I could start another collection, of shells and smooth glass and stones. Maybe Lucca would like to do that with me.
I already had a bucket and shovel in my collection from a different beach, so I held on to any sand toys I found to give Lucca. Maybe we could build sand castles together. The shells and stones we collected could be decorations.
That sounded so fun maybe I was the one who was three.
Besides shovels and shells, I found:
A charm bracelet with two charms—a pair of ballet shoes and a poodle puppy.
A quarter and two dimes.
An adult-size water shoe with a rubber gripper bottom and mesh top. Had it been dropped as someone walked along? Or maybe someone had trouble in the ocean and her shoe washed up on the shore.
That made me shudder.
Why was finding a shoe different from finding a bracelet?
Maybe it’s just harder to imagine someone leaving behind a shoe. A bracelet could easily fall off.
But maybe the person had other shoes. Probably she’d been holding lots of stuff, like a towel and clothes, and had dropped it.
The car wasn’t there when I got home.
I set my new finds on the porch. They would have to be rinsed off before I brought them into the house. Wouldn’t want Mom getting on my case about collecting supersandy things.
We were also supposed to brush the sand off our feet before going inside, so I rubbed my flip-flops on the thick, scratchy doormat whose straw bristles reminded me of a broom. It was okay to go inside with your shoes on after you’d brushed them off. In Brooklyn we never wore our shoes inside. Shoes get too dirty in the city. We lined them up by the door. Here, the dirt felt different—clean. Wholesome … as long as you didn’t track in extra. Plus the floors in the old house could give you splinters, so it was safer to have shoes on.
Another difference: it seemed to be okay to leave the house unlocked. The door had been left open for me.
I stood just inside the doorway, frozen. My family wasn’t home, and yet … it felt like someone might be there.
“Hello?” I called.
I listened closely, my heart beating hard. No answer.
Make a lot of noise. Keep busy.
I loudly stomped to the kitchen, opened the fridge, found what I needed to make a sandwich, and put everything on the counter.
I was sitting at the table eating when Mom and Lucca came back with several grocery bags.
“Where’s Dad?”
“He just dropped us off. He wanted to double-check everything for when the kids come. Can’t run soccer camp without soccer balls. Here, take care of this melty ice cream.” Mom slid a container and a spoon over to me.
“No prob,” I said, popping off the lid and swirling the spoon around the edges of the ice cream—black raspberry, my favorite. All that melted stuff isn’t the same after it re-freezes, so we always enjoy a taste of ice cream right when we get it home.
“Did you find a car?”
“I think we did. We’ll get it real soon.”
After the melted edges were gone, I put the ice cream in the freezer and went back to my sandwich. Lucca was taking fruit out of one of the bags and placing it gently, carefully, in a pyramid in a big bowl. Mom was unpacking everything else into the fridge.
“Mom, you don’t think this house is haunted?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Lucca knows what I’m talking about, don’t you, Lucca?”
Lucca nodded sincerely.
“Are you putting ideas in his head?” Mom jumped on me. “Are you making him afraid?”
“No. I can just tell he notices this stuff, too.”
“Lucca, what are you noticing?”
Lucca looked at the ceiling and moved his pointer finger in a circle.
“See, Mom?”
“You two must be in cahoots to drive me crazy.”
“No cahoots.”
“Look, this house is probably filled with stories. It’s been around for over a hundred years. Maybe it’s not ghosts like you think, but just a sense of the past. Of history. Maybe you should write some stories about our house and see if you feel better.”
Mom had no idea how much of a sense of history I had, how sometimes the images just flashed in front of me as if I were really present to see them.
I carried my plate to the sink. “If I just made up stories about our house, I still wouldn’t know what really happened.”
“Might not matter. You might just settle your feelings.”
Mom didn’t know half of my feelings.
Things had started going wrong with Kelsey way before what happened at the museum.
There was the business with Lucca, of course. How she said I’d become obsessed with him. How I always wanted to stay at my house now instead of going to hers because I never wanted to be away from home too long.
And there was the picking things up. The abandoned things.
“Ew, Siena, that’s trash,” she said when I crouched on the subway platform and picked up a string of metal bottle caps. “Don’t touch it!”
“I don’t think it’s trash, I think it’s a necklace or something.” I studied it carefully. Definitely made deliberately.
Kelsey wrinkled her nose as I put the necklace into my backpack. “You don’t know who it belonged to!”
And my dreams … she never used to mind being woken in the night to talk about them. She’d often even be the one to wake me, to ask what I’d been seeing. But one night I woke up sweating, having just been in a castle under siege.
“Kels?”
“Rmm?”
“Kels!”
“What is it?”
“I dreamed … I dreamed that—”
“I’m sleeping. Tell me tomorrow, ‘kay?”
I was quiet, trying to still my heart.
In the morning, she didn’t ask to hear, and I didn’t offer to tell her.
