Rusty Summer (24 page)

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Authors: Mary McKinley

BOOK: Rusty Summer
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“Oh, that's nothing . . . just where Raven jumped on us last night.” She smiles at the memory.
“I don't think that's a good sign, Leo. She didn't hit you that hard and that looks messed up!”
After I dress I wander out, leaving Leo to continue tripping in the bathroom. My dad is sitting alone at the kitchen table reading the paper.
“Where's GramMer?” I look out the window. It's misting outside.
“Raven has a doctor's appointment and her mom can't take her because she has a test so your grandma said she would. She has to get her shots for school in September. I hate seeing her get shots.”
“Wait—she's not five yet, is she?”
“Not yet, but she's so smart we thought we'd put her in early. She's already reading.”
“Oh, I know,
I know.
” Yeah, so, I'm no longer the only genius kid either. She's brill too!
I pour some coffee and sit at the table glumly, feeling completely replaced.
But good ol' Dad just keeps 'em coming.
“Rylee, I think we should talk about them friends of yours.”
I raise my eyebrows to indicate I'm listening.
“Well, sugar foots, I'm not for sure, but I think those fellers might be gay.”
He looks at me from under his eyebrows like Oscar the Grouch.
Have you ever felt the urge to laugh and cry simultaneously?
“Ya think, Dad?” I'm sure I have a snorty expression on my face. “Huh, maybe . . . I'd never considered it!”
“Well, Rylee Marie,” he starts out seriously. “It's—hey, I'm being serious here!” He gripes, all exasperated when I grin and he sees I'm just winding him up. “That's not funny! I was just asking if you knew about . . . stuff.” He informs me, severely vague.
So I relent.
“Yeah, I do know about stuff, Dad, and I'm totally cool with it—like it's any of my bizness. How 'bout you? What's your take on ‘stuff' and such?” I settle in to enjoy an hour-long smirk-fest.
My dad totally surprises me. Instead of a barking mad diatribe, he answers thoughtfully.
“Well, it's a lot more common than you might think.”
This pulls me up short. Really? It makes me look at him sharply.
“Oh, yeah? Do tell,” I say.
“A lot of guys in the navy,” he says like he was answering a quiz question.
“Oh, really? You knew gay guys in the navy, Dad?”
“Yeah. Quite a few. They—” He nods emphatically and inhales to elaborate.
“OK! DAD! That's fine!” I cut him off before he TMIs things I can't un-hear. After about age eleven you will RUN in the STREET to avoid hearing about sex when it's your parents with the info. Instead I redirect him.
“So—you're cool, then? It's just common sense and civil rights, pure and simple. Right?”
Dad pulls a face. “Waal, I dunno if
pure
would be the word I'd use, exactly,” he drawls.
“Did all hell break loose?” Again—I'm bagging on him; it's another of his fave expressions. He looks at me quickly to see if I'm sincere and makes a face when he sees I'm still not.
“No, Miss Smartass, and for your information I think I might even vote for it someday, if they ask Alaskans if it's okay for two men to get hitched. Why should I give a good goddam'? Ain't got nothin' to do with me—or ladies too,” he adds equitably. “Hell, why not?”
I feel myself warming to him. I nod but don't answer right away.
I feel SO happy—and a tiny bit guilty—about how much more evolved he is than I gave him credit for. Why should I be so surprised? I try to keep the ball rolling and hear what else he might say that will surprise me. I nod encouragingly.
“It's a concept whose time has come, right, Dad? ‘A few fly bites can't stop a spirited horse,' isn't that how it goes?”
“Yeah, I've heard that one before. Your grandma says it.”
“Mark Twain probably said it first.”
“Probably.”
“Also, ‘the dogs bark but the caravan passes on.' My teacher told me that one.”
“You know, I've never been exactly sure what that one meant. I just figured something like: mind your own business.” He says this sincerely, in a way that is kind of endearing, for a knucklehead.
I start to explain—and then just smile at him, and nod. Close enough.
It's too much effort to be such a pain-in-the-ass expert, all the damn time. Too exhausting.
We sit in our own little worlds for a bit. Finally he clears his throat and looks at me.
“Well . . . like I said, I guess it might not be so bad. Couldn't be worse than a pack of damn dogs barking at camels, all night, right?” His eyes plead. He's trying to joke us back together.
I don't say anything. He's trying so hard to make it up to me.
The poor old thing . . .
the steady drumbeat sounds.
Empathy, Rylee.
He smiles at me hopefully while I'm quiet.
And so I smile at him too.
“Yep,” I say, kindly, and mean it. “Keep up the good work, Dad.”
 
