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“She died on Valentine’s Day,” Rosa told Alex. “A week after my ninth birthday. All kinds of people came, and the neighbors brought food, but mostly it just spoiled in the refrigerator and then we threw it out because nobody was hungry. Some of the women got right to work on my father. They wanted him to marry again immediately.” She shuddered.
“Mrs. Carmichael thinks he looks like Syvester Stallone. I heard her talking to somebody about it on the phone.”
Rosa made a face. “He just looks like Pop.”
The chill water sluiced in, breaking over Rosa’s feet and Alex’s checkered Vans sneakers.
“Tide’s coming in. We’d better go back,” he said.
“All right.” She stood up and offered her hand.
“I can make it,” he said.
As they headed back along the public beach, she glanced at the sky. It wasn’t that late yet. “Do you think we should hurry?”
“No, but my mother doesn’t like me to be late for dinner. At least when we’re at the shore, we don’t have to dress for dinner like we do in the city.”
“You mean you eat naked?” Rosa fell down laughing, landing in the sun-warmed sand.
“Ha-ha, very funny,” he said, trying to act serious. But he fell down next to her, clearly not in a hurry anymore. They watched Windsurfers skimming along, and families having picnics and feeding the seagulls. Alex found a piece of driftwood and dug a deep moat while Rosa formed the mound into a castle. It wasn’t a very good one, so they weren’t sorry when a wave sneaked up and swamped it. Rosa jumped up in time to avoid getting wet, but Alex got soaked to the skin.
“Yikes, that’s cold,” he said, but he was grinning. When he stood up, he had something in his hand. He bent and washed it in the surf. “A nautilus shell. I’ve never found one before.”
It was a nice big one, a rare find, not too damaged by the battering waves. Alex couldn’t know it, but it was Mamma’s favorite kind of shell. The nautilus is a symbol of harmony and peace, she used to say.
“You can have it if you want,” he said, holding the shell out to her.
“No. You found it.” Rosa kept her hands at her sides even though she wanted it desperately.
“I’m not good at keeping things.” He wound up as if to throw it back into the surf.
“Don’t! If you’re not going to keep it, I will,” Rosa said, grabbing it from him.
“I wasn’t really going to throw it away,” he said. “I just wanted you to have it.”
When they got back to Alex’s yard and Rosa saw what awaited them, she closed her hand around the seashell. “I hope this thing brings me good luck. I’m going to be needing it,” she said.
Mrs. Montgomery and Pop stood waiting for them, both their faces taut with worry and anger. Before either of them spoke, Rosa could already hear them. Where have you been? Do you know how worried we’ve been?
“Where on earth have you been?” demanded Mrs. Montgomery. Rosa was speechless at the sight of her. She had flame-red hair and wore a straight white summer dress and white sandals. Her long, thin fingers held a long, thin cigarette. Mrs. Montgomery herself looked like a cigarette. A giant human cigarette.
“What are you thinking, eh? I told you to stay out of trouble,” said Pop.
“And you’re soaking wet,” Mrs. Montgomery declared as though being wet was the crime of the century. From her shiny white handbag, she took out a bunch of what appeared to be first-aid gear. “Honestly, Alexander, I can’t imagine what you were thinking. Come over here and let me take your temperature.”
He dragged his feet, but submitted to her with the resignation of long habit. Mrs. Montgomery didn’t check for fever like a regular mother, by feeling with her hands. She stuck a cone-shaped thing in his ear and then took it out and read the number.
“All right for you,” Pop said, marching Rosa toward the truck. “We’re gonna get you home, talk some sense into you.”
As their parents separated them, Rosa and Alex caught each other’s eye. Neither of them could keep from grinning. They both knew this wasn’t the end of their adventure.
Eight
Summer 1984
During the second summer Rosa and Alex spent together, she saw him suffer a full-blown asthma attack, and it made her weep with terror. She had never seen anything like it before. She had stopped thinking of him as being sick at all, because the medications and breathing apparatus kept his condition under control.
But not always. On a bright August day, they convinced his mother to allow them to fly kites on the beach, something that—incredibly—Alex had never done before. Rosa showed up with a kite her brother Sal had sent from Hong Kong, where the destroyer he was serving on had made port. She and Alex spent an entire morning putting the kite together, then headed for the beach.
At the long shoreline, isolated from the public beaches by a dense salt marsh, the wind was perfect for kite-flying. It blew strong and steady, a warm current up from the south. Rosa held the kite for Alex to launch. He got so excited and ran so fast along the beach that at first she had no clue there was anything wrong.
“Go, Alex, go!” she called, waiting to feel the wind fill the kite so she could launch it. “Faster!”
But he didn’t go faster. He stumbled as though tripping over a log, yet there was nothing but sand beneath his feet.
“Hurry up,” she urged.
He collapsed like a bird shot from the sky. His glasses flew off and landed in the sand.
“Alex!” she said, dropping the kite. She plunged to her knees beside him and touched his shoulder.
