Leftovers (5 page)

Sullivan shrugs. “He sucks at puzzles? He's too busy? He's too nearsighted to tell one piece from the other? He's been bugging me now for three summers to do it for him. I keep telling him no way, that it will take me forever. But now I've got no choice.”

“Why's that?”

Sullivan laughs darkly. “It's punishment. Mom's grounded me until it's finished.”

“Isn't having to live out here every summer punishment enough?”

Sullivan laughs. “Nah. I don't mind it. I like dogs. I like Dr. Fred. I like...”

“Hanging out with the juvies?” I offer.

“The volunteers, you mean,” Sullivan says.

“Wouldn't you rather have a real summer job?”

Sullivan's neck glows pink. I realize what a stupid question that was. “Dr. Fred pays you for your work here, doesn't he?”

“Well...yeah.”

And why wouldn't he? It's not like Sullivan has ever done anything really bad in his life.

Or maybe he has. Maybe he isn't Saint Sullivan after all.

“What did you do to get grounded?” I ask.

Sullivan sits up, swinging his legs off the bed and planting his gigantic feet on the belly of the tiger. His big hairy toes dig into the plush, making me wonder if someday Sullivan will grow into his feet the way big-breed puppies do.

“Remember yesterday? Mom sent me over to town in the boat to pick up the mail?”

Please. All I remember about yesterday were the hours and hours I'd spent washing and brushing and cutting the mats and burrs out of Judy's fur after she went rolling around in dog ecstasy through a big pile of brush compost. I hadn't even made it to the lodge for lunch. Take it from me: it might be easier to groom a temperamental gorilla than a St. Bernard-Newfie who keeps wiggling over onto her back for belly rubs and won't stop trying to wash your face with her tongue.

Sullivan continues. “Well...anyway...I didn't come back for five hours.”

Is that really the worst thing Sullivan's ever done?

“See...I ran into some guys I knew from last summer. We went to the 7-Eleven for a while, got Slurpees, played some video games.”

“Then what? You robbed the place?” I ask, joking. Sort of.

“Nooooo.”

“So what's the big deal?”

Sullivan cracks his knuckles one at a time. “Well...the main dock was full when I got to town, so I tied the boat a ways down the shoreline. Near the park. Some joker must have come along, untied it and let it drift into the river. Remember how choppy the water was yesterday? The coast guard found the boat drifting out near the shipping lanes. They looked up the registration number and towed it back to Moose Island. Mom thought I'd drowned. I'm not a very strong swimmer.”

“Don't you have a cell phone?” He has everything else, I think, peering around the messy room. Nice clothes, lots of sports equipment, books, a laptop, more colored high-tops than I've seen anywhere outside a shoe store. The Batman quilts need to go, but overall—

“I forgot to charge it last night,” Sullivan says. “She couldn't reach me.”

“Oops,” I say, borrowing Johanna's favorite expression.

“Mom gave the coast guard my description. The coast guard gave the town cops my description. They spotted me walking back to the park to get the boat—of course I didn't even know it was gone—and told me that Victoria was freaking out.”

“Wasn't she happy just to hear you were alive?”

Sullivan shrugged. “You'd think she would be, you know? But after she charged across to town in the boat to bring me home, she chewed me out the whole way back. About keeping my cell phone charged. About making sure I tie up the boat at a supervised dock. About losing track of time—”

“Lots of chewing. Bet you felt like a piece of rawhide,” I interrupt, wondering if Sullivan has any inkling that his so-called problems are the stuff of a family sit-com. Or that my problems are—by comparison—the stuff of horror movies.

“So now the punishment,” Sullivan explains. “I'm not allowed off-island until the puzzle is done. Mom believes in ‘creative behavior management.'” He throws himself back on the bed. “Why can't she just smack me around the way some mothers do, then let it go? It would save us both time and—”

Maybe because she loves you more than that!
I think. I jump up.

“Sarah...wait...”

“Cut to the chase, Sullivan,” I say from the doorway. “You called me up here because you want me to help you with the puzzle, right? Why me?”

