Lulu and the Dog from the Sea Page 3
“Good dog! It’s all right,” Lulu told him. “Good dog!”
The alarm seemed to fade. Very slowly the dog’s tail began swinging again.
“He trusts you,” said Mellie.
He did, but he was still nervous. At the sudden rustle of the French fry bag he backed away. A moment later, when Lulu accidentally rattled the trash can lid, he vanished completely.
“He’ll be back again tomorrow,” said Lulu.
Tuesday was a day of gray skies and sudden showers.
“There’s a cliff-top walk we really should try,” said Lulu’s father, getting out his map.
Sam knew about maps and very long walks and he went and hid behind the sofa.
“I know how he feels,” said Lulu’s mother, but she did not hide behind the sofa. She built a driftwood fire and settled down in front of it with her third vacation book.
Behind the sofa Sam found Mellie’s kite box. A long smooth stick fell out when he pushed it. Sam chewed it to pieces.
The silvery driftwood burned with pale-blue flames, and the room became warm. Lulu and Mellie and Lulu’s father bumped away in the car. Sam thought it might be safe to come out from behind the sofa. He settled down in front of the fire with a second long stick from the box...
“My kite struts!” shrieked Mellie the moment she walked through the door.
When she had calmed down a bit, Lulu’s father explained that nothing in the world was easier to make than kite struts.
And that he would do it in a moment. Beautifully and perfectly. Better than the originals. Out of any old straight piece of washed-up driftwood they could find.
After that the whole family hunted for washed-up driftwood in straight enough pieces to make new struts for a kite. They hunted until it was too dark to see, but they didn’t find any.
And then they went sadly back to the cottage and ate omelettes and chocolate cake to cheer themselves up. It was a rather dismal evening, despite the chocolate cake and the charm of the driftwood fire. Mellie put all her pieces of kite on the table, the seagull picture and the chewed wood and the tangled strings and the plastic loops for threading who-knew-what through (since the instructions had been lost) and she said to Lulu, “You said you’d help.”
“I will help,” said Lulu.
“Well, think of something!”
An idea came to Lulu like a present from the sky. She told her mother and her mother gave her a big happy hug. She told her father, and he said she was a genius. She would have told Mellie, but Mellie covered her ears and said, “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, in case it doesn’t work.”
That night, the dog from the sea was waiting for Lulu. He ate omelette and toast and chocolate cake, a lot of dog food, and a large piece of cheese. More thorns and tangles were snipped from his fur. Once again, Mellie watched from the window, but this time he was much less nervous.
“I think he might like me after all,” whispered Mellie.
“Of course he does,” said Lulu.
Chapter Five
Wednesday
They woke up on Wednesday to a day of bright sunshine.
“I am going shopping; I may be a while,” said Lulu’s mother, climbing into the car.
“What kind of shopping?” asked Mellie.
“Secret shopping,” said Lulu’s mother, and to Lulu she whispered, “Operation Kite!”
Then she bumped away down the dusty road with Sam to keep her company.
Lulu and Mellie and Lulu’s father headed for the beach. It was a much easier journey over the sand dunes without Sam and his beanbag. Lulu’s father went swimming, and Lulu and Mellie went to the kiddie pool. However, no one stayed in long because, as Lulu’s father pointed out, the sea was very close to freezing and if it froze over completely they’d be stuck in the ice. Afterward, Lulu and Mellie went off to play, while Lulu’s father did some exercises to get rid of the numbness in his hands and feet.
Lulu and Mellie had not been playing for more than five minutes when a head with paper-bag ears looked over the sand dunes.
The dog from the sea had come to play too.
At first he just played beside them. When Lulu and Mellie raced after the frisbee, the dog from the sea raced after an invisible frisbee of his own. When they peered into rock pools, he peered into rock pools close by. When they paddled in the pools, which were much warmer than the sea, the dog paddled too, sneezing at the splashes. And then they got out two bottles of bubbles.
