Last year, for Christmas, the girls got a Wii, and for a while, they spent all their time playing video games. Their favorite was Mario Kart. Iris liked to play as one of the grown-up princesses, but Tilly (for reasons that may or may not have been significant) was drawn to the baby characters. Most often, she’d choose to be Baby Peach, who was admittedly adorable: a little golden-haired cherub, crown on her head, pacifier between her lips. Occasionally, it would strike you as funny, the idea of a baby driving a race car, speeding through factories and shopping malls, barreling into gold mines, soaring down mountains, gliding across rainbow tracks in the depths of space.
One day, you were sitting with the girls but not paying much attention, when you heard Tilly make a joke: “Do you think this would be safe, Mommy? To let a baby drive through a volcano?”
You laughed, surprised that she’d thought of it, too. And then you put down your phone, or whatever stupid thing you’d been focusing on, and you watched your children play their game, rooting silently for Tilly to win. Something about it made you want to cry: brave Baby Peach, poised before the volcano. Baby Peach, starting up her motor and driving right into the fire.
You lead her over to the bench where you’ve left your things and start repacking the picnic food.
“What are you doing?” she asks. “I thought we were going to eat here.”
“I think maybe we can find a nice spot somewhere else,” you say.
The group of kids have turned away from the statue to watch you. One of them fake-coughs, loudly. “Loser,” he calls, tacking it on to the end of the noise.
“What?” asks Tilly. She turns around to look at the kids, bewildered.
“Sweetie,” you say. “Let’s go.”
“Who’s a loser?” she asks the group at large.
For a minute, no one answers. Some of the kids look down or hide their laughing mouths behind their hands. Some are still staring openly, enjoying the show. Where the hell are these kids’ teachers?
Then a voice from the back of the crowd—you can’t tell who’s talking or even if it’s a boy or a girl—yells out, “You are, you freak!”
It’s like they all have permission to talk, suddenly. “Freak!” yells someone else. “No one cares about stupid statues,” calls someone else.
You watch Tilly’s face as she begins to understand, finally, that they’re making fun of her. You watch her crumble right in front of you. She opens her mouth and lets out a surprised little wail. And then, just before the tears start, she turns around and runs.
She’s not a fast runner, but neither are you. You follow as she races back the way you came, out of the clearing, into the trees. You keep her in sight, but you can’t quite catch up.
“Tilly,” you call. “Wait! Tilly!” You’re already out of breath.
She’s not stopping. You follow her out across the footbridge and into the parking lot. You don’t think she has a plan, exactly; she just wants to get away. But the parking lot isn’t very wide, just a pull-off directly from the parkway. If she keeps going, she’ll reach a bike path, a narrow strip of grass, and then the road itself.
The only reason she doesn’t make it—the metal barriers and the cars flying past—is an uneven patch of asphalt in the parking lot. You thank God for the loose gravel, for her clumsy feet. Thank God for her badly skinned knees, bleeding through her jeans. Thank God for her wrist, for the tiny bone that snaps when she lands and prevents her from going any farther. Because you weren’t going to be able to stop her. Your running and screaming and calling her name . . . it did nothing. You don’t know why you thought you’d be able to keep her safe. You don’t know how you thought you’d be able to do this alone.
One year, you spent the night before Mother’s Day in the emergency room at Children’s because Iris was vomiting blood. She was maybe a year and a half old. It turned out not to be as bad as it sounded—she just had a regular old stomach virus, and her esophagus had become irritated from all that puking—but you were there for a good long stretch, maybe from 6 p.m. until three or four in the morning, because that’s just how long these things take. Iris had thrown up on your shirt in the elevator on the way up from the parking garage—no big deal, the quantities were pretty small at that point—and when the intake nurse asked what color the vomit was, you just showed her the stain. At 11 p.m., you’d seen a doctor and had been sent to an inner waiting room to try to coax Iris to drink something, anything. (You couldn’t, which is why you were there so much longer; eventually, they had to give her IV fluids to rehydrate her.) The local news was on, tossing out a progression of increasingly horrifying stories as you held your squirming girl and wiped away each flavor of juice she drooled back out. Against all this, you became aware of a flurry of activity and looked up to see a stretcher rushing past, a child moaning, a mother chasing behind. The TV news had moved on to something fluffier now, because they wanted to end on a happy note, because it was almost Mother’s Day. You were happy to sit there all night, if necessary, happy to be a low priority. You were well aware that there were a lot of mothers in the world who were in worse places than you.