“Because Johanna would tell me to piss off if I asked her. Brant's not here in the evening; even if he were, he would tell me that jigsaws aren't cool. Taylor scares the hell out of me. Nicky might eat the pieces. Please...will you help me?”

“Is it still punishment if I help you?”

“That depends on you, I guess.”

Ouch. Ten points for Sullivan.

Sullivan tosses the tiger aside, falls off the bed onto his knees and pleads with me. “Puh-leeeeeese, Sarah. Mom never said I had to do it alone. You know how she is, always preaching ‘resourcefulness.' We can spread the puzzle out on this old ping-pong table that Dr. Fred keeps out in the storage shed. It's got a broken leg but we can find a way to prop it up.”

“What's in it for me?”

Sullivan doesn't miss a beat. “Ratgut is in Ottawa the second week of August. I have two tickets. Won them last week on a radio call-in show. Ninth caller through. I've been
so
pumped about seeing them live. They're amazing. I thought about seeing if one of the guys I was hanging out with yesterday wanted to go with me—they all have cars— but if you help me
and
we get the puzzle done by then, I'll take you instead. How about it? We've got almost a month to finish the puzzle. If I ask, I'm sure my dad will come down from Riverwood to drive us there and back. It'll be a late night, but you're allowed off-island after evening chores, aren't you? Ratgut is...” Sullivan pauses, gets down on all fours, reaches down under his bed again and extracts a
CD
. He thrusts it up at me. “Here. Take this back to your cabin tonight. You have to listen all the way through to get a real feel for it. It's...
genius
.”

Forget the stupid rock concert, I think, my brain spinning faster than any
CD
. Sullivan is my Golden Ticket.
My ticket into the city. My ticket into my father's restaurant without my mother knowing. My ticket to finding that hated shoe box full of old Polaroids. My ticket to freedom. My future.

My facial muscles relax for the first time since arriving at Camp Dog Gone Fun. I smile openly at another human being for the first time in what is probably years. “I'll do it.” I reach out to shake Sullivan's hand, to seal the deal, hoping he doesn't take it too personally when I ditch him at the concert gates.

A week later, Sullivan bangs into the kitchen through the screen door. I'm slicing carrots for a beef stew.

“Nice job,” he says, sidling up to me and watching as the thin slices fall onto the cutting board like orange dominoes. He grabs a few and inspects them. “How do you get them all the same thickness like this?”

“It's all in the wrist,” I tell him, holding up my left arm and giving it a shake.

Now get out, Sullivan, I think. You smell like the dog barn. Your cheerfulness distracts me from my work.

And work it is.

Dr. Fred and Victoria have put me in charge of meals. All meals. It wasn't forced on me; they shamelessly spent this morning begging me to do it. Then, over lunch, the other “volunteers” and Sullivan voted unanimously to take on my dog duties, even Poo Patrol, if I'd take care of breakfast, lunch and dinner for the rest of the summer. It was the promise of no more Poo Patrol that clinched the deal.
(“But not Judy. No way,” Sullivan had said. “She's attached herself to you, Sarah, like a hairy overgrown leech. She's
your
Special Project.”)

It was my spaghetti sauce last night that tipped everyone off to the fact that I could cook.
Really
cook. Maybe I should have stuck to thawing frozen lasagna or stirring up a mess of Hamburger Helper like everybody else does when they draw the Meal Prep straw at flagpole. Maybe I should have known that adding those extra veggies and spices to the Prego last night was a bad idea.

Cooking is...well...it disgusts me a bit that I've somehow absorbed my father's talent for slicing and dicing and sautéing and whipping. It kind of creeps me out that I can stir a pound of ground beef, an onion, some mushrooms, two cans of stewed tomatoes, a mess of dried herbs and a big pot of noodles into something that even Johanna, Camp Dog Gone Fun's wannabe anorexic, can't help but shovel in by the forkful. But part of me likes being good at something, so I'm secretly pleased when they ask me to cook.

And I can't believe that I'm already thinking ahead to tomorrow. I'm planning to set my alarm a half hour early to stir up some whole-wheat waffle batter and chop red peppers for an omelet. Next I'll be wondering if that sunny dirt pile behind the lodge would support a small tomato patch.

