The Turn of the Tide Page 4

  It was too late. The Saga’s hull scraped cement as it passed over a piece of cannery foundation. Jet winced. Oliver clung to the mast, his eyes squeezed shut. Jet tugged an oar out of the oarlock and stood poised to push them away from danger. She saw the rusted remains of the boiler. She stuck the paddle in the water to guide them around it. The oar hit one of the pipes on the boiler, releasing a swirl of scum that hid the rest of the wreckage from sight. There was nothing to do but hold on.

  A second later a boiler pipe punched a hole in the side of the Saga below the waterline. It felt as if the jagged piece of steel went straight through her heart. Jet forced herself not to scream and scare her brother even more.

  “It’s okay. We’re going to be okay,” Jet said firmly, as if saying so could make it true.

  Oliver opened his eyes. “We’re sinking!”

  He was an inch away from screaming, and Jet felt the cold hand of dread pushing her toward panic. She felt the urge to drop everything and hug her little brother until he stopped shaking—her only brother. How could she have done this? A rookie mistake. Whatever a bar pilot put on his résumé, Jet was pretty sure “zero ships sunk under your command” was the most important thing.

  She pulled herself together and looked over the side at the damage. It wasn’t as bad as she thought. She took a deep breath and put on a captain’s voice. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “The split isn’t very big.”

  “Okay,” Oliver said. “Now what?”

  “Now we wait for the tide.”

  Jet gave the line a tug to make sure it was secure, then checked the phone. The tide app took a while to load. When it finally pulled up the correct chart, it showed still another half hour until the turn of the tide. Jet buried her head in her hands. How could she have not checked the tide? She always checked the tide. It was in the newspaper. On her phone. In her dad’s desk. She’d been in such a hurry. For what? Her dad was going to kill her. What on earth would she say to him? There was just no excuse.

  “Snack?” Oliver said, holding out the bag of marshmallows and M&M’s.

  Jet shook her head. She was never going to eat again. Oliver munched for a while, then took out his book. When the tide rose, Jet rowed to the edge of the bay. There was water in the buoyancy space behind the hole. Jet scrubbed the area around the split dry and covered it with two layers of duct tape. She pushed the Saga back out into the bay. The patch held. She and her brother waded along the mudflats at the edge of the bay, towing the Saga in defeat all the way back to its mooring spot. When they rounded the last bend before the sailing club, they saw Beck and Roland launching their brand-new boat on the incoming tide.

  JET WOKE UP on the couch the next morning, still in her clothes from the night before. In the middle of dinner—finally—they’d gotten the word. Kai was safe! And he needed a place to stay while Uncle Lars and Aunt Hanako were repairing the power plant. Dad had been on the phone past midnight. Apparently sending a kid to another country when his passport is at the bottom of the ocean is a problem. You’d think Kai was a terrorist or something. Lucky that he had dual citizenship, or Dad would probably still be on the phone, yelling at people.

  So instead of reciting her carefully rehearsedapology about wrecking the Saga, Jet spent most of the night helping move Mom’s art stuff from the studio next to Jet’s bedroom to the living room, downstairs. A neighbor loaned them a bed. Jet moved her clothes into boxes and gave up her dresser. Mom was in a frenzy of nervous cleaning, almost coming to tears over the ink stains in the carpet. Oliver wandered in bleary-eyed in his pajamas and told Mom to move the bed over the ink spots, making him the hero of the night, even though he’d hardly done any work.

  Jet yawned and stretched. She took in the unfamiliar landscape of the living room. The TV and couch were squashed into one corner. Mom’s work desk and office chair were crammed in by the window, and her project board, bins of paper, bottles of ink, file cabinet, and cup of five thousand pens squeezed in wherever they fit. Only the fireplace and its row of family pictures remained the same. The house was unnaturally quiet.

  Jet wandered into the kitchen and scooped up a well-deserved breakfast of strawberries and ice cream. Notes on the fridge announced which ship Dad was piloting and which flight in Portland Mom was meeting. They’d both be gone for hours.