His face was turning blue and gray, like a ghost’s. The rattle and wheeze of his struggling lungs terrified her, and she burst into tears. “Oh, Alex, I don’t know what to do,” she said, feeling helpless and horrible all at once. She looked around wildly, but there was nothing in sight except a pair of blue herons wading in the shallows. “Tell me what to do.”
He shook his head and groped in the pocket of his khaki shorts. He took out his inhaler and inhaled three quick puffs. His eyes looked bright and desperate, but his coloring didn’t improve and his wheezing grew worse. He couldn’t seem to get his lungs working right.
Then he took something from another pocket. A black-and-yellow tube. He ripped open the plastic packaging and then, with his teeth, removed the gray cap from the end. Finally, in one smooth movement, he stabbed the black tip of the tube at his thigh and held it there for several seconds. He wheezed hard four times—in a panic, Rosa counted them—but then his breathing seemed to start working better.
He slowly removed the tube and inspected the black tip. Rosa was horrified to see a rather large needle sticking out of it. The whole business had taken only a few seconds. In the strange aftermath, Alex lay weak upon the sand, and Rosa was still crying.
“It’s okay,” he said, his voice soft and raspy. “I’m all right. Cross my heart and hope—”
“Are you going to be able to make it back home?”
“I need a minute.”
Rosa started to scramble to her feet, but stopped when his cold hand touched hers. “No, wait,” he said. “The kite—”
“You’re not flying the kite.”
“I know. But…how about you fly it for me? I need to rest.” His voice was thin and pleading. “Come on, Rosa. She’s going to take me straight to the hospital. That’s the rule.”
“Then I should go right now and get help.”
“A few minutes won’t make any difference one way or another. I’ll be able to walk back if I can rest a little. The shot lasts twenty minutes, and I’m over the wheezing anyway. Fly the kite. Please.”
“I can do that. But only for a minute.” She looked down at their hands—hers dark, his pale—and felt a wave of emotion moving through her. Then she gave him his glasses. Spying a mermaid’s purse in the sand, she gave him that, too. “For luck,” she explained, closing his hand around the small shell.
It felt particularly important to get it right. Like if she didn’t, if she messed up, she would be letting him down along with the kite. It was a beautiful, one-of-a-kind kite, yellow with red streamers, and Pop had given her a brand-new spool of string to use. She refused to let Alex launch the kite, because he needed to rest. Instead, she planted it in the sand to catch the wind, and ran with the string shortened until the kite spiked up. Then she put on a full burst of speed and paid out the string.
She could hear Alex saying, “Go, Rosa,” and that only made her run faster. Don’t let him down, she thought. Don’t let him down.
She managed to hoist the kite upward until it took off as though it had a will of its own, and would stay up no matter what she did on the ground. Breathless from running, she brought the string spool to Alex.
“It’s up,” she said.
“It’s up,” he echoed, taking hold and watching with shining eyes.
The moment they got back, there was a big fuss, just as Alex had warned her. They tried to act as though nothing had happened, but Alex’s mother had an uncanny eye, and the minute she saw him, she said, “You were running on the beach, weren’t you?”
“No, we just—”
“You were running, and you started wheezing.”
He stared at the floor as he held out the autoinjection tube for her to inspect. Her face turned hard as alabaster marble. “I need to get my purse,” she said. She brushed past Rosa as though she didn’t see her at all.
Rosa and Pop stood on the porch and watched them go. Mrs. Montgomery hardly ever drove the car that was parked in the old carriage house, and when she gunned the engine, it coughed and wheezed worse than Alex. She didn’t seem to be a very good driver, either, Rosa observed. The blue Ford Galaxy lurched and shuddered backward out of the driveway, and the engine banged and backfired all the way down Ocean Road.
“It’s so sad that he’s sick,” Rosa said to her father. “When he couldn’t breathe, I got really scared, like—” She stopped, not wanting to upset her father by mentioning Mamma. “Do you think Mrs. Montgomery is really mad at me?”
“She is afraid for her boy.” Pop grabbed his pruning shears, ready to get back to work. “I think next week, you will stay with one of the neighbors.”
“Pop, no.” Rosa panicked. The neighbor ladies—those who stayed home instead of going to work—were old and smelled funny and some even had chin whiskers. Worse, the widowed ones all wanted to marry her father. “Please, Pop, I’ll be good, I swear I will. Just give me a chance, okay, Pop. Okay?”
Returning from the doctor’s a couple of hours later, Alex seemed to be having a similar argument with his mother. “It’s no big deal, you know it’s not,” he said, banging the car door shut.
Rosa came running from the yard, where she had been watching the koi fish feed on hapless bugs. “Are you all right, Alex?” she asked. “Hello, Mrs. Montgomery.”
Mrs. Montgomery was inspecting Alex fiercely; she didn’t even seem to hear Rosa. “You’re not to do anything but rest,” she scolded. “You heard the doctor.”
“Fine,” Alex said. “I’ll teach Rosa to play chess.”
“I don’t think Rosa—”
“I already know how to play chess,” Rosa declared. “We could have a tournament.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Alex said. “We’ll have a chess tournament.”