“Did you know,” Sullivan continues, popping carrot slices into his mouth and talking with his mouth open, “that when Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel, he portrayed Adam receiving life from God through his left hand?”

“Did you know, Sullivan,” I reply, “that while only ten percent of the general population is left-handed, fifteen to thirty percent of mental patients are left-handed?”

That should give him something to think about. Somewhere else, hopefully.

“Julia Roberts is left-handed,” Sullivan states, undeterred.

“Here. Taste this.” I shove a wooden spoon dripping with stew into Sullivan's mouth.

He smacks his lips. “Incredible. Listen, can I come with you later? When you go out in the canoe? With Judy?”

As part of Judy's “program,” I paddle around the island each evening in an old beat-up aluminum canoe while Judy swims beside me. We never travel too far from the island. I tell myself that it's because a) I'm no hotshot at water sports (I lied to Victoria about being able to swim) and b) if Judy tires, she can quickly make it to shore for a rest. Except that a) I got the hang of canoeing early on (making tipping, and therefore swimming, avoidable) and b) it seems Judy never tires. On land, she's a clumsy, lumbering, knuckle-headed oaf; in the water, she's a mermaid with energy to burn and a thick layer of body fat to keep her afloat. (Whatever the shortcomings of her previous owners, Judy appears to have been well fed.) The
real
reason I stick to shore is because on warm summer evenings, the tourists are out on the St. Lawrence in droves. The river is a regatta. Some of the smaller boats come dangerously close
to Moose Island—not that I give a rat's ass if they scratch their boats on the rocks, but the tourists have cameras and they'll point them at anything, even at me and Judy. I just know that
Enormous Dog Swimming Beside Girl in Canoe
is begging to be photographed and published on the cover of some Thousand Islands travel brochure.

“Aren't you grounded?”

Sullivan chews thoughtfully on another piece of carrot. “Mom said it was okay to go out in the canoe with you. As long as we don't venture over to town.”

“What if we ‘ventured over' to upstate New York instead?” I joke, waving my knife toward the south-facing window.

“Or not. Anyway, I just thought...the water's a bit rough out there tonight. You might want some...help?”

“It's not
that
rough.” First the puzzle, now this. Sullivan is getting clingier than Judy. If I were one of those popular girls from the chick-lit novels I read in the school library, I might think that Sullivan was flirting with me.

What the hell am I thinking? It can't be that.

“Well?” Sullivan persists.

I can see out the window that the wind has picked up a little. And wake from some of the powerboats can be daunting.

“I guess an extra set of puny triceps can't be a bad thing.”

After dinner, we head down to the dock. It's Sullivan's canoe, so I let him take the stern. I hate it, though. I can feel his eyes watching me, boring into the back of my skull like a couple of corkscrews.

“So...that dog puzzle's really coming along,” he says.

I'm not sure if he's asking for confirmation or just stating the obvious, so I stay quiet.

“I'd say we placed at least one, maybe two hundred pieces last night? Not bad, since we only worked at it for a couple of hours. It's hard, that puzzle.”

“Not so hard,” I tell him.

And it'd be way easier if Sullivan spent more puzzle time puzzling instead of yapping.

“Think we'll get it all done by the concert?” he asks. “It's only four weeks away.”

“We damn well better,” I mumble.

“I can't hear you!” Sullivan calls up.

“Yes!” I shout. “We'll get it done!”

Sullivan splashes my back with his next stroke. “Admit it, Sarah, you loved that
CD
I lent you.”

I need to maintain my cover, but here's the truth: the
CD
sucks. Ratgut is just a bunch of screaming losers. Their “instrumentals” sound like ice cubes in a blender.

But I swivel in my seat to face Sullivan. “Ratgut is
amazing
! Just like you said, Sullivan.
Genius
! I can't
wait
to get to that concert!”

Well, at least that last part is true.

Sullivan is encouraged by my enthusiasm. “Listen, maybe we could...you know...rush through evening chores that day? Get an early start to the city? Make time to stop somewhere for pizza before the concert?”

Sullivan's not trying to turn this little concert outing into a date, is he?