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  “Edward, bring them a towel or something, would you? Don’t you two come in here without wiping off. Oh, Brenda, just look at you! You’ve ruined your shirt.”

  “I’ll go to the front office right now and borrow a pot,” their father blustered. “We don’t have anything big enough to cook this huge catch.”

  Beneath his breath, Sam whispered to his sister, “Don’t tell.”

  “I won’t,” she whispered back.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Gulls hung in the air the next morning like kites moored to the wharf with string when his father took him to sign up for a deep-sea fishing trip. Occasionally a gull would land on the weathered sign that read, “McCart’s Bait Shop,” folding its wings against its sides, surveying the fish scales on the pier with interested, yellow eyes.

  “No sense taking up room on the boat for me,” Sam’s mother had told them as she’d scoured the pot a second time this morning before she returned it to the office. “I’d just feel sick, and worry that Brenda might fall over the side.”

  “We’re on vacation for family togetherness, Terrie. This is something we do once a year.”

  “I don’t like to watch things get reeled in, gasping until they die. They’re so pitiful! I’d much rather take Brenda shopping on the Strand for back-to-school clothes.”

  “Talk about gasping and dying,” Sam’s father said.

  So there they were, just the two of them, making reservations for a boat.

  His father pushed the bait-shop door open and Sam thought that the place smelled even fishier on the inside than it did on the outside. Chicken-wire crab pots dangled overhead. Behind the counter stood three faded, dusty framed photographs of fishing boats—the Westerly, the Stately Mary, and the No Nonsense. His father gestured toward the photos. “You got room for two more on one of those vessels tomorrow?” he asked.

  The fellow who stood behind the cash register looked as distinguished as any fisherman, with a leathered face and whiskers as white as minnow bellies. He reached for a black ledger with rusty rings and curled edges. Inside, on green quadrille paper, the penciled names of what must be customers had been written in a small, square hand.

  Edward propped his elbow on the counter. “We’d like a salmon trip, if we could.”

  The man was dressed in a red-plaid shirt with a green Scottish sweater. st read A REEL EXPERT CAN TACKLE ANYTHING. “You’re talking salmon, you ought to have real good luck this year. Been a good season all the way around.”

  Outside, from down the pier, came a scraping sound and the slapping of ropes. “Arlie,” someone shouted. “Get on out here and tie us up.”

  “That’s them coming in now.” The man named Arlie slammed the ledger shut and hurried outside, leaving them at the counter.

  Sam shrugged. His father gripped his hand. “What do you say? Why don’t we see what they’ve brought in?” They hurried outside and walked the length of the wharf, then found themselves pulling ropes, too, heaving the boat hard against tire bumpers, tying knots around rusty iron moorings. The captain climbed out of the Westerly, lifted his hand to assist the ladies in sun hats to disembark, as the men in Ber muda shorts, toting Brownie Starmite cameras, helped them selves. A teenage boy, tan and wiry, opened a metal cooler on board and began pitching the day’s catch out onto the dock. This must not have been a salmon trip, Sam surmised, but rather a bottom-fishing trip close to shore. The speckled rust body of a lingcod, the silver ribbon of an eel, and a great assortment of spiny sea bass hit the dock.

  “Got two more who want to go out with you tomorrow, McCart. You willing to take a group out to deep water?”

  “Don’t know as I have enough crew—”

  “I can do that trip if you want me to.” The girl stepped forward on deck, the poles and fishing lures in her hand jangling like wind chimes. “I’d like to do it.” And when Sam recognized her, he knew that this day, which he had already suspected would be nice, had just become even more interesting.

  He waited to see if she would say something about them meeting last night. He was afraid she might say, “Oh, you’re the one I had to dig all those clams for.” She didn’t. She only smiled at Sam and he felt instant gratitude.

  The girl with the bottle-green eyes propped two poles inside their metal holders on the railing and leapt ashore. “It doesn’t always have to be Kenneth who goes out on the deep-water trips.”

