So school and holidays slowly returned
to their normal patterns. And I went to
school, endured my classes (every now and then—something interesting; not as
often as I wanted—especially after my year with Mrs. Falkner), played and
talked with Harriet at lunch, then home to read and work in the basement,
figuring things out … reading in the evening.
Doing what little homework I had to do.
Mrs. Eastbrook and Harriet were
often at our house—or we were at theirs—and this was very comfortable for both
Harriet and me. We both liked the
other’s parent. It was a nice arrangement. Two families joining. Sort of. At first, both Harriet and I had thought that
maybe our parents would do more than socialize—that they’d marry, join our
families officially. But that didn’t
seem to be happening, and pretty soon both Harriet and I were considering the
other’s parent more like an aunt or uncle. And Father and Mrs. Eastbrook acted toward
each other—certainly around us—more like brother and sister, not a husband and
wife.
Father always took his two vacation
weeks in late July, and we always went to the same place, one of the islands in
Lake Erie. There are lots of them in
the western part of the lake, ranging in size from Kelleys Island (nearly 3000
acres) to tiny ones where there’s hardly even room to take a single step. Some
of the names are so strange, too: Mouse Island, West Sister, Green Island,
Sugar Island. Some are open to the
public, some are owned by the U. S. or
Canadian government, some are refuges for birds and other wildlife, some are
private property. One—Rattlesnake Island,
a creepy name—is a private club, the whole island.
Look at a map of Ohio, and you can
see how we went. We drove north on I-77
to the Ohio Turnpike, then headed west to Exit 6, where we picked up Ohio Route
53, drove north to Catawba Point. There
we caught one of the ferries—the Islander
was my favorite—and chugged four miles to South Bass Island, usually called
Put-In-Bay. The trip on the water took
only about twenty minutes.[i]
In 1995, the summer after sixth grade,
I convinced Father—and Mrs. Eastbrook, too—to let Harriet go with us. Her mother was a little reluctant—Harriet
would miss some lessons, some club meetings—but when Father talked to her about
all the exciting things we could do on Put-In Bay (and on the other islands,
too), she finally gave in.
Father liked to get on the ferry
before noon, and it was more than two hundred miles to Catawba Point from
Franconia, so the night before we left, Harriet slept at our house so we could
get an early start.
In the middle of the night, I woke
up thirsty and went down to the kitchen for a drink of water. When I got back to my room, I could see in
the dim glow of our nightlight that Harriet—though asleep—was twisting around
on her bed and mumbling things I could not understand.
I went to her bed for a closer
look. Her eyes were open and were moving
rapidly around. The sounds she was
making were louder, but still impossible to make any sense out of.
I leaned over to her and
whispered: “Harriet … Harriet … wake
up.”
At first she did not respond to me
at all, but when I repeated what I’d said—this time a little louder—she started
up so suddenly that I yelped in surprise.
“Vickie!” she said. “What are you doing? You scared me!”
“I scared you!”
I cried. “You scared me!”
“I did?”
“Yeah, you were twisting around on
the bed, your eyes were swirling around, and—”
She sat up quickly and used both
hands to smooth her long hair back out of her face. “Oh, Vickie,” she said, “I was having the
worst dream!”
“It wasn’t the monster again, was
it?”
We heard the door open. Father!
“Girls?
Is everything all right?” He
flipped on the light. “I heard some
noises coming from here.”
“I just had a bad dream, Mr. Stone,” said
Harriet. “I’m okay now.”
“Are you sure?
Is there anything I can do?”
“I’m sure.”
She made a laughing sound that I knew was not real. “It was a dumb dream, really. I’m sorry I woke you up.” She sort of laughed again.
“All right,” said Father. “Be sure to let me know if I can do anything,
though.”
“Okay.”
He turned out the light, pulled the
door softly shut. I sat in bed beside Harriet;
she was shivering with fright. “Don’t
talk about it too much,” I warned. “I’ve
heard that if you talk about a bad dream, you’ll remember it—maybe even dream
it again.”
“Okay,” she said in a very small voice. “But there’s just one thing …”
“What?”
“There was a big snake thing, Vickie.”
I waited.
“It was in a lake,” she said. “It was swimming across a great big lake.”
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