Courtney opened her mouth, and then closed it. “You’re lying,” she said. Janie watched her without speaking. Courtney tried again. “Men aren’t like that any more.”
“They are, if the women are worth it,” Janie said quietly. “Would you want a man to love you that much? Would all of you?”
At least half of the girls nodded their heads. “Good,” Janie said. “We have honesty, and we need that. Now then. If that’s what you want, what if you think about the idea that you’ll never get anyone to love you more than you love yourself. This is a buy-low sell-high world, ladies. Guys will pay as little as they can to get what they want. What have you been trading your heart for, Courtney?”
“Fuck you,” Courtney said. A single tear swelled from her left eye, and began its lonely way down her puffy red cheek.
Janie looked at her, a bit mystified now. “Courtney?”
“I know. I know…” Courtney wiped at her face and stared into the floor.
Janie looked at one of the other counselors, and sent her over to comfort the girl.
“Who else has had bad experiences with boys? Would anyone do us the honor of talking about it?”
Destiny shifted uncomfortably. “I…” she began, and then paused.
“Yes, Destiny?”
Destiny shook her head. “Not me,” she said in a low voice. “My sister.”
“What about your sister?” Janie asked.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Not tonight. Maybe another night.”
* * *
In the Arts and Crafts center, the boys sat sharing. Ocean and Jason were tag-teaming the discussion, and struggling with it. Having compared notes with Janie over the years, Ocean knew the boys would be far more reluctant to share emotions than the girls, but needed the release even more.
“No,” Colin said. “The problem isn’t that my father doesn’t communicate. The problem is that the bastard won’t leave me alone.”
“Why would you say that?” Justin asked.
“Because he’s in jail, and it’s just embarrassin’. I wish he’d stop even trying to write me, call me.”
A couple of the other kids nodded. Ocean blinked hard. Slowly, he asked, “How many of you have fathers who are incarcerated? In jail?”
About a third of the boys raised their hands. Ocean felt positively sick. He breathed deeply and plowed on. “Well … your fathers’ path doesn’t have to be yours.”
Mathias stiffened defensively. “You’re saying my dad did it. I don’t think he did.”
“Yeah,” Colin said. “Everybody’s innocent.”
“Fuck you.”
“Hey! Hey! That’s a point off!” Ocean said.
Patrick sat, very quiet indeed. “My dad is dead.”
“Dead?” Ocean’s voice grew soft. “When did that happen?”
“A week ago.”
The group went absolutely quiet.
“I killed him,” Patrick said.
Ocean searched for something to say. Jason caught his eye, and his freckled face was baffled.
Before he could speak, Frankie jumped into the silence. “He means that he feels … I don’t know. Responsible. Right?” He held Patrick’s eyes. “But you didn’t actually have anything to do with it. Right, Patrick?”
“Yeah. If he hadn’t taken me shopping that night, nothing would have…” Patrick started to break down and cry. One of the other boys put his arms around Patrick. They formed a protective wall, pushing Ocean aside.
The two counselors shuffled around the outside of the knot, seeking entrance, and finally realized that the kids had closed ranks. For now, the adults were not wanted, or needed. Jason hunched his shoulders and crooked a finger at Ocean, calling him outside.
“This is weird, man.” Ocean stared out across the camp, as if hoping there were answers hidden in the shadows.
Jason shrugged his massive shoulders again. “Yeah. And almost none of them have fathers in the home. Divorced, single moms, foster kids. I’d say the people backing this chose pretty carefully. Looking for at-risk kids. We’ve seen that before.”
Ocean seemed vaguely troubled. “Yeah, but…”
“But what?”
He sighed. “Hell, man, I don’t know.” He peered back through the window. Back in the room, Frankie was on the outside of the hug. He looked out at Ocean and Jason, his eyes bright and tiny, like those of a small wild thing caught in the glare of oncoming headlights.