Today’s trip to the ER is similar on the surface: another long wait, another injury that’s low priority and not life-threatening. But not all trauma can be measured by X-ray. Tilly is uncharacteristically quiet and clingy, and you don’t want to take your hands off her. Eventually Josh arrives, having sent Iris to a friend’s house, and the three of you sit silently, late into the night, huddled together, watching Disney Channel sitcoms on a screen above your heads.
At some endless moment of night, you search through your purse, desperate for distraction, and your fingers land on one of the flyers you’ve been mailing out for Scott all week. Josh is sitting on the exam table, holding up Tilly, who’s fallen asleep against him, her new purple cast resting heavily on her stomach. He looks as exhausted and frightened as you feel.
You’re almost finished here; all you need is to be discharged, and you can go home. But that isn’t a particularly reassuring thought.
You hand Josh the pamphlet, and he looks at it without seeming to see it.
“I think,” you say, but your voice doesn’t come out right, so you clear your throat and start again. “I think this is something we might want to consider.”
• • •
In another world, you make it work. In another world, you never even hear the name “Scott Bean.” Or you do, and you maybe even subscribe to his newsletter, but on the night that he comes to speak at a library not far from your house, Iris is sent home from school with a stomach bug, or Josh is out of town and you don’t want to hire a sitter. You figure you’ll catch him next time. Later, when you hear his name on the news and it sounds familiar, you shake your head and think, “What a wacko.” It doesn’t even occur to you to say, “That could have been me.” Because you know yourself, and it goes without saying. You would never get mixed up in something like that. End of story.
Instead, though, this is where you are. Right here, in the only world you’ve ever known. Sitting with your husband in the last shambles of the day. He’s got the Camp Harmony flyer in his hand.
“So,” you ask him. “What’s life without risk?”
He smiles, just a little. “How bad could it be?”
You finish it up: “You’ve gotta do something.”
And just like that, you’ve decided.
You stand up on your tiptoes and kiss your husband. Rough bristles, soft lips, and the relief of being together in this life. For the first time in a long time, you feel something very close to hope.
chapter 37
Iris
July 14, 2012: New Hampshire
When the police car pulls up, I’m over by the chicken coop, feeding Henny Penny and her babies. I think I’m the first one to see them; everyone else is busy with cleaning the cabins and doing laundry and all that. I stand and watch wh
ile two policemen get out of the car and go up to knock on the office door. But nobody answers because nobody’s in there, and that’s when one of them looks around and sees me.
The two cops come over and introduce themselves, and ask if I know where they can find Scott. I feel really funny about it, because they’re being nice and I know that cops are supposed to help people. But I wonder if Scott’s in trouble. And I wonder if I want Scott to be in trouble.
Anyway, I go with them to help them find Scott, who’s in the dining hall, cleaning up from breakfast. He looks surprised to see them, but not worried, and then the three of them go up to the office and stay in there for a long time, like maybe an hour.
After they come out, the cops leave and Scott stays. That’s good, right? They didn’t arrest him. But he doesn’t look too happy when he comes to lunch. And as soon as everyone’s finished eating, he stands up and bangs his spoon against his glass.
“Emergency meeting,” he says. “Harmony Circle in five minutes.”
And I follow him. I follow him because I’m supposed to. Because those are the rules, and when you’re here, every adult is your parent. All of us Core Family, kids and adults, form a loose line and follow him into the woods.