After that, it started to feel like whenever I wanted or needed to talk about something odd that had happened, she tried to brush it off as if it could happen to anyone. But she wasn’t really hearing me. She didn’t understand. It made me feel like she didn’t like me, the real me, anymore, whoever that was.
“Yoo-hoo!”
I hadn’t even noticed the woman until she yelled down to me from her yard above the beach. She was older, dressed in clothes that looked heavy for the heat, and was tending to flowers that grew in her yard along the fence. Her house, like ours, perched above the beach on the rock ledge.
“What?” I yelled back.
“Just saying yoo-hoo!”
“Oh. Uh … yoo-hoo.”
“What are you doing out there?”
“Wandering, I guess.”
“Are you thirsty? I have some iced tea, made this morning.”
Hmm. Mom had asked me not to talk to strangers. But what harm could this old lady do? Could she be the front for some bad guys? Putting poison or drugs in the tea?
I doubted it.
“Yeah, I’ll come up.” I climbed the steep wooden stairs that wound up the rocks between the beach and the two houses.
When I got up there, I could see under the gardening hat that the lady was Asian. She was smiling.
“I love company for tea. Not that I invite everyone up, but you seemed so all-by-yourself.”
“It’s okay to be by myself.” Was it? I paused. Me wanting to be by myself might have something to do with what was wrong with Lucca.
“I like to be by myself, too, sometimes. I’m Mrs. Lang. Well, here, have a seat.”
“I’m Siena.” I sat down at a gray, weather-worn table.
She shuffled into the house and came back with glasses and a pitcher of iced tea with lemon slices floating in it.
“Where are you staying?” she asked as she filled our glasses.
“I live here,” I said. “Well, I do now, anyway. The big gray house down the way. Number 1445.”
“Ah, yes. A nice house.”
; “You know it?”
“Sure. I’ve lived here twenty-five years. Always wanted to live by the ocean. My children grew up, my husband passed on, so I came here. How about you?”
“Escaping the city. That’s the short version, anyway.”
“We have time for the long version.”
I sipped the iced tea. Not too sweet, not too lemony, not too strong. Also it wasn’t from a mix. Real things are nice.
“Okay, well, the short version works for now,” Mrs. Lang conceded.
“Do you know anything about my house? About who used to live there?”
“Not really, because mostly it was rented out to vacationers, like the one next to me. Nothing but vacationers, summer after summer. I presume your place was furnished?”
“All the furniture was gone when we moved in. The old owner must have gotten rid of it.”
“I’d like to hear some more about you. I expect you’re more interesting than furniture.”
“I hope so.” I laughed.
“What do you like to do?”
“Read and write, mostly. I like to learn things, but I didn’t like my old school very much. I play with my brother. He’s three. I like games.”
“Oh, wonderful! You can stop by to play Uno any time you like. It’s boring to play Uno by yourself.”
“Okay. So what’s there to do around here?”
“Oh, lots of things. We have a nice library. There’s a town green and on Monday nights in the summer they have concerts and on Saturday morning there’s a farmers’ market. You can go on boat rides or whale watches. Where are you from?”
“New York. Brooklyn.”
“I bet there were lots of things for you to do there.”
“Same things. Libraries and concerts and farmers’ markets.”
“Did you ever go to the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building?”
“Once. There were also a lot of museums and shows and good restaurants.”
“The good restaurants here are mostly seafood places, but there’s an Italian place and a few pizza shops, a diner, and Chinese food. There’s also Nielly’s.”
I finished my tea. Probably Mrs. Lang could talk and talk forever and liked the company, but maybe she needed me to go so she could watch TV or something and she was too polite to tell me.
“Thank you so much for the tea. I should get going.”
I stood up and offered my hand for her to shake. Her skin was kind of soft and her handshake was gentle.
“Thanks for stopping by, Siena. Come back anytime and we can play some Uno. And your brother can come, too.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said. “See you soon.”
I slipped off my flip-flops to walk barefoot in the sand now that the sun was less strong and it had cooled.
The next day, it was pouring. Dad had to go buy soccer balls. Mom wanted to work and then she and Dad would go get her car, so she asked if I’d mind taking care of Lucca for the day. There was no lightning or thunder, so I dressed him in his bathing suit and I put on mine and we went down to the beach to run around in the rain. Mom yelled after us not to go in the water in case it was choppy. I promised we wouldn’t. But it was still fun to play in the wet sand and get soaked. Eventually I noticed that Lucca was shivering, so we decided to go home.
“Your lips are blue,” I told him. He ran into the bathroom and stood on his stepping stool in front of the mirror to see.
We took showers to get the sand off and put on sweats because we were freezing. Whew, what a change from Brooklyn! Maine was great. We sat in the living room playing Lucca’s favorite game, Candy Land. He kept laughing really loud and Mom kept poking her head in and looking pretty happy about it. I guess she thought this place was working—or would work.
That night, Lucca came into my room, but not to snuggle. He took my hand and led me to his own room, and then he just stood there in the middle, waiting for me to notice something.
“What is it?” I asked. “What?”
