Red Kayak Read online

  I got up twice to get a drink of water. I got up just to look out the window. And I got up once to take Tilly outside and stood for a long time in my mother’s butterfly garden outside the back kitchen door. It was clear and cold, with just enough moonlight to see the little brick path Dad had made. All the different bushes, so pretty in summer, were brown and broken from the long winter. But there was a measure of comfort standing in the butterfly garden because I knew it was there for Amanda.

  The sweet, painful memory of my sister had paled over the years, but I would never forget. I was seven years old when she came and went—and we never ever talked about Amanda. We don’t even refer to her—leastways not in front of my mother. There is nothing in our house to even suggest Amanda ever existed. Not a stuffed animal, or a picture, or a piece of her clothing—nothing. My parents packed some stuff in a trunk and got rid of the rest. Then they locked that trunk and put it in a corner of the attic. The only thing left was Amanda’s name on the back of Dad’s boat, and Dad wasn’t about to paint over it. Despite my mother, he stood his ground on that one.

  I scuffed down the brick path a ways and thought about how some things had changed forever that morning my parents found Amanda in her crib, not breathing. My mother blamed herself—she kept crying about how she should have checked on the baby during the night. And I wondered if Mrs. DiAngelo would blame herself the same way. Would she regret not telling Ben it was too cold to go out in the kayak? Or that they didn’t have time? Or that she couldn’t find the life jackets?

  God, I thought, why didn’t I just yell something?

  In my weaker moments, I still think she might have heard me.

  Back inside, I tried to sleep again, but I couldn’t even close my eyes. At 4 A.M., when I heard Dad get up to go crabbing, I got up to go with him. Maybe out there, we’d find time to talk, I thought. Maybe that would help. I wasn’t sure. I only knew that I couldn’t sleep and I didn’t want to be in bed, alone in the dark, anymore.

  “You’re up?” Dad rubbed his eyes. He was surprised, but he is not one to make a big deal out of anything.

  “I want to go with you.”

  He didn’t blink an eye. “All right by me,” he said. “Why don’t you fix us some sandwiches while I get dressed.”

  I was glad for the work. I put together four thick sandwiches with cold cuts, American cheese, and lots of mustard and mayonnaise. Put them in little plastic bags and threw them in a cooler with some blue ice and a couple of apples and bananas. I tossed in a box of Oreos, too, then a big bottle of grapefruit juice for Dad and two cans of Dr Pepper for me.

  By the time I was finished making lunch and got myself dressed, Dad had fixed his thermos of coffee and was ready to go, too. We headed out together, Tilly left to whimper inside the back door. Because it was still dark, we had to use a flashlight to see our way down to the toolshed, where my father kept his bait in two old refrigerators. We pulled out five bushels of brown razor clams, dumped them in our baskets, and carried them down to the workboat. It took us two trips to get all the bait on board.

  While Dad checked everything on the Miss Amanda—the water, the oil, the fuel—I turned on the radar, flipped the lights on and off, and turned both the VHF and the AM/FM radio on. Dad liked a country music station out of Baltimore, which drove me nuts, but I left it on low, figuring I’d better not say anything since I was missing a day of school to be there.

  By five-thirty, we were ready to set out. Dad liked working his first hour or so in the dark because he could beat the wind that way. The wind comes up between eight and ten in the morning, and if it’s in your face, it makes the job more time-consuming. “You gotta beat the wind to make time,” Dad always says. “And you gotta make time.”

  Outside in the brisk air, with a few early songbirds starting up and our eyes getting used to the darkness, I felt a little bit better, like somehow life was going on.

  After we cast off the lines, Dad let me go up front to the doghouse to drive the workboat out of its slip into the creek. Then he came in a few seconds later, to pick up the radio and check in with his best waterman friend, Kenny O’Leary. Kenny kept his boat up near Rock Hall with most of the local crabbers, and was just stocking his boat, so Dad said, “See you out there” as we left the creek and turned into the river. If you kept going south, on down past Queenstown, the river would hook around in the west, then the north and empty into the Chesapeake Bay, but mostly we crabbed the river.

