Summer at Willow Lake

by Susan Wiggs

  “Would you have listened?” Her father cocked an eyebrow.

  “Are you kidding? He’s Rand Whitney. He looks like Brad Pitt.”

  “Which should have been your first warning sign,” Earl pointed out. “Never trust a man who gets collagen injections.”

  “He doesn’t—” Olivia cut herself off. “It was just the one time, for that Vanity Fair feature.” The magazine had made her even more crazy about him, emphasizing his blond good looks, his effortless charm, his insistence that being a Whitney didn’t define him, his assurance that he worked for a living just like everyone else. Well, like everyone else, except for that handy trust fund.

  In the article, Olivia had been reduced to a single line: “Rand Whitney is protective of his privacy. When asked about romance, he says only, ‘I’ve met someone special. She’s wonderful, and that’s all I can tell you.’”

  There was only one problem. A dozen other women also thought the statement was about them. When the article came out, Olivia and Rand had laughed about it, and she had been touched by the pride that lit his face. He had his insecurities like everyone else.

  And now he had his freedom.

  She resigned herself to spending the evening with her father and Earl. It was one of the first warm spring nights of the season, so Earl insisted on bringing over the coq au vin to the patio for dining alfresco. She, her dad and Earl even played the toasting game. They went around the table, taking turns finding one thing to drink to, the goal being to prove to themselves that no matter what else happened in the world, they had something to be grateful for.

  “Voice dictation software,” Earl said, raising a glass. “I despise typing.”

  “I’m toasting guys who can cook,” Philip said. “Thanks for dinner.” He turned to Olivia. “Your turn.”

  “Once-a-month heartworm pills,” she said with a fond glance at Barkis.

  Her father regarded her with kindly eyes. “Too bad they don’t make them for humans.”

  He and Earl had seen her through this two times before. They knew the drill. And the depressing thing about that was, so did she. She felt…stuck. There was a point in her past that still held her captive. She knew what that moment was. She’d been seventeen, spending her last summer before college at camp, working as a counselor. That had been the only time she’d truly given her heart—fully, fearlessly, without reservation. It had ended badly and she didn’t know it at the time, but she had gotten stuck there, mired in emotional quicksand. She still hadn’t figured out how to move on.

  Maybe her grandmother was offering her an opportunity to do that. “You know what?” she said, jumping up from the table. “I don’t have time to sit around and wallow.”

  “So we’re practicing speed breakups now?”

  “Sorry, but you guys will have to excuse me. I need to pack my bags,” she said, taking Nana’s photo album out of her briefcase. “I’m starting a new project first thing in the morning.” She took a deep breath, surprised to feel a beat of hopeful excitement. “I’m going away for the summer.”

  Three

  “This is a bad idea,” said Pamela Bellamy as she opened the door to let Olivia in. The opulent apartment on Fifth Avenue had a museum-like quality, with its polished parquet floors and beautifully displayed art. To Olivia, however, it was simply the place she had grown up. To her, the Renoir in the foyer was no more remarkable than the Tupperware in the kitchen.

  Yet even as a child, she’d felt like a visiting alien, out of place amid the Gilded Age elegance of her own home. She preferred cozy things—African violets and overstuffed chairs, Fiestaware and afghans. There was a long history of disconnect between mother and daughter. Olivia had been a lonely child, her parents’ one and only and as such, she’d always felt a certain pressure to be all things to them. She’d applied herself diligently to her studies and her music, hoping that a perfect report card or a music prize would warm the chill that seemed to surround her family for as long as she could remember.

  “Hello to you, too, Mom.” Olivia set her bag on the hall table and gave her a hug. Her mother smelled of Chanel No. 5 and of the cigarette she sneaked on the east balcony after breakfast each morning.

  “Why on earth would you take on such a project?” her mother demanded.

  So far, all Pamela knew was what Olivia had told her on the phone the previous night—that it was over between her and Rand, and that she was going to spend the summer renovating Camp Kioga. “Because Nana asked me to,” she said softly. It was the simplest explanation she could come up with.