  Oliver came downstairs, poured himself a bowl of cereal, and picked at it with all the speed and enthusiasm of a banana slug. Oliver did not like strangers. Mom reminded him last night that he and Kai had been buddies when the family visited Japan five years ago. Oliver went to the computer, looked up a child-development website, and announced that “children do not remember things before they are three years old!” It was not the highlight of Mom’s evening. And now Oliver was just sitting there. He wasn’t even reading the cereal box.

  “Park today,” Jet announced.

  Oliver made his usual grumbles. Jet made her usual promise about stopping at the library on the way home. While he was changing out of pajamas, Jet looked up boat repair on her phone.

  “Fiberglass cloth and a can of resin,” she mumbled to herself.

  Jet fiddled with the repair diagram to enlarge it. The work didn’t look super tricky. She’d never fixed a boat on her own, but maybe she could make the repairs without telling Dad about her colossal failure. Conversation with him was not for sissies. He was always loud, and he was always right. Jet had gone over what she’d say in her head twenty times already, and each time it was more awful. It would be way better if he never found out.

  When Oliver was finally done changing, they hopped on their bikes and headed down to the park. Oliver’s friends were deeply engaged in an epic jungle-gym war. Jet was relieved to see her brother get swept up in the violence. Her crowd from school was at the park, too, and Roland was in the thick of them like always. He and Beck and the Mikes were practicing jumps in the skate park. Bridgie and Skye were sitting on the swings, cooing over the boys’ skateboard tricks and planning their next road trip to the mall in Portland.

  Jet went over and sat with them, but her heart wasn’t in it. The mall bored her to death. She offered to get them passes to Rose City Comic Con when her Mom went at the end of summer, but only got a lukewarm response. The three of them used to love to go to the kid zone and draw monsters all day long and come home with stacks of free comics and rub-on tattoos. Now Bridgie and Skye were more interested in which movie stars were coming.

  It was going to be a long summer.

  Biking home took forever. Oliver had a one-speed, and they lived on top of the tallest hill in town. He had to walk it on the steepest part. Jet shifted her bike down to a crawling gear and rode alongside him. They got home just as Mom pulled up.

  Her cousin stepped out of the van. No suitcase, no backpack, just a kid in a grass-stained shirt and torn pants. He stood in the vulture position a boy takes when he’s in danger of being jumped for his lunch money: shoulders up, chin down. Mom was saying something about the history of the house and the five generations of Ellstroms who’d lived here. Kai nodded as if he was paying attention, but Jet could see the words sheeting off him like rain. Mom had probably been talking all the way from the airport.

  “Kai?” Jet said.

  “Are you Bridget?”

  “Everybody calls me Jet.”

  In the picture on the fireplace, Kai was five, wearing a kimono and standing outside a temple with a curving red roof. Blond, broad-shouldered Uncle Lars beamed on one side of him, and elegant Aunt Hanako smiled serenely on the other. There was a row of six photos of Kai in his school uniform on the fridge. This tall rumpled person couldn’t possibly be the same boy. He looked so much older.

  Jet wracked her brains for something to say. The usual conversation beginners—“How are you? How was your trip?”—seemed wrong. He didn’t want to answer those questions. It would be mean to make him answer. Mom seemed intent on carrying the entire conversation, anyway.

  “Lunch?” Jet said when her mom pause
d to draw a breath.

  Kai nodded.

  “Of course!” Mom said. “You’ll be hungry. Let’s see…peanut butter? Tuna? Ham?” She launched into the full list of sandwich choices.

  Jet led them to the kitchen. Kai slid into a chair, folded his hands politely, and fell to blinking and nodding as if his aunt were giving an algebra lesson. Jet consulted her mental map of the Pacific. She counted time zones. No, that couldn’t be right.

  “What time is it at home?” she whispered while her mother’s back was turned.

  Kai closed his eyes; he tapped out the numbers on his fingers. “Seven a.m. tomorrow,” he said.

  “Tomorrow?! Are you kidding?”

  Kai shook his head, looking more exhausted by the minute.

  “You’ve been traveling for sixteen hours?” Jet said quietly, still wrapping her head around the dateline Kai had crossed.

