When Melissa got back to the cabin, there was a note on the table from her mother.
Cody and I have gone to the store. Keeping ice is a full-time job. NO SWIMMING BY YOURSELF!!! Love Mom
Melissa got out her sketchbook and pencils and settled herself on the porch. She doodled for a few minutes while she decided what to draw. Her mind drifted to the pact that she and Alice had made. It had been dumb, really, pricking their fingers with the knife. The kind of thing little kids did. But Alice had taken it so seriously.
There was no way Melissa was going to jump off that cliff. She knew that about herself. It made her sick just thinking about it. She shrugged away the worrisome thought and started to sketch the dock with the red canoe tied at the end. She was just finishing shading the weathered boards when Cody and Sharlene returned.
“Mail! Can you believe it?” said Sharlene. She handed Melissa an envelope. “I feel like a local. It’s from Jill. She sent it General Delivery. It’s to all of us. You can open it if you like. And I met Bonnie Hill from the guest ranch. She was picking up her mail. She’s coming over for iced tea in a few minutes.”
Sharlene attracts people the way honey attracts bears, thought Melissa. Pretty soon she would be friends with the whole neighborhood. Sharlene disappeared inside the cabin with Cody, who had spilt pop all down his shirt and needed a clean one. Melissa examined the French stamps for a second and then slit open the envelope and took out a folded piece of paper.
“What does she say?” Sharlene called through the open door.
“Mmmm…she’s having a great time. She’s been to the Louvre and she says I would love the art there. And she went up the Eiffel Tower but she didn’t walk. She took the elevator.” Melissa skimmed over the rest quickly. “The life jackets are in the shed, which we already know, and—”
Melissa frowned. She read the next part twice.
Melissa, don’t forget to check out the island. There’s a neat tree fort in the middle that my sons built. They used to play “Marooned on a Desert Island.”
Sharlene came out carrying a tray of glasses and a jug of iced tea just as a brown pickup truck stopped beside the cabin. Cody trailed at her heels with his thumb in his mouth. Melissa folded the paper and put it back in the envelope. “You can read it yourself,” she said.
Her mind whirled with confusion. Jill’s sons had built the tree house? So why had Alice said that it was her and Austin? There was no way Jill Templeton would lie. So it must have been Alice who had lied. Why?
A short freckled woman wearing jeans and dusty cowboy boots stepped out of the truck, and Melissa pulled her thoughts away from the letter. Sharlene introduced Bonnie Hill, who admired Melissa’s drawing and let Cody show her the fish under the dock before everyone settled down in lawn chairs with glasses of iced tea.
Melissa closed her eyes and listened while Sharlene asked Bonnie a million questions about running a guest ranch. No wonder everyone liked Sharlene. She’s really interested in people, thought Melissa almost grudgingly.
But not us, she reminded herself. She remembered all those years when Sharlene was too busy with her boyfriends, and Melissa had struggled to look out for Cody. She shifted in her chair. The counselor had told her to focus on the times when Sharlene had tried to be a good mother. Melissa had dug into her memory and come up with the time when she was six and had the chicken pox and Sharlene had made special meals and played cards with her. It had been a perfect week and Melissa had actually been sorry when the doctor said she was well enough to go back to school. There were other scattered memories: Sharlene’s once-in-a-lifetime effort at baking lumpy green cupcakes that none of the kids would eat for a school St. Patrick’s Day party; Sharlene sitting in the front row of the gym at a Christmas concert, taking flash pictures and laughing too loudly. It was the drinking that had messed her mother up, the counselor had explained to Melissa. Her intentions had always been good.
“Melissa?” said Sharlene, and Melissa realized that Bonnie was talking to her. “Pardon,” she said quickly, focusing on Bonnie’s smiling face.
“You seem like a very talented artist. I hope you’re going to put some of your drawings in the fair.”
Had Sharlene prompted her to say that? Probably. Melissa’s pictures were private. Melissa shrugged. She ignored the frown on her mother’s face and stood up. “I’m going to go inside. It’s too hot out here.”
“That was extremely rude,” said Sharlene. She stood in the doorway of Melissa’s bedroom.
Melissa was lying on her stomach on her bed. She had been picking away in her brain at Alice’s lie. Why had she said that she and Austin had built the tree house when it wasn’t true? Had she lied about other stuff too? Melissa rolled onto her back and studied the ceiling. “What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean. Bonnie was trying to be friendly about your drawing and you didn’t even have the decency to answer her.”
“I don’t want everyone to keep pestering me about putting my drawings in the fair.” Melissa could hear how weak that sounded. But she didn’t have the courage to tell Sharlene what was really bothering her. She didn’t exactly understand it herself but it had something to do with hearing her mother laugh and chat with Bonnie, pretending that they were a normal family when they weren’t.
What would Bonnie think if she knew what the real Sharlene was like? Melissa flopped back on her stomach and buried her face in her pillow.
“I’d appreciate some help with supper,” said Sharlene tightly. “I got some corn at the store that you can shuck. And after supper you and Cody and I are going fishing.”
Not, would you like to go fishing? Not, maybe you have something else you’d rather do. Melissa sighed. The trouble was, there was nothing else to do here. The only good thing that had happened so far was Alice and Dar Wynd. And now her feelings about that were mixed up with Alice’s lie and jumping off that stupid cliff. Melissa closed her eyes until she heard the angry banging of pots from the other room that told her that Sharlene had left her alone.
Melissa sat in the bow of the canoe, Cody in the middle and Sharlene in the stern. Cody had refused to wear a life jacket unless Melissa did too. Melissa’s jacket was too small and bumped her chin. It didn’t improve her mood.