  We didn’t talk about Ben or what had happened. We stepped into our rubber overalls, pulled on our rubber gloves, and started winching in crab pots, dumping out crabs, and refilling the bait holders with clams. I figured that eventually the subject would come up.

  About an hour later, there was a beautiful sunrise.

  “Lookee there,” Dad said, pausing to wipe sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. We paused a moment to marvel at how the rising rim of gold sun silently announced itself by illuminating the sky with brilliant, broad streaks of pink, purple, and orange.

  “Just think,” Dad went on as he plucked out a small crab from the wooden bin where everything from each pot got dumped and sorted. “You and me, Brady, we seen more sunrises in a month than some people see their whole lives.” He tossed the undersize crab back in the water.

  It was true. A good sunrise was awesome. I watched the little crab dart away beneath the waves. His second chance, I thought. Maybe he’d live and grow big enough to become a keeper one day.

  At 10 A.M. we sat on top of the huge engine box in the middle of the boat and had lunch. By then I was pretty hungry, but after half a sandwich, I didn’t feel like eating anymore.

  Dad noticed. “You can change the station if you want.”

  “That’s okay,” I told him. I wished he had asked how I was feeling instead. “It’s not the station,” I said, but he didn’t bite.

  Still, being out there with Dad, seeing that beautiful sky—it should have done more for me.

  By late morning, we had several bushels of crabs sitting there, all separated in bushel baskets. There was a short row, four bushels of number-one males—those five and three-quarters inches or more. Then three baskets of mixed males, five to five and three-quarters. And four bushel baskets of females.

  “Was a time when I’d have twice as many crabs here for the work we done this mornin’,” Dad said soberly as he surveyed the catch.

  “But the price is up,” I said, shrugging. “We caught less, but we made more per bushel, didn’t we?”

  My father lifted his cap and scratched the back of his head. “Ain’t the same, Brady. And I worry about it.”

  When Dad went up front to answer a call on the radio, I stood for a long time staring down at the haul we’d made, watching the crabs while they blew bubbles and snapped at one another. I remember thinking how pretty they were with their moist olive green shells and that bright blue stripe down their claws. And I had the odd thought about how this was the end for them. There would be no more second chances. No more swimming in the beautiful bay or up the Corsica River. They’d be in somebody’s steamer that night.

  This was not a normal way to think. Not for me! But a dark sense of dread washed over me, and I almost couldn’t breathe. It had nothing to do with the scarcity of crabs or feeling sorry for the bay. No. It was all because of Ben. Ben, who didn’t get his second chance. Who wouldn’t grow up now. I was suffocating, and no one knew it. I had to do something!

  So I flipped out—I mean, how else would you explain the fact that all of a sudden I started picking up those baskets and dumping everything back overboard?

  CHAPTER TEN

  Brady! Stop!” Dad hollered.

  But by the time he saw me dumping the crabs, there were only two bushels left.

  “What the hell are you doin’?” he demanded, seizing my wrist with one hand and the basket with his other.

  I couldn’t look at him.

  “Brady!”

  All I felt was empty inside�
��empty and removed—as though it wasn’t even me who was standing there.

  “What’s goin’ on?” he shouted at me.

  I cringed, but I couldn’t answer.

  Disgusted, Dad threw down my hand and kicked the last two baskets up toward the front of the boat.

  I heard him cuss under his breath, but then nothing more.

  Silence as we rode home on the boat.

  Neither Mom nor Dad knew what to say, or how to start a conversation with me. So I went to my room down the hall and listened to my parents’ hushed voices. Off the deep end…I don’t know!…For cryin’ out loud…But I’m worried, Tom…Then I heard my mother call Carl and ask him to come over. I waited inside my door, biting my thumbnail. It hit me then how my parents couldn’t talk to me. It’s like they wanted to help, but they didn’t know how.

