Olivia looked down at her feet and saw a pale, pink shell the size of her fingernail rising up out of the sand. Its fleshy arm stretched and flexed to hold itself upright. Then another shell rose up. And another! Shells were rising out of the sand everywhere. Thousands, each a different color. Striped and spotted. Tangerine, violet, and rose. Pink, indigo, and chocolate. Olivia smiled. There were so many shells she couldn’t even see the sand beneath them. She could feel them tickling up under her feet. Funny-looking shrimp washed up in the waves and sat down in the sand around her. They were all staring up at her as if she, Olivia Brophie, were something inexplicably wonderful that they had never seen before. Their tiny black eyes never blinked.
“Oh my,” Aunt exclaimed from up the beach. Olivia spun around. Hundreds of white crabs lined up on the sand. Even worse, birds of every shape and size stood on the beach, all staring at her silently. While she had watched the ship, the birds had quietly landed behind her back: pelicans, skimmers, oystercatchers, laughing gulls, turnstones, terns, ringbills, sandpipers, plovers, sanderlings, willets, gannets, grackles. But to her, they were all nameless birds. They all just stood there, staring with their yellow and black eyes. Their beaks snapped at the wind. Feathers ruffled. Olivia didn’t move a muscle. She suddenly didn’t like the beach very much. She couldn’t breathe.
“AAaaaYiiiiiiiiiii!” Gnat screamed like a very loud fire alarm and stood up with a large crab hanging from one of his fingers. All of the birds took off with a great cackling and cawing. The white crabs scurried to their holes. The shrimp rode the next wave out to sea. The shells — all of those purple, pink, and blue shells — disappeared beneath the brown sand.
Olivia ran to Aunt, “What is going on?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never . . .” She frowned at the birds circling overhead. “Come on. Let’s go home.” Aunt put her arm around Olivia as they walked back up the hot sand.
“Florida is very strange,” Olivia thought. She didn’t realize that this was going to be the least strange day she would have for a long, long time.
2
Opals
The sun was going down as their rusty turquoise car bumped along a quiet highway. A dark swamp pressed in on both sides of the road. Cypress trees loomed over them. Palms swayed their enormous green fans. Everything was draped with thick curtains of gray hanging moss. Olivia watched for eyes in the dark water. She had heard somewhere that alligator eyes glowed blood-red at night. Gnat was sleeping next to her with his video game still on. They had turned west from the beach and now it seemed like they were light-years away from those shells and rude birds.
Lyonia, Florida, lies lost somewhere at the center of the state between the swamps and miles of orange groves. The small town looked exactly like Uncle’s car, old and junky. Olivia saw an antique store, a post office, a hardware store, El Taco Loco, and a brand-new gas station. She also counted two ragged old dogs and six chickens. The post office had a banner hanging in the window that said “Black Bear Carnival—Aug 13.” Cars and trucks packed into a place called Croakers on the edge of town. Olivia was so tired of riding in the car that she didn’t even care how stupid the town looked.
Ten miles later, they turned down a sandy road that was so overgrown she could hardly see it from the highway. It looked to Olivia like they were being swallowed by the trees.
“Are we here?” Gnat asked.
“This is our driveway,” Aunt smiled.
“Finally,” Olivia mumbled under her breath.
The surrounding forest was weird. The trees grew short and twisted. Most of them weren’t much taller than Uncle. There was white sand everywhere, so much that it almost looked like they were back at the beach. Olivia saw cactus growing in the sand, and the tree bark was covered with red splotches.
But she was too tired to pay much attention. Finally, two days after it started, the horrible trip was over.
Then she saw the house. Old and broken, it squatted in the woods like a hobo. Some of it was brick, some stone. The wooden roof was patched with several old sheets of tin. There was no lawn, just lots and lots of white sand.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I know it isn’t much,” Aunt apologized. “It isn’t what you are used to, but there is room for all of us.”
A little fence made of crooked branches circled the house. Colorful bottles and glass ornaments hung all over the fence. Olivia heard them clinking in the breeze. A tiny old air-conditioner rattled and coughed on the side of the house. It could fall apart at any minute. It may have been evening, but the air felt like a summer greenhouse. The short trees screamed with insects who sounded very large and bloodthirsty. She could barely hear anything over their noise.
“Come on. Let’s go inside and get ready for bed,” Uncle said as he lifted Gnat from the back of the car.
The front door of the house opened and an angry dachshund tumbled outside barking at the top of his lungs.
“Baybeeeeee!” Aunt squealed. “We missed you widdle widdle baybeee! Kids, I want you to meet Cheeto.”
Gnat, safely cradled in Uncle’s arms, shouted, “Incoming! Defensive shields up!”
Uncle joined in laughing, “Take that alien dog!”
Cheeto was long, red, and lean. He took things very seriously and he did not seem happy to see them. He ran around Olivia’s feet sniffing and growling.
Olivia rolled her eyes. Suddenly bored with the newcomers, Cheeto ran off into the forest.
“Come back!” Gnat yelled.
“Cheeto doesn’t trust anybody, not even Uncle. He will be fine,” reassured Aunt.
If the car was full of junk, then their house was completely conquered by it. Bookshelves lined every wall. Piles of old magazines sat on the floor. There were countless artifacts, oddities, specimens, curios, totems, and geegaws sitting or hanging on every possible space.
“It sure is bigger on the inside than it looked outside,” Olivia thought. There was a giant boulder taking up entirely too much room in the corner of the living room. The rock was taller than Olivia and four times wider. It must have weighed a ton.
“Your Uncle found that in the middle of the Orinoco River in Venezuela. He carried that darn thing out of the jungle fifty years ago,” Aunt explained when she saw Olivia touching it. “He won’t put it outside. I’ll probably have to bury him with it.”
Olivia couldn’t imagine how one man could carry such an enormous rock through the jungle. She looked closer. It was filled with smooth chunks of shining multicolored nuggets embedded into the rock.
“Opals,” Aunt whispered, smiling.
“Wait. Fifty years ago? How old is Uncle anyway?” But Aunt had already disappeared into the kitchen.
Olivia looked at the pictures on the wall: jungle waterfalls, a young woman in a bi-plane, exotic cities, and precarious poses on mountaintops. One photograph showed two girls in the foreground with a boy swinging on a rope and dropping into a swimming hole. The two girls looked like they just got out of the beautiful blue water. One looked very familiar to Olivia.
And then it struck her. She hadn’t seen the TV yet.
“Ummmm . . . Excuse me. Where is the TV?” Olivia asked loudly and with enough attitude that there was no doubt about her irritation.
From somewhere several rooms away, Aunt responded, “I’m sorry, dear. We don’t have one. Maybe we can fix one of the ones in the garage.”
“What??