The dog from the sea could not resist the bubbles. He raced to catch them, snapped at them in the air, and looked astonished when they vanished. He loved when Lulu and Mellie laughed at him. His tail wagged and his paper-bag ears flapped and he bounced like a dog on springs.
When Lulu’s mother arrived with Sam and his beanbag and a thumbs-up sign for Lulu and a hug for Mellie and a picnic and a handful of dripping ice cream, the dog from the sea did not run away.
He stayed and shared the picnic.
He didn’t come very close. He didn’t quite trust Lulu’s parents not to be secret dogcatchers, but still, he stayed.
If Sam had not been worn out by shopping he would not have let this happen. But shopping had tired Sam completely. He lay down on his beanbag and closed his eyes so that he could not see the dog from the sea, with the frisbee as a plate, eating hot dogs and sandwiches, and drinking water from Lulu’s bucket.
“Now!” said Lulu’s mother, when the picnic was all finished. “You’ll never guess what I bought this morning, Mellie!”
“What?”
“A build-your-own-kite kit just like the one you had!” said Lulu’s mother triumphantly. “So now we have all the pieces and new strings with no knots and the proper instructions!”
“Oh!” gasped Mellie, hugging her. “Was that what you thought of, Lulu, last night?”
“I told you I’d help!” said Lulu proudly, and her father said, “Come on! Back to the cottage, everyone, for Operation Kite!”
Operation Kite took Lulu’s parents and Mellie all afternoon, and except for the seagull picture on the front, it was a brand-new kite.
“It’s the picture on the front that matters,” said Mellie cheerfully.
Lulu did not help with the kite-making. Instead, she spent the afternoon on the grassy patch outside the house, playing with the dog from the sea.
It was very, very different from playing with Sam. If you threw a ball for Sam to fetch he would try not to look unless you happened to be someone he loved very much. If you were, he would get slowly to his feet. Slowly, slowly he would walk to the ball, pick it up in his teeth as if it tasted nasty, and then slowly bring it back to you, spit it out, and sigh.
The sigh meant, “Please don’t do that again. I will not fetch it twice.”
Very different from the dog from the sea, who hurtled after balls so fast he skidded and rolled in somersaults. Who could catch a frisbee in his teeth. Who understood the game of tag and played it around and around the little white cottage.
Lulu and the dog from the sea played so hard, they didn’t notice the cottage owner coming silently along the path to the cottage.
The cottage owner liked to visit the cottage now and then, to check that her guests were behaving as she thought they should behave.
Just in case they weren’t.
Lulu wasn’t.
Halfway along the path the cottage owner saw Lulu and the dog from the sea.
She paused.
She got off her bike.
She glared.
She puffed with fury.
Then she turned around and rode off again as quickly as she could to call the dogcatchers.
The dogcatchers came quickly with a cage, a long stick with a collar on the end, and a handful of dog biscuits, and the cottage owner following behind
.
It took Lulu a little while to understand what was happening. At first she just stood and stared, her hand on the neck of the dog from the sea. Then she saw the van and the collar on a stick and the cottage owner, very eager, rushing up with her bike.
Lulu screamed and clutched the dog from the sea.
“That’s right, hang on to him!” screeched the cottage owner, while from inside the cottage ran Lulu’s parents and Mellie, and Sam barking, “RUFF! RUFF! RUFF!”
“Stand still, please!” begged one of the two dogcatchers. “Ooooff!”
That was the sound made when Mellie flung herself headfirst into the nearest dogcatcher’s stomach.
“Mellie!” exclaimed Lulu’s mother, grabbing her.
“RUFF! RUFF! RUFF!” roared Sam at the dogcatchers and the cottage owner and at the dog from the sea, trembling with fear under Lulu’s hand.
“Get that dog!” shouted the wicked witch of a cottage owner. “He’s a thief! He’s a menace! He needs to be locked up!”
