We spread out our blanket alongside many others, seeking shade where we could find it. I eagerly soaked up the atmosphere, watching the little children running in and out of the cold water of Surprise Lake, listening to the laughter and conversations of their mothers. This was a different world from the one I knew. My mother rarely had the luxury of idle conversation or idle hands. She would not have felt comfortable here.
Charlie and Arnie entered every event they could; the three-legged race, the sack race, the wheelbarrow race; they ran them all and won most of them. Emily and I watched, me cheering, she silent as always, preferring to stand back, away from the crowds and the noise, more interested in the plants and bugs than in the people who tried to engage her in conversation. Charlie and Arnie even convinced me to enter the sack race, which I didn’t win. I didn’t mind, though. I couldn’t remember ever having laughed so hard, stumbling across the finish line in next-to-last place, spending almost as much time falling to the ground as I did hopping forward.
There was a scavenger hunt, too. Emily helped me with that. We scattered with the other children into the bushes to find pine cones, moose maple leaves, seagull feathers, four-leaf clovers, heart-shaped rocks, and reindeer lichen. We found most of the items on the list, winning a little brown bag of candy that kept Emily busy for the rest of the afternoon.
Finally, it came time for the hundred-yard dash.
Charlie, Arnie, and Doug lined up with the others. I left Emily on our blanket in the shade—she had her sketchbook and candies and seemed perfectly content—and gathered with the other spectators alongside the course. When the pistol sounded, the crowd erupted in cheers. This was the last event of the day. The rivalry between Charlie and Doug was well known, at least among the younger crowd, and it was the race everyone had been waiting for.
Doug took an early lead, but Arnie and Charlie were right on his heels.
“Go, Charlie!” I yelled. “Run! Faster!”
Charlie pumped his arms, his face a picture of focus and determination. He passed Arnie within a few steps and was quickly gaining on Doug. It was going to be close, and for a moment, I doubted Charlie—doubted that he could make up the distance between them. Seconds became minutes, but with each step that Charlie landed, he moved closer and closer to Doug. The hundred-yard dash is not a long race. It’s over in a few heartbeats, but it seemed to me to last an eternity. By a toe, by half a foot length, Charlie crossed the finish line first. The trophy would be his, just like he said.
But Doug thought that he had won. He raised his hands into the air, dancing around the finish line while Charlie and Arnie recovered their breath. Charlie wasn’t about to stand for it. It was a fault of his, I suppose. Instead of waiting for someone else to fill him in, Charlie stepped in front of Doug and tapped him on the chest.
“I beat you,” he said, still winded, panting. “I won.”
Doug dropped his hands, squared himself to my brother, stood toe to toe, eye to eye, and leaned toward him. “I won.”
The crowd grew silent. I could see Charlie’s jaw working, his fists clench.
“Come on, Doug,” said Arnie. “Charlie won. Fair and square.”
“That’s bull.” Doug still kept his eyes level with Charlie’s. He didn’t look at Arnie or at the faces of the hushed crowd. I could feel the tension building. “You don’t even belong here.” He spat on the ground. “You and your retarded sisters.”
Doug never saw the fist coming, but he felt it. It knocked him right to the ground. Arnie was quick to grab Charlie’s arms and hold him back so he couldn’t take another swing, and by the time Doug had scrambled to his feet and wiped the blood from his nose, someone had grabbed him, too.
The starter stepped between them. “That’s enough.” His voice was firm and authoritative. “We’ll be having none of that. Get on out of here.”
Charlie struggled against Arnie’s grip, but not for long. Then he turned and walked away from all of us.
That night, Emily and I climbed into Sweet Pea and pushed off from the wharf. It was still and calm, and I only had to pull on the oars a few times to maneuver us out into the channel between Silver Islet and Burnt Island where we floated, drifting on the inky surface of the Lake. The moon, nearly full, was climbing the sky, and it provided us with all the light we needed. I could hear the music. I knew there was dancing. I knew Charlie and Arnie would be there. All the young people were. Except Emily and me. I convinced myself that we weren’t old enough to go anyway. Next year, Charlie would bring us. Next year we would go to the dance. We lay in the bottom of the boat, wrapped in our picnic blanket, hands clasped over our ears, while fireworks burst against the indigo backdrop of night.
When we sailed back to Porphyry the next day, the trophy did not come with us.
31
Elizabeth
The summer continued hot and dry. Sometimes, when the heat became unbearable, we swam. Superior holds the cold of winter deep, deep in her dark depths and refuses to let go, and that year was no exception. The blue waves that lapped at the shore were tempting, and we occasionally stripped to our undergarments and slipped into the water’s grasp, the chill quickly reaching the center of our bones, leaving us shivering and aching and sated. Emily never swam. Even on days like that, she would only wade to her ankles before retreating to the shade of a tree to watch Charlie and I gasping at the cold, splashing each other and laughing.
On other days Charlie took us out on the Lake, where the breeze tempered the blazing sun. It was on such a day, hot and dry, that Charlie, Emily, and I boarded Sweet Pea with a canning jar of cold sweet tea to drink and a half dozen biscuits wrapped in a towel and headed around Porphyry Point, past Dreadnaught Island and down Magnet Channel between Edward Island and the Black Bay Peninsula. The wind was light, but strong enough to fill our sail and send a trail of ripples out from the stern. The sea rolled, large, lumpy waves that heaved across the still surface and tumbled little Sweet Pea about like a cork. We could only come this way on clear days; the hands on Charlie’s compass would spin wildly about as we neared Magnet Island, and we knew how the place got its name. We decided to take our picnic into Pringle Bay, to sit on the beach and dabble our toes in the water.
I brought a book with me and lay in the shade, quickly traveling far from the shores of the Lake to distant lands with a man named Gulliver, devouring the fascinating creatures imagined to life on the pages. Emily had brought along a sketchbook that Peter sent back for her, and she had her pencils, rendering the beach peas onto the pages. Charlie headed off to explore, slingshot in hand.
I must have dozed off, with visions of Lilliputians scurrying over my legs as I lay in the sand, restrained by imagined threads, drifting between Swift’s land and my own in a dreamy world populated by scurrying black ants and the waking dreams of afternoon naps.