  “It’s absurd,” Pamela said, straightening the shawl collar of Olivia’s sweater. “You’ll wind up spending the entire summer in the wilderness.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “It is a bad thing.”

  “I tried to tell you and Dad that every summer when I was growing up, but you never listened.”

  “I thought you liked going to summer camp.” Her mother held out her hands, palms up, in a helpless gesture.

  Olivia had no reply. The misconception summed up her entire childhood.

  “I assume you’ve already discussed this with your father,” Pamela said, her voice iced with indifference.

  “Yes. Nana and Granddad are his parents, after all.” Olivia felt weary already. Her mother had a way of wearing her down with a steady rain of words. Yet Olivia was determined not to be talked out of this. At least her father hadn’t tried to stand in her way. Last night, when she’d explained her sudden decision to take on the Camp Kioga project, he’d been supportive and encouraging. By noon today, arrangements were already under way. She had leased a huge SUV for the summer, organized her office for her absence and arranged for another real-estate enhancement firm to take referrals and maintain her current properties.

  “You’re running away,” her mother said. “Again.”

  “I guess I am.” Olivia took out her day runner and flipped it open to a lengthy list she’d made in the taxi ride over here.

  “Darling, I’m so sorry.” Her mother looked genuinely crestfallen.

  “Yes, well. It happens.” Just once, Olivia wished she could snuggle up to her mother and cry on her shoulder. It didn’t work like that, though. Not between her and Pamela. “I’m sorry too, Mom,” she said. “I know you had your hopes up this time.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, never mind me.” Her mother made a clucking sound. “I simply want you to be happy, that’s all. That’s my main concern.”

  “I’ll be all right,” Olivia assured her. To her amazement, a telltale gleam of tears flashed in her mother’s eyes. She realized Pamela was taking this harder than she was. “It’s not the end of the world, right?” Olivia said. “There are worse things in life than being dumped by your boyfriend. And now that I think about it, I wasn’t even dumped.”

  “You weren’t?” she patted her forehead and cheeks with a tissue.

  “Rand asked me to move to L.A. with him.”

  “I didn’t know that. Dear, perhaps you ought to consider—”

  “Don’t even go there.”

  “But once you take that step, once you’re sharing a life, you’ll both realize you’re happy together.”

  “I think I’ve realized we’re happy apart.”

  “Nonsense. Rand Whitney is perfect for you. I don’t know why you’re giving up without a fight.”

  Olivia’s heart sank. This was what made Pamela Lightsey Bellamy tick—the quest to look happy and successful at all costs, even if it meant a fight. Even if it meant hiding the fact that you still hadn’t gotten over a divorce, seventeen years earlier.

  Once, long ago, Olivia had asked her mother if she was happy. The question had excited a short laugh of disbelief. “Don’t be silly,” Pamela had said. “I am supremely happy and it would seem ungracious to appear any other way.”

  Which wasn’t even close to providing the answer Olivia sought, but she had dropped the subject.

  “I’m done with Ran
d Whitney,” she concluded, “and you’re sweet to worry about me. But my mind is made up. I’m going to do this for Nana. I wanted to grab a few things while I’m here.”

  “This is insane,” her mother said. “I don’t know what Jane was thinking, asking you to do such a thing.”

  “Maybe she was thinking that I’m good enough at my job to make a success of this.”

  Pamela stiffened her spine. “Of course she was. And she is a very lucky woman, because that place is going to look amazing once you finish with it.”

  “Thank you, Mom. You’re absolutely right.” The distress on her mother’s face wasn’t all about Rand. Olivia knew that the upcoming anniversary put her mother in an awkward spot. Pamela’s father, Samuel Lightsey, was best friends with Charles Bellamy. This was probably another reason her mother had finalized the divorce on paper but never in her heart. Her family’s close ties with the Bellamys created a bond she couldn’t escape.

  “Mom, do you think you’ll go?”

  “It would be petty to do otherwise.”

