Homecoming

  “Oh, I’d like it, you know that. I’m always game for something out of the ordinary. But I don’t have to be home by dark. I don’t have the mother who has to know where I am every minute of the day.”

  “Cut it out, okay? Lay off that stuff. I mean what can they do to me after all? Lock me in the attic? Beat me with wet noodles? Send me away to school?”

  Tom shrugged.

  “Gee, I don’t want to get you in trouble,” James said.

  “Trouble,” Jerry said, as if there was no trouble he couldn’t handle. “Let me worry about that. I’m game for a day’s hard sailing. Think you can do it?” he challenged Tom.

  “Anything you can do I can do,” Tom answered.

  “We’ll see,” Jerry said. “You kids get back here early tomorrow—eight o’clock. Can you be here that early?”

  “I think so,” Dicey said. “I think there’s a seven o’clock bus we could say we were taking. It sure would be fun to sail over.”

  “It’s not easy,” Jerry warned her. “You have to keep out of the way.”

  “We can do that,” Dicey said.

  “And the little kids—can they swim?”

  “I can swim good,” Sammy said.

  “Okay, then. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Dicey agreed. They left the boat quickly. She picked up her bag from the dock and hustled everyone ahead of her down the dock. When they were well out of sight, she slowed down and turned to James.

  “Gee, James,” she said—and burst out laughing.

  James joined in.

  “I want hamburgers for supper tonight,” he said.

  “You deserve them,” Dicey answered.

  “I thought you’d never catch on,” he said. “I thought that Jerry’d never catch on. You know, Dicey? We made them do what we wanted them to do.”

  “Tom really did it,” Dicey said.

  “Yeah. Why did he? Does he want to get his friend in trouble?”

  “I dunno,” Dicey said. “Is that what friends do?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “No. I never had a friend like that, a best friend from first grade. We never had many friends, did we?”

  “I guess not.” James thought about that. “None of us did. Maybe Tillermans don’t.”

  They ate dinner at Burger King: hamburgers, french fries, milkshakes. It tasted good to them, after weeks of Cousin Eunice’s frozen dinners and pot pies. They wandered around again until evening had settled in, milling with crowds of people who seemed to have nothing else to do but saunter down the streets and look in store windows, or peer at the little houses.

  When they had drifted back to their own empty house, the little children fell asleep almost at once. Dicey and James sat for a long time down by the river. Occasional boats motored up and down. Voices floated across the water. The air was humid and hot. Altogether Dicey felt satisfied.

  “What do you know about our grandmother?” James asked her.

  “I think she’s poor,” Dicey said. “And maybe strange.”

  “Strange? Like Momma? Crazy?”

  “Strange like all the Tillermans,” Dicey said. “She lives all alone on a farm.”

  “Why do Tillermans always live alone?”

  “We don’t. We live together.”

  “Together, but all alone together,” James said.

  “Maybe every family feels that way,” Dicey said. “Maybe that’s what families are.”

  “I don’t know,” James said. “I don’t think so.”

  Before she went to sleep that night, Dicey counted her money, peering at the bills in the dim light. She had forty-seven dollars left, and some change.

  It had cost them a lot to get to Annapolis. Dicey decided that forty would be the amount to keep in her pocket. Once they got across the bay, they’d have to stop spending. They’d have to fish for food, and get clams; or something. And she’d have to earn money if she could. Seven dollars could go a long way, if it had to, if you made it. She’d make it go as far as she could, all the way to Crisfield. If she could.

  CHAPTER 3

  When Dicey awoke, she was cool and damp, and even a little chilly. The morning air lay moist over her. She turned her eyes from the gray sky to her family.

  Sammy wasn’t there.

  She sat up, peering toward the bush they used for a bathroom. She waited, long enough, she judged, but he did not appear. She jumped to her feet and looked around.

  His little figure sat huddled on the bulkheading at the end of the lawn. In the mists rising from the water, he could have been a woeful little bush planted between the willow and the pine.

