The Pricker Boy (27 page)

I’m waiting now, waiting for this summer to end. When it goes, there’ll be no more night breezes through the open window. No more charred hot dogs off of Dad’s grill. No more baseball on the radio. No more bare feet. No more staying up late at night just to look for shooting stars. It’ll all go: the frogs and the birds and the crayfish and the
lightning bugs and the screaming cicadas. Sitting in the shade under the leaves. Lying back in the grass.

And my friends. They’ll go too.

I’m scared of what’s coming in their wake. I’m scared of the winter and the frost and the cruel ice creeping across Tanner Pond.

It’s the last day of summer and I’m sitting by the edge of the pond. Boris is stretched out on the ground next to me. He’s probably half-asleep, but if I were to say his name he’d leap to his feet, ready for action. My foot is propped up on one of the lawn chairs. The cast is a mash of bright colors, having been the Cricket’s Magic Marker drawing pad for a few weeks now. He and I are keeping an eye on Nana as she swims. It’s late August, but there’s September in the air. That doesn’t stop Nana. She’s floating in the water and singing to the Cricket, asking him over and over to come in and swim with her. I’m surprised when I hear a splash, and I look up to see the Cricket paddling around with her, his legs kicking into the air over the surface of the water.

Emily shows up, blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, walking slowly. She is wearing shoes, which tells me that her family has finished packing and that she is coming to say goodbye. She sits down next to me, so close that I forget how to breathe.

“We’re just finishing up,” Emily says. “My dad is bleeding the water lines, and Mom is cleaning out the fridge. I’ve got everything packed.”

Now that she is leaving, I can’t think of anything to say. I take the gold ring from my pocket and begin moving it from finger to finger. I keep looking at that ring and my fidgeting fingers.

“I just wanted to stop over and say goodbye,” she offers.

“I know.” I raise my head to her.

The awkward silence that follows is one of the longest moments of my life, but it is also incredible, because she is looking right at me, and I am looking at her, and I can feel my heart thudding inside my chest. We listen to Nana and the Cricket splashing in the water. I look down toward the water just in time to see the Cricket place a hand on the top of her head. She goes under, pretending that he has dunked her. She comes up and spits water at him. “Stanley, you’re just as bad as your grandfather was!” she says cheerily, gleeful about having a swimming partner.

“He’s still not talking?” Emily asks me.

“He will. Eventually.”

Another long silence.

“Did you notice anything strange about all those things from the offering stone in the Hawthorns?” Emily asks me. “Each one of them pointed.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, each one of them somehow related to someone else. Robin’s comics were written with Ronnie. Ronnie’s book had my clover in it. Vivek’s baseball cards, you used them to help teach him math. Everything had to do with someone else.”

“Almost everything,” I say, looking down at the ring.

She reaches out with her finger and pulls my chin so that I have to look at her. She points to her neck. Her locket is dangling there. She holds her finger under the chain and lifts it. “Here, open it,” she offers.

I reach out and try to get my fingers around the locket, but when they get close to Emily’s body they fumble over the shiny metal. She rolls her eyes and reaches up and opens the clasp herself. “There,” she says. “Now take it out.”

There is a tiny piece of paper inside, folded over and over and over. It has yellowed over the years. I take it out and unfold it. Inside, written in the rounded script of a young girl, are four words:
I LOVE STUCKS CUMBERLAND
. I chuckle. Emily smiles. “Isn’t that sweet?” she asks me.

I don’t even know who leans in first. Our lips meet and hold. This is not the kiss of the schoolyard, the smack and escape that I had played as a child. This is obvious; this is intentional. This is feeling my heartbeat in my throat; this is suddenly being out of breath. We only kiss for about five seconds, then one of us laughs, and we break away. Neither of us can look at the other.

“That was, that was … uh, nice,” I stumble. My lips are tingling, every nerve overloaded. They feel swollen, like all the blood in my body is rushing to my mouth to try to grab a little lingering piece of her.

I shake my head. “No, that’s not what I want to say.” I
wait until she can look at me. “I mean that was my first. My first real kiss.”

She nods. “Me too. It was nice, don’t you think?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve been ‘interested’ in kissing you for a while.” She winks.

We laugh again.

The door to the back of the house opens. Robin steps out and, seeing us, mumbles an awkward sorry and turns to go back inside.

“It’s okay,” I say.

She turns hesitantly, looking to Emily for confirmation. At Emily’s nod she comes out and sits in one of the chairs in the circle. I hear Nana singing down by the water. “Stucks and Emily, sittin’ in a tree …” The song is interrupted when the Cricket dunks her again.

