The water bears, p.1
The Water Bears, page 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Kim Baker
Cover art copyright © 2020 by Luisa Uribe
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Wendy Lamb Books and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9781984852205 (trade)—ISBN 9781984852212 (lib. bdg.)—ebook ISBN 9781984852229
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Acknowledgments
About the Author
for Sam
I turned thirteen the day after a storm came in with a king tide.
High tides climb up part of the shore, but a king tide can make the whole beach disappear. It squeezed Murphy Island until seawater rose and salted the trees. The smell of waves pushed through the woods, through the cracks around my bedroom window, and washed away the dregs of a bad dream.
People notice details when they hope a day might be special. It could be a surprise-visitor day, a hey-I’m-starting-to-grow-a-mustache day, or a blow-out-the-candles-on-your-favorite-cake day.
I found my mom on the computer in my brother Carlos’s old room. I stood in the doorway behind the desk, where she couldn’t see my leg. I am an expert at keeping furniture between us, especially when it’s hot enough for shorts. Even with the desk and me standing with my good leg in front of the bad one, Mom was careful not to look down. She hugged me and sang “Happy Birthday” like an opera singer. I clapped for the effort.
“Where are Dad and Little Leti?” I asked. I thought they might be out getting me a present. My sister always waits until the last minute. Or they’d gone to the bakery to pick up a cake. Dad used to make our favorites at home, but he’s working more this year.
“They’re down at Gertrude Lake. Everyone’s down there,” she said. Everyone but us. She brushed dog hair off the keyboard and straightened a stack of bills. “Your dad saw it this morning.”
“Saw what?” The first thing I thought of couldn’t be right, but she said it anyway.
“He saw Marvelo.” She smiled again, like that was good news, or a joke, or the start of a conversation. She stretched and turned back to the computer, scrolling through recipes and fishing reports.
There was nothing to say back.
Marvelo is a creature that supposedly lives in Gertrude Lake, in the middle of the island. Optimistic tourists rent paddleboats and pump quarters into the telescopes on the beach, hoping to see it. There’s a warning at the paddleboat stand that boaters might get eaten. It’s a joke with the locals. Every year, Marvelo is “spotted” before the Marvelo Festival. Bits in blurry pictures could be a lake monster if you squint, or they could be logs. We have a lot of logs.
* * *
—
I walked slowly over the squishy mud so my leg wouldn’t be too sore on the way back home. I almost stepped on a salamander, but I shooed him off the path into the ferns.
Islands are shaped like things, the way clouds are shaped like things. On a map, Murphy looks like a wonky avocado half, thirty-seven miles from the mainland. Rocky beaches and smooth mudflats are the skin, and Gertrude Lake is the pit. Everything else is the creamy green stuff that goes brown if you leave it out.
Dad stood with the pack of friends he calls comrades beside a gazebo that Mom helped build out of old farm equipment and blue bottles. The bottles hummed from a lake breeze, and Dad waved his arms toward the water.
“Just forty feet that way!” he said. “It spy-hopped and breached like a humpback, but leaner and more serpent-like. It splashed down hard enough to slosh a wake up onto the shore.” Dad pointed to his still-wet shoes. The guys around him nodded, and a waiter came out from the café across the street to sell coffee and pastries to everyone standing around.
“Hey, buddy. Ready for summer?” Tom-with-the-beard tilted his head and smiled at me. He runs the paddleboat stand, and he’s not my buddy. He asked how physical therapy was going, like he should get points for knowing about it. I said I was done, and he said I was brave and squeezed my shoulder, which is the absolute worst.
I shrugged and he left to rent a paddleboat to a tourist. Somebody could ride a blue cat boat or a purple fox boat out to look for Marvelo. Tom-with-the-beard must have left the paddleboats unchained, because a couple of them drifted around the lake like lost pets. Little Leti sat in the orange zebra boat still chained to the dock. She threw a basketball up and caught it, over and over.
“Newt! Come here!” Dad pulled me in for a hug. “Happy birthday, mijo! Thirteen! You feel different?” I shook my head. “Can you believe it?” I didn’t know if he was talking about turning thirteen or Marvelo. My answers would have been yes and no, but he didn’t wait. He spun around when someone asked about the reward. A cryptozoology club in Portland offered three thousand dollars a while back to anyone who could prove that Marvelo lived in the lake. The lake isn’t huge. It’s a pretty safe bet that the club will never have to write that check, no matter what Dad says. The club has reward offers for Sasquatch and jackalopes too. It’s that kind of operation.
