Homecoming (7 page)

“Toilets I guess,” James answered. “Do you think they have showers too?”

Dicey had been hoping for a kitchen house of some sort, with pans and a stove. Where
you could make a soup. James didn’t think that was likely.

“Okay,” Dicey announced. “I say we walk down to here”—she pointed to the large campground—“and
put our stuff at this site.” The site nearest to the water. That would feel more like
their own home. “Then we better get down to the shore and see if we can find some
clams. When we’ve solved the food problem for the day, we can take it easy.”

Once again they set off, walking four abreast. Perhaps it was the deep silence around
them, perhaps the salty wind off the water, perhaps the sense of forest and solitude;
for whatever reason, this walk was a pleasure. Dicey’s legs swung out and she began
to sing the song about pretty Peggy-O. The others joined in. They sang softly, though,
so that their music would contribute to the quiet, not destroy it.

They passed the playground area to their left. It had tennis courts, parking lots
and a children’s section with swings and slide and sandbox and seesaws.

They continued past to the campsites, which had fireplaces, water faucets and flat
dirt spaces, where a tent could be pitched or a car pulled in. They put the two bags
down and looked about them. It was high land, and trees soared above them. Hulking
gray rocks broke through the earth at irregular intervals, some so large you could
climb to the top and sit looking down. A faint path led off to the east. One behind
the other, they followed the path. Soon they were standing on top of a rocky bluff,
looking
down to shallow water. The path ran on for several more yards along the front of the
bluff, then descended to a small beach. The children ran down that section of path,
slipping, tumbling, jumping from rock to rock.

The beach was nestled into the rocks, as if after hundreds of years of work the waves
had succeeded in making themselves a little room to rest in. It was high tide. Dicey
knew that by the closeness of the waves to the line of seaweed that etched the sand.
There would be no clams for lunch—you clammed at low tide, on the sandbars. There
would be no lunch then, and they’d just have to stand it. They could drink some milk.

She explained this to the others and they did not complain. Sammy took off his sneakers
and waded in the water, which he reported as cold. “Not as cold as ours, but too cold
for swimming.” Maybeth gathered the fragments of shells that nestled among the grassy
seaweed. James went off to climb the rocks at the water’s edge. Dicey stood, looking
out over the water.

You could see no land across the Sound, just unending, restless dark water. A couple
of white sails skimmed along in the distance, bellied out in the wind. The sun toasted
her face. She breathed deeply.

Somehow, they had to get some more money. Maybe she could go back to that store and
offer to work. She could sweep and straighten out shelves. She could fetch things.
But then she’d have to think up stories to tell the young red-headed man, and she
was tired of making up stories, tired.

James called out, then came running back. “Dicey? There’re mussels on the rocks.”
He held out two of the black, bearded mollusks. “You can eat mussels, can’t you?”

“We sure can,” Dicey said. “We can eat them right here.”

Dicey and James pulled mussels from the rocks and washed them off in the water, while
Maybeth and Sammy climbed back
up the hill for twigs and larger pieces of wood. Soon they had a large mound of mussels
waiting beside a crackling fire. Dicey gathered an armload of damp seaweed from the
water’s edge. When the fire was ready, she placed a layer of wet seaweed right on
top of it. Steam hissed its way up through to the air. Quickly, Sammy dropped the
mussels onto this bed, and Dicey covered them with another layer of seaweed.

“It’s like a pie,” she said.

“Or a sandwich,” James said.

“It looks awful,” Sammy said, poking at the fire with a stick.

“But they’ll taste good,” James answered. “Anything would taste good. It’s funny,
you know? When I thought there wasn’t anything for lunch I wasn’t that hungry. But
now—”

“Now I’m staaaarr-ving!” Sammy shrieked. He jumped up, did two cartwheels, which took
him to the water’s edge, and landed on his feet with his arms out. “And we’re gonna
eat!”

They ate the rich, meaty mussels for lunch. That evening, when the tide was low and
the muddy sandbars appeared among puddles of water, as far as a hundred yards out,
they gathered clams. These they steamed as they had the mussels. With supper, they
drank part of the milk and had an apple apiece. They buried the fire in sand and tossed
the shells into the water. Then they climbed back up the steep hill, to hurl apple
cores into the woods and go to bed.

