The Hidden Summer (8 page)

“Maybe it’s kids,” I say. “Serial litterers. Or maybe there’s still a maintenance guy who checks on things.”

“And that doesn’t worry you?”

“Not really,” I say. “I think there’s a good chance the wind just blew that can over here. It’s one Coke can. And this place is huge. What are the chances of running into anybody
if
someone’s here?”

“If somebody’s on this golf course, it’d be nice to know who,” says Lydia. “I might walk into my rocket one day and find some guy waving a knife.”

Have I mentioned that there’s a downside to Lydia watching all those horror movies?

“You mean some guy waving a Coke,” I say.

“I just think it’s strange,” Lydia says. “That’s all. This place is supposed to be abandoned. But if there is a guy with a knife, I’ve been practicing this kickboxing move that might be perfect.”

She demonstrates, lifting one leg off the ground and bringing her hands up in a boxing position. She twists and leans back a little, then bends her knee and rams the heel of her foot into my shoulder.

“Ow!”

“Right?” she says, pleased. “And if you had a knife, don’t you think you would have dropped it?”

She’s lucky that I think being weird is a good thing.

Rubbing my shoulder, I start walking and tell her to come on. I don’t plan to waste anymore energy thinking about the Coke can or imaginary knives. We have a new world to discover.

We set a pretty fast pace and keep within sight of the fence, hoping to make a complete loop around the course before it gets dark. I’ll admit, we get a little sidetracked. Even with the constant itchy weeds and swarms of gnats and mosquitoes, the golf course is fascinating. We see the flag for Hole Four at the top of a wide, steep hill. The top of the hill is flat like a crater, and the white sand of the sand traps catches the sunlight. We plow through the grass and hike up the hill. When we get to the top, panting, it’s obvious we’re on what used to be the green. The grass is thicker and nicer than most of the course—no weeds, just tall, soft green blades. It makes me wish all grass was like the grass on the putt-putt course, that it didn’t grow at all. Then we’d be standing on a carpet-grassed green like on television, and we could lie down and take a nap on it.

Needing a break, we sit down even though the spot isn’t quite as nice as carpet. We flatten out a patch by making grass angels, then we lie back and catch our breaths. That’s when we notice that you have a perfect view of the airplanes landing and taking off at the airport, which is maybe ten miles away. When we’re flat on our backs, we can see the white underbellies of the planes as they go over us. The Southwest planes look like orange and purple birds gliding through the sky, and when they get close you see their red bellies. They’re by far the most colorful ones. It’s like we’ve found some hidden island where giant, prehistoric birds still live, and we can observe them secretly. I smile at that idea: This white bird-plane is going off to find food for its nest. The next bird-plane is coming home to rest for the night. That last one is going so high and so straight that it just enjoys the feel of flying.

We shake the grass out of our hair and walk until we come to Hole Six, which is another steep climb. We’re curious if we can see the planes better from here, but instead we’re looking into downtown Birmingham. Just below us, we see the Western Supermarket and the stoplight on 22nd Street. Then lots of flat gray roofs. But past that, the view of the city is breathtaking. I look away from the lights and peer downhill—there’s something about steep hills that makes me want to roll down them. So I do. I lie down and push off, and soon I’m tumbling so fast that everything is a green and blue blur. I keep picking up speed—if I were a boulder on a mountain, I’d be starting an avalanche. If I were an airplane on a runway, I’d be lifting into the air. I shriek and I taste grass in my mouth. Then I’m at the bottom, breathless, my head spinning. It’s like the end of a roller coaster: First of all, I’m possibly ready to throw up. Second of all, I’m thinking I need to do it all over again.

As I’m sitting up, I hear a thumping sound and a squeal. Lydia is coming down the hill, too. She lands a few feet from me.

“That was amazing!” she says, still lying sprawled across the ground, her eyes squeezed shut. “Let’s do it again!”

So we do. And before we know it, the sky has turned orange and pink, and we have to start jogging home. We don’t want to make our moms suspicious on our first day.

As we head away from Hole Six, we see movement off to our left, close to one of the ponds we haven’t explored. At first I think it’s just a tree in the wind, but then I see a shadow. Not a tree shadow. A person shadow.

“Lydia,” I whisper.

She stops and turns back to me. “What?”

“Over there.”

“I don’t see anything.”

She starts walking, but I’m slower to move. I decide Lydia’s talk about some Coke-drinking boogeyman has made me paranoid. We pick up the pace and barely make it back into our own yards before the sun completely sets.