“No!” shouted Lulu, and she stopped holding on to the dog from the sea. She pushed him away and cried, “Run!”
There had been two friends playing, blue-green grass, and a blue and white sky.
Now there was noise and trouble and anger. And the dog from the sea was gone, running for his life.
That night Lulu waited and waited, but the dog from the sea did not come to visit the cottage.
“Do you think he’s thinking of me like I am thinking of him?” she asked Mellie.
“Yes,” said Mellie.
Much later in the night Mellie said, “I think you should stop climbing in and out of the window.”
“I can’t get to sleep.”
“No one could get to sleep,” said Mellie, “if they kept climbing in and out of a window.”
“Why aren’t you sad?” demanded Lulu.
“I am sad,” said Mellie. “About the poor dog from the sea, I’m sad! About how frightened he was, and how he looked at you to see if it was true, and how he saw that it was true, and ran, I’m sad about that! I helped, didn’t I? I charged that dogcatcher as hard as I could!”
“Yes, you did,” admitted Lulu.
“But I am not completely sad because I can’t help feeling happy about my kite. I thought we’d never fix it, and now we have, and it’s perfect. Don’t you think that’s good?”
“You know I do,” said Lulu. “It was me that thought of the way to fix it.”
“Tomorrow,” said Mellie, “we can fly my kite on the beach. It will show for miles and miles. The dog will see it and come running.”
That was a happy thought.
Lulu fell asleep thinking it.
Chapter Six
Thursday and Friday
Early on Thursday morning Mellie woke everyone up, hurried them through breakfast, and chased them out of the house.
“What’s all this pushing and rushing?” demanded Lulu’s father. “It’s the last day of the vacation! Shouldn’t we make the most of it and have a little peace?”
“It’s because it’s the last day!” said Mellie.
“What do you want peace for, anyway?” asked Lulu.
“I still haven’t flown my kite!” said Mellie.
Lulu’s parents looked at each other.
Then out the window.
“Mellie...” began Lulu’s mother, but Mellie would not listen. Over the sand dunes she raced the family and onto the wide sunny beach.
Not a breath of wind was blowing.
Not a breath of wind blew all that day.
They tried the beach and they tried the park and they tried the high place on the cliffs where the fort stood. They discovered that no amount of running and tossing and adjusting and untangling will make a kite fly without any wind.
It was the last day of the vacation, and no kite flew. No dog from the sea saw it and came running. And nothing, not paddling, nor fair rides, nor even takeout food from the Golden Lotus could make Lulu and Mellie happy.
The grown-ups were sad too. They had worked hard to make that kite fly, spent a lot of money, and driven through a great many potholes. They were unhappy about the dog from the sea as well. Secretly, they took turns going to look for him. Lulu’s father went for a long marathon-training run all through the sand dunes with dog biscuits in his pockets. Lulu’s mother walked in the opposite direction with a bucket and a bottle of water. She stopped to talk with the people from the hot dog and ice cream stall and with the lady at the bucket and shovel shop.
Nobody had seen the dog from the sea.
In the evening, promises were made to Mellie. “We have to get an early start in the morning,” Lulu’s mother told her. “I’m sorry, Mellie, but I have to be at work at the hospital by lunchtime...”
Mellie nodded. Lulu’s mother was a nurse, and both Lulu and Mellie understood that nurses have to be at work when they are expected.
“But the first windy day at home that everyone is free we will all stop whatever we’re doing and rush to the park with your kite! We promise! Don’t we, Lulu?”
“Yes,” said Lulu, “but...”
But it won’t be the same, she nearly said.
“But what?” asked her mother.
“Nothing,” said Lulu, because what was the use of saying what everybody knew.
The bare little cottage was tidied and cleaned. Bags were packed. Sand drifts were swept from the corners of floors. Last of all, Lulu and Mellie and Lulu’s father smuggled the trash can lid rocks back over the sand dunes. With the help of the map they put them back on the beach in their old locations.
