by Susan Wiggs
Olivia’s smile didn’t falter. “I don’t know about cute, but I was definitely the chubby one.”
“Lost your baby fat, I see.”
“Dad.”
“How about a soda?” Terry asked her.
“I’d love one. Thanks.” She didn’t seem the least insulted by his candor as she graciously accepted a blue bottle of Saratoga Springs water and had a seat at the round table.
“So here you are, all grown-up,” Terry said. “Been what, ten years?”
“Nine.”
“Man. Connor sure was crazy about you. Still single?”
“Dad, for chrissake—”
Terry waved him silent. “All right, all right, I’m sure you didn’t come here to get teased about your old girlfriend.”
“It’s fine,” Olivia assured him. “Really. I don’t mind hearing that Connor was crazy about me, although that’s not quite the way I remember it.”
Bringing her here was a bad idea, Connor thought. Why the hell had he brought her here?
Terry chuckled. “He’s had other girlfriends since you, but none of them lasted.”
“Neither did I,” she reminded him.
“Yeah, but that was because—”
“Hey, Dad.” Ready to change the subject, Connor said, “Olivia found this old photograph. We were wondering if you could tell us anything about it.”
Olivia handed over the yellowed snapshot. “It was developed in August 1977. The guy in the picture is my father.”
When Connor’s father saw the photograph, his face changed. He went from mild and congenial to tense and agitated. He quickly handed the print back to Olivia. “That’s a picture of Mariska Majesky,” he said. “She’s Helen and Leo’s daughter. She’s been gone twenty years, maybe thirty.”
“You mean she passed away?”
“I mean she’s gone. Took off one day and no one ever saw her again. She was always the restless type,” he added. “Had a habit of taking off for a while, but she always came back to see her kid. Up until that last time, I guess. Mariska up and left, and no one ever saw her again.”
“She had a kid.” Connor looked at Olivia and they both had the same thought. Jenny.
“Was she married?” Olivia asked, her voice unsteady. “Or…involved?”
“I reckon you should talk to your father, ma’am,” Terry said.
As she left the small, cluttered apartment, Olivia felt as though something had been sucked out of her. She must’ve looked that way, too, because Connor put one hand at the small of her back to steady her. She wasn’t sure how he had come by this latent sense of chivalry, but he was careful with her in a way no other man had ever been.
“I keep thinking there must be a zillion explanations,” she said to him, “but they’re all just excuses.”
“We could still be drawing the wrong conclusion,” Connor cautioned. “Maybe there’s no mystery at all about who Jenny’s father is.”
“Your dad knows,” Olivia insisted. “You saw his face. He just didn’t want to say.” She’d hoped it was some local guy—anyone but Philip Bellamy—but based on Terry Davis’s discomfiture and his insistence that she talk to her father, her certainty was hardening fast. She stopped walking and held the photograph in front of Connor. “Take a good look. See my dad’s chin?” She pointed out the Cary Grant–style dimple. “Jenny has that, but her mother doesn’t.”
He smiled. “It’s not exactly unique.”
“It’s a recessive trait, like blue eyes. According to the laws of genetics, a person with a cleft chin always has at least one parent with one.”
“You won’t know anything for sure until you ask your father about her,” Connor said, digging his keys out of his pocket.
Olivia couldn’t forget the way Terry Davis had avoided her eyes. She looked around the parking lot, at the world that hadn’t changed one iota in the past few minutes. It was an illusion, though. A fundamental shift had occurred. The earth had slipped its bonds and was slowly spinning off course. “I don’t really need to ask. I know. The laws of genetics aside, you can see by the way he looks in this picture that he was with this…Mariska when he was engaged to my mother. God, maybe even after he married my mother. And Jenny Majesky is…”
She wobbled a bit, and Connor helped her into the truck. She felt like the victim of a violent accident as she spoke her next thought aloud. “I have a sister.” A sister. A sister. The word reverberated through her on a wave of disbelief.
“This is all speculation.”
“We both know it’ll be confirmed.”
“And what if it is? Would that be such a bad thing, having a half sister?”
“God, no. The bad part is that we grew up not knowing each other.” I have a sister. She wondered what her life would have been like, had she known Jenny through the years. Someone to share secrets and jokes, to give her advice or quarrel with her. Maybe Olivia’s childhood wouldn’t have been so lonely. Maybe she would have had more self-confidence.
“What do I do now?” she wondered aloud. “Is it possible Jenny doesn’t know who her father is? I can’t just walk up to her and ask.”
“Call your father,” Connor suggested. “Ask him yourself.”
“I can’t do it by phone. I need to talk to him in person. I need to see his face.”
Connor nodded. “You’re right.” He turned on his signal and headed up the river road. “What time do you want to leave?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Tomorrow,” he said. “For the city. I think we should leave by seven in the morning. Can you be ready that early?”
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“Taking you to see your father.”
Olivia was incredulous. “Why would you do that?”
“Because I’m a good guy. Always have been, which is something we haven’t really talked about yet.”
“Wait a minute. You’re taking me to the city?”
“First thing in the morning. This secret’s been kept for a long time. It can keep one more night.”
