Life Guards in the Hamptons (14 page)

I drew until my hand got tired, thought until my brain went numb. I sat out there until it grew too dark to see a damn thing, even with the porch light on. The wind kept trying to grab my pages, and spatterings of rain blown from the trees blotted the marker ink. And I needed a glass of milk to go with the brownies.

I decided to wait inside for the blasted thing to call me. If Oey wanted my help, my company, it had to meet me halfway. So there.

When I opened the fridge to take out the milk, a chill hit me. Not the usual refrigerator cold, but like a shadow across the landscape, or what they used to call a goose walking on your grave, whatever that meant. Maybe I was coming down with the flu. Or—heaven help me—receiving a premonition. Was this how my father felt? Shivers in his blood, a ticking clock in his chest, a big fist squeezing his head?

I didn’t know what, but I knew something was desperately wrong. I raced around, checking the dogs, checking the furnace, checking the phones for messages.

Oey! It must be in trouble, trying to reach me via mental telepathy. No, I’d see pictures. That’s how most of the Others communicated.

Grandma Eve? Maybe my mother had a premonition, too, when I spoke to her. Maybe she caught the power from my father, the way they say Matt caught his new
perceptions from me. The last thing I needed was a foggy new “gift.”

I called my grandmother and woke her up. Not a good thing.

“You’re okay?”

“I was before you scared the life out of me with the phone call. And no, Lou is not here, if you were calling to check up on me.”

“I, ah, just had a feeling.”

“You’ve been listening to that jackass father of yours again, haven’t you? Either find the bird, or go to sleep and let the rest of us get some rest.”

I couldn’t disturb my father on his date. Mom would have called if there’d been an emergency, which I couldn’t do anything about from here anyway.

Maybe the coming storm? A lightning bolt I hadn’t heard, the change in atmospheric pressure? But the dogs were all sleeping, relaxed. I heard they could tell changes like earthquakes and people’s seizures.

It had to be Oey. I went to the door. “Oey, come on, boy, girl, whatever. We need to talk. Show me you are all right.”

The feeling of dread stayed with me. “Twee! Twee!” I yelled, pouring my heart and my fear into the call.

“Twee?”

“You came! Are you all right? Hurt? Hungry? Lonely? Come in out of the storm.”

But it wasn’t Oey calling from the woods. It was Matt, standing on the porch, his head cocked, listening to me call a bird no one could see.

“What are you—?” But I knew. One look at his face told me the beagle had died. “Oh, I am so sorry.”

I held my arms out and he came to me and we just held each other for a long time there, inside my front door. It felt right.

He’d come to me, not his poker buddies. Not his obnoxious niece. But me. And my heart went out to him. I could hardly bear the weight of the village’s expectations on my shoulders; I couldn’t imagine having a beloved
pet’s life in my hands. People depended on Matt to perform miracles all the time.

“I don’t know how you do it.” I made him come sit on the sofa before he fell down, he looked so tired and empty. I rushed to put on the coffeemaker.

“You never get used to it,” he said when I got back, “but you have to go on, to save what you can.” He laid his head back and sighed.

I waited.

“That wasn’t the hard part. Homer didn’t have much of a chance going in. We all knew it. The hard part was your mother.”

“I’m sorry. I know she can be overpowering. I shouldn’t have told her you needed her.”

“I did need her, but she didn’t call. Not on the phone anyway. I felt her talking to me, as if she stood next to me in the operating room. I thought I was delusional, not fit to take out a splinter, much less put poor Homer back together.”

I kept quiet. What could I say?

“She told me Homer didn’t want to live if he couldn’t ever run again. That he’d be mortified if he couldn’t control his bowels, couldn’t play with his people. He knew he’d never recover and the pain would be too much.”

“He was a good dog.”

“Not really. He escaped every chance he got. The Camerons were his third adoption. They named him Homer, hoping he’d stick. He didn’t. But do you know what? I believed her, your mother in Florida or wherever she is this week, that she knew what Homer wanted, that she’d somehow found a way to tell me.”