They slept behind the campsite rather than in it, in the woods nearer the water. Dicey
couldn’t relax. When she saw that the others were all soundly sleeping, she quietly
got up and went back down to the little beach. For a while she just sat in the sand,
hearing and seeing the dark waters. Then she walked back and forth along the water’s
edge. The stars burned high overhead. Silence and solitude: she might have been alone
in the world.

If she had been sitting when the voices approached, she would
have kept still and tried to remain unnoticed. But she was standing by the water,
clearly silhouetted there, and she could hear a woman’s voice saying, “There’s someone
here.”

Two figures approached, descending the hill cautiously, hand in hand.

“Hey, man,” the man called.

Warily, Dicey nodded to him.

“Don’t be afraid of us, we’re harmless,” the woman said. Only she was a girl, really.
They were both young, in their teens.

“So am I,” Dicey answered.

“Are your folks camping here?” the boy asked.

“No,” Dicey said.

“We are,” the girl said. She looked up at the boy’s face. “We’ve been here for two
weeks already, haven’t we? Was that your fire we saw earlier?”

“Probably,” Dicey said. “I had some clams.”

“You live near here?” the boy asked.

“Yeah,” Dicey said. Well, right now they were living about fifty yards from where
she stood.

“We always come to this beach,” the girl said. “It feels like our own private beach
by now. Doesn’t it, Lou? It does to me. Except for weekends, it’s empty. You’re the
first person we’ve met on it during the week.”

Dicey made a grunting noise in answer.

“What’s your name, kid?” the boy asked.

“Danny.”

“Danny what?”

“Don’t pry, Lou. Leave him be,” the girl interrupted. “I’m Edie. This is Lou, short
for Louis. You’ll scare him,” she said to the boy.

“Naw I won’t. Will I?”

“I dunno,” Dicey said.

“I know about him and it’s okay,” Lou said. Dicey looked up in alarm. She couldn’t
see his face clearly. “You ran away, didn’t you? It all got to be too much for you,
and you cut out. Isn’t that about it?”

“So what?” Dicey asked.

“So we’re in the same boat, on the same trip. So you haven’t got any reason to worry
about us squealing on you, or laying a heavy go-home message on you. So, relax.”

Dicey grinned. “Okay,” she said.

“Are you alone?”

“Not exactly.”

“That’s relaxed? I’ve seen people who thought they were about to be mugged more relaxed.
Okay, I won’t bug you. We’ll all enjoy the scenery together here and talk about cabbages
and kings.”

“I gotta go now.”

“If you stick around here,” the girl said, “we’ll see you again. I’d like that, Danny.
We’re easy to find, at the small campground. We’ll be there, or at the playground,
or down here.”

“Okay,” Dicey said. “Well—see you.”

They had forgotten her by the time she reached the top of the bluff. They stood where
she had left them, their arms around each other, facing out over the water. She returned
quickly to her family and fell asleep easily.

First thing the next morning, while they munched apples and passed the milk carton
around, Dicey told the others about her encounter of the night before. “I told them
I was a boy,” she said. “Named Danny. Can you remember that?” They nodded. “Maybeth?
You too.”

“But why?” James asked. “What does it matter?”

“It’s safer to be a boy than a girl,” Dicey said. “People leave boys alone more. Anyway,
if we meet them again don’t tell our
last name. I told them I was a runaway. We’ll all be runaways.”

“Are we runaways?” Sammy asked.

“Sort of,” Dicey said.

“We were running away with Momma.” James worked it out. “But then Momma ran away from
us. And now we’re running away from everybody. But we’re running to Aunt Cilla’s house,
and that makes it different. And Momma may be there. That’s another difference. We’re
runaways
to
, not just runaways.”

Dicey gave her orders for the morning. James and Sammy were to fish, while she and
Maybeth washed out the clothes they had been wearing. They wouldn’t wash the shorts,
just the underwear and socks and shirts. She had seen a movie at school once, where
the village women washed out the clothes and dried them in the sun.

Dicey carried the clothes down to the beach. James and Sammy came down later with
some worms they had dug. The boys sat out on a rock surrounded by water, while the
girls stood knee-deep in the waves, dipping and rubbing the clothing.

