by Wendy Wunder
“Believing in what, flamingos? Hoping for what?” Bart stirred and then lifted his head, looking at her sleepily.
“Hope, my friend, is its own reward,” Elaine said as she walked down the hallway to put her coffee cup in the sink.
“Hope, Dr. Whittier, is a tease,” Cam called after her.
Bart jumped his front paws up to her knees and scratched at her jeans, reminding her that she had a promise of her own to keep. She called into the other room, “Mind if I borrow Bart? I promised him the ultimate puppy day.”
“Sure, just don’t tire him out.”
“Okay, buddy. Let’s go for a ride.”
Cam might not have believed in hope, but she believed in keeping her promises.
EIGHTEEN
CAM LET BART SIT ON HER LAP WHILE SHE DROVE ALONG THE OCEAN, hugging its deep blue curves before turning up the big hill to Avalon. Bart kept his little snout out the window the whole time, his tongue wagging behind him in the wind. He was a happy pup.
She played a little tug-of-war with him on the front lawn, fed him the special lamb-and-rice food she had brought with her from the vet’s office, and then she let him fall asleep in a sunny spot on the porch. She wandered around back to where her mother was on her knees in the dirt. Big bags of topsoil and fertilizer and trowels and seedlings were scattered around her.
“What’s all this?”
“I’m planting a garden. I saw you with the puppy. He’s adorable, but don’t let him in the house.” Her mom looked beautiful. She wore a wide-brimmed straw sunhat with a red scarf tied around it, a white peasant blouse, and a red skirt that circled around her. She stood up and wiped her forehead with the back of her brown-gloved hand.
“You look like the lady on the raisin box.”
“Is that good?”
“You’re just all, like, harvesty. Like you’re going to stomp on some grapes later.”
“Maybe I will.” Alicia held her arm up, her wrist cocked to the left, and hopped her knees up in the air.
“Since when are you into gardening?” Cam asked.
“One of those things I’ve always wanted to do and never had the time,” Alicia said as she threw her tools one by one back into the tool bucket.
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
“You’re supposed to say, ‘It won’t come up.’”
“What?”
“You had a favorite book as a toddler called The Carrot Seed. Do you remember it?” her mom asked, taking off her gloves and putting her arm around Cam’s shoulders.
“No.”
“A little boy planted a seed, and each of his family members stopped by to tell him, ‘It won’t come up.’ You used to giggle and recite, ‘It won’t come up,’ whenever I turned the page.”
“How did it end?” Cam said.
“Campbell. It was a children’s book. How do you think?”
“Joking, Mom, God. I miss the old sarcastic you. I should get Bart back to the vet’s.”
On the drive back, with Bart once again seated on her lap, she thought about the argument with Perry last night. About her mom planting a garden. About how desperately they wanted to believe. She was tiring of her role as the naysayer. She pictured herself as a three-year-old saying, ‘It won’t come up.’ She was turning out to be predictable. Cam hated predictable.
She thought about all the things her mom had done for her to create a happy childhood—to perpetuate the innocence for as long as she possibly could. The cookies for Santa, the notes from the tooth fairy, the fabulous birthday parties, all creating the illusion of comfort and safety and magic, when none of that actually existed. Maybe it was Cam’s turn to perpetuate some innocence.
She did not believe in the hokey story of how the town got its magic. She did not believe in the “magic” itself. She herself could not hope.
But she could give the gift of hope to her mother and sister. She could help them believe. That was easy.
She just needed to steal some tomato plants.
She found some on the side of the road in a garden that seemed to belong to no one, stretching for acres in all directions and blooming with produce. She climbed over the fence and stepped into it. Vines grew laced and tangled around one another and brushed against her legs as she walked. She swatted at imaginary bugs.
She found three tomato, two zucchini, two eggplant, and an enormous sunflower plant. She used her mother’s trowel to dig them up from the roots, extricating them without letting the heavy fruit drop from the vines. Then she placed the plants gently in her trunk and covered them with a wet towel to keep them fresh.
Something about locking them in the trunk felt sinister. As if she were some mafia killer transporting a debtor to the docks for execution.
“I’m sorry,” she said to the fearful face of the sunflower. “It’s only temporary.” And then she slammed the trunk.
At midnight, Cam slipped out into her mother’s garden to replant her haul. Even with the half moon bulging toward her with its pregnant yellow belly, night was deeper here, without streetlamps or nearby houses to leaven the darkness. Night even had a specific smell to it in Maine. A fresh, wet, dewy smell that jumped out at her as she pierced the earth with the sharp tip of her shovel. She was thankful the earthworms were asleep.
She was able to get the first two tomato plants to stand up using the stake her mom had placed next to the seedling. The long green vines wound around the stake like a ladder of DNA. She began the last plant, sticking the trowel into the earth with a satisfying scrape.
“What are you doing?” said a voice from way too close behind her.
She screamed, turned, and threw the trowel. It bit into the side of Asher’s forehead before falling to the ground with a thud.
“Ow. Jesus.” His hands flew to his face.
“Oh my God! Shit! Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Ow. I think so.” Asher said, drawing his fingers away. They were streaked with blood.
“Oh. You’re bleeding. I’m so sorry. Here,” she said and handed him a towel. “You really need to stop sneaking up on me like that!”