  Dicey went to the bathroom, then walked down to join him. He knew who she was without turning his head. “What got you up?” she asked.

  “I had to pee,” he said. His fingers picked long splinters from the wood. “I was thinking,” he said.

  “You worried?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not scared of sailing.”

  “I never said you were,” Dicey answered. “You’re not scared of anything, are you?”

  Sammy looked at her then, his eyes questioning. “I had a dream that you were all on a bus and the door closed and I couldn’t get on. I ran and ran after it, but it kept getting away.”

  Dicey nodded her head and watched the mists rising almost in straight lines, like rain going backward. In the east, the sky lightened.

  “Dicey? Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tell the truth?”

  “I always do.”

  “No, you don’t,” Sammy said.

  Dicey understood him. “I’ll tell the truth, Sammy, I promise.”

  Sammy asked his question: “Why were you going to go alone, before James caught you?”

  The hulls of the boats were shadowy silhouettes on the water. Mist caught in the branches of the trees across the river. The mists would burn off, Dicey thought. There wasn’t much wind.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to find when we get there,” Dicey said. “So I figured if I went down alone and saw what it’s like, then I could come back and get you all. If it was okay. If it wasn’t okay, I could just forget about it. Also, I had enough money to get there and back on a bus and stay on my own in a hotel. See, Sammy, I don’t know what this grandmother will be like. I was trying to make things easiest for you all. Do you understand?”

  “I guess so. I think so—like I fight when people say things, so they won’t say them anymore. Are you sorry that we’re with you?”

  “A little, yes. It’s harder with four of us. And more expensive. And”—since Dicey had determined to tell the whole truth, she did—“I kind of liked the idea of traveling alone—you know? With no one to look after. But I was wrong, Sammy, or at least I think now I was. I made a mistake not telling you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we do things together. The trouble was, we didn’t do things together at Cousin Eunice’s and that got me thinking the wrong way.”

  “How can something get you thinking the wrong way, if you know how to think the right way?” Sammy asked. But he was sitting up straighter and kicking his heels.

  “They just do. I don’t know how.”

  “I always thought . . . well, you didn’t make mistakes.”

  “Everybody makes mistakes!”

  “Not you—you didn’t.”

  “Oh, Sammy. I made dozens of mistakes.”

  “Name one.”

  “Staying too long at Rockland. Not planning how to cross the Connecticut River. Not having any money in New Haven. Not telling Cousin Eunice what I thought, about you and Maybeth.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Sammy begged. “Don’t tell me any more.”

  “But you asked me to!” Dicey protested.

  The sun was rising, turning the sky and air a rosy gold color. Gulls wheeled through the air. A boat motored quietly down the river, the people on it dark figures.

  “You did,” Dicey insisted. “You did ask me
.” She reached over and tickled Sammy under his arm. He squirmed. She reached her other arm over and wrestled him down to the grass, tickling, crying, “You did, you did, you did. Say so.”

  Sammy screamed with laughter and wriggled under her hands. “All right, I did!”

  Dicey stood up. She brushed her hands briskly together. “Let’s get going,” she said. They raced back up the lawn.

  They were early down to the boat, early and hungry. James grumbled that he wanted breakfast but Dicey ignored him. She didn’t want to spend any money until they got across the bay. She wanted everything to stay just as it was until they were actually on the other side.

  The Tillermans sat on the end of the dock waiting. All around them, the boatyards came awake. Water traffic made many little waves. A slight breeze blew now, and little boats sailed down to the mouth of the river and the bay.

  Time passed slowly. Dicey sensed that it was after eight o’clock. Cars streamed over the bridge, going toward town. People going to work, she thought. Her hunger mounted. She had been sure, at first, that she could wait to eat until they were across.

  “Tonight,” Dicey announced, “we’ve got to wash our underwear. And put on clean. Maybe shirts too. Okay?”

  “Do you think they forgot?” James asked. His head moved restlessly. “Or changed their minds?”

  “Maybe,” Dicey said. “Or they could have been lying to us.”