  When Mom finished and hung up the phone, I heard her say that Carl had to be in Easton for a meeting, but that he’d stop by on the way.

  I was relieved Carl was coming. I changed and waited for him in the kitchen. When he came in, he had my parka, the one I had wrapped around Ben. My mother took it and gave Carl back the jacket the police officer had lent me. It occurred to me she must have quietly gotten rid of Ben’s jacket, too. That and his life jacket. I hadn’t seen them around the house.

  Carl and I pulled out chairs at the kitchen table.

  “We’re going out to get a pizza,” Mom said as she and my father came through the room. “We’ll bring it back, Carl, if you want to stay and eat with us—”

  “Thanks—I’m all set,” Carl replied.

  Mom picked up her purse. As Dad put his cap on and opened the door for her, I thought how easy he’d been on me considering what I had done. All that work and he’d brought home a measly two bushels. I began to feel unbelievably stupid and ungrateful for doing that to him—to us. What I did affected the whole family.

  After my parents were gone, Carl unzipped his brown leather jacket and rested his strong arms on the table. He seemed just a little bit uncomfortable, but I was sure he would say the right thing. Carl is one smart person, and he’s got a good heart, too. If anyone had the answer, it was him. I remember once, when Carl worked with the toll facilities police, how he stopped a woman from jumping off the Chesapeake Bay Bridge just by talking to her. He never would tell me exactly what he said. None of those guys are supposed to talk about it. But whatever it was, it must have been good.

  So I listened up, even if I didn’t look up.

  Carl pressed his thick fingers together. “You know,” he finally began, “every time we get a call, Brady, a car accident or a hunting incident—and somebody dies at the scene—it’s very distressing to us.”

  I lifted my eyes.

  “Even though we know someone has died, we keep going back to recheck. To make sure the person has—you know, passed on. It’s a little like we can’t quite believe it.” He shrugged. “Can’t quite accept it—because see?” He opened his hands. “Here we have all this training, all this skill, and sometimes it’s simply too late. Or for some reason it wasn’t meant to be. It wasn’t necessarily our fault ’cause we didn’t get there in time.”

  Carl paused. “In the end, there isn’t anything more we can do. We need to put it behind us. So we can move on to the next one. If we didn’t, we would be totally burned out.

  “You need to do the same thing, Brady,” he said, waiting until our eyes connected. “You need to talk it out—people have these feelings, you know. You need to talk it out and put it behind you so you can move forward.”

  I looked away again, but I knew Carl needed me to respond. A little nod was all I could manage. I didn’t know how to express what I was feeling, which, as far as I could tell then was a combination of guilt for what I hadn’t done, anger because of what did happen—and enormous sadness for Ben and his family. Maybe that’s what I should have told him.

  It took me a while, but I was getting my thoughts together when Carl stood up.

  He shouldn’t have stood up. Another few seconds, maybe, I could have gotten something out.

  “You sure you don’t want to talk about it?” he asked. It was obvious he needed to get going because he glanced at his watch.

  I nodded again. I didn’t want to hold him back.

  “Look, I gotta run, Brady, but if you change your mind and want to talk, give me a holler. You know where I am.”

  I stared at the table, disappointed, while Carl zipped up his jacket.

  “Wait,” I said when Carl reached for the door handle, because there was one thing I had to know.

  He turned around.

  “I just wondered what happened. I mean…why did Ben die?” I felt my voice quaver. “I thought you guys had a pulse.”

  Carl came back to the table and sat down. He forced me to look at him.

  “We did have a pulse, Brady. There is no question you brought him back.”

  I swallowed hard. I hoped Carl wouldn’t think less of me for getting tears in my eyes.

  “But he had a lot of water in his lungs, and it gave him pneumonia, what they call aspiration pneumonia,” Carl explained. “That on top of the exposure—it was too much.”