  “Walt McCart.” The captain of the Westerly, a man with a rectangular, lined face and sun-faded blue eyes, offered his hand. Stiff points of blanched brown hair poked from beneath his billed cap. He looked just as weathered as the man who had taken their reservation inside the bait shop. The captain gestured to the teen beside him who had been dumping fish, ignoring his daughter. “This is my son, Kenneth. He’s going to be running these boats someday.”

  Although his features seemed somewhat plain, Kenneth stood as straight and tall as a sailboat’s mast, his brown hair tousled, his eyes darker than his father’s, his teeth as white as the gleaming hull of the boat beside him. “Nice to meet you, sir. Hello, Sam.”

  “Nice to meet you, Kenneth.” Edward extended a hand, too, and they shook.

  “Just earned his Eagle, isn’t that an honor for a Scout? Just got moved to clean-up hitter in his baseball line-up, too.”

  McCart announced all those accomplishments before he seemed to notice Sam eyeing the one person who hadn’t been introduced, the girl standing at her father’s side.

  “Oh. And this here’s my daughter. Aubrey.”

  “Aubrey,” Sam repeated. “Hello, Aubrey.”

  “Do you want me to show you how many places there are to hide on a boat?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  While the two fathers made fishing arrangements in the office and Kenneth hauled off a load of fish to be filleted at the Cannery, the two kids clambered onto the boat. Aubrey showed Sam how the long white plank seats on the ship folded open. Beneath the seats were chambers that held the lifejackets, still damp from passengers this morning.

  “Climb in,” she said.

  “What?”

  “If you lie down in here and I cover you up with lifejackets and close the lid, nobody will know you’re here.”

  “You’ll sit on the seat,” Sam said. “You’ll sit there and you’ll sit on top of me and you won’t let me out.”

  But she climbed in first. “Cover me up.”

  “You mean we’re both hiding in here?”

  “Hurry up. Kenneth will be back soon. He washes off the deck and he makes me leave and go home.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you worried? Look, there’s no way you’ll get stuck. No way to latch it.”

  If Sam didn’t do it, this would make the second time he was shown up by this girl. He clambered over the side and into the lifejackets, began piling them on top of himself. As Aubrey lay down, she brought the lid over on top of them.

  “Watch your hands,” she whispered.

  “I can’t . . . see . . .”

  “You don’t have to see anything. You have to listen.”

  “Aubrey? Are you there?”

  “Careful not to breathe too hard. If you do, you might run out of air.”

  That statement made Sam hold his breath in terror. And sure enough, just as Aubrey had said, the sounds around him seemed to magnify, the slap slap slap of the waves against the dock, the melancholy bells from the buoys out in the bay, the jukebox playing “Tom Dooley” by the Kingston Trio in a café on the shore.

  “He’ll come soon,” she whispered.

  “Why won’t Kenneth let you stay on the boat? When it belongs to your father?”

  “Kenneth thinks he’s in charge of everything.” He felt her hand touch his arm. “Just be still.”

  At that moment, they heard footsteps on the planking, someone whistling a tune. A water hose slapped the pavement. The faucet squeaked. Then a spray pelted the side of the boat in short, broken sweeps.

  They
had no way of knowing how much time passed. The water washed over the side of the deck, splattered off the railing, trickled into the bay below them. That, too, seemed to make music. A long, unending song.

  At last, when the hose smacked the ground again and the water changed pitch and the faucet squeaked off, Sam waited for the footsteps to move away. “I haven’t run out of air yet, Aubrey.”

  “You won’t.”

  “You said I would.”

  “I was just teasing.”

  He began to push his way up out of the lifejackets.

  “No, wait. Stay still. Just a minute longer.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you feel safe, being here?”

  He didn’t answer right away. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “I always feel safe when they don’t know where I am.”

  “That’s crazy, Aubrey.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You have a bike? If you do, I can teach you to ride on the curb without falling off.”