“Just like that? We’re going to drop everything and go to the city?”
He balanced his wrists casually atop the steering wheel. “That’s the beauty of being self-employed. We get to drop everything if we want to.”
“But you don’t have to drive me. I could always take the train.”
“Not this time.”
Her heart lifted. She didn’t know why he was offering this kindness. She was almost afraid to trust it. “It’s a three-hour drive.”
“You don’t think we can find something to talk about for three hours?” Though he kept his eyes on the road straight ahead, he grinned. “I think we’ve got plenty to talk about, Lolly.”
CAMP KIOGA TRADITIONS
Camp Kioga serves young people, ages eight to sixteen. One of the most important Kioga traditions is continuity. Campers of good character are invited to serve as counselors as soon as they earn their high-school diploma and are certified in lifesaving and water-safety techniques.
Nineteen
Summer 1997
Following high school graduation, Lolly had mixed feelings about returning to Camp Kioga to be a counselor, but as a Bellamy, she didn’t have much choice. It was a family tradition that all Bellamys served as camp counselors, and Lolly was no exception.
And maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. After the summer she was twelve, she had learned to hate camp just a little less. The reason for this could be summed up in two words: Connor Davis. What took root and grew that first summer was an unexpected friendship, and for the next two summers, the friendship flourished. Even though she thought he was rude and he said she was a prissy know-it-all, somehow they just clicked.
When she was with him, hiking or kayaking or serving on breakfast duty or facing off over a rainy-day game of Scrabble, she was content in the moment. With Connor, she didn’t have to be a certain way. He didn’t expect her to have good grades or important friends or prizes for pian
o and art. He didn’t expect her to act like the class clown. She just acted like herself. Just Lolly.
Subsequent summers—following seventh and then eighth grades—were no exception. Even though she and Connor might circle each other warily and trade insults back and forth, their taunting was built on a bedrock foundation of something mutual and unexpected—respect and friendship.
There was no obvious reason that they should be friends. He was this giant boy, an athlete, with a difficult mother and stepfather in a working-class life in Buffalo, and a father who kept breaking his heart, year in and year out. She was an unhappy girl with too much riding on her shoulders. In other words, a total mismatch. Except they clicked. From the first day they’d met at the age of twelve, and learned too much about each other, they had shared a quirky friendship.
Each summer, they would meet again and pick up where they had left off, as though they had never been apart. Then it would be a long season of kitchen raids at midnight, dumb but hilarious pranks played on counselors or other campers. They would team up for anything requiring skill and brains because he always had the skill and she had the brains.
Eventually, they told each other even more secrets. Connor confessed his shame over his father’s drinking and his unrequited crush on Evelyn Waller. Lolly admitted her favorite subject in school was fiber arts and that she was obsessed with her idol, Martha Stewart. He challenged her to be better, braver and more confident than she was, and he supported her when she was down. He treated her like an equal. Like one of the guys. She liked that because it was a way to get close to him without the awkward boy-girl tension.
Each Labor Day, Connor returned to Buffalo and she to New York, and they didn’t speak or see each other between summers. Sometimes she would think about writing him a letter but she never had anything to say: Dear Connor. My life sucks. Who wanted to read that?
She supposed she could make stuff up. Some of the girls she knew at school did that. But she couldn’t imagine how making up stories about her fabulous life would make it suck less.
Then, without warning or explanation, the friendship ended. The summer following ninth grade, Lolly arrived at camp expecting to meet Connor again, but he never showed up. When she screwed up enough courage to ask his father about him, Mr. Davis would say only, “My boy’s got a job in Buffalo this summer. He won’t be coming.”
When Lolly finished tenth grade, her mother thought it was time for her to see the world, and took her to visit the capitals of Europe. Not to be out-done, her father claimed the entire summer after eleventh grade, whisking her off on a Mediterranean cruise.
It all sounded fantastic. It should have been fantastic. Yet the pressure robbed something from the experience. Her parents expected everything of her—perfect grades, perfect test scores, prizes at music competitions and science fairs. “I just want you to get into a good college,” her mother maintained, though she never explained why. As far as Lolly could tell, going to Yale and marrying a Yale man had brought Pamela Lightsey no joy, just a lot of money and a divorce. It made Lolly wonder why her mother insisted getting into the perfect college was the key to some magical kingdom.
Now she was done with high school and had been accepted to Columbia, which she hoped would fulfill her obligation to be her parents’ trophy daughter. This was to be the last summer of her childhood, and she had come back to Camp Kioga.
She considered staying away, knowing her grandparents would understand. Then a phone call from Nana made up Lolly’s mind for her. “Connor Davis will be working at Camp Kioga this summer,” Nana had said. “I thought you’d like to know.”
“This year, things are going to be totally different,” declared Dare Yates, Lolly’s closest cousin.
“No shit, Sherlock,” said Frankie, who was Dare’s sister, older by a year. “We get to be in charge.”
“I just hope being a counselor is as good as it looked when we were kids,” Lolly said, walking out on the porch of their bungalow to shake the mud from her hiking boots.
