“Mr. Packard is taller and older and he has gray hair and a dog named King Crab.”
Michael ignored her.
“And he’s not a grump. Like you.”
He stopped and looked down her.
Her expression dared him to ignore her again.
“He’s my grandfather,” he told her and started walking away again.
She kept up with him, not saying anything, but he could feel her studying him. He looked at her finally. All he saw was an expressive face and a pair of frowning brown eyes that were the same color as root beer.
They were on the narrowest section of the sea cliff trail where it paralleled the water. He slowed his steps. “Watch it there, Squirt.” He grabbed her arm. “There’s a cliff on that side of the path. Fall down it and you’ll land in the water. Really cold water.”
She frowned down at his hand gripping her arm, then wriggled free with a stubborn independence and looked up at him. She stared for the longest time. “We come here every summer. I’ve never seen you here before.”
He wasn’t going to tell some kid why he had to live here.
But she wouldn’t shut up. “Where’d you come from anyway?”
“The stork dropped me down the chimney.”
“Funny.” She called him a dork under her breath.
He almost laughed then.
When he said nothing she piped up, “I’m not a baby, you know.”
He snorted and walked on.
“I know all about things like why the ocean is blue.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I know how planes fly and why engines need oil—” She paused as if she were waiting for him to make her prove it.
After a moment she announced, “And I know all about sex.”
He stopped and looked down at her. Then he did laugh. Loud and long, because she was so silly.
She planted her hands on her boyish hips, raised her chin, and said, “I do.”
He just shook his head and moved farther down the path. He could hear her running after him.
“Go ahead. Ask me something.”
“No.”
“But I know…” Her voice suddenly changed to a scream.
Michael turned.
One instant she was wobbling on the edge of the path, and before he could reach out, she tumbled down the hillside toward the water, hollering all the way.
Michael swore under his breath and went after her, sliding down the steep hillside feet-first.
She was still screaming. Below him he saw her hit the water. Rock and dirt and mud tumbled down ahead of him. The whole time he was watching for her silly head to pop up out of the glassy surface.
It didn’t.
He panicked and shoved off the hill in a half-dive. He hit the water just a foot away from where she’d sank. He dove down deeper.
The water was deep here and icy cold. She was frantic, kicking out and waving her arms like someone who couldn’t swim.
He clamped his arm around her wiggling, scrawny body and pushed upward. She stopped kicking and he felt her small hands tightly grip his forearm as they rose through the water.
Their heads broke the surface and he heard her gasp for breath. He swam through the water, pulling her with him to a rocky beach. He crawled onshore with her hanging limply under one arm.
Once they were safely on the gravel beach she stiffened and rolled away from him. She just lay there. She had her face buried in her folded arms, and her back rose with each gasp for breath. He knew she was going to be all right when she began to cough.
He sat up, resting his arms on his knees, and watched her. After a minute he could see one brown eye peeking out from her arms. He shook his head and gave her a stern look. “You need to watch where you walk, Squirt.”
She buried her head deeper in her arms and muttered something.
“What did you say?”
She scowled over at him. “I said I fell on purpose.” Her chin jutted out like a mule he’d seen once. “I wanted to see how cold the water was.”
They both knew she was lying.
She was too proud to admit she’d slipped and fallen in.
He stood, then looked down at her wet face staring up at him with a look that dared him to argue with her. He could have called her bluff. But he didn’t. Pride was something he understood. He turned away and started to walk toward the cove just beyond the rocky beach.
Behind him he heard her mumble that she wasn’t some squirty kid, that she was Catherine Wardwell and she did know all about sex.
He stopped and turned back around. “Hey, Squirt.”
She was standing now, looking right at him.
“If I were you, I’d stop trying to learn ‘all about sex’ and just learn how to swim.”
Three
Summer, 1963
The Wardwells were coming back to Spruce Island. For the past three years they had returned every June, and each year Catherine Wardwell spent most of the month bugging him. He’d discovered she had an annoying habit of popping up at the worst possible moment, like when he was in the woods drinking the beers he’d found in a boat his grandfather had loaned to some sportmen. Or when he was making out with a girl named Kristy behind the old well house near the cove where her parents had moored their boat.
It was June again, and like Dylan had sung, the times they were-a-changing. The Coca-Cola Company made a major move in packaging, from bottle containers to aluminum cans. The Beach Boys hit number one on the pop charts, and Dr. Strangelove or Why I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb opened in theaters with My Fair Lady.
But for Michael, June was hell month. Catherine Wardwell was back.
She was fourteen now, and she wore something called Erase for lipstick; it made her look too pale. She’d cut her hair short like some Seventeen magazine cover model. She looked pudgy and awkward and silly, as if she were trying too hard to be older.
He told her she wore too much makeup and looked half-dead. She told him his oxford shirt was buttoned too high and made him look like a geek.
It didn’t take long for her to get in his hair again. During that first week he woke up one morning and caught her peeking in the cabin window. He slipped outside and turned the hose on her.
The second week she stole a pack of cigarettes from him and had broken them all in two. He hadn’t cared much about smoking, just carried them to be cool, but to spite her he smoked all the stubs and blew the smoke in her face. She was so pig-headed she stood there and refused to run away.
But the worst incident was the afternoon he’d found a letter his dad had written to his grandfather on the day he was born, a letter that was filled with a father’s pride and dreams, things that only reminded Michael of the family he had lost.
No one had ever seen him cry; his pride would not let him show that he hurt.
But she saw him cry that day, when he was seventeen and sitting on a rock in a deserted section of the island. He thought he was alone when he sat there and sobbed in his knees.
That day she had walked right up to him and picked up the letter.
He cursed at her and tried to grab it away from her, but he could only see blurred images through his wet eyes.
She