Yeah, I’d have a tough time with that, too. Or I would have, a few months ago. “The mind is a wondrous thing.” Lame, I knew, but all I could offer.

He took my hand. For comfort, I supposed.

“So I talked to the Camerons. That was harder still. I brought them in to say good-bye, for their sake. Homer couldn’t know, I had him so sedated for the surgery. Except I felt your mother standing over my shoulder. ‘He
knows,’ she told me. ‘He’s glad. He loves them. He thanks you.’”

We both cried.

Damn, I never let the dog die. In all my books, I’ll kill off the hero. He can always come back in the next volume. His girlfriend? So what? But never, ever, would I let the dog die. It’s a rule. It’s not fair to the kids who read your books. I’ll never forgive Fred Gipson for Old Yeller. And now … instead of comforting Matt, I was sobbing on his chest. He stroked my shoulder and I think he kissed the top of my head.

I fled to the kitchen so he couldn’t see me all splotchy-faced and red-eyed. Men hated crying women, I knew. It makes them feel helpless, and Matt had enough failure today.

Chattering helped overcome the grief. “I bet you never had dinner tonight. It’ll just take a few minutes in the microwave. I have some of Grandma Eve’s vegetable lasagna. It’s delicious.”

He was beside me, handing me a tissue. “That’ll be great. Thank you. But, Willow, I didn’t really hear your mother, did I?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible. Anything is in this place. Or maybe you knew what she’d say.”

“Do the right thing. For the animal.”

“You did.”

I pushed my drawing pads and notebooks and pens to one side so he had a place to eat at the dining room table, then served him right out of the plastic container, with a paper plate under it, and a bottle of water. Just like my grandmother. Hah.

The lack of ambiance did not affect his appetite. And the lasagna didn’t suffer too much from the indignity of being nuked. The food revived him enough that he apologized for bothering me so late, without calling.

“It’s no bother, I promise. I wanted you— That is, I was going to ask you to stop by tonight, but Chief Haversmith said you’d be playing poker.”

“I couldn’t. Not tonight. They moved the game to the
firehouse. The volunteers are on alert anyway. No one was saying why, but it’s better they are at the station.”

“I heard there’s a bad storm coming. Maybe something else in the wind.”

Something that let my mother’s thoughts travel up the eastern seaboard? Something that had me attuned to Matt’s sorrow? Something worse that had DUE sending out warnings? I didn’t feel that bone-deep chill anymore—his arms had been great heating elements—yet a sense of impending doom stayed with me. I felt sorry for my father if this is what he lived with.

“I know what we need, brownies with ice cream on top.”

“Gee, the chief suggested a stiff drink, and the guys left me a six-pack. But you’re right. That’s why they call it comfort food.”

“With a dash of Kahlua, then, if the chief said so. And afterward we’ll go looking for the oiaca bird.”

“Oh, is that what you were doing? I thought you were feeding the racoons. I some saw run off when I drove up. I couldn’t believe you’d invite them inside, though.”

“Damn, did they eat all my offerings?”

“I’ll go check while you scoop the ice cream.”

“No, we’ll go check together, after we eat dessert.” I let him scoop, while I poured the coffee.

“You think it’s here, in your yard?”

“I think it was last night.”

“You saw the bird?”

“I saw something out of the ordinary. That’s why I wanted you to come, to give me your opinion.”

“I’m not much of an expert on ornithology, any more than I could answer your questions on entomology when the lightning bugs came by.”

“How are you at ichthyology?”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said.”

T
HE WIND HOWLED SO FIERCELY we couldn’t hear each other speak. Thank goodness I hadn’t brought Little Red out. He’d have been blown to Connecticut. He’d have to use his papers tonight. Or keep me up all night, whining.

Matt pulled me closer and shouted in my ear. “No bird would be out in this. It couldn’t fly against the wind, and it’d get blown into the houses or trees.”