  “Good for you,” Olivia said. “It’ll be fine. Listen, I have to dig out some things from the basement.” She studied her mother’s lovely, composed face. “My duffel bag and sports equipment. And I need Dad’s old footlocker,” she added. Then her heart sank. “Tell me you didn’t throw it out.”

  “I never throw anything away. Ever,” her mother said.

  Which explained much about Pamela. Fresh as yesterday, Olivia could remember the day her father had moved out. She could still picture the way he looked through a blur of tears, as if he was on the other side of a rain-smudged window. He’d sat down so he could look her in the eye. “I have to go, honey,” he’d told her.

  “No, you don’t. But you’re going to, anyway.”

  He’d refused to be dissuaded. The unspoken tension that had always existed between Olivia’s parents had finally reached the breaking point. It should have been a relief, but Olivia could never recall feeling relieved.

  “I’m leaving some boxes of my stuff in the basement,” her father had told her, “including all my sports equipment and camp gear. It’s all yours now.”

  Every once in a while, she’d take out his old Kioga sweatshirt and put it on, or wrap herself in the Hudson’s Bay blanket, which smelled of mothballs.

  She took the service elevator, descending alone into the bowels of the old building, and let herself into the storage unit. She found her duffel right away. The stiff canvas was covered with a patchwork of badges from Kioga, marking every summer from 1987 to 1994. Most campers avidly collected the coveted patches, each of which represented a magical summer at sleepaway camp. Not Olivia. Though she had dutifully sewn on her patches in order to keep from offending her grandparents, the colorful badges held no sentimental value for her. Nana and Granddad were convinced that the camp was Shangri-la and it would hurt their feelings to say otherwise.

  Olivia set aside the duffel bag and looked around the crowded but well-organized basement room, dank with disuse and old memories. There were framed photographs of Olivia and her father and leather-bound albums labeled Bellamy. Pulling out the large, heavy footlocker her father had left behind for Olivia all those years ago, she opened the lid and was hit with a musty smell she could immediately put a name to: camp. It was an unforgettable combination of mildew, wood smoke and outdoors, an essence that resisted laundering and airing out.

  Rifling through the locker, she helped herself to a lantern and a book on wilderness survival, and grabbed a vintage Kioga hooded sweatshirt with the words Camp Counselor stenciled on the back. In the Bellamy family, it wasn’t enough to be a camper. As each individual came of age, working as a counselor was a rite of passage. Olivia’s father, all her aunts and uncles had spent college summers there, leading camp activities by day and partying at night with the rest of the staff. Olivia and the next generation of cousins had done the same, right up until the camp had closed nine years ago. It was a summer that had begun with great promise but ended in disaster. She was surprised by how vividly she recalled the sounds and smells, the quality of the light and the stillness of the lake, the dizzying joy and nauseating disappointment she’d experienced that summer. I’m crazy for going back there, she thought.

  She stuffed a few key items of memorabilia into the duffel bags—the striped Hudson’s Bay blanket, the sweatshirt, an old tennis racquet that needed to be restrung. There were wooden pins with campers’ names burnt in, canoe paddles that had been painted with surprising skill, the shafts autographed by other campers. Songbooks, friendship bracelets, dipped candles and birch-bark craft projects—it was a treasure trove.

  The key to staging a property was in the details—the more authentic, the better. Things like this would bring the camp back to life, and she was counting on her aunts and uncles to contribute to the collection. In the bottom of the footlocker, she found a tennis cup, tarnished and battered. It had a pedestal, a domed lid and double handles. The piece would look handsome in the glass trophy case in the dining hall of the camp, assuming the display case was still there.

  When she picked up the tennis cup, something rolled around inside it. She pried off the lid, and an object fell out. A button? A cuff link. It, too, was wrought of tarnished silver, with a fish design—maybe a zodiac sign? She looked around for its mate, but there was only the one. She put the cuff link in her pocket and rubbed the trophy, trying to make out the engraving: Counselors Classic. First Place. Philip Bellamy. 1977. Apparently her father had won the cup at the annual staff games while working as a counselor at Camp Kioga that year. He would have been twenty-one, getting ready to go off for his senior year at college.

