As Simple as It Seems

  When I got home, my mother was out in the yard watering her rosebushes. She had changed into her gardening clothes: a pink terry-cloth sweat suit, polka-dotted gardening gloves I’d given her for Mother’s Day, and a pair of bright green rubber clogs. I thought about Pooch’s mom in her tight black clothes with her fixed-up face and wondered what she would make of my mother. Honey was stretched out in a sunny spot nearby, dozing next to a cardboard box, which I assumed held the unfortunate bunnies my mother had agreed to foster. I’d hoped maybe she would be off on errands when I got back so that I would be able to be alone with my feelings for a while without being bombarded by a million questions about the visit to the new neighbors, but as soon as she saw me, my mother turned off the hose.

  “How was it?” she asked, holding the nozzle away so that the hose wouldn’t drip on her feet. “What were they like? Did they enjoy the brownies?”

  But I couldn’t answer her questions. I was too busy staring at the pile of white rags sitting on the grass at her feet. I knew right away what it was.

  “What did you do?” I cried. “What did you do?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Rain, Rain

  “That nightgown had seen better days,” my mother said when she saw the horrified look on my face, “so I washed it and tore it up into strips to make some bedding for the bunny. There’s only one left now—the other one didn’t make it. Poor thing.”

  I’d left my tattered nightgown on the floor of my room that afternoon when I’d changed into my clothes to go over to the Allen house. I had planned to wash it out myself and wear it again when I went to meet Pooch in the morning, but my mother had gotten to it first.

  “How could you do that?” I shouted. “How could you tear it up like that without even asking?”

  “You’ve got plenty of others in your drawer,” she said, “or we can buy you a new one. I had no idea you’d react this way. Was there something special about this nightie that I didn’t know?”

  “It was mine.”

  I was upset, but my words weren’t coming from the same place as the ugly thing I’d said to my mother earlier that day. This feeling was different, more like the one I’d had over at the Allen house—sad and hopeless and empty. I felt like nothing belonged to me anymore and it never would.

  Dinner was a gloomy, silent affair. We sat around the kitchen table, pushing spaghetti and meatballs around our plates. My father tried to make small talk about his day at work, but eventually he gave up, and the room grew still except for the clinking of silverware and the ticking of the teapot clock hanging over the stove.

  “These brownies taste different, Ellen, not like the ones you usually make,” my father said when dessert was served.

  “It’s a new recipe,” she told him. “Half regular and half nut flour. I saw it in a magazine.”

  “Not bad,” my father said, reaching for another.

  Later my mother came into my room to say good night, but I pretended that I was already asleep. I didn’t want to hear her apologize again. She didn’t understand that it wasn’t the nightgown I was upset about. After she left, I fell asleep—still in my clothes, on top of the covers—only to awaken hours later to find the house completely dark and the sound of a gentle rain falling outside. Too upset to eat at dinner, I was hungry now, so I tiptoed past my parents’ bedroom and down the stairs to the kitchen for a snack of cold spaghetti and meatballs, which I ate standing up by the light of the open refrigerator door. When I had finished, I crept back upstairs and climbed under the covers. Funny, I thought, to spend two days in a nightgown and then go to bed wearing your clothes. I lay in the dark for a long time thinking, and when I finally drifted off, I had another dream, even more vivid than the last one. It was about Pooch this time. There was something really important I needed to tell him, but I couldn’t seem to get him to listen to me—he kept laughing and running away. Finally I got really mad at him and started yelling, but then he lifted up his hair to show me that the reason he couldn’t hear me was because he didn’t have any ears.

  In the morning I drifted in and out of consciousness, vaguely aware of the sound of my father’s truck starting up and, later, my mother’s car crunching down the gravel driveway, heading into town to help set up for the Fourth of July festivities. I looked over at the clock and sat bolt upright in bed. It was almost noon! I had promised to meet Pooch at ten. Jumping out of bed, I ran to the window. It was pouring outside. Would Pooch have gone down to the lake in this weather? Could he be down there now waiting for me? I tore off my clothes, grabbed a clean nightgown out of the drawer, and pulled it on over my head. Then I raced down the stairs, nearly tripping over Jack, who was lying on the floor pressed up against the open front door like a doorstop. He scrambled awkwardly to his feet, wagging his tail as I flew past him, but I told him “no” when he tried to follow me out of the house. I let the screen door slam shut right in his face.

  Ten minutes later, soaked to the bone, I was standing breathless at the edge of Bonners Lake, but Pooch was nowhere in sight.

  Along the way, my nightgown had caught in the prickers and torn, just as the other one had. Pooch might not even notice the difference. It was sticking to me like a second skin, and goose bumps the size of tapioca pearls covered my arms. I had just finished telling myself that I must have been crazy to think Pooch would come out in this kind of weather to meet me when I saw a flash of yellow moving through the trees. A minute later he stepped out of the woods, clutching the handle of a flimsy little yellow fold-up umbrella, a hunk of white nylon rope coiled over one bony shoulder.

  “Did you check the patch?” he asked, coming over to stand beside me so that I could get under the umbrella with him. “Is it ruined?”