63
After the kitchen was clean, Vivian emerged into the waning daylight, sitting on a rude bench made from half a split log. She stared out at the woods filled with juniper, aspen and majestic blue spruce. The woods of her youth had teemed with pine, and she saw few of them here. Another loneliness.
North, on the athletic field, some of the kids were playing a quick pickup game of soccer, while others at the lake a half mile further north were getting in the last swim of a good, long day. The light was cool and fragmented, filtering through leaves and pine needles. The distant joyous sounds of happy children made this ending seem almost a new beginning.
“Hi, how are ya?” a voice said behind her. Vivian turned, startled, and saw Janie, who wore her customary wide, friendly grin.
She scooted over, making room. Janie sat. “I hear that you’re doing great in the kitchen, and in the craft room. The kids like you.”
Vivian smiled shyly.
“This is kind of a magical space,” Janie said, breathing deeply and satisfied. “I hope you’re enjoying yourself.”
Vivian caught a distant flash of some kind, high in the western woods. Reflective metal, perhaps? Machinery or binoculars? “Are there people up in those hills?”
Janie shrugged. “I’ve seen people on the roads, some surveyors, whatever.” She looked at Vivian curiously. “Why? What are you worried about? Everything is going fine.”
After a hesitation, Vivian began to talk with Janie about her troubles, what had happened in Claremont. “After something like that happens, you are likely to start at ghosts.”
Janie nodded. “You say that you and your ex-husband were separated?”
Vivian nodded. “There wasn’t any way to heal. No way to get back to what we used to be, but we … I pretended that there was. For a little while.”
She felt her face flush, and realized that she hadn’t talked to anyone about this, not even Lolly Schmeer.
“I get the feeling that you don’t talk to many people,” Janie said.
“I watch the way you are with Ocean,” Vivian said enviously, “like the song says: ‘holding hands, making plans…’” She sighed. “It’s too easy for me to remember the old days.”
“You run your own business?”
She nodded. “Otis even tried to help. For a while. A big guy like that mousing around the fabric racks—it just didn’t work out. But at least we were partners at home.”
“Growing apart isn’t a sin. Do you have anyone?”
Vivian paused, thinking. Did she? Was there? While realizing exactly how ridiculous it might sound, she said, “There is someone, but it’s just a chance.”
“A chance? Your whole face lit up when you said that.”
“Well, I don’t want to talk about it too much. If I talk about it, it might ruin everything. I’d like to think there’s a chance.” Her voice caught in her throat. “That I haven’t run out of time.…”
She turned away from Janie, suddenly feeling dizzy and frightened.
Janie took both of her hands. “Honey, if you can even pretend to still feel like that, it’s not too late.”
With a smile, Janie went off about her business, but Vivian felt the warmth of the counselor’s hands. Her own skin felt tissue-thin, and hot enough to blister.
Oh, Vivian, she thought wonderingly. You are flat-out sprung.
* * *
Janie found Ocean back at the main counselor’s cabin. He was working on a map for the next day’s scavenger hunt. “How’s it going, big guy?”
&nbs
p; “Pretty good. Kids are pretty coordinated—they pick up physical motion well, but are still a little closed.” He paused, and reconsidered. “At least with us. With each other, they’re like old friends.”
“You have an admirer,” Janie said, and threw herself into his lap. “Map later. Me now. I need kissy. Lots and lots of kissy.” He hesitated for a moment, then surrendered to her affections for two steamy minutes, after which she nestled her head against his chest and pretended to swoon. “Sir,” she murmured, “you undo me.”
“Yeah,” he whispered, combing his fingers through her short blond hair. “You tell that to all the counselors. That’s how you get us so cheap.” She kissed the point of his chin. “So,” he said, “who’s this admirer person?”
“The sex bomb.”
“Oh, you must mean Courtney.”
“Funny how you guessed that so quickly.”
“So sue me, I’m male.”
