instant she was wobbling on the edge of the path, and before he could reach out, she tumbled down the hillside toward the water, hollering all the way.
Michael swore under his breath and went after her, sliding down the steep hillside feet-first.
She was still screaming. Below him he saw her hit the water. Rock and dirt and mud tumbled down ahead of him. The whole time he was watching for her silly head to pop up out of the glassy surface.
It didn’t.
He panicked and shoved off the hill in a half-dive. He hit the water just a foot away from where she’d sank. He dove down deeper.
The water was deep here and icy cold. She was frantic, kicking out and waving her arms like someone who couldn’t swim.
He clamped his arm around her wiggling, scrawny body and pushed upward. She stopped kicking and he felt her small hands tightly grip his forearm as they rose through the water.
Their heads broke the surface and he heard her gasp for breath. He swam through the water, pulling her with him to a rocky beach. He crawled onshore with her hanging limply under one arm.
Once they were safely on the gravel beach she stiffened and rolled away from him. She just lay there. She had her face buried in her folded arms, and her back rose with each gasp for breath. He knew she was going to be all right when she began to cough.
He sat up, resting his arms on his knees, and watched her. After a minute he could see one brown eye peeking out from her arms. He shook his head and gave her a stern look. “You need to watch where you walk, Squirt.”
She buried her head deeper in her arms and muttered something.
“What did you say?”
She scowled over at him. “I said I fell on purpose.” Her chin jutted out like a mule he’d seen once. “I wanted to see how cold the water was.”
They both knew she was lying.
She was too proud to admit she’d slipped and fallen in.
He stood, then looked down at her wet face staring up at him with a look that dared him to argue with her. He could have called her bluff. But he didn’t. Pride was something he understood. He turned away and started to walk toward the cove just beyond the rocky beach.
Behind him he heard her mumble that she wasn’t some squirty kid, that she was Catherine Wardwell and she did know all about sex.
He stopped and turned back around. “Hey, Squirt.”
She was standing now, looking right at him.
“If I were you, I’d stop trying to learn ‘all about sex’ and just learn how to swim.”
Three
Summer, 1963
The Wardwells were coming back to Spruce Island. For the past three years they had returned every June, and each year Catherine Wardwell spent most of the month bugging him. He’d discovered she had an annoying habit of popping up at the worst possible moment, like when he was in the woods drinking the beers he’d found in a boat his grandfather had loaned to some sportmen. Or when he was making out with a girl named Kristy behind the old well house near the cove where her parents had moored their boat.
It was June again, and like Dylan had sung, the times they were-a-changing. The Coca-Cola Company made a major move in packaging, from bottle containers to aluminum cans. The Beach Boys hit number one on the pop charts, and Dr. Strangelove or Why I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb opened in theaters with My Fair Lady.
But for Michael, June was hell month. Catherine Wardwell was back.
She was fourteen now, and she wore something called Erase for lipstick; it made her look too pale. She’d cut her hair short like some Seventeen magazine cover model. She looked pudgy and awkward and silly, as if she were trying too hard to be older.
He told her she wore too much makeup and looked half-dead. She told him his oxford shirt was buttoned too high and made him look like a geek.
It didn’t take long for her to get in his hair again. During that first week he woke up one morning and caught her peeking in the cabin window. He slipped outside and turned the hose on her.
The second week she stole a pack of cigarettes from him and had broken them all in two. He hadn’t cared much about smoking, just carried them to be cool, but to spite her he smoked all the stubs and blew the smoke in her face. She was so pig-headed she stood there and refused to run away.
But the worst incident was the afternoon he’d found a letter his dad had written to his grandfather on the day he was born, a letter that was filled with a father’s pride and dreams, things that only reminded Michael of the family he had lost.
No one had ever seen him cry; his pride would not let him show that he hurt.
But she saw him cry that day, when he was seventeen and sitting on a rock in a deserted section of the island. He thought he was alone when he sat there and sobbed in his knees.
That day she had walked right up to him and picked up the letter.
He cursed at her and tried to grab it away from her, but he could only see blurred images through his wet eyes.
She quickly stuffed it in her bra and ran away.
He didn’t have the energy to chase after her, so he just stared off into the distance, trying hard to picture his dad’s face and seeing nothing but the shadow of a tall man.
In a few minutes she came back, walking quietly.
From her tentative steps and her somber manner he could tell she’d read the letter.
She sat down next to him and handed him the crumpled paper.
He didn’t take it. Didn’t look at her. He only wanted to be left alone.
She began to smooth the paper against a rock, a lame effort to try to flatten it back to the way it had been.
It was a stupid thing to do. Like not having his dad anymore would hurt less if the letter weren’t creased.
She stopped after a minute and said nothing. Time passed in awkward and tense seconds that seemed to last an hour, one of those moments where you want to run away and hide from everything.
But she just sat there right next to him, so close that he could feel the warmth from her where their shoulders almost touched. She folded her hands in her lap and hung her head. Then she did the one thing he’d never expected.
She cried with him.
Summer, 1966
For the first time since 1963, the Wardwells had come back to the island. It was the same day he got his draft notice.
Dear Mr. Packard,
Greetings from the President of the United States…
There was no doubt the letter would change his future. The draft situation had
