Summer of Lost and Found (2 page)

Hearing Jade mention my dad made me feel something sharp in my stomach. My mom was still being cagey with information about where he went. Or when he was coming back. Or
why
he left. The specifics were a mystery, not unlike the ones he wrote. But I didn't want to tell Jade what was going on—her parents are perfect, the type who always hold hands at school events and refer to each other as “darling” around the house. My parents like to squabble, and even when one of my friends is over, they'll roll their eyes at each other and argue about whose turn it is to take out the recycling. It's not like they have big dramatic fights all the time—just lots of little bickering ones.
Maybe even more than usual lately,
I thought.

“My dad's away for a bit, for work.”

She narrowed her eyes slightly. “You haven't mentioned anything about that before.” Jade knows me too well. But I didn't want her nosing into this . . . whatever it was. Situation.
Separation?

“It came up really fast. Tight deadline.”

“I'm bummed,” she said, leaning over to wrap her arm around my shoulder. “We were going to have so much fun this summer.”

“We totally were.” I ran upstairs to put Mom's custard in the freezer, then came back down. Jade and I sat on the steps to my building, slurping up the dregs of our dessert. Her phone buzzed, and she smiled. “Well, now Sofia might get to do zoo camp too. She was on the waiting list. We'll text you lots of pictures.”

I stuck my spoon in my dish like it was a white flag of surrender. My stomach was getting that awful stabby feeling again. Now my best friend and Sofia would bond all summer while feeding zoo animals, and they'd probably get tennis-player boyfriends, and meanwhile I'd be collecting leaves in the boonies of North Carolina.

Great.

•  •  •

The night before we left, in a last-ditch effort to salvage my plans, I e-mailed my dad. Maybe a list of the reasons why summer is the best time in New York City could convince him to hightail it back from wherever he was. I wrote about the joys of the ice-cream truck and outdoor film fests, listing all our favorite warm-weather activities and city traditions. I left out the negatives, like free-range cockroaches and the constant drizzle of air-conditioner water onto the sidewalks.

All I got back was this:
Great list. You're making me homesick, Nelly. We'll take full advantage of the fun summer stuff when we're both back in town. Because as you know: “Summer's lease hath all too short a date.” (That's from a sonnet.) Love you, Dad.
When I showed it to Mom while she was folding pretrip laundry, her mouth screwed up into a grimace. “I'm sorry that he's homesick, but . . .” she started, leaving the sentence unfinished.

She cleared her throat. “Have you finished packing?”

In truth, I hadn't started. Normally I love filling my suitcase for a trip, but there was too much weirdness surrounding this one. “What do I need to bring to North Carolina?”

“Clothes! Good shoes for walking! Swimsuit! Sunglasses! Bug spray!” Mom kept rattling off a list from the other room as I wandered back to mine. “Toothbrush! Toothpaste! Dental floss!”

“Okay!” I cringed, remembering when I first noticed what had gone missing in our medicine cabinet.

She called, “Plenty of books!” I thought about how the first time I went to sleepaway camp for two weeks, I'd packed six books. Dad had told me I'd be out having too much fun in the great outdoors or by the campfire to read, but I'd still insisted on bringing them all, just in case. “If you send us lots of letters about how many books you've read, we'll take it as a sign that you need rescuing,” he'd added.

I really hadn't liked that camp, so I'd sent four letters on stationery from my new personalized set. By the fourth letter, I had written to say that I'd finished all my books and was in desperate need of rescuing. Unfortunately for me, the letter hadn't arrived until two days after I'd gotten back to the city.

So while packing for Roanoke, I swept the whole pile of books on my nightstand into my suitcase. The thing was, if I ended up reading them all in a miserable first week, who would come and rescue me?

W
e stood in the world's longest rental-car line at the Norfolk airport. I wandered over to the free coffee bar, which was really just an old vending machine that spat bizarrely foamy lattes into ten-ounce cups. I made a double for Mom, who still had sleep creases on the side of her face from her in-flight nap.

“How long do we have to drive now?” We'd left for the airport at ten a.m., and thanks to some delays we hadn't arrived until five p.m. I was ready to unpack my bag, take a shower, and eat something other than the canister of potato chips that I'd bought on the plane.

Mom absentmindedly ruffled my hair as she continued reading the rental-car agreement in front of her. “Not long, sprout. Under two hours.”

“Ugh.” I wandered back to the coffee thing to make myself a hot chocolate. I checked my phone to see if Dad had replied to the text I'd sent:
We got to Norfolk okay. It's even more humid here than in our bathroom on a rainy day—and it's sunny outside. SOS.
No response yet. Whenever I text, he usually replies right away. I squeezed my balled-up sweatshirt against my chest. No matter how much he tried to reassure me in his messages, I still felt unsettled by his absence.

“All set, Nell?” Mom stood behind me, jingling a set of rental-car keys. “Surprise, I splurged on the Jeep.”

I rewarded her with a half smile. I wanted to hate my mom for dragging me away from New York, but she's pretty hard to hate. Even when she's totally keeping secrets from me. The night before, I'd overheard her call my aunt. “No,” she'd said softly. “Not yet. Every time I try, I feel so guilty that I . . .” Then she had shut her door. I'd tiptoed over and pressed my ear against the heavy wood, but all I'd been able to make out was, “I want to wait until we've figured out what's next. You know?”

We drove slowly while Mom got used to the Jeep. It was weird to be in a non-Manhattan place and see so much open sky, trading pedestrians for cars, and city blocks of bodegas and bagel shops for strip malls with grocery stores and gardening supplies. It only took us a half hour to cross from Virginia into North Carolina and onto a road called the Caratoke Highway. The countryside around us was a rich green, dotted with farm stands, barbecue restaurants, and gas stations. Billboards enthusiastically detailed all the fun stuff ahead in the “OBX,” which I knew meant the Outer Banks. I yawned and reclined in my seat, stretching my legs up and resting my feet on the dashboard.