Rosa was aware of Mrs. Montgomery’s stern disapproval, but she chose to ignore it.
So did Alex. He had the key to his mother. She would rather put up with Rosa than say no to Alex. He showed her that he had kept the mermaid’s purse she’d given him. “I think it did bring me luck,” he said.
He was good at chess, way better than she was. She was impulsive, he was deliberate. She moved by intuition while he applied his knowledge and intelligence. She didn’t bother looking ahead at things; he studied the board as though it held the meaning of life.
Despite her poor skills, she managed to win a few victories. She improved quickly, and before long, she was asking about all the other interesting games stashed in a tall cabinet in the library.
“Canasta and backgammon,” he said, then took down a long, narrow pegboard. “Cribbage.”
She chuckled. “Sounds like something to eat.”
“It’s a good game. I’ll show you.”
Nine
Summer 1986
By their fourth summer together, Rosa and Alex had fallen into a routine. From mid-June until Labor Day, they were best friends. Mrs. Montgomery objected, but as usual, Alex knew how to handle her. He had all these long arguments about how being with someone his own age helped him manage his illness, because being alone was stressful and made his lungs twitchy.
Rosa couldn’t believe his mother bought that. Maybe a mother’s love made her putty in his hands. She was a severe woman but she adored Alex. She used to try to get him to invite other boys over, “other” meaning boys like him, summer people. Alex pitched such a fit that eventually his mother stopped trying. Rosa was just as glad about that. With the exception of Alex, summer people were snooty, and they seemed to have nothing better to do than work on their tans or shop. Pop said they were his bread and butter so she’d better be polite to them.
Each year at summer’s end, Alex went away, and Rosa felt bereft after he was gone. They always said they’d write to stay in touch, but somehow, neither of them got around to it. Rosa got busy with school and sports, and the year would speed past. When the next summer rolled around, they fell effortlessly back into their friendship. Getting together with Alex was like putting on a comfortable old sweater you’d forgotten you had.
That fourth summer, they were both going into the seventh grade, and they didn’t ease back into the friendship as effortlessly as before. For some strange reason, she felt a little bashful around him that year. He was just plain old Alex, skinny and fair-skinned and funny. And she was just Rosa, loud and bossy. Yet there was a subtle difference between them that hadn’t been there before. It was that stupid boy-girl thing, Rosa knew, because even the nuns were required to show kids those dumb videos, Girl into Woman and Boy into Man.
According to the videos, Rosa was still at least ninety percent girl, and Alex was definitely a boy. He had the same scrawny chest and piping boyish voice. She was pretty scrawny herself, and even though she sometimes yearned for boobs like Linda Lipschitz’s, she also dreaded the transformation. Maybe if her mother was still alive, she’d feel differently, but on her own, she was more than happy for nature to take its time.
Mrs. Montgomery hadn’t changed one bit, either. The whole first week of summer, Alex was confined to the house because his mother said he had a head cold. Fine, thought Rosa, trying not to feel frustrated about missing out on perfect weather. They’d find indoor things to do.
One day in June she showed up with an idea. She found Alex in the library, reading one of his zillions of books. Before she could lose her nerve, she took out a folded flyer and handed it to him.
“What’s this?” he asked, adjusting his glasses.
With great solemnity, she indicated the flyer. “Just read it.”
“‘Locks for Love,’” he read. “‘A non-profit organization that provides hairpieces at no charge to patients across the U.S. suffering from long-term medical hair loss.’ And there’s a donation form.” He touched his pale hair. “Who would want this?”
She sniffed. “Very funny. Get the scissors.”
He eyed her thick, curly hair, which swung clear down to her waist. “Are you sure?”
She nodded, thinking of her mother, the baby-bird baldness that had afflicted her after the chemo kicked in. She’d worn scarves and hats, and someone at the hospital gave her a wig, but she said it didn’t look like real hair and never wore it. If only Rosa had known about Locks for Love then, she could have given Mamma her hair.
“Do it, Alex.” She blew upward at the springy curls that fell down over her forehead. Her hair was always a mess. There was never a hair tie or barrette to be found in the house. Pop never thought to buy them, and she never remembered to tell him.
She looked up to see Alex watching her. “What?”
“You really want me to cut off your hair?”
“I need a haircut, anyway.”
He grew solemn. “There are salons. My mother takes me to Ritchie’s in the city.”
“I don’t think I would like a salon. Mamma used to cut my hair when I was little.” Suddenly it was there again in her throat, that hurtful feeling of wanting. She blinked fast and tried to swallow, but it wouldn’t go away. That was another thing about this girl-into-woman business. Sometimes she cried like a baby. Her emotions were as unpredictable as the weather.
Alex watched her for a moment longer. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose—a nervous habit. She looked him straight in the eye and conquered her tears. “Go get the scissors. And a hair tie.”
“A what?”
She rolled her eyes. “You know, like a rubber band with cloth on it for making a ponytail. Or just a rubber band will do. The instructions say I have to send my hair in a ponytail. Do it, Alex.”