“Rusty! Come here! I need you!” I hear Leonie hissing like a flyweight teapot.
“What?” Her urgency makes me hurry. I'm intrigued.
I enter the bedroom and she has her hand over the speaker. She mouths “Shane!” and points to her phone. “Help me!” she says silently. I cover my mouth so I don't laugh.
“Are you there?” Shane is on speaker.
“Yeah.” Leo says, looking at me pitifully.
“Are you okay? Are you mad? Say something! You're so funny when you text, but now you're being so quiet!” His voice is tinny and tiny through her phone. I sit beside Leo on the bed.
She looks at me with wide, wild eyes. I cup my hands around her ear.
“Tell him—‘well, the days
do
seem longer since you left,' ” I whisper directly into her ear.
“Well, the days
do
seem longer since you left.”
Shane cracks up. Leo looks at me like, “why is that funny?”
(Derp, because the days
are
getting longer.)
“Really? Does that mean you'll get over me the twenty-first of June?” Shane asks, mad flirting.
Leo looks at me and shrugs in bewilderment.
“No,” she answers on her own, “that's graduation day.”
“Sweet! Hey, that's a good omen—to graduate on the solstice.”
“What's a solstice?” Leo mouths to me. I shake my head—tell you later—and whisper again.
“It's the only day long enough to miss you suspiciously,” Leo repeats like a robot.
“Sorry?” asks Shane, puzzled. I furiously whisper into Leo's ear again.
“
Sufficiently,
I mean!” she corrects herself in weird triumph.
“Ohhh . . . yeah. Well, I
already
miss you sufficiently. Hey, maybe I should come watch you graduate.” His velvety voice is tentative. My heart suddenly bangs so loud I wonder if Leo can hear.
“Okay!” she says, without help. “You can have one of my tickets! We each get three!” She's so pleased. I look at her, totally dumbstruck. I don't even know what I'm thinking, except:
Omg . . . Shane at graduation.
 
GramMer and Raven come home soon after. Bommy gets up to greet them. Raven is sniveling.
“I got three!” she tells Dad heartbrokenly. She hiccups.
“You got three?” he repeats helplessly. He looks like he might cry too.
“Shots! On my arrrrrrmmm! And on my leg!” she howls, soggily. “And it huuurrt!”
“She was very brave!” GramMer strokes her hair. “I am so proud of you!” she adds.
Raven starts wailing louder and climbs on my dad. I notice how their heads fit together; his chin cupping her forehead as she sits on his lap, bawling from recent memories. It makes me remember . . .
I recall when I was very small, sitting on him just like that, with
my
forehead fitting under his chin perfectly. The smell of aftershave. My dad throwing me way up into the air, singing “I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah! I love you! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” and me shrieking with delight. I was flying.
Hazy, faded memories. I haven't been small enough to throw around in millennia.
 