  At this, James smiled: “That would serve us right, wouldn’t it?”

  They had to eat. If Dicey was hungry, James must be starving. She went back to a gas station and bought crackers with peanut butter from a machine. Then she put in two more quarters and got chocolate bars.

  When she returned, the two boys were there, busy working with sails on the deck. They were dressed just as they had been the day before. Dicey wondered if they slept in their swimming suits. She looked at James and raised her eyebrows. She handed out packets of crackers and offered some of hers to Jerry and Tom. “No thanks,” they both said. “We just ate. You kids stay in the cockpit, okay?”

  It was like sitting in a booth without a table, with the four Tillermans, two to a side, knees hitting knees, stiff and watchful. The boys spent a long time putting on the jib. Jerry came back and stood by the base of the mast. He pulled down on a rope. The jib rose slowly and hung flapping at its stay. Jerry told Tom to fend off from the bow while he backed out of the dock.

  When Jerry returned to the cockpit, he looked at the Tillermans. “Ready to go?”

  “You bet,” Dicey answered.

  “Drop your bag on one of the bunks below,” Jerry told her. “Then I think you and your brother James had better go sit on the cabin. I need room for play on the tiller, and Tom’ll be back here, handling the sails. You ever sail before?”

  Dicey thought of lying and then thought better of it. “No,” she said.

  Jerry considered this. His face was thin and his hair was bleached to a metallic tone that matched the gold in his eyes. His mouth looked soft and sulky, but his body was lean. “Okay,” he said, “listen carefully. We’re going to have to tack out a ways, then we can reach over to St. Mikes. Tacking means we zigzag, going as close to the wind as possible.” His hand sketched a zigzag motion in the air. “At the end of each tack, I’ll call, ‘ready about.’ The boat will rotate, about sixty degrees, and the mainsail and boom will swing from one side to the other. The heel will reverse too.”

  “What?” James said. “I don’t understand.”

  Jerry held his hand out stiffly, slanted one way, then reversed the slant. “That’s what the keel does when we tack and come about,” he said. “On a reach we’ll ride pretty flat. All you have to do is hang on when we come about. There’s no danger. I want you to sit where you’re put, and sit quiet. But if I tell you to move, or give any order, you’ve got to obey right away. Got that?”

  “We can do that,” Dicey said. “All of us.”

  She leaned down and tossed her bag onto a bunk below. Then she and James went up forward to sit on the roof of the cabin. They could lean back against the mast, or slip down to the deck and lean against the cabin wall.

  Jerry started the motor. Tom uncleated a heavy line with a floater tied on its end and dropped it into the water. James looked at Dicey: “I hope they know what they’re doing,” he said.

  The sun was toasting warm. The water danced beneath the keel. The motor hummed. The boat slipped out into the river and turned east. The jib flapped.

  Waterfront buildings glided slowly by, boatyards, condominiums with great glass windows looking out over the water, an occasional small house in the middle of a green lawn. Theirs was one of many boats headed out to the bay.

  The motor stopped. Dicey turned her head. She smiled to Sammy and Maybeth, sitting straight up and still, one on each side of the cockpit. Tom stood up, holding the tiller. Jerry jumped up behind them to raise the mainsail. When he had it cleated, he jumped down into the cockpit and hauled in on a line.

  The mainsail stiffened, then puffed out. The boat responded, surging forward underneath them.

  Tom returned the tiller to Jerry and pulled in the jib. It was not the kind of jib Dicey knew. At Provincetown she had seen little, narrow triangular sails. This jib was long. It curved back around, halfway down the length of the cockpit. Dicey turned her head back and yelled, “What kind of a jib is that?”

  “It’s a genoa,” Tom answered. He seemed to be enjoying himself. His eyes squinted into the sunlight, and his smile showed big, square teeth.

  The wind blew firmly against the sails. The water jostled the boat, wave after wave. When Dicey looked at the water, they seemed to be traveling quite fast. But when she looked at the shore, now falling away beside them, they seemed to be going very slowly.

