wet,” Mrs. Montgomery declared as though being wet was the crime of the century. From her shiny white handbag, she took out a bunch of what appeared to be first-aid gear. “Honestly, Alexander, I can’t imagine what you were thinking. Come over here and let me take your temperature.”
He dragged his feet, but submitted to her with the resignation of long habit. Mrs. Montgomery didn’t check for fever like a regular mother, by feeling with her hands. She stuck a cone-shaped thing in his ear and then took it out and read the number.
“All right for you,” Pop said, marching Rosa toward the truck. “We’re gonna get you home, talk some sense into you.”
As their parents separated them, Rosa and Alex caught each other’s eye. Neither of them could keep from grinning. They both knew this wasn’t the end of their adventure.
Eight
Summer 1984
During the second summer Rosa and Alex spent together, she saw him suffer a full-blown asthma attack, and it made her weep with terror. She had never seen anything like it before. She had stopped thinking of him as being sick at all, because the medications and breathing apparatus kept his condition under control.
But not always. On a bright August day, they convinced his mother to allow them to fly kites on the beach, something that—incredibly—Alex had never done before. Rosa showed up with a kite her brother Sal had sent from Hong Kong, where the destroyer he was serving on had made port. She and Alex spent an entire morning putting the kite together, then headed for the beach.
At the long shoreline, isolated from the public beaches by a dense salt marsh, the wind was perfect for kite-flying. It blew strong and steady, a warm current up from the south. Rosa held the kite for Alex to launch. He got so excited and ran so fast along the beach that at first she had no clue there was anything wrong.
“Go, Alex, go!” she called, waiting to feel the wind fill the kite so she could launch it. “Faster!”
But he didn’t go faster. He stumbled as though tripping over a log, yet there was nothing but sand beneath his feet.
“Hurry up,” she urged.
He collapsed like a bird shot from the sky. His glasses flew off and landed in the sand.
“Alex!” she said, dropping the kite. She plunged to her knees beside him and touched his shoulder.
His face was turning blue and gray, like a ghost’s. The rattle and wheeze of his struggling lungs terrified her, and she burst into tears. “Oh, Alex, I don’t know what to do,” she said, feeling helpless and horrible all at once. She looked around wildly, but there was nothing in sight except a pair of blue herons wading in the shallows. “Tell me what to do.”
He shook his head and groped in the pocket of his khaki shorts. He took out his inhaler and inhaled three quick puffs. His eyes looked bright and desperate, but his coloring didn’t improve and his wheezing grew worse. He couldn’t seem to get his lungs working right.
Then he took something from another pocket. A black-and-yellow tube. He ripped open the plastic packaging and then, with his teeth, removed the gray cap from the end. Finally, in one smooth movement, he stabbed the black tip of the tube at his thigh and held it there for several seconds. He wheezed hard four times—in a panic, Rosa counted them—but then his breathing seemed to start working better.
He slowly removed the tube and inspected the black tip. Rosa was horrified to see a rather large needle sticking out of it. The whole business had taken only a few seconds. In the strange aftermath, Alex lay weak upon the sand, and Rosa was still crying.
“It’s okay,” he said, his voice soft and raspy. “I’m all right. Cross my heart and hope—”
“Are you going to be able to make it back home?”
“I need a minute.”
Rosa started to scramble to her feet, but stopped when his cold hand touched hers. “No, wait,” he said. “The kite—”
“You’re not flying the kite.”
“I know. But…how about you fly it for me? I need to rest.” His voice was thin and pleading. “Come on, Rosa. She’s going to take me straight to the hospital. That’s the rule.”
“Then I should go right now and get help.”
“A few minutes won’t make any difference one way or another. I’ll be able to walk back if I can rest a little. The shot lasts twenty minutes, and I’m over the wheezing anyway. Fly the kite. Please.”
“I can do that. But only for a minute.” She looked down at their hands—hers dark, his pale—and felt a wave of emotion moving through her. Then she gave him his glasses. Spying a mermaid’s purse in the sand, she gave him that, too. “For luck,” she explained, closing his hand around the small shell.
It felt particularly important to get it right. Like if she didn’t, if she messed up, she would be letting him down along with the kite. It was a beautiful, one-of-a-kind kite, yellow with red streamers, and Pop had given her a brand-new spool of string to use. She refused to let Alex launch the kite, because he needed to rest. Instead, she planted it in the sand to catch the wind, and ran with the string shortened until the kite spiked up. Then she put on a full burst of speed and paid out the string.
She could hear Alex saying, “Go, Rosa,” and that only made her run faster. Don’t let him down, she thought. Don’t let him down.
She managed to hoist the kite upward until it took off as though it had a will of its own, and would stay up no matter what she did on the ground. Breathless from running, she brought the string spool to Alex.
“It’s up,” she said.
“It’s up,” he echoed, taking hold and watching with shining eyes.
The moment they got back, there was a big fuss, just as Alex had warned her. They tried to act as though nothing had happened, but Alex’s mother had an uncanny eye, and the minute she saw him, she said, “You were running on the beach, weren’t you?”
“No, we just—”
“You were running, and you started wheezing.”
He stared at the floor as he held out the autoinjection tube for her to inspect. Her face turned hard as alabaster marble. “I need to get my purse,” she said. She brushed past Rosa as though she didn’t see her at all.
Rosa and Pop stood on the porch and watched them go. Mrs. Montgomery hardly ever drove the car that was parked in the old carriage house, and when she gunned the engine, it coughed and wheezed worse than Alex. She didn’t seem to be a very good driver, either, Rosa observed. The blue Ford Galaxy lurched and shuddered backward out of the driveway, and the engine banged and backfired all the way down Ocean Road.
“It’s so sad that he’s sick,” Rosa said to her father. “When he couldn’t breathe, I got really scared, like—” She stopped, not wanting to upset her father by mentioning Mamma. “Do you think Mrs. Montgomery is really mad at me?”
“She is afraid for her boy.” Pop grabbed his pruning shears, ready to get back to work. “I think next week, you will stay with one of the neighbors.”
“Pop, no.” Rosa panicked. The neighbor ladies—those who stayed home instead of going to work—were old and smelled funny and some even had chin whiskers. Worse, the widowed ones all wanted to marry her father. “Please, Pop, I’ll be good, I swear I will. Just give me a chance, okay, Pop. Okay?”
Returning from the doctor’s a couple of hours later, Alex seemed to be having a similar argument with his mother. “It’s no big deal, you know it’s not,” he said, banging the car door shut.
Rosa came running from the yard, where she had been watching the koi fish feed on hapless bugs. “Are you all