He didn’t answer, but looked all around, especially up at the ceiling.
“It’s the ghosts, isn’t it?” I asked. “Don’t worry. I’ll try to get to the bottom of it.”
6
The next day, I had a new destination: our town’s main drive with all the shops on it. I figured that was where all the restaurants and things were that Mrs. Lang had been talking about.
Dad had told me the streets to take; it was easy to remember. The walk took about twenty-five minutes, which didn’t seem bad. We used to walk a lot in Brooklyn. As I got nearer to the center of town, the houses got closer together: large, old houses with tall windows and front porches and full second stories.
First stop: library.
It was so small! Two floors, but in a building the size of a house. Kids’ section on the first floor, adults’ upstairs. No separate teen section. There were two computers for public use that looked like they were the first computers ever made.
The librarian noticed me right away, me being the only other person there.
“Hi, how can I help you? Do you have a summer reading list?”
“No.” Dad hadn’t brought one for me, but surely there must be one. “I guess I’ll be getting it late. I just moved here. I’d like a library card.”
“Oh, of course. You’re old enough to get it on your own, but I’ll need some kind of proof of your family’s address, something with a last name matching yours on it.”
“Dad gave me a copy of the paperwork for the water bill and a copy of my school registration.”
“Those will do just fine.”
She took the papers and entered my information into her own computer, which was a far newer one than the ones for public use.
“If you want to wait a few minutes, I can make the card for you. You can pick out some books and take them home today.”
“Thanks.”
She disappeared into the room behind her desk.
I started looking on the children’s shelves and found some books with stickers that said YA. I picked something out and then I got something for Lucca: a picture book about a lion. Maybe he’d roar along with the story when I read to him.
The woman had the plastic card ready for me, complete with bar code and my name typed on it.
“Your name is beautiful,” she said. “So interesting.”
“Thank you,” I said. Not that I’d picked it out, but it was mine to carry around, after all.
“Just sign here.”
I signed the card and she checked out my books and told me they were due back in three weeks. It was hard to believe that would be almost half the summer.
The store next door sold paintings, mostly of rocky shores, boats on the water, and lighthouses, and the shop after that, pottery. Stuff for tourists. I spotted the restaurants Mrs. Lang had mentioned. Nielly’s was a shop in an unpainted wooden building. Through the wide, open doorway, I could see produce and shelves of cans and boxes. But there were also tables. It was almost lunchtime.
I walked past the flowers for sale on the porch and went inside. A few people were buying groceries, chatting happily with the checkout people. Only two of the five registers were open. There was a counter and a sign that said, “Hot lunches canceled for summer. See you in the fall!” Near the tables were a salad bar, a deli counter, and magazine racks. A girl my age was sitting at one of the tables reading a magazine.
I hoped she wouldn’t notice me looking around like a newcomer, but she hopped up and came over.
“Hey,” she said. Was she being friendly or just curious? She wasn’t smiling.
I stopped staring at her and remembered she was expecting an answer. “Hi.”
“How long are you here for, a week?”
“No.”
Now she looked extra interested.
“How long, then?”
“We’re staying …” I stopped myself from saying “forever.” Too dramatic. “We moved in.”
“What grade are you in?”
“Eighth.”
“Me too. So’s Sam.” She nodded in the direction of a boy who was bagging up some groceries. “It’s his family’s store. I’m Morgan.”
“I’m Siena.”
“That’s unusual. Does it mean something?”
“It’s a place in Italy.”
“What, were you conceived there?”
This problem is a recent development in my life. When kids my age hear I have a place-name, they all want to talk about my conception. I would never ask about their conceptions. What, was it everyone’s business now? Wasn’t everyone conceived somewhere? What’s the big deal?
I rank it as part of the immaturity of middle schoolers. Everyone just wants to mention sex all the time, to make themselves seem to know something about it. I don’t really care about sex. Though I would prefer it if we didn’t have to talk about my parents having sex.
Note to self: don’t name your kid after a place. It’s no fun for them.
When we were younger, people just used to say, “Cool, Italy. Is your family from there?”
The answer to both questions is no.
“My mom researched art there,” I said. “She just liked the sound of it for a name. Thought it sounded certain and strong and brave.”
“So, are you? Certain and strong and brave?”
Strong or brave? I was even nervous having this conversation. Was I certain? If I had to ask the question, then I guess not.
But that wasn’t really this girl’s business, either. Whether or not I lived up to the sound of my name.
Sam had noticed us talking and came over.
“Welcome to Nielly’s!” he declared in the exuberant voice of a TV announcer, spreading his arms wide. Then he dropped them to hold one out to me. “Sam Nielly, at your service.”
Morgan smiled then, for the first time. For Sam, not for me. I looked at Sam as I shook his hand.
“This is Siena,” Morgan told him. “She’s named to be certain and strong and brave.”
“Oh,” Sam said. “I was just named third.”
“Third?”
“Yeah. I’m the third brother. Michael and Jack were already taken.”