Lily's Crossing by Patricia Reilly Giff

Author:Patricia Reilly Giff [Giff, Patricia Reilly]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780385729932
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2009-05-20T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

It was late on Monday night. Still in shorts and a shirt, Lily lay under her red quilt looking up at the sky. She could see Orion’s Belt, and the W of Cassiopeia. They were sharp and clear among the other stars in the dark sky. It was a beautiful night, and finally she and Albert were going to watch for convoys.

She thought about it a little uneasily. They hadn’t talked about Lily’s going to Europe since that day at the beach. Maybe he had forgotten, she told herself, or maybe he had thought it over by now and knew she had been lying.

She turned in the bed, trying to put it out of her mind. Everything was ready for tonight, on the floor. A sweater, two towels, her sneakers tucked in one side of her beach bag, and two bottles of soda jammed into the other side.

If only Gram would go to sleep. Vaguely she heard Gram’s radio, the end of Lux Radio Theatre, and then music. “Would you like to swing on a star?” She couldn’t keep her eyes open.

Then suddenly she was awake, wide awake. It seemed very late, midnight, maybe one o’clock. Gram’s radio was off, and all the lights. Lily reached for the screen and pushed it up and out.

She dropped into the rowboat and pushed herself along under the porches. In the light that spilled out from the les of Mrs. Colgan’s blackout shades, she could see a mess of sand crabs hanging on to the pilings.

And at the Orbans’, just silence. She sat there as wide awake as if it were the middle of the morning, so angry at herself for sleeping, so disappointed Albert was asleep, she could have cried.

“Too much crying,” she said aloud.

“Too much talking to yourself,” a voice said, so close she jumped.

Albert dropped into the boat. He was clumsy and splashed water in over the side. “Because of the cat,” he said.

She leaned over until she could see the cat’s face, its eyes peering out from the front of his open jacket. “Cats hate the water.”

“This one does not. I thought you would not come.”

She opened her mouth, ready to lie, but raised one shoulder instead. “I fell asleep.”

Albert nodded. “It is hard to stay awake sometimes.”

Lily pushed the boat out from under the porches. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll cut across the bay. That way we can stay away from the surf.”

“But it is closer the other way.”

“Yes, but it’s harder to fight the surf than the bay. If you’re going far you want to save your arms.”

He nodded, watching her pull on the oars.

“Will you teach me to swim?” he asked after a while.

She blinked. She had been thinking again about Poppy . . . Poppy on a troop ship watching her swim toward him. It was a wonderful dream. “Swim?” she repeated. “Yes. But why can’t you swim?”

“I did not have an ocean,” he said. Like Margaret in Detroit, she thought.

“I had a river, the Danube.

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