I don’t even want to get into it, but my dad is writing a graphic novel about an island with two monsters called Marvelo and Manxadon. Manxadon is the sidekick, a superhero mutant that’s half mastodon and half Manx cat. He stays on land, and Marvelo stays in the water. I used to help Dad sometimes, bounce around story ideas, but it’s been a while. They’ve put short sections of the story in the Murphy newspaper a few times. People who don’t think too hard about the logic love it. He wants to make it a full graphic novel, but he’s too busy building condos on the mainland to ever finish.
“Is this for the book?” I said.
“Absolutely. Marvelo moved like I thought he might, but I got the skin texture totally wrong. How are you feeling, mijo?” He brushed my bangs back, but I pushed his hand away.
“Fine. Did you get any proof?”
“It’s all here.” He pointed to his temple.
“You need proof for the reward,” I said. Dad waggled his eyebrows and rubbed his fingers together. He made it all up. If he can convince other people he saw it, then he can collect the reward. Maybe you can’t blame a guy who works all the time. But maybe you can.
“I don’t have proof. Yet,” he said. “It’s lucky I didn’t pick up your present, or I would have missed Marvelo! Meet me at the ferry dock after school on Monday, and I’ll give you your present then. Today I’m helping with storm cleanup. It washed Tom’s patio table away!”
I nodded and waded around in the shallows, away from the crowd, so people would stop looking at my leg. Even when they think they’re being subtle, I can feel it. I should have worn pants.
The water stayed flat as Dad described Marvelo all over again to a new group of passing comrades. I’m not a comrade, so I walked home.
Last year, I said I didn’t care what I got for my birthday and got shirts and a sleeping bag. This year, when they asked, I said I wanted a bike. I left windows open on the computer to new bikes I liked. I ordered bike catalogs and left them lying around. No surprise camping gear this year, even if I do use the sleeping bag to sleep in the tub sometimes. Plus, the doctor said riding a bike would be good for my ligaments.
There are a finite number of bikes already on Murphy Island. None are new. A lot of them are cruisers that were here for guests to use back when the island was a fancy resort. They are older than my parents. I detoured to the bike rack near the parking lot to see if maybe Dad was just being sly and was setting me up for a surprise. A new bike would stand out like a jewel, but old island bikes filled the rack. One had a motorcycle windshield welded on and a Jolly Roger flag. The next bike had antlers for handlebars, and the one b
Mom sat on the porch with our dog, Chuck. He is a giant rescue mutt who guards our goats, unless one of us is outside, and then I guess he figures we’ll do it. Chickens pecked around in the wet yard, hoping worms had come up to dry off. The grass smelled bruised from the storm and stained my wet shoes green.
“Mail came,” Mom said. She handed me birthday cards from her side of the family.
“How’d it go?” She leaned out of the swing she made from old skis that sat on our porch, and balanced a row of peanuts on the railing. The phone rang inside, but she pretended not to hear it, like she usually does.
“He said he’d give me a present on Monday,” I said. I sniffed. “Is that a cake?” It smelled like pineapple and banana. I opened a card from my uncle and five bucks fell out.
“Yeah. I mean by the lake. Did anyone get a picture?” Two crows flew down from the cottonwood tree to the railing on the far side of Chuck. He watched them crab-walk over to snatch the peanuts in their talons like Mom trained them to do, but he didn’t move. The crows will take anything edible, whether it’s meant for them or not. Sometimes they bring her buttons and lures and other shiny things they find around Murphy. She says it’s a trade for the treats.
Mom and Dad asked all week if I wanted any hints about my present. They said I could never guess what it was, so I didn’t. We all knew it would be a bike.
I told her that Dad and his comrades planned to take turns keeping watch at Gertrude Lake. She nodded, like watching for a lake monster was a normal way to spend a day.
“Why didn’t you stay?” she asked.
I shrugged. Because it doesn’t exist, I wanted to say. Because it’s my birthday and I hoped we would do something fun. I crossed my fingers that he would be back in time for cake. I could blow out candles and wish to be far away on the mainland, where there are no made-up lake monsters.
The morning after my birthday, Carlos picked me up from the ferry dock in Lincoln.
“You by yourself?” he asked.
“Mom got called in to work, so they’ll meet us at abuela’s house before the party,” I said. Carlos nodded and offered to stop for birthday donuts.
“What’s new?” Carlos asked as I opened the door to the bakery.
“My friend Rocket’s cat had kittens under their porch,” I said. “Two are calico boys, which he says is really rare.” Carlos looked it up on his phone, and we found out that only one in three thousand calico cats is male, because of something about chromosomes.
We waited in line behind a mom letting a toddler pick his own donut. The toddler couldn’t deal with having so many choices. He paced and whined, finally pointing to an orange-sprinkle one. When the clerk asked if that was his pick, he shook his head no.