  “Okay.”

  “At first, it can be scary.”

  “Did you see the Masterson-Linn Mortuary down the street? You want to know the scariest thing I ever did?”

  “Yeah. What?”

  “My friends and I snuck in there once and tried out the caskets.”

  Sam didn’t quite know what to say. That topped curb-riding, for sure.

  “It was kind of like this.”

  “I want to get out of here now.”

  “We wanted to try them out. To see if the expensive ones were more comfortable than the cheap ones.”

  Another boat must have passed because he heard an engine pulsing and the Westerly began swaying with the swells. Diesel exhaust stung Sam’s nostrils. The boat began to rock as the biggest waves moved on by.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Well, what?”

  “Were they?”

  “Were they what?”

  “More comfortable?”

  “They were all the same.” She was quiet for a moment and then whispered, “He’s gone.” As she struggled to sit up, she jostled the lifejackets and he felt her movement all around him. Sam shoved open the wooden seat cover and sunlight blinded them both.

  It was the way he would feel every summer during the years he spent with Aubrey, visiting Piddock Beach, as if she poured light into his life and it blinded them both.

  Below the wharf, at the base of a rickety ladder that led down to the waterline, a platform floated. Three sea lions slept on it, their hides dry from the sun. Aubrey took a handful of bait fish from her father’s cooler and pitched them over the side.

  One sea lion awakened and rolled backward into the sea. Another, which had surfaced ten yards beyond, jumped for a fish and upset the platform. They all fell in, barked their complaints while a pelican lifted its bill and waggled its pouch at them, sidestepping the noise.

  “Did you know that a rhinoceros horn is made of compacted hair?” he asked.

  “Did you know that a puffer fish can hold its breath for two days?”

  “You think you know everything.”

  “Maybe I do.”

  They stared each other down in unspoken challenge. Later, when they thought of it, neither could decide who had started the race. They dashed up the pier toward land, laughing, weaving among people, their Keds slapping the wooden planks, leaping over fishing poles and water hoses and ropes in the way. They landed in the sea grass at the end of the dock at the exact same time, in a dead tie, and lifted their faces toward clouds rolling in from the Pacific.

  “The least I can do is offer you a piece of cake.” Mrs. Branton has on an apron with splashes of cabbage roses that is tied so tightly around her waist her belly folds over it like dough. “Angel food.” When she reaches to unknot the strings, Sam sees the small white knobs of her knuckles. “If it didn’t fall with this clatter you’re making, it ought to be good.”

  Sam is nineteen and, as long as he stays at Iowa State studying liberal arts, he will not go to Vietnam. He has a job serving food at the student-union cafeteria and, in April, the week before Easter, he was handing a plate of meatloaf and French fries over the counter when something came to his head and his heart, the only way he could describe it was a holy urge, and spoke distinctly inside his head.

  You have been chosen by me, Sam Tibbits, to feed the ones I love.

  He stood there, with the plate still in hand, staring at a classmate who looked like she’d been studying all night and hadn’t changed clothes in three days.

  If this is what I think it is, he’d wondered, if this is God calling me, then shouldn’t I hear something more?

  Instead, he heard the clatter of the girl’s plate as she set it on her tray, the rattling of silverware, the noisy talk that filled the cafeteria, the next person in line ordering roast chicken with green beans.

  This summer his head is filled with questions. He longs to talk to Aubrey and see what she thinks about him going to seminary. He knows, from seeing her every year, that her father has never taken her to church. And her opinion won’t amount to much compared to that of Pastor Wiley, the man who had baptized Sam when he’d been nine, who had asked about a thousand questions when he heard the story, who had phoned a colleague at a Bible school in Kansas City and had said, “I have a man sitting across from me who has a holy calling on his life. I would like to recommend him to you with warm-hearted approval and authority.”

  But Aubrey’s opinion has always mattered to him more than he would ever let on. He has to see her. Watch her eyes as she hears the news.