Ronnie appears, walking across from his grandparents’ cottage with Vivek. They take a couple chairs, and Vivek eyes the ring in my hand. “I found a ring this summer too,” he says. “It was around my bathtub.” We all laugh.

“I’m still trying to remember which one of us left this out there,” I say. “We all got our stuff back, but we still haven’t placed this ring yet.”

“I’m still wondering which one of us left that package out there in the Hawthorns,” Ronnie says.

“I think it was Stucks,” Robin says.

“What are you talking about?” I reply. “I told you guys—”
Emily jumps in. “We all said that we didn’t do it. But one of us must have. Someone must be holding something back.”

“Or forgetting. Not sure themselves,” Robin says.

“Look,” I say, “I know that I’m crazy. I don’t even trust my own brain to tell me the truth anymore.” Emily reaches over and takes my hand.

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” Ronnie says. “I mean, I believed it, and it was my story.”

“Stucks, I’m not saying you’re crazy,” Robin says. “But you’ve been walking in your sleep since we were kids. And you did wake up out there on the first morning of the summer. So who’s to say that it wasn’t you?”

“Because he didn’t have the items to place in the package,” Emily says. “The answer to the mystery is figuring out who would have been brave enough, even as a kid, to go back there alone and collect those items after they’d been placed out there. I think it was Vivek.”

Ronnie chimes in. “He always made jokes. He never took it seriously.”

“But I’m a big, fat, fraidy-scared coward!” he replies.

“And you were the one who first ‘discovered’ the package,” Ronnie adds.

“It might have been Robin,” Emily says.

“Me?”

“Yes. More than any of us, you hate going home at the end of the summer. Sometimes you’ve had to leave early, and I know you always worry about what you might
miss—or that we won’t miss you, which is ridiculous. And you’re sentimental. You’re the one most likely to collect mementos. To hold on to the summer, even if just for a little bit.”

“And you, Ronnie,” Vivek says. “You always knew that the story was … shall we say ‘invented’? You could have been hiding in the bushes”—I start to laugh at the image, and Ronnie does too—“just waiting for the widow’s walk to end so you could scramble out there and grab every little treat.”

“And me?” Emily asks.

“Oh, that’s easy,” Robin says. “You’re a girl. I can’t believe that you’d give up that locket for good.”

“And you’re fearless,” Ronnie says. I detect a note of envy in his voice.

“I suppose,” I say, “that even Pete could have done it. He could have gone out there before he … before he …”

“Before he left,” Robin says.

We sit staring from one to the other without anybody saying another word. I can hear Nana and the Cricket splashing to the edge of the water, and then Nana’s voice as she talks to the Cricket and dries him off.

“So no one’s going to admit to it?” Vivek begs. “This is damned disappointing.”

“I’d rather not know.” Ronnie smiles. “More of a mystery that way.”

“Not me,” Vivek whines. “I want to know. This sucks.”

We all laugh at that. Then Vivek leans over and hands
me a piece of folded paper. I open it. On the inside are four phone numbers, each one written by a different hand. Below them Vivek has written,
YOU NEED US, YOU CALL
.

I swallow and nod, not looking up at any of them. I stuff the piece of paper into my pocket. I stare at my ring for a moment, and then I look away, down at the water. Nana is using a cane to steady herself as she navigates the roots. It’s the cane that Mr. Milkes gave me so that I could get around better with my leg in the cast. She stole it from me earlier in the day.

“Nana, Mr. Milkes is going to want that cane back,” I say.

“Let him come and get it,” she says, and shakes the cane in the air toward the Milkeses’ house. “That old man is a pain in the …”

She stops. Slowly she turns back toward me. She walks over quickly and leans over me. Water from her bathing cap drips onto my head. “Where did you get that?” she asks, her voice almost a whisper.

“What?” I reply, more than a little alarmed at the fear in her eyes.

She reaches down and clutches my hand, closing my fingers and hers around the gold ring. “Put it back!” she cries. “Stucks! Please put it back!”

“Nana, what’s the matter?” I ask her. I take my foot down from the lawn chair and she sits in it, but she doesn’t let go of my hand.

“Your grandfather’s wedding ring! You have to put it back, Stucks! You have to!”

I don’t know what to say. No one does. My mouth falls open. All this time I’ve had my grandfather’s wedding ring in my pocket. The Cricket was only an infant when he died. I barely remember him myself, but all summer long I’ve been holding the ring that he wore for four decades while he was married to Nana.