  Under the protection of the shore, the boat heeled only slightly. Jerry brought the boat about, and Dicey and James had to do no more than protect themselves from the genoa as it flapped across the bow in front of them. Dicey saw a shadow of shoreline, across the bay.

  She also saw three huge tankers, moored one behind the other, lying across their path, like tall buildings. Jerry approached them, then passed between two, where there was much more room than there had first seemed to be. The metal walls soared up above the little boat. Some crewmen waved down at them, and Dicey waved back. The tanker came from Athens, from Athens across the Atlantic and down the length of the Mediterranean Sea.

  Dicey looked up the bay to where Baltimore was. Two bridges, twin spans, crossed the bay in long arcs. They looked like something from the future, slender silver ropes flung over the broad water, beautiful and strong.

  Dicey’s eyes moved out, across again. Jerry brought the boat about, and—after shifting her weight to compensate for the heel—she found she could no longer see the far shore, for which they were headed. They had left most of the other boats behind, and now passed only an occasional fishing boat, rocking at the end of its anchor line.

  The wind hummed in her ears, the sun poured over her face and arms and legs, the waves knocked against the keel, and the boat pulled forward. Like everything else in Annapolis, the movement was both lazy and fast, at once. She turned back and saw Sammy staring at Tom. Jerry sat with the long wooden tiller in his hand, his eyes on the sails.

  Dicey slid down onto the deck and leaned her back against the cabin. The sky was clear, the sails shone white against it. She closed her eyes.

  In the darkness behind her eyelids, Dicey felt part of the boat itself, riding the wind over the water. It was easy work, this. It was silent and serene. Her thoughts loosed themselves from their everyday moorings and wandered. Nothing mattered out here. Nobody talked and nobody listened. The waves went past them, maybe each different, maybe the same wave over and over again. Who knew which? Who cared?

  Dicey opened her eyes. They had never sailed in Provincetown. They had never been asked. She had rowed in dinghies and been out once or twice on large fishing boats. But they were nothing like this quie
t harnessing of wind and the sharp keel cutting through silken water.

  Out here, there was salt on the wind itself that fell on your skin like rain. You could taste it. Out here the sun heated and the wind cooled, and the waves sang their constant song.

  Dicey wished she could stop breathing and give herself entirely over to the movement and the being still. Maybe she could learn to sail. Maybe she could go to sea, somehow. A boat could be a home. The perfect home that could move around, a home that didn’t close you in or tie you down: and a sailor would always be at home if he was on the sea.

  Maybe life was like a sea, and all the people were like boats. There were big, important yachts and little rafts and motorboats and sailboats and working boats and pleasure boats. And some really big boats like ocean liners or tankers—those would be rich or powerful people, whose lives engulfed many other lives and carried them along. Or maybe each boat was a kind of family. Then what kind of boat would the Tillermans be? A little one, bobbling about, with the mast fallen off? A grubby, worn-down workboat, with Dicey hanging on to the rudder for dear life.

  Everybody who was born was cast onto the sea. Winds would blow them in all directions. Tides would rise and turn, in their own rhythm. And the boats—they just went along as best they could, trying to find a harbor.

  Dicey didn’t feel like finding a harbor. She knew she needed one, and they needed one, but she would rather just sail along, dreaming, not caring where they were going or when they would get there or what they would do there.

  Couldn’t you live your whole life without going into harbor? The land would catch you at the end. Home is the sailor. But until then, you could keep free. And even then, even when you died, you could die at sea and your body would roll with the underwater currents until your flesh peeled off and you were white bones rocking in the waves on the sandy bottom of the ocean. Always part of the changing.

  Dicey smiled to herself. The ocean at Provincetown had always sung at her too. As long as I’m near the water, she thought, that’ll be enough, even if I’m on land. Because life wasn’t really an ocean, and she wasn’t really a little boat bobbling about on it. There were James and Maybeth and Sammy, for one thing. But for now, she was content to sit still and silent.