Frankie looked around the cottage the three of them would be sharing for the summer. “This is nice,” she said. “Why is it so nice in here?”
“You can thank Lolly for that,” Dare said. “She got here a day early and fixed up our cabin.”
Lolly was pleased that her cousins had noticed. It had taken so little to make their army-barracks-plain cabin more pleasant. She’d raided the camp’s storage sheds and trunks, reclaiming treasures from summers past. She’d covered the bunks with colorful tartan blankets, added a braided rug, some old Adirondack twig chairs and a rustic table. Nana had encouraged her to help herself to left-behind crafts projects—a birch-bark sign with Kioga spelled out in twigs, some lanterns with parchment panes, even a handwoven doormat. Jars of wildflowers brightened the windowsills.
“It’s great, Lolly,” Frankie called through the screen door. “I think you have a flair for this.”
“That’s me,” Lolly said. “The girl with the flair.”
She and her cousins were in charge of the youngest group of campers—the Fledglings. The little girls had arrived the day before, and had survived the first night with just a few tears and no hysteria. Lolly loved the way the girls giggled and shrieked when they were having fun. She even liked bandaging their hurts and comforting them when they were afraid—and for some of these kids, she suspected, that was going to be every night. She thought particularly of little Ramona Fisher, who had cowered in her bunk last night like a bivouacked soldier under fire.
Dare joined Lolly on the porch and lifted a pair of field glasses to her eyes, aiming toward the lake. “God, I love this view.” She wasn’t talking about the lake, though. Lolly knew that. The lenses were trained inexorably on the swimming area. The male counselors and Fledgling boys were already there, doing routine swim tests in order to form skill-level groups.
The three cousins lined up at the porch railing, passing the binoculars between them. The counselors wore shorts, muscle shirts and whistles around their necks. They joked around with the kids, trying to put them at ease.
Even from a distance, and without the binoculars, Lolly felt a thrill of recognition. The tall, dark-haired boy was Connor Davis.
She hadn’t seen him up close yet. The arrival of the campers had been too chaotic, taking up all their time and attention. And when it was her turn with the field glasses, she had to pretend she was giving all the guys equal scrutiny. She wasn’t, of course.
Connor Davis had grown taller than ever, and although he was still skinny, his shoulders were broader. He was tanned already, maybe from working outdoors with his father, and he looked completely at ease with the kids, as though he was born to do this.
Lolly suppressed a sigh, wondering what had changed between them, and what would stay the same, if there was any remnant of their friendship left or if they’d be strangers now. She knew she’d changed in some obvious ways. She was nearly eighteen now, and she’d seen a good bit of the world. She spoke French and had passed five Advanced Placement exams.
The fundamental Lolly hadn’t changed, though. She was still the overweight sidekick to prettier, more popular girls. Instead of going to school dances with boys, she always served on the decoration committee and was almost embarrassingly good at it. During her high-school years, she had magically transformed the gym into a Wild West wonderland, an undersea fantasy, even a scene from the hit movie Men In Black. She had grown adept at hiding the fact that she was lonely and unhappy. Her good humor and can-do attitude were a careful facade. People thought she was perfectly content being the gym decorator, the best friend, the brainy but unattractive honor student. Lolly tried to accept herself as such. She tried to be happy—or at least content. Sometimes it even worked and she forgot herself for a while, but then something would happen to remind her.
Like today. She had to put on a swimsuit, possibly the least-flattering garment ever invented. The entire morning was going to be devoted to water-safety skills, a key component
of the Kioga experience. It had always been a point of pride with Lolly’s grandparents that every single camper learned water safety, even if it meant the fat ones had to stuff themselves like sausages into skins of spandex.
Frankie propped her elbows on the railing to steady the field glasses. “Is it totally strange to like a guy’s legs?” she asked in a dreamy voice.
“Probably,” Dare replied, equally dreamy. “Hand me the binoculars and I’ll let you know.”
Lolly picked up her clipboard and looked over the day’s schedule, pretending not to listen. Sometimes it was amusing to hear her cousins mooning over various guys. Most of the time it was just tedious. She didn’t understand how they—how every girl their age—could be so totally obsessed with the way people looked. Then, sneaking a glance at the tall, dark-haired boy at the lakeshore, she felt a deep inner tug, and realized maybe she understood, just a little.
“We’d better get going,” Dare said, grabbing her makeup bag. “We’ve got to get the girls in their swim groups, and after morning snack, I want to start on the choral reading for Friday night. I thought maybe a Little Mermaid theme would be fun.” Dare loved making a production of things. She was good at it, the way Lolly was good at transformation and illusion. Together, they’d make a good team this summer.
Frankie put away the field glasses, and they went into the cabin, pulling her T-shirt off over her head as she crossed the room. Lolly felt a familiar twinge of envy. It must be nice, she thought, to be so unself-conscious about your body. Frankie and Dare deserved to be. They were both slender, and Frankie had secretly had her belly button pierced.
Lolly could hear her cousins horsing around in the adjacent room as they got ready. She envied them being sisters, too. Even though the two of them fought, they were loyal about the things that mattered, and shared a bond that would endure all their lives.