“They look like they’ve never been moved!” said Lulu’s father.
That night the trash can lid was left unguarded. Now that the dog from the sea had disappeared, he no longer seemed such an impossible idea to Lulu’s parents.
“I bet Sam would have gotten used to him, after a while,” they said, and they understood when Lulu put the leftovers from the Golden Lotus in a bowl beside the trash can, just in case.
They understood, too, when Mellie could not bear to pack her unflown kite. “Just let me keep it like it is until morning! Just to look at,” she begged.
“All right, Mellie.”
They even understood when Lulu insisted on keeping the bedroom window wide, wide open.
“But no getting out and camping by the trash can!” said Lulu’s father, astonishing Lulu, who had not even told Mellie of this very private idea. “Promise?”
“Promise,” said Lulu reluctantly.
“Go to sleep quickly then,” said Lulu’s parents, who kissed them and went to bed.
Going to sleep quickly was not something that Lulu and Mellie usually managed. Usually they chatted for hours.
This time, however, they went to sleep quickly.
Mellie woke with a jump in a room full of gray light.
It was dawn and it was cold, and the air was full of a thin sound. At the window the curtains were streaming like flags into the room.
“Lulu! Lulu!” whispered Mellie. “The wind is blowing!”
The wind was blowing, and Lulu’s watch said half past four in the morning. They had hours and hours before the grown-ups woke.
They did not pause for a moment.
Lulu put on her sandals.
Mellie picked up her kite.
First Lulu, then Mellie, climbed out of the window.
The food from the Golden Lotus was still untouched in the bowl by the trash.
“But he’ll see the kite,” said Lulu and followed Mellie across the patch of blue-green grass, into the sandy paths that wound through the sand dunes, and onto the empty beach.
A strong straight wind was blowing. A perfect flying wind. The kite, with its flock of bright seagulls, leaped into the sky.
From the moment the kite took off, Lulu and Mellie forgot everything but the need to hold on to it. It pulled on the strings like something alive. No flock of seagulls had ever soared higher.
The kite
raced in front of the wind, and Lulu and Mellie raced along the beach behind it, each clinging to a kite handle.
“Hold tight with both hands!” screamed Mellie, and it lifted them as they ran, so that they hardly felt their feet touch the sand. They felt nothing but the huge tug of the strings in their hands, and they saw nothing but sky.
For a long time, an unmeasurable amount of time, it was like running in an airy dream.
Then Lulu tripped and fell.
The kite-string handle flew out of her hand, and the kite, suddenly unbalanced, spun in a spiral, poised in the air for a moment, and then dived its whole flock of rainbow seagulls headfirst into the sand dunes.
“Oh!” gasped Mellie, while Lulu picked herself up. “My kite, my kite!” She started running to where it had fallen.
Lulu followed more slowly, gathering the kite strings and feeling her bumped knees. She had time to look around and see where they were. They were on a strange part of the beach, with unknown sand dunes, far away from the little white cottage.
Mellie was nowhere in sight.
Nothing Lulu recognized was anywhere in sight.
Then, from somewhere high above, Mellie screamed.
Lulu began to run.
In those unknown sand dunes the gray-leaved, orange-berried bushes grew very close and thorny. The sandy paths were narrower, made for rabbits, not people. The hollows were deep and unexpected. The grasses grew over them and hid them, so they opened suddenly, like traps.
“Lulu!” cried Mellie, and Lulu called back, “Where are you? Where are you?” and stumbled as she hurried.
It took a long time to find Mellie.
It was like trying to find someone in a maze.
But at last, there she was. Tumbled into a hollow, clutching her kite, and trying not to cry.
“I’m all right,” she told Lulu, with her eyes screwed tight shut. “But I hurt my foot! I hurt it really...” She gave a little sob. “I don’t want to look. Is it bleeding?”
It was bleeding. Mellie had caught it on thorns, tripped, and fallen with it twisted beneath her. Already her ankle was puffy and swollen.