A Swirl of Ocean Read online

  ALSO BY MELISSA SARNO

  Just Under the Clouds

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  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 © 2019 by Melissa Sarno

  Cover art copyright © 2019 by Leo Nickolls

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  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 9781524720124 (trade) — ISBN 9781524720131 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9781524720148

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Melissa Sarno

  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

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Mom and Dad

  “It’s way too cold.” Lindy slings her boots over her shoulder and skirts the ocean water as fast she can, her toes and their chipped polish dancing away.

  I stand flat-footed at the shore, letting the cool water wash over my feet. “Scaredy-cat.”

  Lindy laughs, but then she gets the look she always gets in her eyes when we’re together at the water. Something sad and far-off. Something I can’t get at. She always says you can’t trust the ocean.

  When I wondered why someone who didn’t trust the ocean lived right up next to it, she only said it’s better to keep a close eye on something you can’t trust.

  Maybe it has something to do with Lindy finding me here ten years ago. Right on this shore.

  She saw me in the morning, my hair wet and wound with seaweed as I sat on the beach. I was two years old. She was twenty. I wore nothing but my moon snail necklace and a bathing suit. There was no one up or down the sand. She called the paramedics first, to make sure I was okay. Then the police. They took me to the hospital, where the doctors examined me and the detectives asked their questions. They sat me on an examination table, and I banged my feet against the tinny base. Lindy said the clanging set her own heart racing; she was scared they wouldn’t figure out where I came from and then scared because she knew I was already where I belonged. With her. And what did she know about taking care of a two-year-old?

  But the days, she said, kept warming me toward her, the way I took her pinkie and led her around, the way I emptied her jigsaw puzzles and spread myself in the pieces, shrieking as I tossed them up like snow. She said I guided her to the shore and crouched down low, scooping up sand and shells, and pointing at seagulls. That was the thing, she said, about being only a couple years in and brand-new to the world. I came and let her see it new.

  Still, I’ve asked her a thousand times why she took me, a girl alive but left for dead. She always smiles, says it like it’s nothing, “I figured you were mine.”

  And I have been hers, ever since, my whole life, but for two years when I was somebody nobody else seems to have known.

  As I sink deeper and deeper into the sand, Lindy’s elbows jut from her stick arms and her bony hips tick from side to side. She never let me call her Mom because she always said the two of us were more like sisters than anything else. But we’re eighteen years apart and I look nothing like her. Solid rock is what she calls me. Others call me sturdy. Lindy, on the other hand, is like some kind of twig ready to snap. Her hair is as short as mine is long, all spiky and stick-uppy and not caring which direction it’s going. She wears a leather cuff at her wrist and all black no matter how sunny it is. My boy shorts and breezy hair seem so plain next to her.

  She drops her lace-up boots in the bucket. I hear the shells clack against the tin.

  I snatch the bucket from her hands and sigh. “I think I’m done for the season.” It’s the middle of September, and I only sold one shell necklace for the day. An oyster shell I painted turquoise with gold trim.

  The breeze yawns over me just as the sun looks away. Everybody else might be gone until next summer, but we live here year-round, on the long, skinny strip of land we call ours, between the ocean and the bay. The ocean is the only thing coming and the only thing going.

  “So, what are you thinking?” she asks.

  I know what she’s asking without her having to say, the same thing she’s been wondering since she first brought it up yesterday, about Elder Glynn and his yapping dog moving in with us.

  I don’t know. I mean, she used to say there was never anyone in Barnes Bluff that she would give the time of day, and now all of a sudden she’s talking about a boyfriend moving in.

  I want to tell her it’s fine. I want to make her happy. But Elder? I don’t understand why she’s leaving it up to me.

  “Don’t you think there’s something a little funny about him?” I ask.

  “He makes me laugh,” she offers.

  “I mean funny-strange. That kind of funny.”

  “Everybody’s strange.”

  “He can’t even control his eight-pound dog,” I say.

  She laughs.

  I swallow hard. “Wouldn’t it be better if he left us alone?”

  She frowns. “I don’t know. We’ve been alone for a long time, Summer.”

  “I like it that way,” I say.

  “Well, we don’t have to decide right now,” she says.

  I can tell she’s disappointed, but she forces a little smile. “Come on.” She reaches for my hand, and we walk to the boardwalk.

