“Earth to Anna,” Zack called.
I turned and saw him treading water about eight feet from the dock. His wet hair was slicked straight back and dripped down his neck, almost touching his shoulders.
Some people look weird wet and slick, but not Zack.
“Hi.”
“Hi! Come on in,” he invited. “Water’s great.”
“Looks great, but no thanks.”
“Come on,” he coaxed.
“I’m not wearing a bathing suit.”
“So?”
“So,” I said firmly.
“Do you like boats? I’ve got a rowboat.” He pulled a tan arm out of the water to gesture in the direction of the Flemings’ dock. “Want to use it?”
I had always wanted to take out a boat — I mean a real one, not the purple sea dragons that I had pedaled in the Baltimore harbor. Floating around on an evening like this. .
“I’ll row for you.”
“I can row myself,” I said — not that I ever had.
“Okay. There’s a gate through the hedge, close to the house.”
I glanced in the direction of the Flemings’ dock, then back at the gate.
“Meet you over there,” he said, and swam toward his own dock.
Well, how hard can rowing be? I asked myself as I crossed from one yard to the other. It was a children’s song — Row, row, row your boat. But when I walked out on the Flemings’ dock, I had second thoughts. There was an expensive-looking cabin cruiser tied next to the rowboat, and I imagined myself rowing into it. These things didn’t have brakes.
Zack was floating on his back. When he saw me looking at the cabin cruiser, he righted himself. “Do you like big boats? Our sailboat’s at the marina. We can’t get its mast under the bridge.”
And where do you keep your oceangoing yacht? I felt like asking. I stared down at the water. I didn’t remember the boats in Baltimore’s harbor sitting that many feet below the dock.
Zack swam closer. “Want some help getting in? Tide’s low.”
“I can manage it,” I assured him, and jumped. I landed squarely on both feet, the force of my leap making the boat rock wildly. I rocked with it and grabbed the piling to which the boat was tied, holding on to it like a cat clinging to a tree.
When I peeked at Zack, he had ducked under the water.
From the bubbles coming up, I knew he was laughing.
“Next time,” he said, when he’d surfaced, “you might want to sit on the dock and ease yourself down to the boat.”
“I might.”
“Why don’t you put on the life jacket,” he suggested, “just in case the coast guard comes by.”
The coast guard wasn’t coming by; Zack thought I needed something to keep me afloat, and he was probably right.
I let go of the piling, sat down, and pulled on the clumsy padding. Slipping the oars in the oarlocks — that was surprisingly easy to figure out — I was about to shove off when, just in time, I remembered I was still tied to the piling.
Now, that would have been embarrassing.
I quickly leaned forward and untied the rope, trying to look as if I knew what I was doing. When the difficult knot finally came undone, I noticed Zack once again making like a submarine, sending up flurries of bubbles. I bit my lip.
He surfaced choking. I pretended not to notice.
“You know,” he said, “if there is only one rope, it works better to free the loop attached to the dock. That way, if you dock somewhere else, you will still have a rope in the boat.”
I glanced at the rope, which dangled forlornly from the dock. “Fortunately, as it turns out, I will be coming back here.”
He grinned. “Fortunately.”
I pushed off from the piling, letting the boat float itself away from the dock and cabin cruiser, then picked up the oars and started rowing. It wasn’t as easy as I had thought.
Sometimes I lowered the oars too deeply and could barely drag them out of the water; other times I skipped them along the surface, dousing myself. My right arm was stronger than my left, which meant I rowed in circles. Since I had already proven I didn’t know what I was doing, there was no point in worrying about how I looked to Zack. I kept rowing. I rowed till my shoulders and arms ached, determined to master the skill.
Zack left me alone, watching me from time to time but saying nothing as he swam around and floated on his back.
Perhaps he read my body language and knew I wouldn’t welcome his help.
Finally, with the skin on my hands rubbed raw, I had to stop. I floated about, watching how the sun melted in a pool behind the bridge, leaving the western sky a fiery pink, enjoying the sounds — the voices and laughter that carried across from the other side of the creek. The floor of the boat was gritty. I brushed off a spot and lowered myself onto it, resting my back against one of the two seat slats, cushioning my spine with the life vest. I could have floated out there all night, watching the sky fade to lilac.
“Hello!” Zack had popped up like a smiling porpoise and was hanging on to the bow of the boat, his arms and shoulders resting along the boat’s edge. “Permission to board, Captain?”
Without waiting for an answer, he heaved himself over the side of the boat — wet, muscular shoulders and arms, powerful legs. I stared at him, pulling myself up onto the boat seat. Stop looking at him, I told myself. But it was hard not to, since he took up most of the space in front of me.
“Switch places,” he said. “Take it slowly, Anna, okay?”
“Sure.” For a moment we had a slow dance in the middle of the boat, he steadying me with his wet hands and laughing when I bolted for the other seat. “You’re determined to sink this thing!”
He sat down in the rower’s seat and picked up the oars. “I thought you might like a tour of our neck of the creek. A quick one, before it gets dark,” he said, glancing at the sky.
His eyes were the color of the sky at twilight. There was a soft light in them, like the last bit at the end of the day. As he rowed across the creek, I forced myself to look at the shoreline rather than him.
“That’s a little park,” he said, pausing a moment to point, “used mostly by people from Chase College. The campus is back in that direction. The pavilion belongs to them, but everybody uses it to picnic. Those docks are for their crew and sailing teams.”
Beyond the college waterfront we passed a large house with terraced gardens, then crossed over the creek to glide by another estate. Estates, crew teams, a guy rowing me around — I felt as if I had slipped between the pages of a British novel.
“That’s the Fairfaxes’ place.”
“I can see the roof above the trees. That’s a lot of roof!”
“The house is large,” he said, as if he didn’t live in a manse.
“There’s no dock,” I observed.
“They like their privacy. You can’t see it well in this light, but they let the lower part of their grounds on each side go wild and marshy, so you can’t walk — you can’t even wade the shoreline all the way through. They own several houses and are here only in the fall and spring. They put out a floating dock then. It’s Marcy’s family,” he said. “Her adoptive family.”
“Her adoptive family?” He had hit a nerve. “Meaning not her real family?”
“Sorry?”
“Meaning just her adoptive family, which is something less than being her birth family?”
He frowned. “I didn’t mean that at all.”
“Then why even mention it?” I asked. Let it go, Anna, I told myself, but I couldn’t.
“Because Marcy mentions it — a lot.” He had stopped rowing and was studying my face, as if trying to understand.
“You’re adopted,” he guessed.
“Obviously.”
“Your family must miss you,” he said.