But a fish could hunker down in the pond near Susan’s parents’ house, or that low spot in the fields. A creature from the otherworld could vanish whenever it wanted.

The porch chair I’d left out had been blown into the backyard, and the wading pool got overturned. Leaves were down, weeks early, and branches and twigs covered the grass.

“What a freaky storm. They never mentioned it in the forecast I heard on my way over.”

I guess that depended on what station you listened to.

We turned to go back inside, where we couldn’t be hit by falling tree limbs. But I heard a noise, different from the storm. “Pewil! Twee, pewil!”

“Is that the bird? It’s calling for a pearl?”

“No, I think it means peril.”

He looked at me as if I’d grown another head. Hey, he was the one who heard my mother.

“Oey? Where are you? Come out where we can see
you, or on the porch where there’s less peril.” I pointed toward the house.

Nothing. I ran inside and grabbed my pad and a marker.

“Twee? Twee?”

I drew two trees, and pictured two in my head. “That’s right, two twees, er, trees.”

I flipped the pages and made Matt’s tree an oak, tall and proud and sturdy, shielding the willow from the wind. “Yes,” I thought, and spoke aloud. “This is Matt, a friend.”

Matt looked over my shoulder. “You see me as a tree?”

“Hush. You want me to draw a door mat? You think it’ll understand a welcome sign? Besides, it’s not exactly welcome. Everyone wishes it would go home.”

I heard a loud, plaintive, “Pewil! Pewil” coming, I thought, from the roof of the house. I tried to hold up my pendant, so it could see. “Not now. Now all I want is to keep you safe. Friend, care, share, love.”

“Fwiend? O-ey”—and a lot more syllables and pictures flashing in my head—“new fwiend?”

If not for Matt I’d be blown over, craning my neck up. “Yes, he loves all creatures. Now come to the porch where we can talk.”

“Tweeth.”

Matt got into the spirit of the thing. “Tweeth. Two trees. Friends.” He wrapped an arm around me, to hold me steady, and to show trust and closeness. “And no peril.”

I thought he muttered “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” but the wind carried his words away.

“Wuve?”

For crying out loud, had Oey been talking to my mother, too? “Friends.”

But Matt was saying yes. Was he crazy, too? He held up our joined hands, then we made a dash to the back side of the covered porch, sheltered by the house from the brunt of the hurricane-force winds, which dropped off the second we reached shelter.

Oey must have been convinced because it popped up on the railing. The bird head turned this way and that, studying us. “Thecth?”

“None of your business. Oh, that. Yes, he is a male. I am female. What about you?”

“Bowff.” I got a picture in my head of the bird laying eggs in the water, the fish coming to fertilize them. Good grief.

Matt hadn’t moved an inch, except to drop his jaw. I guess the first sight of Oey could be a little unnerving, to say the least.

“You do see it, don’t you?”

“I see something like a patchwork quilt, only it’s talking.”

“Can you see the pictures in your mind?”

“No pictures. My mind got blown away when your … friend showed up on the porch.”

“Yup, that’s Oey. Except its name is something huge and long and filled with pictures and emotions and clicks and glubs and past history and the future of its kind. Oh, and the parrot part is female, the fish is male.”

I thought he might turn tail and run. Matt, not Oey.

“I’ll explain later.”

“If you can explain this, you’ll have a TV show of your own, like Dr. Phil.”

“For now it’s enough that you can see what’s not a pink-toed Patagonian pigeon. The mind thing is optional.” I took a step closer to the railing while Matt shook his head, as if that would clear it.

“Okay, Oey, introductions over. Get serious now. We’re friends, we want to help. But here’s the thing, you don’t belong here. You are disturbing the weft of the worlds. Maybe causing this freak storm. You have to go back.”

“Pewil.”

“Yes, but if you leave, the peril might end.”

Oey jumped up and down on the railing, screeching, “Pewil, pewil!”

“Okay, got that. You’re not making the storm. It’s almost
passed now anyway. But there’s some other danger? And you’ve come to warn us?”