  The umbrella was too small to protect us both from the rain.

  “I just got here,” I said, putting my hand over his on the umbrella handle to steady it.

  “Oh good,” he said, relieved. “I wasn’t sure if I should come earlier or not, but then I remembered what you’d said about getting wet.” He looked at my nightgown. “You do look kind of wrinkled.”

  A drop of rainwater slid down Pooch’s nose. He scrunched up his face, wiggling his nose like a rabbit to shake it free. I suddenly flashed on my dream from the night before. The bunnies. That must have been why I’d dreamed that Pooch had no ears. Dreams have such a funny way of sifting out random pieces and stitching them together like a crazy quilt.

  “Guess there aren’t going to be any fireworks tonight, huh?” said Pooch disappointedly.

  “You can still go to the band concert—they always play no matter what,” I told him.

  “Really?” he said.

  The rain began to slow, and when the sky suddenly cleared, Pooch folded up the little yellow umbrella and jammed it into one of his many pockets. Together we walked over to the boat to check on the patch.

  “It seems tight,” he said, running his hands over the piece of pale bark. “Let’s tip it over and dump the rainwater out.”

  Together we tipped the boat, and as we rocked it back into place again the sun came out. Grateful for the warmth, I hoped it would stay out long enough to dry my nightgown.

  “Did you bring your list?” asked Pooch.

  In my haste to get down to the lake, I’d left the list of boat names behind on the little night table beside my bed. I’d been too upset the night before to put more thought into it anyway.

  “They weren’t very good,” I told Pooch.

  “Mine either,” he said. “Maybe we need to get in and float around for a while for inspiration.”

  I looked at him skeptically.

  “Okay, maybe I just want to see if it floats—don’t you?” he asked.

  “Give me one end of that rope,” I told him. “I’ll tie it to the boat, and you go tie the other end to that tree over there.”

  “Cool,” said Pooch.

  In all the times I’d been down to Bonners Lake, I had never so much as stuck a toe in the water, bu
t in order to launch the boat, it was necessary for us both to wade out into the lake. As the chilly water rose first above my ankles, and then up to my knees, I shivered. It was hard not to think about how deep it might be out in the middle. I could have made up some kind of an excuse to keep from having to go out in the boat with Pooch. He would have believed anything I told him. But as long as the rope was tied tight and was only long enough to let us out a little ways, I thought I could handle it. I had worked as hard as Pooch getting the boat ready; I wanted to share in the glory of the launch.

  As soon as the boat was free of the mud, Pooch, who had taken off his shoes and socks and rolled up the legs of his pants, threw a leg over the side and scrambled in.

  “It’s awesome!” he cried.

  “Is the patch holding?” I asked.

  Pooch leaned down and put his hand on the spot where the hole had been.

  “Dry as a bone,” he announced with a grin. “Come on. Get in.”

  I glanced nervously back at the tree where Pooch had tied the rope before we pushed the boat out.

  “Did you double knot it?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry,” said Pooch. “I know about knots. I read a whole book about them. I’m practically an expert.”

  Climbing into a boat in a nightgown while trying to maintain your dignity is no easy feat. My arms were too weak to hoist myself over the side, so Pooch had to take my hands and pull me in. In the process I did a lot of kicking and thrashing around, gathering a number of painful splinters in some very tender spots. The boat definitely could have used a bit more sanding. When I finally managed to get in, I was soaking wet again and we were both out of breath. Pooch sat down on the middle seat, and I was crawling along the bottom of the boat to sit in the back when I noticed that we were drifting.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Hello Trouble

  Pooch quickly scrambled up to the bow of the boat and pulled on the rope, but there was no tension—it was limp in his hands. The knot on the other end had come untied.

  “I used a granny knot,” Pooch said. “I’ve made it a million times. You pass the right end over and under the left. Or wait, maybe it’s the other way around.”

  “You idiot!” I screamed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Sorry doesn’t help. Get out quick and pull us back in before we drift any farther.”

  A miserable look came over Pooch’s face.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t swim.” He peered over the side of the boat. “And I don’t see the bottom anymore.”

  Since we didn’t have oars, the plan had been to pull ourselves, hand over hand, back to shore with the rope when we were done. We tried leaning over the sides and paddling like mad, but our arms were too short, and it got us nowhere.

  For a minute we sat, stunned, drifting in silence.

  “Wait a second!” said Pooch, smacking his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I just thought of something. You’re a ghost! You can fly! You can pull us in with the rope and you won’t even have to get wet. Or we could ask some of the other ghosts you know to come and help us.”

  I did not want to have to tell Pooch that he’d been duped by a girl in a ripped-up nightgown, who could neither fly nor summon ghosts, but clearly the time had come to tell the truth.

  At first he didn’t believe me.

  “Come on,” he said, “quit fooling.”

  “No, really,” I told him. “I’m not a ghost. I never even met Tracy Allen. My name is Verbena Colter and I live in that big white house next door to where you and your mom are staying. And I hate to tell you this, but I can’t swim either.”

  When Pooch realized I wasn’t kidding, he was devastated.

  “You lied to me?” he said, his face crumpled in disbelief. “About everything?”

