The Bay at Midnight

cute. His hair was thick, the color of sunshine. He looked a little like Troy Donahue.

“Hi, Ned,” I managed to say, and only when I said his name out loud did I realize that he had the same name as Nancy Drew’s steady boyfriend. “Hi, Ned,” I repeated, this time to myself, just to feel his name on my tongue again.

He’d reached the opposite side of the fence from where I was standing and leaned over, his elbows resting on the metal bar at the top of the chain link. “You’re an early bird,” he said.

“You, too.”

“How many did you get?” He leaned farther over the fence to try to look in the bucket.

“Five, so far.”

“You like them?”

“To eat, you mean?”

He took a drag on his cigarette and let the smoke out in a long stream. “What else?” he asked.

“Actually, no.” I giggled and was annoyed with myself for sounding like a kid. “Grandma loves them, though. And I love catching them, so it works out okay.”

“So.” He rubbed his hand across his chin as though checking if he needed a shave. It was a sexy gesture. “Did Izzy get in trouble last night?”

I nodded. “She can’t go out all day. She asked me to give you something, though.”

I balanced carefully as I walked back along the bulkhead, trying to impress him by not holding on to the fence. In my yard, I put down the bucket and the net, then grabbed the giraffe from beneath the chair and carried it over to him. “She asked me to give you this,” I said.

He smiled, taking the giraffe from my hand. I felt embarrassed for Isabel that she wanted to give him something so dumb. I didn’t believe her when she’d said it was actually his.

“That’s nice of you to do that for her,” he said, looking right at me, and I stood as tall as I could, wondering how my small, barely there breasts looked in the childish one-piece bathing suit I was wearing. I needed to get a two-piece this summer, if Mom would let me.

“She said it belonged to you,” I said.

“Yeah, it does, actually,” he said. “Thanks for bringing it over. Tell her everything’s copacetic.”

Why, oh why, hadn’t I remembered to bring my dictionary? I heard sounds coming from his screened porch and didn’t want to be in the Chapmans’ yard when goofy Ethan came outside, so I said goodbye to Ned and went back to our dock to see if any new crabs had appeared along the bulkhead.

Right after lunch, Grandpop, Daddy and I towed the boat down to the marina. We gassed it up, Grandpop hopping onto the pier like a young man happy to be alive. I knew how he felt. Just the smell of the gasoline mixing with the salty scent of the water filled me up with joy. I thought to myself, I take after him. Grandpop loved everything about the shore—the water, fishing, boating, the smells, the night sky—everything, just as I did. We looked nothing alike: he was nearly bald, with a sad sort of face that always reminded me of a basset hound, but in many other ways, we were the same.

He and I went for a spin on the bay before taking the boat through the canal and into our dock. Grandpop let me pilot it myself part of the time, even allowing me to maneuver it into our dock, and he told me I did a terrific job. Our boat had no steering wheel, just a tiller handle attached to the motor, and I felt good that I was getting the hang of it so quickly. I nearly fell when I tried to get from the boat to the bulkhead, though, but Grandpop said I would have it mastered in a few days. I tied the boat to the hooks at the sides of the dock, loving the wet, rough feel of the rope beneath my fingers. I felt sorry for Izzy. Here it was, her first full day at the shore, and she wasn’t even allowed out of the house.

I sat with her and Lucy on the porch for a while, reading. Lucy and I were in the rockers, and Isabel was stretched out on the bed at the end of the porch, as close to the Chapmans’ house as she could get. I noticed that she wasn’t turning the pages of her book. She gazed in the direction of the Chapmans’ yard, probably waiting for a glimpse of Ned. He and Mr. Chapman were working on their boat, and I doubted she could see their dock from her place on the bed, but when Ned walked through their yard to get something from their house, I could nearly hear Izzy’s heartbeat quicken. I understood how she felt. He was having the same effect on me.

Before dinner, I took the boat out by myself. Mom was nervous about it, but Daddy talked her into letting me as long as I wore the hideous orange life preserver. It was a Monday and the weekend congestion on the canal had vanished overnight. I took the boat right to the mouth of the bay. The water stretched in front of me wide and inviting and I longed to go out into it, just a little way, but I didn’t dare. Instead I turned around in a broad arc and headed for the dock between the colored fishermen and the rooster house.

Once inside the unfamiliar dock, I cut the motor. There was a short ladder on my left and I tied my boat to a rung, took off the life preserver, then climbed up. The colored fishermen made me nervous. I didn’t look directly at them, but I could feel their eyes following me as I walked between the cattails and the fence, heading away from them in the direction of the shack. I finally found a narrow path cut through the tall grass, and I followed it right to the front porch of the ramshackle little cottage.

“Who are you?”

I jumped at the sound of a man’s voice, disembodied because I couldn’t see through the screens of his porch.

“I was just coming to see where the rooster lives,” I said.

The screen door creaked open a few inches and a man stood in the doorway. He had a thick beard and a dirty old hat on his head. The early evening sunlight fell onto his face and he squinted, his eyes reduced to little beads of translucent blue, making him look a bit demonic. The Mystery of theWarlock’s Shack, I thought to myself. I liked the title. Maybe I would try to write my own book.

“Where do you live?” he asked.

I turned and pointed to my bungalow, which was barely visible through the reeds. It looked very far away.

“You come over by boat?” he asked.