They paddled into a small deep cove partway up the lake and let themselves drift. Sharlene had brought a fishing rod along, which she had fiddled with after supper, unscrambling the line, attaching something she called a sinker, which she found in a tackle box in the shed. Melissa had pretended to be uninterested but inside she was impressed. Her mother acted like she knew what she was doing.
Sharlene baited the hook with a shrimp, dropped the line over the side of the canoe and handed the rod to Cody. Cody stared at the water, his mouth open. “If you feel something jiggle, let me know,” said Sharlene. Melissa stretched her legs out and closed her eyes. There was no sound here, not even a bird call. She thought of the apartment, where you could always hear someone’s tv or people arguing in the hallways or the backfire of a truck.
Cody had three false alarms. The first two times Sharlene pulled in the line there was nothing on the hook except the shriveled-up pale pink shrimp. The third time there was a mass of gnarled green weed that looked like a nest.
“We’re drifting too close to shore,” said Sharlene. “How about we paddle and let Cody troll the line behind us?”
Melissa studied the shore as they paddled up the lake. Mostly it was dense forest, with tall dark trees that grew right up to the edge of the water, but in a few places there were grassy clearings sprinkled with purple and yellow wild flowers.
After a while, Cody announced that he didn’t want to fish anymore. Sharlene reeled in the line and laid the fishing rod carefully in the bottom of the canoe. “We’ll try worms tomorrow.”
“I want to go back,” said Cody.
“Not yet,” said Sharlene. “It can’t be much farther to the end of the lake. Pretend you’re an explorer.”
Cody hunched over and jammed his thumb in his mouth. Melissa was glad that for once Sharlene hadn’t given in to her brother’s demands. Now that they were out here, she had to admit she was enjoying herself. It was satisfying to feel the canoe surge forward each time she pulled the paddle through the still water.
“You’re good in a canoe, Mel,” said Sharlene suddenly. “You make very even strokes. I think we make a great team. When your Aunty Eleanor and I used to take our grandpa’s canoe out, we argued steadily about who was paddling the hardest.” Sharlene chuckled. “Once we got in a down-and-out fight and tipped the canoe right over!”
Melissa couldn’t help grinning. She found it impossible to imagine Sharlene and her sister Eleanor as kids, canoeing on some lake that might have been a bit like this. Melissa didn’t know her aunt very well, and the few times they got together, she always had the feeling that Aunty Eleanor disapproved of Sharlene.
She examined the compliment her mother had given her and imagined casually telling the kids at school that she had spent the summer canoeing.
“Oh my,” said Sharlene suddenly in a low voice. “Keep quiet and look over to the right.”
A sleek black and white bird drifted on the smooth water. It opened its bill and gave a long quavering cry.
“A loon,” whispered Sharlene. “It’s calling its mate.”
Melissa scanned the lake and spotted another loon. “There it is!” she said, pointing. “Way over there.”
The loons called back and forth. Goose bumps prickled Melissa’s back. The sound was beautiful and sad at the same time.
For a long time they let the canoe drift while they watched the loons. Finally the birds dove and reappeared far in the distance. Melissa and Sharlene picked up their paddles. The canoe glided around a point of land that jutted into the water. “Look, Cody,” said Sharlene. “Somebody lives here.”
Cody looked up long enough to decide that it wasn’t at all interesting and began to whine, “I want to go back. I want to go back.”
“This must be the Hopes’ ranch,” said Sharlene.
Melissa’s heart gave a jump. Rippling green fields stretched back from the lake. A tractor was parked in the middle of one field and a swath of mowed grass stretched like a ribbon behind it. The field next to it had been cut and was dotted with huge round bales of hay. A log house, the fading sunlight glinting off the dark windows, faced the lake, and a barn and several outbuildings were scattered behind. A long dock in front of the house was bare except for the blue canoe and an aluminum boat tied to the end.
Melissa thought of the clutter of lawn chairs, beach towels and Cody’s toys that had spread across the grass and onto the dock in front of their cabin. Sharlene must have been thinking the same thing for she said, “It looks kind of lonely here.”
Sharlene and Melissa rested their paddles and the canoe drifted toward the house. “Maybe we better go back,” said Melissa quickly. Her heart raced in her chest. She was terrified that Alice would think she was spying on her.
At that moment a tall thin boy walked through a door onto the front porch of the house. He was wearing baggy blue jeans and a gray T-shirt with the arms cut off. His black hair was long and fell over one side of his face. He stopped and stared out at them, and Melissa’s face flushed. “Come on,” she urged. “It looks like we’re being nosy.”
“Nonsense,” said Sharlene. She waved at the boy. “Hello!” she called out.
The boy stared a moment longer but made no sign that he had heard Sharlene. Then he wheeled around and disappeared back inside the house, slamming the door.
“See!” said Melissa, mortified. Was Alice watching them too, from one of the windows? She dug her paddle into the water and swung the canoe around.
Sharlene seemed bemused rather than upset by what had happened. “He certainly wasn’t very neighborly,” she said. “Although your friend Alice sounds like a nice girl. I’ll ask Marge more about the family next time I’m at the store.”
“It’s none of our business,” said Melissa firmly. The magic had gone out of the evening. It was harder to paddle back; a small breeze had kicked up and the water had roughened and was pushing against the bow of the canoe. Melissa thought about the boy on the porch. It must have been Austin. Alice made Austin sound like so much fun, but he didn’t look like a boy who would have popcorn fights and take his sister on picnics. He looked like a boy who wanted to be left alone.