  Usually we’d visit the souvenir shops and b
rowse T-shirts, then point out the weirdest ones we could find. I still have a worn-out tee of a hamburger and hot dog holding hands, and I half snorted when Lindy named the burger Patty. But the shops are already closed for the season, and the boardwalk is nearly empty. A tall man stands at a wooden post, overlooking the beach. He’s out of place in a corduroy blazer, with a notebook sticking out of the breast pocket.

  Lindy watches him, her brow furrowed.

  “What?” I wonder out loud.

  Words stick to her tongue, then she shakes her head like she’s shaking off sand. She shrugs and turns away from the stranger. Her eyes brighten like a little kid’s, because Lindy may look like she’s all bone-sharp and full of jagged angles, but she’s mush-soft inside.

  I know what she’s thinking before she says it.

  “We could get glitter moon sprinkles.” She grins.

  “Purple pumpkin,” I offer.

  “Buttercream sea foam.”

  “Sunbeam buttercrunch.”

  “Popsicle rainbow.”

  “Ham and egg Cracker Jack?”

  Lindy wrinkles her nose with a “No thank you,” and we both bust out laughing as we climb the steps to the boardwalk toward Old Crocker’s ice cream cart, where none of our made-up flavors are ever there and Crocker scoops vanilla or chocolate only. There are no swirls or sprinkles or even cones. And the ice cream comes in a flimsy tan cup with a wooden spoon.

  But Crocker grabs our quarters with his soft, shaky hands and knows without us having to say that I want vanilla and Lindy wants chocolate, and, somehow, when it melts on our tongues, it is the creamiest, sweetest-tasting ice cream we’ve ever had.

  Lindy happy-groans as she takes her first bite, and we both sink to the bench, right next to his weathered umbrella, because you can’t eat Old Crocker’s ice cream unless you’re sitting down.

  I set the bucket at our bare feet and let the cool vanilla slide down my throat.

  “You closing up shop?” Lindy asks.

  Crocker’s voice is quiet. “Tomorrow.”

  “We’ll miss you,” I say.

  There’s not a hint of a smile past his cracked lips, just his way of looking up and out at the sand, the shore, and the sky. “I’ll be back.”

  I tuck my head on Lindy’s shoulder and breathe the smooth salty air.

  Once I’m done with my ice cream, I wander by myself to Gramzy’s Pitch & Putt, banging the bell a bunch of times, my signal to Jeremiah that it’s me.

  Wire buckets of golf balls hang from the ceiling like houseplants, all the colors of the rainbow. I always pick purple. Lindy calls it the color of royalty. Fit for a queen.

  I jump to my tiptoes and peek into the game room, which is connected by a little glass window to the hut. Jeremiah traipses past the air-hockey board, his hair sticking up wild. You’d think he just woke up, but that’s the way it always is, a bird’s nest around his ears.

  Then he swings open the adjoining door, marching barefoot right on past me. Fishhooks dangle from the belt loop of his jeans, like always, and he carries a crooked fishing rod. “Good. You’re here. Got something to show you.”

  I don’t ask any questions. Jeremiah’s always got something to show somebody, and as he marches on, the door nearly knocks me in the chin as he steps out into the sunlight.

  He leads me up onto the little golf course, which nobody’s using now that summer’s done. We climb the bunker around hole number four, pushing past the beach grass and out into the dunes.

  Our feet sink in and out of the squishy sand, and it feels a little like riding a pogo stick as we slip in and pop back up.

  Jeremiah stops and uses his fishing rod to point to a little mound in the sand.

  I kneel in closer. It’s the blackish hump of a turtle. This is the fourth one we’ve found in two days. The shell is a pattern of diamonds, and it’s marked with a big yellow dot, just like all the others. But all the others were dead, according to Jeremiah’s Gramzy, who pretty much knows everybody’s current status in Barnes Bluff.

  This one’s stretching its crinkly neck.

  I look at the tag dangling at its feet. “Four, seven, dash, three,” I read out loud.

  I know what Jeremiah’s thinking before he can say anything, both of us looking over the beach grass at his neighbor’s place.

  “Turtle Lady,” I say, looking at her house next door.

  If you’re a kid in Barnes Bluff, you know Turtle Lady but you don’t see her. She’s a scientist, and she’s got an overgrown mess of a backyard and a house with all the windows shut up. Even the adults in Barnes Bluff think she’s creepy. Lindy always hugs her chest whenever anyone mentions Turtle Lady’s name or we pass her house.