  I dropped my eyes again and was trying real hard to hold everything in.

  Carl cleared his throat a little. “He went fast, they tell me. Kids, when they go down, they go fast.”

  I wiped at my eyes with the heel of my hand.

  “Don’t beat yourself, Brady,” Carl said. “You did a great thing. You tried. You gave it your best, and that’s what matters.”

  Carl ended up staying until my parents came back with the pizza, but then he left. Mom and Dad still seemed worried about me. Dad even said I could hang out at home again the next day if I wanted. But I guess the talk with Carl did me a little good after all because what I said was, “Thanks, but it’s time to move on.”

  I tried. I tried the best I could. In my room, I put away the bag of LEGOs and slid my heavy backpack over to my desk. I took a shower, reviewed material for the social studies exam I had missed, and hung a clean shirt on the drawer pull of my bureau.

  But at school the next day, I couldn’t seem to pick up where I had left off. I knew I avoided looking at people. I just wanted to be invisible, but I couldn’t because a lot of kids came up to me and said they were sorry and “it’s too bad about what happened.”

  They were just being nice, I know. But I couldn’t think of what to say back. Plus, I didn’t feel as though I belonged in school that day. Everyone else was in a good mood because of it being Friday, and spring break was the following week. But I just wanted to find J.T. Then I wanted to be left alone.

  I waited for J.T. at his locker during six-minute break, but he never showed up, so I went on to social studies by myself, knowing I’d see him there, in class. I was supposed to sleep over J.T.’s house that night, only I was thinking of backing out on him because I wasn’t up for it. Then again, I thought, it might be good to watch a movie and play a bunch of video games and stuff. I didn’t know. I was mixed up. So when I saw J.T. finally come through the door, I was relieved.

  “Hey,” I said, when J.T. took the seat beside me, where he always sits.

  “How ya doin’?” he asked.

  “Not so good, “I replied, rolling my eyes. “It’s been really awful.”

  J.T. nodded. “I’ll bet.”

  I thought he was going to say something else, but he didn’t. He sort of paused, then reached into his backpack and pulled a book up onto his desk. He started looking through it, like he was searching for homework or something. But we didn’t have any that I knew of.

  “J.T.,” I said. “About tonight—”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yeah. You wanted me to come over, remember?”

  “Oh—gee,” he replied, before getting this weird look. Like he just remembered something. “Tonight—Brady, I don’t think we can do it.”

  “No big deal,” I said, trying to make light of it. Afte
r all, I was relieved. Wasn’t I?

  “We’ve got all next week off,” I said. “We can do something later.”

  J.T. shot a quick glance at me. “Actually, we won’t be home. We’re going down to North Carolina—to visit my aunt and uncle.”

  I stared at him because J.T.’s family hardly ever went anywhere, on account of their chicken farm.

  He must have known what I was thinking. “My dad’s not going.”

  Just then, our teacher, Mr. Figley, came in the room and loudly closed the door so we’d all shut up.

  After class, I spoke briefly with Mr. Figley about making up the test I had missed, then I tried to catch up with J.T., just for the walk downstairs—he went to Spanish and I went to math. But he had slipped into the crowd and disappeared.

  Later, in the hall between third and fourth periods, I saw Digger, and I know he saw me—because I watched him do a double take and then turn a complete one-eighty.

  Then, back at my locker, where I stopped to switch books, Kate came up to me. She was still on crutches because of her ankle, so her girlfriend Ryan carried her backpack.

  “Sorry about Ben,” she said.

  “Me, too. It’s really sad,” Ryan added.

  “Thanks,” I muttered.

  Kate had her brown hair pulled up and back into two ponytails, like a little kid. But it was cute.

  When I bent down to pick up my books, she said, “I guess I’ll see you tonight. Mom said you were coming over.”

  Surprised, I straightened up. “I thought you were going to North Carolina.”

  Kate’s eyes widened. “What are you talking about?”