  Mom had a sandwich in front of him in record time. She turned back to the fridge for milk, still talking. Jet slid the plate to the far side of the table and put a chair cushion in its place. She put one finger between Kai’s shoulder blades and pushed him forward. He collapsed onto the table like a dead man. Mom turned around, glass of milk in hand.

  “Oh dear,” she said.

  Kai made a little snore.

  “Mom,” Jet said firmly. “This boy smells like a gym sock.”

  “Bridget Jane!”

  “Did you get him any clothes? Deodorant? You know, boy stuff?”

  Mom leaned on the pantry door. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days. “We didn’t know what size,” she began. “And it took so much longer than I thought it would to clear out my studio and make it a bedroom. And I’m not even finished—”

  “It’s fine,” Jet barged in. “You know his size now.”

  Mom sighed. “You’re right. I should pick up a few things.”

  “The room is perfect,” Jet said soothingly.

  “Do you think? Maybe he’ll want that one up in the attic. It’s bigger.”

  “Oliver lost a frog in the attic two months ago.”

  “What?!”

  “There’s the ghost of a dried-up frog up there. Sorry.”

  Mom shuddered. She could write a whole comic-book series about the zombie apocalypse, but she couldn’t cope with amphibians in the house. There was no understanding her.

  “Mom,” Jet said patiently. “The room is awesome. Kai. Needs. Clothes.” She started moving toward the front hall, where Mom had left her purse. “Pajamas? Toothbrush?” Jet kept walking. Mom was not following her. “Starbucks is on the way!” Jet added in her most chipper voice.

  Mom looked over her shoulder at Kai. “Poor baby. Alone in the world.”

  “I’ll take care of things here. Kai’s asleep. Oliver’s reading. What could happen?”

  Mom gave her a look. Things had been known to happen on Jet’s watch.

  “What!” Jet held up both hands. “Oliver is completely frog-free! I checked his pockets. Go!”

  Mom laughed. Finally.

  “Okay, I’m out of here.” She stroked the hair in Jet’s ponytail, immediately lodging her fingers in the largest tangle. “Thanks, Jet.” She shook her hand free of the tangles and headed out the door. “Just call if—”

  “The zombie apocalypse comes this way?”

  Mom glared.

  “Kidding!” Jet waved and grinned. She restrained herself from slamming the front door, but slumped against it after her mother left. Parents. So exhausting.

  Oliver was hiding out with a book in the tree house. Kai wasn’t going to wake up for hours, maybe not for several days, so Jet made herself a sandwich and took off for the barn, where her dad kept his office. She settled into his chair. Much as she liked the idea of fixing the boat on the sly, she knew she’d never get away with it, not for long. Dad was loud and goofy, but he wasn’t stupid. He’d figure it out. And then what would she say?

  There was no excuse. No matter how many times she ran over the events of the wreck, she couldn’t justify it. Forgot to check the tide? Pathetic. Misread the chart? Inexcusable. And a lie. She knew. And she sailed anyway. Would she put up with this kind of incompetence if she were captain? Not a chance.

  When he discovered the truth, he’d never let her sail again.

  HOURS LATER, KAI woke with a start. He glancedaround the room, amazed. He remembered where he was. Sixteen hours on a plane was hard to forget, even when you wanted to. It was just that Aunt Karin’s kitchen was the largest room he’d ever seen. He slid out of the chair and turned in a full circle. It was a national park of a kitchen, but instead of mountains and forests, it was a trackless landscape of green linoleum, silver appliances, and white countertops. Kai peeked in a cupboard. An army of cans and boxes stood in rank and file, enough to feed a family for a year.

  Kai went outside. The yard was empty. He had another cousin, a boy. There were always two of them in the pictures. Storm clouds bruised the sky, hurried by a wind that raised goose bumps on his bare arms. There was an archery target set up at one end of the yard. Two spreading oaks had a zip line between them. A tire swing dangled from one tree, a knotted rope from the other. There wasn’t another house in sight.

  Kai saw the tail end of the knotted rope disappear up in the branches of the oak tree. Now that he knew where to look, he could see the outline of a tree house, painted with leaves to hide it from view.

