

“No offense,” she says. “Anyway, it looks like you’re not going anywhere. And we all need to make the best of it. We’ve only seen you during the day—are you here at night, too? Have you run away from home?”

“No,” I say quickly. “We go home at night.”

“So your parents know you’re here?”

“Umm,” I say.

“Errrrr,” says Lydia.

Gloria studies us. “So you’ll be staying for how long?”

“For the summer,” says Lydia.

“Well, welcome to the neighborhood,” says Gloria. “Would y’all like to see our place?”

“You mean your putt-putt hole?” asks Lydia.

“Same thing,” says Gloria.

We’re confused and a little suspicious, but she seems friendly enough. Even sort of charming. And what are we going to say? No, we do not want to see how you’ve been living right next to us in underground aquariums without us even knowing? Yeah, right.

We follow her out the door, and she makes small talk as we walk. She points out the bird nest at the top of an old light pole, and she tells us that the sprinklers come on every night at ten minutes past midnight. She has no idea why there are still sprinklers when there’s no one around to pay the water bill. But if we’re looking to take a good shower, she says, ten minutes after midnight is the time to do it.

We come to the stairs leading down into Hole Nine, and, even in the afternoon sun, I can see a faint glow from the bottom. At our feet, I see the small curved shapes of the three openmouthed fish. As I watch the back of Lydia’s head bob down the stairs in front of me, it occurs to me that this could be some sort of trap. Gloria could have anyone down here waiting for us, hiding in the shadows and ready to spring. It would have been smarter to bring Saban. He’s a nuisance, but he knows when strangers are around.

But the bottom of the stairs looks exactly as we remember it—empty aquariums, some bits of coral inside, lots of dust on the glass, and those painted symbols. I can’t see any signs of life. No criminals hiding in wait. No snakes weaving in and out of human skulls. Also, no beds or blankets or anything like furniture.

“You stay down here?” Lydia asks Gloria.

“Not exactly right here.”

Lydia has stopped by the painted symbols again. She runs her finger over the purple circles. “Did you paint these symbols?” she asks. “Do you know what they mean? Is there something below us? Did there used to be tadpoles down here?”

Gloria cocks her head like she can’t decide what to make of Lydia. Teachers sometimes give Lydia that same look—when she answers a question in class, she usually shouts out three or four answers at once, just to make sure she gets the right one.

“I painted them,” says a voice behind us, and I know it’s Jakobe before we turn around. “And they’re not tadpoles.”

He’s standing behind us, leaning against the glass. He’s got a half-eaten apple in one hand.

“You painted the same signs on the tree where we climb into Lodema, didn’t you?” I ask, even though I’m sure of the answer. “And you did the chalk drawing on top of the castle.”

“Yeah,” he says.

“So what do they mean?” asks Lydia.

“I paint the best things,” he answers. “My favorite things about here. The green means rolling down the hills, and the purple is the blackberries, and the blue is the sprinklers at night.”

“Why those things?” I ask.

He takes a bite out of his apple. “Because they’re my favorite. What else would you paint?”

I study Gloria again, her old jeans and clean gray T-shirt, and her eyes with smile crinkles in the corners. I notice that Jakobe’s wearing the same Chicago Bulls shirt he was wearing the other day.

“You’re . . . homeless, aren’t you?” I say.

Gloria shakes her head. She has silver earrings with little silver feathers dangling from them. They make a sound like bells.

“We’ve just hit a rough patch,” she says. “We’ll be leaving soon.”

“We could stay here forever,” says Jakobe hopefully.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” Gloria says. “But a golf course isn’t quite the same as a house. Now come on, girls, you haven’t met the whole family yet.”

She turns and walks to the second set of stairs, the ones we’d used to exit the aquariums and climb back aboveground.

“I think Lodema is much better than a house,” I whisper to Jakobe. He looks pleased.

Instead of walking up the stairs, Gloria walks around them and stops at a dark corner, where I see nothing but shadow. She reaches toward the wall—at least it looks like a wall—and with a small movement of her hand, she opens a door. Soft light pours out of the door, and we hear someone say, “You back, Mom?”

“It’s me,” Gloria says. To us she explains, “This is an old maintenance entrance. When they needed to clean the tanks, they’d drain the water and then the cleaning crews could go in through this door.”

She steps inside the door, and we’re right behind her. As soon as we step through the doorway, we’re surrounded by aquarium glass again.

When we first came down here, we thought we were looking at two aquariums, one on our left and one on our right. But they aren’t two separate aquariums at all. It’s one big U-shaped aquarium—the two sides we can see from the staircases are joined by a glass tunnel that runs behind the walls. This back section is completely shielded from view.

Unlike in the exposed parts of the aquarium, there’s no dust and trash back here. The floors are swept clean. There’s a sofa, a little refrigerator, and a couple of lamps. The orange glow of the lamps reflect off the glass walls. There are three twin mattresses with blankets and pillows on them. Against the back wall, the glass is wallpapered in posters. It’s square after square of pictures—the Eiffel Tower, an astronaut on the moon, a hummingbird drinking from a flower, a tiny island in the middle of a turquoise ocean, New York City, Mohammed Ali, a baby dressed up like a flower. It doesn’t look like you would expect a bunch of random stuff thrown together underground to look. It’s colorful and warm and cozy.

“This is our place,” says Gloria. “Nell and Lydia, this is my daughter, Maureen.”

One corner of a wall has a spigot on it, the kind where you could attach a garden hose. There’s a girl washing a dish in the stream of water. She stands up and grabs a towel as we walk in. She’s tall and thin and looks like she’s in high school.

“Hey,” she says. “So you’re the girls Jakobe met at the clover patch. Mom said she was going to see if she could find you.”

She walks over to us, flipping her short black hair out of her eyes. It’s cut like a boy’s, but with loose curls that flop over her forehead. Her skin is very pale and smooth like a piece of drawing paper.

“Nice to meet you,” I say. “It’s really cool down here.”

Maureen shrugs. “Mom’s good at decorating. She can always make something out of nothing. And that’s pretty much what we’ve got.”

“We’ve got lots of stuff, Maureen,” says Jakobe with a frown.

His sister ignores him. “How long have you guys been coming here?” she asks us.

“About three weeks,” I say.

“Why?” she asks, a little bit of a challenge in her voice.

“Because we like it,” says Lydia, a little bit of annoyance in her voice.

I jump in before Lydia can say anything else. “So how long have you been here?”

“Too long,” Maureen says. “Since March.”

“I don’t think it’s too long,” says Jakobe.

“And it’s not permanent,” says Gloria.

“It feels like it,” says Maureen.

First of all, every time Maureen says something, there’s something about the tone of her voice that isn’t exactly rude, but it’s, well, not quite friendly, either. Second of all, I get the feeling this is a conversation that the three of them have had plenty of times already. I see Gloria give Maureen a warning look, a sort of be-nice-while-the-guests-are-here look.

Maureen turns back to us. “How old are you anyway?”

“I’ll be thirteen in October,” I say.

“So you’re twelve,” she says. “That means you’re twelve.”

I feel Lydia tense up beside me, and I suddenly know exactly how to describe the tone in Maureen’s voice. It’s like at the end of every sentence, she’s silently adding
“and you’re probably an idiot.”
Gloria is flashing the warning look again. I know Lydia is close to calling Maureen an idiot (or something worse) out loud—Lydia’s not big on patience. But I keep my tone cheerful. I am the salesclerk announcing something over the intercom; I am the hostess at the restaurant asking how many people will be at your table.