“We’ll settle out of court.” She licked his lower lip, and made contented cat sounds. Then she grew quiet and serious. “This is definitely the strangest camp I’ve ever chiefed.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t feel it. There’s something … I don’t know. Off-center about this. I mean, who chose these kids? And why? And why aren’t the money people here?”
“The cash is all in the bank, right?”
“Yep. It’s just … I don’t know. Something tells me that there are some surprises coming.”
Ocean rubbed her nose with his. “The kids are great. They’re bonding faster than I’ve ever seen.”
Janie’s eyes were closed. She was running over the faces, the places and the oddnesses. The absent boss. The number of apparently abused kids. Their uncanny ability to synchronize and bond. There was a pattern, she just knew it, but as yet it remained unclear. And no matter how she rearranged the pieces currently in hand, she was unable to find a way to feel good about them. Why?
Maybe it was just the shakes. There was a pattern, a flow to camps. You laid out the pattern, and you added the kids. The first few days you kept them busy enough not to notice that they were away from home. Kept them too busy to make enemies. You divided them into teams or “tribes,” and set cabins against each other … all of that merely to distract them enough so they could relax and bond. But these kids didn’t need any of that. In a strange way, it was as if they didn’t need her at all. And that felt …
Oddly lonely.
Janie put her arms around Ocean and pulled him closer. This time, there was nothing sexual in the contact. She just needed to be held. In a month or so, she would be back at the bank in Santa Monica, and Ocean would be teaching American Lit at L.A.C.C., and their “real” lives would swallow them again. This was supposed to be their playtime, the emotional glue that held the rest of their lives together. Instead, she had a deep and pervasive sense of wrongness that gnawed at her sleep.
Eyes squeezed shut, she clinched her lower lip with her teeth and wondered what she would do with her thoughts if they didn’t start to cheer up soon. This sort of thing could absolutely ruin a perfectly good week. Or month. Or summer.
Or …
64
The Green team captain was Colin, a tall, gangly Huck-Finnish kid who hailed from a place called Biloxi, Mississippi.
Colin’s accent was as thick as oatmeal. He was quiet, and had a wounded look about him, something that told Patrick that he had been in too many fights without referees, too many scrapes without someone to wield mercurochrome and kisses. That even at fourteen, he was no one to be trifled with.
In another life, he thought that Colin might have made an excellent Grizzly Adams type. It was weird to meet someone so obviously a loner, yet possessed of that strange animal magnetism that made him compelling even when silent and standing still.
They were on the second hour of the scavenger hunt, and had found four of the ten items: a tennis ball, a little plastic pig, a set of song lyrics from a musical called Oklahoma (!), and a paperback copy of a Louis L’amour western. He didn’t know what was next, but there was a hint in the poem they found tucked into the back of the book:
The spider weaves its web to catch
The little flies that are its snacks
But if you look behind the fuel
You’ll see three hints, two paths, one tool.
“Spiderweb?” one of the kids asked. “What in the world could that be?”
“Spiders’re bugs,” Colin said. “They have this sticky stuff comes out of their butts…”
“Hah hah,” Destiny said. She looked at the note. “The fuel. Maybe the propane tanks?”
The twin yellow eight-foot 250-gallon tanks stood between the mess hall and the showers. The kids searched over, under and around. One of the smallest kids crawled behind it, finding three paper envelopes neatly taped to the back. The first was marked “one,” the second “two,” and the third “three.”
They groaned, having previously encountered this very gambit. The one marked “three” had the best clue, but if you opened it, you got three points taken off your score. The one marked “one” had the lamest clue, but you only lost one point for using it. So you had to make a choice—maybe have to open all three, and lose six points, or just open the best clue and lose three, or just maybe open the first, and only lose one.
The seven kids huddled around, while Ocean watched them, curious as to what they would do.
Finally they decided to open the first.
The picture scrawled on it looked like a dancing Indian.
“What the hell is this?” Courtney asked.
“Maybe the dance hall?” Heather said. “You know, the rec center?”