We get out there, into the clearing, and we sit down in a circle. No one bothers to make a campfire. It’s still the middle of the day.
Scott stands in front of us, doing that thing where he looks at us for a minute before he talks.
“So,” he says, finally. “Help me understand what happened here. Did you guys wake up this morning—or maybe yesterday or sometime last week—and say, ‘Huh. Looks like a pretty good day to destroy Camp Harmony’?”
No one answers. At the beginning of the summer, I think people would have been yelling out answers, or arguing with him. But now it’s like everyone’s a kid, even the adults, and Scott’s the parent or the teacher or something. We all know we’re in trouble, and we all know we should probably just shut up and let him talk.
“Nobody?” Scott says, after a minute. “Interesting. Because actually, that would have been the best-case scenario. If we’ve got an evil genius here somewhere, executing a brilliant and villainous plan, then maybe there’s hope for us getting back on track. But if not, if you’re all a bunch of idiots who just stumbled into this, then God help us all.”
“Just tell us, Scott,” says my dad. “What’s going on? What did the police want?”
Scott smiles, but not in a happy way. “What did the police want? They wanted a whole bunch of things. They wanted to know if I was aware that there’s a group of people, led by Candy’s father and kidnapper, calling themselves the Families Against Scott Bean. Apparently, they’re going around telling people that we’re running some sort of cult out here. They’ve got a Facebook page and everything.
“Second, they wanted to show me a picture that popped up today—also on Facebook—of a child in a cage. Allegedly one of our campers.” He looks straight at me. I look down at the grass. “They showed me a picture, and I explained that it was part of a game, but they didn’t seem too impressed.
“Finally, they wanted me to know that they got a phone call from Frances Fincher, alerting them that someone at this camp has been searching for underage pornography on her phone.”
A lot of the grown-ups start talking now and asking questions all at once. Scott stops them by raising his hand.
“None of it’s true,” he says. “It can all be explained. And as you can see, I’m not behind bars. But it’s out there. People are hearing about it and making up their minds about what to believe. You think we’re going to recover from that type of damage? You think we’ve got Guest Campers lined up to join us? No. Because as soon as a story like that gets printed, it becomes the truth. You understand? We’re not ordinary people anymore. As far as the whole wide world is concerned, you’re all members of a cult. And me? I’m your leader, I’m your Jim Jones. This is who we are now; it’s our identity. And if you think we can change it, you’re wrong.”
He pauses and rubs his hands over his face. Then he looks around at us, all of us in a circle, and smiles at us in a way that’s sad and kind of tender. “It’s just us here, guys,” he says. “So tell me: Where did we go wrong? When did you stop believing we had something good going on here, something worthwhile?”
“Scott,” says Tom. “I think you’re blowing this out of proportion. I don’t think this is as bad as you think.”
Scott shrugs. “Well, I don’t know. Anyway, it’s over.”
He reaches a hand behind him, like maybe he’s tucking his shirt into the back of his pants. And when he brings it forward again, I can see he’s got a gun.
chapter 38
Tilly
Date and Location Unknown
There’s an odd detail in the margin of the seventeenth panel of the Hammond Tapestry: nestled among the usual marginalia of fruit and cherubs is a black object, half hidden in the embroidered grass. It’s small, almost a smudge, but its shape is distinctive; it appears to be a firearm, most likely a revolver.
Scholars are divided over the significance of this object. Elsewhere in the tapestry, marginal embroidery is used to illuminate some facet of the associated main panel, and Panel 17 is a crucial one, as it depicts the moment when Alexandra Hammond first becomes aware of the charismatic speaker Scott Bean and his teachings on Harmonious Parenting. In a Chinese restaurant—you can see, if you squint, the zodiac place mats on the table—two adults and a young girl watch as a second girl kneels beside their table and presses her face to the floor. The girl’s behavior is enigmatic: Is she praying? Expressing submission? Enduring some obscure punishment by humiliation? Posture and body positioning are chosen very deliberately in the design of the tapestry; it’s unlikely that the ambiguity is accidental.