“That's not safe.” Mom swatted at my toes with her right hand. “Nice nail polish, though.” Before I'd left, Jade and I had painted our nails the same shade, called “Alice Blue.” It looked better against her skin than mine, but I wanted us to match. I wondered how I was ever going to have a fun summer without Jade.

“How are we doing, navigator?” my mom asked. I carefully unfolded the huge map the guy at the rental-car place gave us. Mom wanted to do a road trip the old-fashioned way, without a smartphone as a guide. Like the road trips she took as a kid. But just in case, I opened the map app on my phone. I watched our little blue dot creep down the unfamiliar road, farther from my home, my friends, my dad. Wherever he was.

“Fine. Like sixty-something miles to go.” The blue dot continued to creep, and I thought maybe it was a good time to ask Mom again about the deal with Dad. Especially that missing passport.

But before I could find the words, she started talking. “Let me tell you why we're here, okay?”

I already knew the
real
answer—to escape our unsettlingly empty apartment. But I said, “The scupper-whatsit.”

Mom seemed happy that I remembered at least part of its name. “
Scuppernong.
It's a type of muscadine. I bet you never thought that grapes were native to the Southeast, right?”

My mom is so nerdy sometimes. Who knew plants could be so exciting? My dad jokes that she bleeds chlorophyll.
Yes, I like to sit and ponder whether grape species are native to various US regions.
But Mom gets so excited about her work that I can't be snarky about it. I nodded.

“Europeans didn't introduce grapes to North America—four species were already in this area, and muscadine is one of them. It has a big, round,
juicy
green fruit. They're beautiful. When explorers came to the coast way back in the fifteen hundreds, they wrote about how chock-full the place was with grapevines.” She paused, brushing her hair off her face.

A message from Jade tempted me, but my mom has a rule about not texting when you're in conversation with people in real life. Dad is always pretty bad about that, and spending so much time gabbing with other writers online.

“Anyway, to make a long story longer, on Roanoke Island there's a vine called the ‘Mother Vine.' People think it's the oldest cultivated grapevine in America. It's so old that the very first English colonists could have eaten from it.”

So that was why “Roanoke” had sounded familiar. When we were studying Jamestown in history, the textbook had one little sidebar devoted to the colony that preceded it—the one that failed, on Roanoke Island. The colonists had gotten lost or been lost, or something. Because it was only a sidebar, it was light on details. I hadn't known that was the same Roanoke we were going to.

My mom was still talking. “Anyway, an archaeologist recently found
another
scuppernong in the woods, and we think it might be even older than the Mother Vine. We're calling it the ‘Grandmother Vine,' for now.” She chuckled at that. “I'm trying to figure out its exact age.” She paused to take in a highway sign. “Time is of the essence.”

“If it's hundreds of years old, what's the rush?”

“Because someone might build a golf course over it.” My mom shook her head angrily and made the same exasperated noise she makes when people have thrown coffee cups in the flowers on our block.

“That's not cool.” The afternoon light was fading to dusk. I hoped we got wherever we were going before dark. Arriving at a hotel at night feels creepy, like a scene out of a horror movie. It's better to check in to a room when it's sunny and fresh and you don't have to worry about anything scary lurking in the shadows. I punched on the radio and scrolled to find some good music. I settled on an oldies station, and Mom and I spent the rest of the drive singing along. I kept refreshing my phone, waiting to see if I'd hear back from Dad. I only got a text from Jade:
Sofia & I r going 2 the movies & eatin at Ollie's after. Miss u.
Ollie's has the best scallion pancakes in the city. I tried not to think about how long I'd have to go without them and cold sesame noodles. I tuned back in to Mom's rambling. She was talking about those colonists again, telling me that some were my age.

When the sun was almost set, we came to a low bridge. According to my phone, the Albemarle Sound glimmered in front of us. “This is the Wright Memorial Bridge,” Mom said as she slowed the car down for the traffic. “Can you guess who it was named after? And don't cheat with that phone—I know you've peeked at the map.”

I shook my head no.

“The Wright brothers,” she explained. “First in powered flight. Kill Devil Hills is across the water, on that barrier island. See, this
is
a cool place. It's steeped in history. You might learn a lot this summer.”

“I could learn a lot at your museum. Or up at the Cloisters.” Every year we take a school field trip to the Cloisters, which is this medieval art museum way at the tippy top of Manhattan. It has armor and super-old books and stuff on display. But what's great are the gardens, which have all kinds of cool medieval plants. Mandrakes, just like in Harry Potter! I asked the docent one year if we could yank it up to see if it would scream, but she declined.

Mom took a deep breath and clutched the steering wheel a little tighter. I forgot that she hates driving across bridges. Like, really
really
hates it. It's part of her open-water phobia. She had some kind of canoe incident when she was a kid, which she never got past. Whenever we leave the city, Dad has to drive over the George Washington Bridge while Mom shades her eyes and does deep-breathing exercises.

“It's okay, Mom,” I tried to reassure her. “This looks like a very sturdy bridge. We're not up high, and people are driving slowly.”

She gave me a grateful smile. “One of these days, we'll live in a place
not
surrounded by water.”

“It would be okay if Dad were here.” I regretted saying that immediately, as the smile on Mom's face crumpled.

We made it across and drove down the Croatan Highway, past the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kitty Hawk. Mom got all excited when we went past a sign for Jockey's Ridge State Park, which she said has the tallest sand dune on the east coast. Then we came to another bridge heading in the direction of the marshy mainland. I noticed some sign about “Dare County.”