“Yeah, but the dance isn’t until day after tomorrow.”
Patrick looked at it, and turned it around and upside down. “You know what this looks like to me? It looks kind of flattened out. I think it’s a shadow, that’s what I think.”
“Shadow?” Courtney asked.
“Remember last night, doing shadow plays by the firelight?”
A light seemed to have gone on in their eyes, and without even looking at the other clues, they scrambled toward the fire pit.
The embers had long since cooled, but a cursory exploration showed two ten-inch cardboard arrows taped to benches around the fire pit. The arrows led them to saplings at the forest’s edge, with yellow ribbons tied to their branches. Each seemed to indicate a path.
“Which one?”
They decided that the shadow indicated the left trail, and scampered along the path, which took them up the western rise. Ocean tagged along behind them.
They had gone halfway up when they ran into a thickset workman in an orange jacket. The man was tanned with a flat, weather-beaten face and shocks of gray shooting through his hair. He wore a khaki work shirt and faded blue jeans, and was crouching, apparently fiddling with a little tripod-mounted viewfinder. He nodded at them, smiling with his mouth but not his eyes. Patrick hailed him in return. “Have you seen a spiderwebby thing?”
“Hey!” said Ocean. “You can’t ask that.”
The big man chuckled. “Sorry kids.” But when they ran past him, the little warmth in his eyes cooled, and then died to ashes.
* * *
Chuck tipped his hat back on his head, and made a spitting sound. “This is really screwed up,” he said. “I got kids not much older than that.…” He tried not to think about those kids, or the life he had grown to love. He tried to think only of the mission that had begun with a midnight phone call, an intense, incredible conversation. With two hours of arguing, cajoling, commanding, and oblique blackmail. The conversation that had dropped him back down the rabbit hole and through a moral looking glass more frightening than anything he had survived in Southeast Asia.
Beside him, Hennings, a moon-faced man with small eyes and a tight, thin mouth, nodded meaninglessly. “We can’t look at it that way,” he said. Hennings was a grandfather. Sold real estate in Grand Rapids, d
oing pretty well if the rumors were right: the old team didn’t stay in touch as much as they had promised to do. It was always that way. “I know if I did I’d go crazy. We know what the old man did. And now his poison is running in these damn kids. We let them go—they might kill one of my girl’s kids, or one of yours.” He was breathing heavy, and his color was bad. He was too old for this. Hell, they were all too old for this shit. But what the hell were they supposed to do? “Little Evelyn. Or Timmy,” he murmured, looking off across the valley as if focusing on his little angels, maybe hoping their smiling, innocent faces would absolve him of guilt, save him from hell. “As hard as this is going to be, how the fuck would we live with that?”
Chuck’s face was bleak. “I can do the job, but I’m not sure I can live with it. Either way.”
“Two more days,” Hennings said, “and it’s over. And you’ll live through it, and go back home.”
* * *
The “spiderweb” was a rope netting with a dozen holes of different sizes—some easily large enough for an adult to slip through, others barely big enough to pass a butterfly.
The task, Ocean informed them, was to eel through without touching any of the ropes. And any particular hole could only be used one time. He didn’t envy them the task: it still looked darned near impossible even to him, and he’d actually seen it done.
Green team wasted the first ten minutes just debating the task’s impossibility, but as they argued Ocean noted that one of the kids, Mathias, walked around the web in slow circles, studying. Thinking, his lips pursed thoughtfully. I think he’s almost got it.
“I think we can do this,” Mathias said finally, calmly, and then laid out his plan. The kids fell in line behind him as if he had a divine right to rule.
Colin was the biggest of them, and they helped him through first. (Ocean had to fight the urge to help them: Colin’s butt alone was wider than most of the gaps.) The Mississippian remained on the far side as they fed the others through one at a time. For the next twenty-two minutes there were few words, just focus, labored grunting, and a few squeals of dismay as someone accidentally touched a rope and had to begin anew.
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