  “Well you lied to me too about being able to tie a knot,” I said defensively. “If you’d done it right, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  “I thought you were my friend,” he said.

  It would have been easier if he’d gotten mad, yelled at me, and called me names. But he was hurt, and as terrified as I was to be drifting untethered in that boat, I felt even worse about what I’d done to Pooch. I’d known from the beginning that it was wrong, and I’d gone ahead and done it anyway. Not only that, but I’d enjoyed it, both the pretending part and the sense of power it had given me over him. I didn’t see any point in trying to explain that I couldn’t help being the way I was. Why should he care? I was the one who had to live with myself.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him.

  “Yeah, well sorry doesn’t help, remember?”

  He turned his back to me, and I could tell from the way his shoulders were shaking that he was crying. I didn’t know what to do, so I just waited. After a while he stopped and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

  “What are we going to do now?” he asked me, without turning around.

  “Are you sure you don’t know how to swim?”

  “I’m sure,” he said.

  “Did you tell your mom you were coming here?”

  Pooch shook his head.

  Of course my parents didn’t know where I was either, and with all the Fourth of July preparations going on in town, there was no telling when they might come home.

  We had drifted about fifteen feet from shore by then. It seemed so close and yet impossibly far away. Pooch started scratching. If I looked at the water, I felt sick, but I discovered that if I looked up at the sky, I could fool myself into thinking we weren’t out that far.

  “Maybe if we yell for help, someone will hear us,” I said.

  I started yelling, and pretty soon Pooch joined in. After ten minutes of shouting at the top of our lungs, the only response we got was the mocking metallic screech of a pair of blue jays scolding us from the top of a tree.

  “Now what?” said Pooch.

  The wind was beginning to pick up a little, which gave me an idea.

  “Maybe we could make a sail out of something,” I suggested.

  “How about your nightgown?”

  “Uh, I don’t think so,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself with a shiver. “How about the umbrella?”

  Pooch knelt on the seat at the bow of the boat, opened the little yellow umbrella, and held it out in front of him, but nothing happened.

  Bonners Lake was not nearly as big as an ocean, but as lakes went, it was a pretty big one. There were no houses around it, and trees and thick brush grew right up to the edges and, in places, right out into the water. The main body of the lake, where Pooch and I were floating, was rounded at one end and split off into two arms down at the other. Once you entered either of those arms, you would no longer be visible from the end of the lake where we’d started.

  “Do you think we should try yelling some more?” I asked Pooch.

  “Nobody heard us the last time.”

  “I think we should do it anyway, just in case,” I said.

  So we yelled again for help, but this time even the blue jays didn’t respond.

  Pooch had moved back to the middle seat and was scratching and wriggling around nervously.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Not really,” he said. “I need to go.”

  “Someone will come looking for us eventually,” I said. “If I’m not home by dark, my parents will send out a search party for sure.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Pooch, “I have to go.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “What should I do?”

  “Can’t you hold it in?” I asked him.

  “I’ve been doing that for a while,” he said, “but now I’ve really got to go.”

  There was nothing in the boat that he could use, so I suggested the only thing I could think of.

  “Do it over the side.”

  “No way,” said Pooch.

  “Okay, then you’ll have to hold it ’til somebody comes and pulls u
s back in.”

  We sat for a few minutes. The wind, stronger now, made the water choppy, so it slapped against the side of the boat. Pooch wriggled uncomfortably.

  “If I do it over the side, do you promise you won’t look?” he asked finally.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him. “I don’t want to see.”

  He squinched up his eyebrows and gave me a good hard look. I knew he must be wondering why in the world he should trust me after what I’d done.

  “I’m not going to look, Pooch,” I told him. “Cross my heart and hope to die.” I drew a little X on my nightie with my finger the way he had always done with me. Then I turned around and covered my eyes.

  When he was finished, Pooch sat back down.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  The likelihood of someone coming down to fish in the middle of the day wasn’t very high, and half an hour later, when the sky grew dark and the rain started up again, our chances of being discovered by accident diminished further. Pooch raised the yellow umbrella, and I was grateful when he invited me to move up to the middle seat to sit beside him. At first he was stiff, holding himself upright so that our bodies wouldn’t touch at all, but the rain was cold and the umbrella small, and pretty soon he relaxed and allowed himself to lean against me. When he started to sniffle again, I put my arm around him.

  “Don’t worry, Pooch,” I said. “Someone’s going to come. We just have to wait.”

  I had no idea how long we’d been out there. Neither of us was wearing a watch, and it was hard to tell what time of day it was because the sky was so dark. It rained off and on, and although the sun peeked out every now and then, it was never out long enough to dry our clothes all the way through. The boat continued to drift, and when we were about twenty-five feet from shore, it stopped and began turning in a lazy circle, caught up in a current of some kind.

  Pressed up against him, I could feel Pooch shaking, or maybe it was both of us. It was hard to look up at the sky from underneath the umbrella, so I closed my eyes to keep from having to see the water. There was something nagging at me, something I needed to do. I didn’t want to alarm Pooch, but neither of us had checked on the patch to see if it was still holding.