What we know for sure is this: Alexandra watches as her daughter bends to kiss the dirty tiles of the floor at Bamboo Garden. And somehow this moment is linked inextricably to an ugly black blotch that may or may not be a gun.
What if we say that the final section of the Hammond Tapestry has been missing for as long as anyone can remember? What if we say that maybe it’s better if we never find it?
chapter 39
Iris
July 14, 2012: New Hampshire
Everything that happens now is fast and strange and wrong. Scott has a gun, and he’s holding it up in the air, not pointing it at anyone, just showing us that he has it.
There’s noise and movement. I am screaming; everyone is screaming and pushing and starting to run, but Tilly is staring and silent. I take her arm and try to pull her away; maybe we can run into the trees, maybe we can escape through the forest. I can’t tell if things are happening fast or slow.
“Stop,” says Scott, and I do. I turn back to hear what he’s going to say. “Seriously?” he asks. “Even now, you think that’s where this is going?”
His eyes meet mine, and he gives me a tiny smile. “Don’t any of you trust me at all?”
My mother is pulling on the back of my shirt, and I’m staggering back, but I struggle against her, because I need to stay here. I need to keep watching Scott. He needs to know that I do trust him. I trust him and I keep on trusting him, right up until he lifts up the gun and sticks it inside his own mouth.
I scream. Someone yells, “No!” Maybe we all yell no. Maybe we all just stay there forever, all of us in the woods, all of us yelling no.
The gun jerks in the air, and there’s noise and smoke. For a while, that’s all there is; I am made of that noise, I am made of that smoke. And then someone grabs my shoulders and pulls me away, my heels dragging against the dirt. And I don’t understand why we’re all leaving. And I don’t understand why Scott is lying on the ground.
After that, I don’t know what happens exactly. We’re back at the camp, we’re in our cabin, everyone’s crying, and my parents make a circle with their a
rms to hold me and Tilly inside. But Scott stays, lying where he falls. He stays with the dirt and the pine needles, with the smoke and the noise. He stays and stays, even after the rest of us are gone.
chapter 40
Alexandra
March 2013: New Hampshire
Among the million or more unhappy facts you learn that day—how the police go about testing a witness’s hands for gunpowder residue, what a human being’s brain matter looks like when it’s spattered on the trunk of a tree—one of them is this: his name was not Scott Bean.
The name on his birth certificate and his driver’s license (neither of which has ever been seen by anyone at Camp Harmony, because why would any of you think to ask?) is Jesse Scott. It means nothing to you, although Iris seems to find it significant: she bursts out with a confused story about stickers and fire and Scott being mean to a brother he didn’t really have. But like so many other details you collect during these days, this one doesn’t seem to slot into any particularly useful space.
It’s true, at least, that he grew up in Montana. He was born to a teenage girl (unmarried) and was given up for adoption: not at birth, but at the age of three. This, at least, seems significant, though exactly what it signifies remains unclear. He ended up in the foster care system, but never stayed with a single family for more than a year; he had trouble in school, was branded a difficult child, and managed to scrape by on the right side of delinquency until he turned eighteen and could be released to take care of himself.
So that explains it, maybe. But which part? His empathy toward children who were different or his grandiose (and sometimes paranoid) belief that he was the only one who could possibly help them? Is it more important that he was fired from a teaching job for striking a kid—another thing that Iris inexplicably knows before you do—or that every child who spent time at Camp Harmony seemed to improve under his care? Which matters more: that for a short time, you were happier than you’d been in years, or that you’re not sure you’ll ever stop hearing gunshots in your sleep? That he lied to you in order to convince you to give up every piece of the life you knew, or that you’re still not sure you were wrong to do it?
Harmony Page 25