CHAPTER 8

THE CHEWY CENTER

As we climb over the crape myrtle and drop down to the golf course on our second day at Lodema, we make a plan. So far we’ve stayed close to the edges of the golf course. If Lodema were a piece of Valentine’s candy, then we’ve only nibbled around the chewy center. It could be caramel or coconut or that disgusting orange crème—we don’t know. So that’s the goal for the day—check out the chewy center and find out what’s in there.

First we need to visit the putt-putt course and drop off our second batch of supplies. Today I filled my backpack mostly with snacks. Next to my inflatable float/couch, I stack up the food I’ve brought—peanut butter, bread, crackers, dried apples. A big can of peanuts and a box of raisins. I had to limit my food supplies to things that didn’t need to be refrigerated and that Mom wouldn’t miss from the pantry.

I fill one corner with a few other supplies: mosquito spray, roach spray, Band-Aids, soap. A plastic bowl, an iron skillet, a plate, and a fork. A bathing suit and a change of clothes, just in case.

Lydia sticks her head inside Marvin as I’m folding my extra T-shirt.

“An underground city built by monkeys,” she says.

“A pirate ship with chests full of gold,” I answer.

We’ve been doing this all morning—seeing who can come up with the strangest, most impossible things we might find today. Of course, it’s more likely that we’ll find nothing but weeds and maybe another pond or two. Or snakes. I’m still watching for snakes.

“How could a ship get on a golf course?” asks Lydia.

“I don’t know,” I say, “but that’s why it’d be such a great hiding place. No one would think to look.”

We head straight toward the center of Lodema. We head past Marvin and the putt-putt course, and if we look over our shoulders we see a dinosaur and a rocket ship and a volcano behind us, and, past that, the city skyline. After ten or fifteen minutes of walking, we can’t see much of anything but the tall grass up past our waists and pine trees all around us. We stumble across a concrete path—an old golf cart path, I guess—and after that the walking gets easier.

“It doesn’t look like the monkeys are going to happen,” I say, wiping the sweat off my forehead. My hair is sticking to me, pieces of grass are sticking to me, and I think some gnats might be sticking to me.

“Maybe an enchanted castle where everyone inside has been asleep for a hundred years,” says Lydia. “Like Sleeping Beauty.”

“Or maybe . . .”

“Don’t even start about the snakes again,” she says.

We plod on, taking swigs of water as we go. When we first see the castle, I think Lydia was right about Sleeping Beauty. We come around a bend in the path and instead of just treetops and sky, we see the top of a stone building. It’s falling apart, with big gaps and holes in the roof and walls, but on one side there’s definitely a turret like in fairy tales.

“If there’s a princess in there, I’m not kissing her,” I say.

“Come on!” says Lydia, and she starts running through the grass. I’m so close behind her that the grass she stomps down slaps back against my thighs. It’s dry and scratchy against my skin, but it makes a whispering sound as we run like it has a secret to tell us.

Once we get closer to the stone building, we can tell there’s not a sleeping princess inside. For one thing, it’s too small to be a real castle. It’s barely bigger than the kitchen of our apartment. But mainly what rules out the princess idea is a faded blue and white sign that says C
ONCESSIONS
hanging over a boarded up window. I suppose it’s blocking the open space where people used to sell drinks and snacks. I’ve heard that before Lodema was a golf course, it was a big park with a merry-go-round and paddleboats and maybe a Ferris wheel. I never really believed it, but the concession stand makes me wonder. I’ve never heard of a concession stand on a golf course.

The bottom of the concession castle seems pretty solid, but the farther up it goes, the more stones are missing. Sky and trees show through the holes. Kudzu has crept into the cracks, and pink buttercups are growing along the walls. Even though we know it’s just a place where people bought Cokes and popcorn, it still feels like some forgotten enchanted hiding place. Maybe not a place where kings and queens lived, but a place where you might find a talking bear or a family of gnomes.

“Can we get in?” I ask.

Lydia shrugs and starts around the left side of the building. “Don’t know,” she says. “I’ll go this way, and you look on the other side.”

I check around the left side, and I only see a small window too tall for me to reach. If there was ever glass in it, it’s long gone now. I hear Lydia’s voice calling me, and when I reach her, she’s holding a weathered piece of plywood propped against the wall. She grins and slides the wood back, and I can see that there’s a hole behind it. A hole wider than my shoulders and nearly as high as my waist.

“This sort of counts as a door,” says Lydia.

There’s something about squeezing through a small space that makes whatever’s on the other side seem more exciting somehow. Like how if you walk through an open gate into someone’s yard, it’s just a normal yard. But if you squeeze through a little hole in a fence, turning and twisting and trying not to cut yourself or rip your clothes, by the time you pop out the other side, you just
expect
to find something worth all that effort.