“Are you guys doing an end-of-sixth-grade project?” Carlos asked.
“Yeah. A new Murphy Island brochure for the visitor center,” I said.
“That’s not bad. We had island-history reenactments when I was in sixth grade. Remember? I dressed up like Truman Murphy. What’s your topic?” Carlos said. The toddler finally picked a chocolate cruller.
“I was thinking tide pools. Remember when Dad would take us fishing and I’d spend the whole time on the beach looking at the tide pools?” I loved lying on my stomach watching little crabs and baby octopuses. It was like an aquarium puddle.
It was our turn to order. I got an apple fritter. One obviously had more apple chunks than the others, but I didn’t want to be picky like the toddler, so I didn’t ask for it. The clerk grabbed the closest one, but it was small and squished looking. I wished I had said something. Carlos got a maple bar and coffee. I tried to order coffee too, but he made me get milk.
“So”—Carlos cleaned crumbs off the table—“how’d it go with Dr. Wu? He really helped my buddy Ray.” He put about a million sugars into his coffee.
I picked icing off my fritter and didn’t answer right away. Dr. Wu was a special kind of doctor who helped people with bad dreams after traumatic events. Insurance didn’t cover my appointment, and my parents paid for it, so if it didn’t help, it would be a big waste.
“It was hard to talk to a stranger, so I didn’t tell him everything.”
“You think it would be easier to talk to someone you know?” Carlos watched me and sipped his coffee.
“No, not really. I don’t know.”
“Tell me. I didn’t ask before because I didn’t want to stir it up for you, but maybe it would help?” He sat up and waited.
“It’s not going to help,” I said.
“Let’s try anyway. You have somewhere to be?” He smiled.
I looked around. The toddler knocked his perfect cruller off the table and howled. His mom cleaned it up with a handful of napkins and carried him out.
“Give it a shot. Please,” Carlos said.
We were alone in the store. The clerk went to the kitchen, probably praying the toddler wouldn’t come back. I could feel my whole body shaking, like the shop was rumbling around me. Carlos looked so serious. “Tell me when the dreams started.”
“Last year, right after it happened.” He nodded. I took a bite of the fritter so he wouldn’t see how close I was to crying, but it was hard to swallow. “We were at Gilda’s house. You know, Mom’s friend? They were inside sorting out the lineup for the festival, and I was waiting for Ethan to come rehearse our act.” Ethan is my best friend. Carlos knew this part already, but I needed to work up to the other stuff.
Blackberry brambles grow all over the island. Big thorny vines popped straight out of the ground behind Gilda’s house like bad luck, but the berries were delicious. “I was scared of getting poked by the thorns. Dumb, huh? I looked for berries on the creek side of the bramble, and there it was. Just like that.” I tried to take deep breaths, but they just made my heart beat harder.
“A black bear, between you and the bush,” Carlos said.
“My brain told me it was a big dog. The bear stood up, and I realized what it was. I tried to back up, but my feet got tangled in vines and I fell. I yelled and the bear must have felt threatened.” That’s what people said afterward. He got scared too. “It growled and came at me. I put my arms up over my face and tried to scoot away. It lunged, stomped on me, and bit my knee.”
Carlos didn’t say anything, even though it took a while for me to keep going.
“It felt like I was split in two. It took another swipe, and I screamed. Mom and Gilda heard me and ran out of the house. Mom banged a frying pan and roared. Remember how she had a scratchy voice after?” Carlos nodded. I told him how the bear took off toward the trees. It was all over in less than a minute. My leg burned like fire. I couldn’t walk. I crawled through those awful vines sideways, like a crab, dragging my bloody leg through the dirt until Mom stopped me.
I didn’t tell him how my skin flapped around through the rip in my jeans. Blackberry juice, dead leaves, and dirt covered the rest of me. My hands got ripped up by the bramble thorns. I hate blackberries now.
Mom and Gilda thought it was a dog at first too, when they saw what was happening from the house. There aren’t usually bears on the island, but stray dogs are pretty common. We rode a floatplane to Lincoln. It was just Mom and Dad, the nurse, the pilot, and me. The ferry did a special trip to bring everyone else. People squeezed into my room until they made everybody but my parents go to the waiting room. Leti stayed at tía Birdy’s house. I was all patched up by the time Carlos got to the hospital. Animal Control said the bear must have swum over from the mainland. One old woman saw it in her yard on Murphy the next day, but it disappeared after that. There were warning flyers everywhere. People stopped walking alone and even went in pairs to take their garbage out. They searched the whole island. It must have swum back to the mountains, they said.