  She will laugh when he tells her he thinks he’s supposed to be a minister. She will poke him in the ribs when he tells her that the heavenly Father did something inside his heart while he was serving meat loaf. She will shake her head when he tells her about the check for tuition that came in the mail from someone in Nebraska who he doesn’t even know.

  If he can convince her to come with him, he’s decided, this may be his last trip to the sea.

  Mrs. Branton squints at him. “She been writing you letters? Maybe you know something we don’t.”

  “Some. It’s been a couple of months, though.” He pictures her last letter, the way it arrived in his dorm mailbox with Aubrey’s handwriting scribbled out and his mother’s scribbled in: Forward to Madison Hall, Rm. 211, Ames, Iowa.

  “They’ve been gone almost two months.”

  Sam tries to remember a date, a postmark, something she wrote that might clue him in. He remembers her last few letters as unsatisfying, too generic, not Aubrey’s normal mix of jokes and stories. But, he thinks, she certainly had her reasons for that. Sam sees himself returning the pages to the envelope, using it to bookmark his Psychology text. He had been cramming for midterms.

  “I heard from her in early spring,” he says. “That’s the last time.”

  “Every window’s locked tighter than a drum.” Mrs. Branton keeps folding and unfolding the broadcloth apron in her hands. “We couldn’t stand it. After three weeks or so, Philip carried the ladder over and climbed up so he could see inside. So odd.”

  “What’s odd?”

  “The Lighthouse-Reporter still unfolded beside Walt McCart’s chair. Mox’s food still in the bowl. Aubrey’s tea bag left on a saucer. As if she intended on coming right back.”

  Should he have known by anything in her letters that something was wrong? All this time Sam is struggling with disappointment. Now he gives in to fear, too. “Do you think something could have happened to them? Did anyone phone the police?”

  “Of course we did. We all thought of doing so. But we’re neighbors, not family. They could have gone anywhere, and we’d be fools saying they were missing.”

  Sam can only think of going down to sit on the beach. He wants to dig his toes deep into the sand where it is cold and wet. He wants to ask questions of the ocean, watch the cresting waves slam toward him, the blue darken as the clouds roll over the sun.

  “Did you talk to Ar
lie? Do you think he would know anything?”

  “Arlie’s long gone. Married some woman named Hester. She made him move to Medford when McCart sold the boats.”

  “It would be worth a try. Even though he’s not here, he might know something.”

  “I saw them get into the car, that’s the funny thing. I ought to have thought something of it. McCart had his hand on her arm.” She shows Sam a grip above the elbow, tight around the sleeve, as his heart becomes a fist inside his throat.

  “He did that? Like he was making her go?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid so.”

  Sam can smell her cake burning inside. He knows she can smell it, too. But they both stand watching each other a moment more, wondering if either of them could do anything for Aubrey now.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Each year the Tibbits’ vacation ended with the same father-son ritual, Edward and Sam perched on a driftwood log watching the rocks turn to silhouettes against the last ocean sunset, the last golden light spreading its fingers up through the sky. The morning before they drove away, there was always a clap on the back at the marina and a promise from Walt McCart for even better fishing next year. Brenda always begged for another cherry phosphate from the soda fountain before they left town. And Aubrey always came running up the walk with a wadded paper sack, gasping for breath because she’d almost missed them, thrusting it toward him and saying, “Here’s this year’s present to remember me by.”

  “What is it?”

  “You have to look inside and see.”

  Each year Sam would unfasten the bag and find some treasure. One year it was something hard and poky. He pulled out the inflated carcass of a puffer fish, its dried spines protruding in every direction. Two fake eyes, moving disks of white and black, had been glued in the sockets.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “It died holding its breath.”

  “Just shut up.”

  “Did you know that a dragonfly lives its entire life in two days? In the same amount of time a puffer fish can hold its breath?”

  “Write me,” she said, as she did every year.