  Gramzy said she used to travel all over the world studying amphibians. I guess being a traveling scientist suits someone who doesn’t like people much. But ever since I’ve known her she’s shut herself inside and doesn’t come out. All we know about Turtle Lady are her turtles. They’ve got blobs of paint and numbered tags at their feet. And everybody calls her Turtle Lady because she’s just that kind of legend.

  “She can’t go around leaving turtles all over. We should stake out her place until she leaves the house,” I say. “You got anywhere to be?”

  Jeremiah shakes his head.

  “Me neither.”

  He lightly taps his fishing rod on the turtle shell. “What about this little thing?”

  “Four seven three?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “You got a cardboard box?”

  We carry 47–3 in a shoebox with poked holes and a half-eaten strawberry, setting up at hole number nine so we’ve got the best view. From here we’re face to face with Turtle Lady’s side yard. We can see her front steps and the driveway if a car pulled away. Jeremiah’s got a jumbo jar of pickles in case we get hungry. I lean back on my elbows, letting the overgrown grass tickle my shoulders.

  I hear the ocean just past the dunes and get to thinking about Lindy’s question again. “I still haven’t answered her,” I tell Jeremiah, who nods, carefully, ready to listen to whatever rambling I need to do. “I mean…Elder? I like our family the way it is.”

  “That dog is pretty terrible,” he reminds me.

  “I know.”

  He scrunches up his nose. “And the whole fish hatchery thing?”

  “His job’s a total hazard.” I groan.

  “Face it. He reeks.”

  “Right?” I agree. “It’s lethal.”

  “But Lindy likes him,” he reminds me.

  “Lindy likes him.” I sigh.

  “It will make her happy.”

  I know he’s right. “It will.”

  I peek in on 47–3. Its little head pokes out like a scared tulip pushing through old winter dirt. Then I look toward Turtle Lady’s sun-washed beach house. All the shingles are battered gray from the salty air.

  “What do you think she’s doing in there?” I ask.

  “Four seven three?”

  I shake my head. “Turtle Lady.”

  “Experiments,” he says, like he’s sure of it.

  I think of the experiments we do in Mrs. Grady’s science class. She says she’s got two “shows” that bring the “audience.” Shows meaning lessons. Audience meaning us.

  Baking soda volcanoes.

  And Coca-Cola and Mentos.

  Everything else is the boring stuff like planting a seed and waiting for it to grow. I’m doing a moldy bread experiment because Lindy did it when she was my age and thought it would be a good idea. I figured it would be all gauzy and puffed and blue-green-gross, but it’s brought me nothing but stale bread.

  “Well, this stakeout is about as exciting as watching paint dry.” I set the shoebox down and stand up, kicking at the bunker. Sand spits up from my dusty flip-flops. “If I can get
to the top of the fence, do you think I could reach the window?”

  “And do what?” Jeremiah asks. “Climb in?”

  “Maybe there’s something we’re missing at this angle. Maybe there’s a way of seeing in. Spot me,” I say before he can argue.

  I run to the wooden fence and climb up.

  Jeremiah stands below me. With his skinny legs and his bony wrists, elbows jutting out like knives, he’s got to be just about the worst spotter I can think of. Scrawny’s good for relay races or squeezing in the back seat of a car. Not for spotting kids falling from fences.

  I’m still too far from the window. The screen has this way of dusting over whatever’s inside. But as I look in, I catch a glint of silver-something, and then I see the sun catch it, and there are sausage-link fingers on the sill, stretching up to a big doughy face and two squinty eyes staring right at me.

  I launch from the fence like I’m in some Sunday funny, blasting to the grass, where I fall to my hands. My palms sting. “She’s in there,” I say, catching my breath. “At the window.” My hair hangs to the grass as I crouch, and Jeremiah looks from me to the window to the pickle jar clutched at his chest.

  Then he screws the lid off and shoves his fist in the jar. “Come and get your turtles!” he yells.

  He starts flinging pickles at the window. One after the other, like he’s on automatic. They hit the glass and slide from it, leaving pickle juice stains.

  “What the heck are you doing?” I shout.

  Jeremiah shakes his head, like some crazed thing. “Come and get ’em!”