day and a half anyway, so no one really noticed these tears fell for a different reason. She knew she should have those men arrested, but she was so confused about everything right now.
She nodded her head and sped for the car. She saw the two men get into their white minivan and drive off. The short one stared at her with his black eyes.
“We are almost in Florida,” Uncle announced, cramming Gnat into the back seat and quickly shutting the door to keep him from falling out. “It will be nice to be home again.”
Back on the interstate, Olivia watched the wind pulling last year’s cotton up from the fields. It floated like snow against the windshield. Uncle called it “orphan’s cotton.” Aunt punched him when he said it.
And then, finally, she saw the great and glassy sea. Olivia had never seen the sea before. Or palm trees. The closest she had come was on Palm Sunday when stern Pastor Kwashanski handed everyone a piece of palm frond to wave in the air when he gave the command after the Invocation. Although it seemed an odd thing to do in church, Olivia thought she would like a place like Florida where the palms waved in the air all year long.
Olivia’s eyes grew big. She saw something silver jump just beyond where the waves were turning white.
“It’s beautiful isn’t it?” Aunt whispered over the seat. Olivia turned away so she couldn’t even see Aunt out of the corners of her eyes.
Uncle pulled the old blue car over and yelled, “Everyone take off your shoes!” and the next thing Olivia knew he was running down the dunes toward the water. A trail of junk followed him. He left the keys in the car and the door open. There was a great commotion as Aunt pulled off her sandals and ran after him squealing. Gnat waddled along behind with his headphones still on and the cord dragging on the sand.
“This is stupid,” Olivia said loudly in the empty car. She looked down the highway for the white minivan. Nothing. It felt good to be alone after being cooped up with these oddballs for so long. She took off her shoes and walked toward the beach. The sand burned her feet. Gnat was kneeling on the sand and sticking his fingers down a crab hole. Aunt and Uncle splashed each other in the waves. Olivia walked to a quieter spot down the beach and let the water wash over her burning heels. She watched each sparkling wave rise up clear as glass then foaming white as it crashed down.
A ship chugged away on the horizon getting smaller and smaller. Maybe it was sailing to Bombay or Jakarta or Timbuktu or Iraq. Olivia thought about what might be on the ship. Probably cabbages or blue jeans. Maybe the ship carried spies to the war. She thought something on the ship might find its way over the enormous ocean to her mom.
Olivia looked down at her feet and saw a pale, pink shell the size of her fingernail rising up out of the sand. Its fleshy arm stretched and flexed to hold itself upright. Then another shell rose up. And another! Shells were rising out of the sand everywhere. Thousands, each a different color. Striped and spotted. Tangerine, violet, and rose. Pink, indigo, and chocolate. Olivia smiled. There were so many shells she couldn’t even see the sand beneath them. She could feel them tickling up under her feet. Funny-looking shrimp washed up in the waves and sat down in the sand around her. They were all staring up at her as if she, Olivia Brophie, were something inexplicably wonderful that they had never seen before. Their tiny black eyes never blinked.
“Oh my,” Aunt exclaimed from up the beach. Olivia spun around. Hundreds of white crabs lined up on the sand. Even worse, birds of every shape and size stood on the beach, all staring at her silently. While she had watched the ship, the birds had quietly landed behind her back: pelicans, skimmers, oystercatchers, laughing gulls, turnstones, terns, ringbills, sandpipers, plovers, sanderlings, willets, gannets, grackles. But to her, they were all nameless birds. They all just stood there, staring with their yellow and black eyes. Their beaks snapped at the wind. Feathers ruffled. Olivia didn’t move a muscle. She suddenly didn’t like the beach very much. She couldn’t breathe.
“AAaaaYiiiiiiiiiii!” Gnat screamed like a very loud fire alarm and stood up with a large crab hanging from one of his fingers. All of the birds took off with a great cackling and cawing. The white crabs scurried to their holes. The shrimp rode the next wave out to sea. The shells — all of those purple, pink, and blue shells — disappeared beneath the brown sand.
Olivia ran to Aunt, “What is going on?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never . . .” She frowned at the birds circling overhead. “Come on. Let’s go home.” Aunt put her arm around Olivia as they walked back up the hot sand.
“Florida is very strange,” Olivia thought. She didn’t realize that this was going to be the least strange day she would have for a long, long time.
2
Opals
The sun was going down as their rusty turquoise car bumped along a quiet highway. A dark swamp pressed in on both sides of the road. Cypress trees loomed over them. Palms swayed their enormous green fans. Everything was draped with thick curtains of gray hanging moss. Olivia watched for eyes in the dark water. She had heard somewhere that alligator eyes glowed blood-red at night. Gnat was sleeping next to her with his video game still on. They had turned west from the beach and now it seemed like they were light-years away from those shells and rude birds.
Lyonia, Florida, lies lost somewhere at the center of the state between the swamps and miles of orange groves. The small town looked exactly like Uncle’s car, old and junky. Olivia saw an antique store, a post office, a hardware store, El Taco Loco, and a brand-new gas station. She also counted two ragged old dogs and six chickens. The post office had a banner hanging in the window that said “Black Bear Carnival—Aug 13.” Cars and trucks packed into a place called Croakers on the edge of town. Olivia was so tired of riding in the car that she didn’t even care how stupid the town looked.
Ten miles later, they turned down a sandy road that was so overgrown she could hardly see it from the highway. It looked to Olivia like they were being swallowed by the trees.
“Are we here?” Gnat asked.
“This is our driveway,” Aunt smiled.
“Finally,” Olivia mumbled under her breath.
The surrounding forest was weird. The trees grew short and twisted. Most of them weren’t much taller than Uncle. There was white sand everywhere, so much that it almost looked like they were back at the beach. Olivia saw cactus growing in the sand, and the tree bark was covered with red splotches.
But she was too tired to pay much attention. Finally, two days after it started, the horrible trip was over.
Then she saw the house. Old and broken, it squatted in the woods like a hobo. Some of it was brick, some stone. The wooden roof was patched with several old sheets of tin. There was no lawn, just lots and lots of white sand.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I know it isn’t much,” Aunt apologized. “It isn’t what you are used to, but there is room for all of us.”
A little fence made of crooked branches circled the house. Colorful bottles and glass ornaments hung all over the fence. Olivia heard them clinking in the breeze. A tiny old air-conditioner rattled and coughed on the side of the house. It could fall apart at any minute. It may have been evening, but the air felt like a summer greenhouse. The short trees screamed with insects who sounded very large and bloodthirsty. She could barely hear anything over