  She found an old photograph stuck down inside the cup. The edges of the picture were curled, the colors fading, but the image made her catch her breath. She saw her father as she had never seen him before, holding the sparkling new trophy aloft. He appeared to be laughing with joy, his head thrown back and his arm around a girl. No, a young woman.

  Olivia wiped the dusty photograph on her sleeve and angled it toward the light. On the back, the photo bore the date—August 1977—and nothing else. She studied the woman more closely. Long dark hair, cut in feathery layers, spilled loosely over the shoulders of her camp shirt. The abundant waves of hair framed an attractive face and a smile that might be tinged with a hint of mystery. With her full lips, high cheekbones and dark, almond-shaped eyes, the stranger was an exotic beauty whose looks contrasted with the ordinary shorts and shirt she wore.

  There was something in the way the man and woman in the photograph seemed bonded together that sent a chill of curiosity through Olivia. A certain familiarity—no, intimacy—was evident in their posture. Or maybe she was reading too much into it.

  Olivia knew she could ask her father who the stranger was. She was quite sure he’d remember a woman who could make him laugh the way he was laughing in the photograph. But she didn’t want to upset him, asking about an old girlfriend. There was probably a very good reason she was a stranger.

  Something about the old photograph bothered Olivia. She studied it a moment longer. Looked at the date again. August 1977. That was it. By August 1977, her father was engaged to her mother, and they married later that year, at Christmastime.

  So what was he doing with the woman in the photograph?

  CAMP KIOGA CODE OF CONDUCT

  Display of overly affectionate attention between males and females is discouraged. This applies to campers, counselors and staff members alike.

  Four

  August 1977

  “Philip, what are you doing?” asked Mariska Majesky, stepping into the bungalow.

  He stopped pacing and turned, his heart lifting at the sight of her in a beautiful chiffon cocktail dress and platform shoes, her dark, wavy hair swept up off suntanned shoulders.

  “Rehearsing,” he confessed, his chest filled with joy and dread, the intense emotions waging an undeclared war.

  She tilted her head to one side in that
adorable way she had of conveying curiosity. “Rehearsing what?”

  “I’m practicing what I’m going to say to Pamela when she gets back from Europe,” he explained. “Trying to figure out how to end our engagement.” Since his fiancée had gone overseas, there had been only a few brief, unsatisfactory phone conversations, a hasty flurry of postcards and aerograms. The Italian telephone system was famously unreliable, and destroying her dreams over a crackling transatlantic wire or in a letter didn’t cut it.

  Next week, she would return and then he’d tell her in person. It was going to turn him into the heel of the century.

  The only thing worse was spending the rest of his life with someone who didn’t own his heart the way Mariska did.

  Now Mariska grew serious, her full mouth forming a sad smile. Philip hugged her. She smelled fantastic, a heady mixture of flowers and fruit, and she fit just right in his arms, as though heaven itself had made her for him, exactly like the song said. Her nearness made him forget his worries about Pamela.

  “I picked these up at the one-hour-photo place today.” Mariska took an envelope out of her purse. “There’s a shot of us. I ordered double prints, so you can keep a copy.” Flipping through the snapshots of the day’s sporting events at the camp, she pulled out one of her and Philip, laughing in triumph as he held a bright silver trophy cup aloft.

  His heart constricted. He looked so damn happy. In that moment, he had been happy. Taking the tennis trophy down from the luggage rack, he put the snapshot inside it and replaced the lid. “Thank you,” he said.

  She crossed the room and kissed him. “We should go. It’s the last dance of the summer, and you know how I love dancing.”

  Each summer, the season ended with a series of rituals. Yesterday, the campers had all gone home. Today was the staff’s farewell, a dinner dance that would end at midnight. By this time tomorrow, nearly everyone else would be gone, the college-age counselors all heading back to school.