  Ah, Kai thought. Cousin number two. Oliver, that was his name. He was younger than the girl. Maybe he was afraid of strangers. Maybe he didn’t want to share his room. Kai moved away from the tree house to give his cousin some time to get used to the idea of him. From the edge of the yard, Kai could see the river. He felt a twinge in his stomach at the sight.

  He pushed his memories of the tsunami aside and instead calculated the distance from the water. Was he more than a thousand meters up? Yes. Easily. Where was higher ground? He glanced all around. This was the high ground.

  When they were taking Kai away from home, Miller and Valdez had stopped for a few minutes at the power plant. Instead of saying good-bye to his mother, instead of hugging his father, he’d pleaded to stay with his friends and help out like everyone else. Before, when his father had proposed sending him to America for the summer, Kai could count on his mother to argue that he should stay and spend his summer preparing for exams at cram school like all the other kids in town. But this time his parents were on the same side.

  “How will I face my friends?” he’d said to them. “I’m the only one who’s running away from hardship. I’ll be ashamed of this forever!”

  And then she’d cried. He’d made his mother cry. As if all the rest wasn’t bad enough.

  “Kai,” she’d said. “You are all we have now. You must let your father put you on the highest ground he knows.”

  Kai turned back now and gave his cousins’ house another look. It had once been his father’s childhood home, and it did seem to fit him. People were always teasing his father about being tall. He was the wrong size for everybody’s furniture. They ordered his lab coats and hazmat suits specially at work. But here he would fit right in.

  Kai was already taller than his mom. He had always been the tallest boy in his class. Sometimes when they were all standing in line at school, Kai would hunch down until he was level with Tomo and Hiroshi and the rest of them. It was rude to stand out against the group. The freckles and the wrong shape of eyes he couldn’t fix, but he could pretend not to be tall.

  Kai looked along the river, past the bridge, and out to sea. The clouds had gone from iron gray to jet black and the wind was getting steadily stronger. His friends were an ocean away, and there was nothing he could do to fix it. He lifted his head to the wind, feeling the first drops of rain. There had to be some honorable thing he could do while he was here—an honorable American thing. Kai had no idea what it would be.

  The drizzle turned to a shower. Kai took shelter under the oak tree. Most June showers in his town were short, but this one g
ot steadily worse. The trees started to sway, and a muffled squeak of alarm came from the tree house overhead. Kai looked up, but Oliver still wasn’t showing himself.

  Kai headed for the back porch so he wouldn’t block Oliver’s escape. No sooner had he shut the door than the knotted rope dropped from the tree and a skinny redhead squirreled down it. Oliver sprinted around to the front of the house and ducked inside. Kai heard a big sigh of relief and the scamper of bare feet going upstairs.

  Aunt Karin was waiting for him in the kitchen. She handed him a bag of clothes and showed him where to shower. Kai had been dirty so long, he’d forgotten how bad he smelled. He bowed his thanks and surrendered to the bliss of hot water.

  Afterward, he stepped into the living room. He could hear Aunt Karin and his cousins in the kitchen, but he wasn’t ready to face them yet. Rain pelted the window, and Kai turned on the lamp by the sofa. Above the fireplace was a row of black-and-white photographs with stern-faced women wearing bonnets and bearded men in uniforms. The pictures got newer toward the end of the row. A man in an army uniform from the Second World War was right beside one of his father in a navy uniform. He’d heard his father talk about some of these people: Grandpa Lars, whom he’d been named for, and Ivar, who’d piloted the bar a hundred years ago. Kai had never seen the pictures before.

  It wasn’t exactly a shrine, like his grandmother kept. No one would put the picture of a living person in a shrine. There was no trace of burned incense. In fact there wasn’t a familiar smell anywhere—no tea and ginger from the kitchen, no tatami mats in the living room, no orchids by the window. But it was his father’s home. The one place in the whole world his father wanted him to be.

  After Kai’s mother cried, his father had hugged him, in front of everybody, which Kai had always hated. His father said, “Your uncle Per was the best brother, the best friend, a boy could have. He knows all of the places I love.” He loosened his grip on Kai. “When I’m working on all of this”—he waved an arm toward the frantic activity of the power plant—“I want to think of you in those places.”