The Cricket sits on the ground next to me, watching us all intently. He rubs Boris’s belly and the old dog groans.

“Promise me you’ll put it back!” Nana cries.

“This is Grandpa’s ring?” I croak.

“Of course it is,” Nana says. “I don’t know how you got hold of it, Stucks. I took it to the woods years ago. It has to go back!” Desperate tears begin to swell in her eyes.

“I’ll take it back. But why did you leave it out there?”

She draws a breath, relieved by my promise. “Because just before Grandpa died, he said, ‘You watch after those boys for me.’ After he was cremated, they gave me his ring. So I took it up to the Hawthorn Trees and left it on the stone there. To protect you boys. To protect all of you. From the things in the woods.”

“What things, Nana?” Robin asks.

“Just things, woodland things!” Nana says. “I knew that when you got older, you’d be off playing in those woods. If I left it there, right in the middle of those three thorny witches, they’d have to protect you. I knew you’d always
come home safe from the woods. No matter what happened out there, you’d always come home safe. And you always have. All of you. Even poor Peter was safe when he was in the woods.” She squeezes my hand even tighter, and I’m amazed at how strong an elderly woman’s grip can be, especially a woman who is missing a finger. “You promise you’ll take it back?” she asks me again.

“We’ll all take it up there. We’ll take it back there right now if you want.” I don’t know if she understands that the woods have burned, but I suppose it doesn’t matter all that much.

She releases my hand, patting the back of it. “You’re a good boy, Stucks.”

The Cricket helps Nana into the house and then returns. He grabs my hand and pulls.

“Now?” I say.

He continues to pull.

Vivek and Robin have to help me—in fact, they almost have to carry me—up through the woods to the offering stone.

The ground is black for hundreds of yards around the Hawthorns. Beyond that the brush has been gnarled by the heat. The thorns are gone, burned back into the blistered ground.

Though their thorns have been burned away, the trunks of the Hawthorns are still there, reaching like skeletons toward the sky. But they’re odd, stubborn old women. I believe next year they’ll sprout again.

I lay the ring on the offering stone. It’ll sit there all day and through the night, and maybe in the morning it’ll still be there. Maybe it won’t.

Everyone is staring at me, even the Cricket. He is absolutely calm, as if all of this is perfectly natural, as if placing Grandpa’s ring in the middle of the Hawthorns is the most logical thing in the world for us to do. “Wanna know something?” he asks us.

Vivek’s eyes shoot open wide. Robin, of course, is immediately ready to cry, and why shouldn’t she? Even Emily is stunned. Ronnie leans in as if he needs to hear the Cricket speak again before he’ll believe that it actually happened.

I just smile.

“Wanna know?” the Cricket repeats.

“What’s that?” I ask him.

The Cricket beams. “Sometimes … I can fly.”

“Now that’s something that I’d like to see,” I say.

The Cricket jumps up, throws his arms out in front of him like Superman, and makes a buzzing motor sound out of the side of his cheek. He runs around us and the offering stone in a huge circle, around and around and around and around. I reach out and tap his hand every time he passes by me, and with each tap I feel another old ghost flit away.

And for the moment anyway, as long as he continues circling us, this summer of loss will be suspended, and our friends will stay with us, safe from both the fire and the ice.

I began working on this book seven years ago, and it would be impossible to acknowledge all of the people who have contributed along the way. I apologize in advance for any names that should be, but are not, listed here.

First and foremost, I would like to thank my wife, Beth, who was silly enough to marry me, and who read this manuscript more times than I can count. Thanks also to Derek May for his research and boundless enthusiasm, and to Jack Harrison, the best critic that the early manuscript saw.

The following people have offered their assistance, friendship, and encouragement for many years: Julia Johnson; my fellow writers at the Buzzards Bay Writing Project, especially Kit Dunlap and Heidi Lane; Carol Malaquias; my brother, Ryan; my sister-in-law, Sandra; Ken Jenks; Terry Holman; and Pat Adler.

Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs
by Scott Cunningham was an invaluable resource.

This book would not have been published without the
support of my agent, Kirsten Wolf, who not only chose to represent me but also pushed me to improve the manuscript when I felt I had given it all I could. And to Nick Eliopulos I offer my apologies about those nightmares.

And last but not least, thanks to Rachel, who is not only a great sister but, it appears, a fairy godmother as well. I love you, you little JT. Say hi to the koalas and kangaroos.