At first, though, as I stand up inside the stone walls, it seems like I might be disappointed. There’s a concrete floor and empty shelves on the walls. Grass is growing through the cracks in the concrete. And there’s a narrow wooden staircase that leads up to what was maybe a storage space. Now the storage space opens up to the sky. The roof of the building is totally gone.

Sunlight and shadows dance across the ground as I look up at the staircase. I look back at Lydia, who’s brushing a spiderweb out of her hair.

“Let’s go,” she says.

We’re careful as we go up the stairs. They creak and groan under our feet. Some of the railing is missing, and the wood is cracking like the old paint in our apartment. I wonder when the last pair of feet stepped on these stairs. But we get to the top stair without any catastrophes. Not only is the roof gone, but the walls are only a couple of feet high, with plenty of stones missing. The whole place is damp and dirty and sprinkled with bird poop.

Then we look over the edge of the walls, and it’s suddenly worth climbing the stairs. We’re looking onto a fat, smallish tree. It’s got pointy wide leaves, so maybe it’s a maple. And in the tree I can see at least a dozen birds’ nests. Some have white eggs, some have brown eggs, and some have blue speckled eggs. Some have grown-up birds perched in them, and a few of them look up and squawk at us. In one small nest near the top of the tree, I can see two baby birds, almost translucent, hardly any feathers at all. They stretch open their beaks and scream to be fed. The eggs, though, are peaceful and quiet. It’s like we’ve found a bird day-care center.

“It’s a whole city of nests,” I say.

“Maybe we can get a baby,” says Lydia.

“No way,” I say. “Not unless we have to. We are not doing that again.”

We found a baby bird in Lydia’s backyard once, and Marvin—the stepdad, not the dinosaur—told us to feed him milk with a medicine dropper. We made a little nest in a shoebox and tried to feed him twice a day. He never seemed to care for the milk much, so we dug for worms and grubs and tried those. But he just got weaker. Eventually he died and we had to bury him out by the honeysuckle tree. Mom told me that we should never have picked him up because his mother probably would have found him. She said you should never touch a baby bird because if you make the baby smell like a human, his mother won’t want him anymore. I think that’s lousy parenting. But I guess even a hard-to-please mother bird would have done a better job of raising that baby bird than we did. I still feel guilty when I remember how light it was in that shoebox, no more weight than the bow off a birthday present. How pale its skin was and how its heart pounded in its rib cage. He was ours to take care of, and we let him down.

I don’t want another baby bird. They weigh too heavy on me.

It’s only as we’re leaving that I notice the wall right at the edge of the staircase. I had my back turned to it as we were coming up to the turret. But I suddenly realize that maybe another pair of feet have walked up these stairs more recently than I thought. I see the same signs we saw in the aquarium and on the crape myrtle. Only this time it’s not painted—it’s a chalk drawing. A pale green arrow, lavender circles, and sky-blue dashes. We stop and stare at it, and Lydia runs her finger over the arrow. The tip of her finger comes away green.

“Nell, wouldn’t chalk wash off when it rains?” asks Lydia.

“Yeah,” I say. “I think.”

“And it rained last Friday, right? So somebody drew this since then?”

“Or maybe it’s a special kind of chalk,” I say, not believing it, but not wanting Lydia to start kickboxing again. “A kind that lasts for years.”

“Right,” she says. “Sure.”

I do not want anyone else to be here. I want this to be our own private kingdom. So I block out the Coke can and the chalk signs and refuse to think about them anymore. My mind is very good at blocking out unpleasant things.

When I get home that afternoon, Mom is sitting on the back patio—a little concrete square, but “patio” sounds better—in her light blue lounge chair. She’s got one knee bent, and she’s hunched over her toes with a bottle of nail polish in one hand.

“Bring out the other chair,” she says. “I’ll do yours, too.”

Lying in the sun is one of the things my mother really likes to do. Painting her nails while the sun beats down on her is maybe her favorite thing in the world. I don’t particularly like to sit in the sun—it’s too hot—and I don’t really care about doing my nails.

“That sounds fun,” I say, and go to pull the other chair from under the stairway.

If I didn’t say that—if I said something like, “I don’t really feel like it”—she’d say, “Okay.” But the way she’d say it, clipped and pinched, would make it obvious that it’s not okay. That I’ve hurt her feelings. Mom can be very sensitive when it comes to getting her feelings hurt. Lionel uses that word about her a lot, and he says it in a sort of complimentary way, like artists are sensitive and geniuses are sensitive.