Uncle Oscar wants to go see bears. Why, I have no idea, but there you have it. He has always heard about Kodiak bears, and now here he is in Kodiak! It's Bear Viewin' Time!
It's salmon season so we can see the bears catching the fish as they return to spawn. It always seemed awful, the salmon get all the way back, almost . . . and then the bears eat so many of them! They just take one bite and toss them as they pull out the next one for half-assed chomping. Wasteful! What jerks!
We need a motor boat. My dad is all over this. He loves to go out on the boats of his buddies and somebody loans him theirs with no problem. A nice one too. Fiberglass. Fast!
We strap life jackets over our layers of other jackets. A motorboat ride in Alaska, even in June, can get pretty nippy.
My grandma stays home with Raven this time. She says she's seen enough bears for one lifetime and Raven has plenty of time to see them. GramMer's not keen on bears. She says they get way too close for comfort sometimes.
It's cloudy again, but not misting, and it's pretty thrilling when we all pile into the boat and Dad cranks it. I love to speed! This is almost as much fun as flying! The nose of the boat, the bow, goes up in the air and I look back—and we are whippin'! Ahh! I love to fly, even on the water! Whee!
As we flit along, I am reminded of another time and another boat, when I was tiny, maybe seven, with my dad.
We were on the waters of La Push, on the Washington coast for a week, to go salmon fishing, something he liked to do a lot. Like I said, he always had a buddy with a boat who would loan it to him.
Just he and I were on the boat this time. It was quiet and peaceful.
I remember looking out into the flat distance and thinking it was like a field, but you couldn't walk across it, when all of a sudden my dad comes up from behind the wheel with his binocs, which he trains on the water beside us. And then he whistles, long and low, before heading up to the bow.
I can't see anything going on so I just keep sitting where I am, on this little perch, and then he points.
“Looky there, Rylee Marie! A gray whale! Can you see it? Look right
there!
”
I remember looking to where he was pointing, and what I had thought was part of the field of water beneath the boat was, in fact, a gray whale, so vast and speckled that I'd thought it was ocean.
When I realized there was a
whale
floating around us checking us out, I lost it. I was only seven and I was positive it was going to rise up from twenty thousand leagues under the sea—with eyes the size of trampolines—to eat and rend and chomp!
“Make it go,” I remember quietly nattering in terror to my dad, but he wasn't listening.
He walked out to the starboard bow and lay down flat, to see closer, and as I watched, frozen silent with panic, in complete certainty that the end was here, the whale rose to the surface and looked back at my dad, its huge eye calm and considering.
At least that's how I remember it now—this giant Yoda-looking eyeball, eyeing us mildly, like an oversize Einstein. Regardless, I was petrified.
Not my dad. As I darted my gaze to him, he let his breath out in a reverent gasp.
“Oh my God,” my dad breathed. “You are so beautiful.”
The whale stayed near for a while, gentle and slow, and then eventually submerged. My dad smiled at me in this exalted way I had never seen him smile, before or since.
We felt we had been given a rare gift.
After about fifteen minutes, as we were preparing to start back to shore and discussing how whales had once lived on land millions of years ago, we heard a giant slap. And then another.
It was our whale, maybe half a mile away, whacking the water with its fluke.
“Look—it's over there!” My dad pointed and as we watched, the gray whale came up and breached the water, crashing massively down and creating a tidal wave on reentry—but far enough away so that I wasn't afraid.
I remember my dad cheering, joyous and childlike, as our boat bobbed like a seagull on the swells. Clearer than anything, I remember the elation on his face. He had tears in his eyes.
I had never seen a transcendent expression before.
“Didja see that, Riley? Omg! Riley! Didja
see
that?!”
I looked over at my dad in surprise. He'd dropped the Marie and was just calling me Rylee. His voice sounded so different. So young and glad.
I think he was telling his brother Riley. I think in his mind they were both kids again.
Young as I was, I was well aware I had seen a rare glimpse of Ovid's bright spirit when the whale waved to us.
That was the whale's real gift to me.
I smile as I remember all this stuff, but my nose stings too, for this strange, dear guy; my dad.
 
Lilly Lake is long and narrow. We zoom along for miles in our boat.
After a while Dad slows the engine and it gets much quieter and slower. We are in the wilderness. He gets his binoculars out.
“There they are!” He gives the binoculars to Oscar, who takes them eagerly.
We slowly approach the shore and look. The feasting bears pause and stare back.
“Oooohh! A mama bear, with twins! How cute is that?!” Oscar whispers. He gives the binocs to Beau. Uncle Frankie takes pictures with his camera with a big ol' lens.

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