“That’s mine! I’m right here!”
The man holding my kayak turned so fast his radio hit the dock. Somebody had read my name off the bow. My mother was already halfway down the hill in her bedroom slippers.
I looked inside. The seat was pulled forward almost to the footrests.
“Ben took it,” I said.
My brother was eight. His legs didn’t reach if he left the seat where I kept it. I’d shown him how to adjust it last summer, sitting on dry ground. Mom had made us both promise he’d never launch it alone.
“Which way?” the harbor worker asked.
I pointed to the island.
“Where would he land?”
“He’d go home.”
Mom stared at me. We lived in the opposite direction.
Last spring, Ben’s hamster died. Dad had taken us to the island and let us bury him beside a hollow willow. Ben built a door from Popsicle sticks and pushed it into the roots. He called it Peanut’s home. The night before, a storm had knocked a tree across our street. At breakfast Ben had asked what happened to little houses when it rained.
The rescue boat rounded the island. Mom and I waited on the dock. She had one slipper on backward. I remember wanting to tell her and knowing how stupid it would sound.
The radio crackled. “We’ve got him.”
Ben had landed, dragged the bow a short way up the mud, then run to the willow. By the time he came back the kayak had floated away. He stayed beside the tree because Dad had always told him to stay put if he got lost.
At home, Mom put the paddles in the locked garage. Ben sat through a long conversation about everything that could have happened on that crossing.
Finally, he opened his fist. Inside was the little wooden door, swollen crooked by the rain.
“Did you really think Peanut was still in there?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Dad made that door.”
Dad had died in February. I had spent all morning telling everybody how well I knew my little brother. I hadn’t understood that part at all.
We dried the door on a dish towel. It sits on our kitchen windowsill now. Ben can check it whenever it rains.
The search takes a chilling turn when the wrong boy is found – there’s another rescue story where one detail at the scene changes everything. For more tense stories about people being misunderstood in a crisis, read about a patient whose son spoke for him and a woman who begged to stay.