Half an hour later, James waded out to stand beside Dicey. “There are no fish here,”
he said.

“The map said there was fishing. That means there must be fish.”

“Well, nothing’s happening.”

“Go back and wait.”

“Why? Sammy’s there.”

“Sammy is only six years old. How do you know he’ll know what to do if he gets a bite?”

“He won’t get a bite.”

“James, do as I say,” Dicey ordered sternly. He shuffled off, picking up stones and
throwing them out into the water, loitering by the base of the bluff, and finally
Dicey saw him climb back up by Sammy.

In another few minutes he was back where Dicey and Maybeth were spreading clothes
out on the sand.

“It’s no use,” James said. “Why are you putting them out here? They’ll get sandy.”

“That’ll blow away once they’re dry.”

“I don’t want sand in my underpants,” James said.

“Our job is laundry, yours is fishing,” Dicey said, and she sent him back.

He was beside her again in another few minutes. “It’s boring,” he said.

“We’ve got to eat,” Dicey muttered.

“We can eat mussels and clams.”

“I need to know if there are fish.”

“I know that already—there aren’t.”

“All right,” she cried, exasperated. “Never mind. Just stop pestering me. I don’t
care what you do, but let me get on with my work.”

James wandered to the far end of the beach. He scratched at the rocks with his nails.
Dicey looked to be sure Sammy was all right. The little boy sat patiently, the line
hanging down from his finger into the water.

When all the clothes had been soaked and scrubbed, then wrung out and laid on the
sand, Dicey waded out to the rock where Sammy sat. She scrambled up to sit with him.
“Hey, Sammy,” she said, “catch anything?”

Sammy shook his head. His mouth was set in a stubborn line. He glared down at the
water.

“Tide’s almost high,” Dicey observed.

Sammy nodded.

“Maybe you should give up.”

“Hush up, Dicey.” Sammy spoke in a whisper. “Fish don’t like noise.”

“But James says there aren’t any fish here,” Dicey whispered.

“James is wrong. Look.” He pulled up the string and showed Dicey a half-eaten worm
still impaled on the hook. “I’ve lost two other worms. Something is down there eating
them. I’ll catch it.”

Dicey left him there and went back to the beach. She started a small fire, more to
let Sammy know she had faith in him than because she thought he would actually catch
anything. Then she skipped stones across the water.

Maybeth stood swaying in a half-dance by the water’s edge, singing to herself. James
was climbing up among the big rocks that had tumbled down to the water. Dicey watched
him scramble to the top of a rounded boulder and stand up. He saw her watching and
waved his arm at her. Then, in a continuation of that motion, he began to fall over.

Dicey didn’t see James fall, because when he lost his balance she had taken off down
the beach. She didn’t know what she would do when she got there, but she would be
as close as possible in case there was something she could do. She climbed over the
small boulders at the bottom of the pile before she looked for James. He had disappeared—except
for one foot, which stuck up over a rock above her head.

Dicey found James cradled in among rocks. His eyes were closed. His face looked pale.
“James?”

He didn’t answer.

Was he dead? That couldn’t happen, could it? And why not, considering the other things
that had happened.

James’s eyes fluttered and opened. He stared around, as if he couldn’t see her. “Dicey?
What happened?” he asked. He hunkered his body up.

So, she thought, no bones were broken.

“You fell,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“I fell?”

“You were waving and you fell off the rock.”

“Oh. Let me think. I don’t—” he said. “My foot slipped, I remember. I shouldn’t have
been climbing with wet sneakers.”

“But are you okay?” Maybeth was standing at the bottom of the rocks, looking up. “It’s
okay,” Dicey yelled down. Sammy still concentrated on the water below the rock. He
hadn’t seen James fall. “Are you?” Dicey asked James.

“I think so.” James moved his arms first, then his legs. “I guess my back’s not broken,”
he remarked.

“How do you know?”

“If you move someone with a broken back, the spine separates and the person dies,
right away,” James stated. “Boy was that scary.” He sat up beside Dicey. “Oooh . . . ”
He bent his head and covered the back of it with his hands. “Dizzy. I must have banged
my head.”