“I thought you heard me coming,” said Asher, looking at the bloody towel.
“Direct pressure. Direct pressure. Hold it on there. No, I didn’t hear you. You’re surefooted, like your deer-hunting ancestors.” Cam thought she had remembered Elaine saying something about them having Native American roots.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Why are you night-gardening?” he asked. Cam now saw his resemblance to Elaine. It was glaring, actually, and she was surprised she hadn’t noticed it earlier. They shared the same distinct high cheekbones, square chins, and of course the parentheses dimples around their smiles when something—usually Cam—amused them. She wasn’t sure she enjoyed being such a source of amusement.
“What are you doing prowling around here at midnight?” she asked.
“I asked you first.”
“My mom likes to believe in all this magical town business, so I’m helping her along. Creating a miracle. I’m a miracle worker.”
“Oooooh, that’s a bad idea,” Asher said, still holding the towel to his head. His shirt was hiked up above his belly button.
No tocar. No tocar, Cam said to herself, remembering the time she went to the museum with her Spanish class and they were told not to touch. “Why?”
“It just is. You can’t force your will with the universe. You just have to trust how things unfold,” he said. “This could blow up in your face.” His uninjured eye was disappointed in her. “It’s already blown up in my face, for example. Think of what else could happen.”
“Yeah, well, some of us don’t have time to wait for the universe to unfold itself. Are you going to be okay? You should probably go clean that up,” Cam said as she packed up her stuff and stood back to admire her “garden.” She couldn’t believe she had gotten the sunflower to stand up. “Looks good, doesn’t it?” She threw some drier dirt around the pla
nts to cover her tracks.
“It looks good, but I’m telling you, I have a bad feeling about this,” he said.
“What harm can possibly come from this? I’m doing a good deed for once. It’s not like I’m putting a kink into the space-time continuum. It’s good karma.”
“It’s lying.”
“You say tomayto, and I say tomahto,” Cam said.
Finally, he smiled. His front teeth overlapped just a tiny bit.
She reached up and slowly peeled the towel away from Asher’s brow. “You might need some help bandaging that,” she said as she accidentally brushed her chest against his shoulder. “Looks like it’s buried in your eyebrow, so you won’t see a scar or anything. Sorry about that.”
“I’m sorry I startled you,” he said. Cam thought she noticed his gaze soften and his pupils dilate. But then she realized it was just a big cloud drifting in front of the moon, changing the light.
“I have a first aid kit in the car. . . . ” Cam offered.
“No, I think there’s some in the carriage house. Come on. I want to show you something,” he said as he walked back toward the woods, away from the house.
“I thought it was this way.” Cam pointed toward the front yard.
“Come here,” he said, and he led her to a woodshed. He moved some firewood out of the way to reveal a staircase going down into the earth.
“What is that, some kind of root cellar? Creepy.”
“Sort of. Come on.” He started to descend the staircase, a trickle of blood creeping down the side of his face.
“This is the part of the horror film where you yell at the girl on the screen, ‘Don’t go. You idiot! Don’t go! Why are they always so stupid?’” Cam told her mom he could be a serial killer.
“It’s completely safe.”
“Right. Cue slasher music. Oh, that’s funny. Slasher rhymes with Asher. That could be your new name. If I survive this, that is.” Cam followed Asher down the stairs and into the smell of dirt. The walls around the staircase were just the earthen sides of a hole in the ground, but when she got to the bottom of the stairs, Asher had turned on a light to reveal a bright, capacious hallway, whose white-tiled walls reminded her of the Lincoln Tunnel in New York City.
“What’s all this?”
“A secret passageway. This house used to be part of the Underground Railroad, so there are secret tunnels and hiding places everywhere.”
“So that explains how you sneak around. See, there’s an explanation for everything. Was your family always so virtuous?”
“No. During Prohibition, my great-grandfather got rich using the tunnels to traffic alcohol. He made a fortune. Come on. I’ll show you where it comes out.”
There was a huge sliding exit at the beach disguised as the face of a rock wall. Growing up at Disney must have inured her to imitation landscapes.
Another tunnel opened up into the floor of the carriage house, and a third came up behind a rotating bookcase in the basement of the main house. They exited through this one, Asher spinning the bookshelf. They stepped into what Cam had dubbed Homer’s room.
Asher moved over to his tank and stared at him for a bit. “You should let him go, I think. If you’re not going to eat him, he should be free to explore the bottom of the ocean.”
He laid his hand on the tank, and Cam could finally read the rubber bracelet around his wrist. FREEDOM, it said.
“Freedom,” she said to him now. “You know, you can’t really have freedom if you’re just waiting around for the universe to unfold. If you’re at the mercy of the universe, you aren’t really free.” Homer stopped trying to climb the glass walls of the tank and retreated to his plastic SpongeBob pineapple house.
“That’s an interesting perspective. But if you’re trying to control the universe, you’re not really free either.”
“Yes, I am. I’m free. I have free will. I can control the universe.” Cam held up her arm, pretending to make a muscle. The term free will reminded her of the philosophy book in her high school library that had been called Free Will until someone had scrawled a y at the end of it with a black Sharpie.
“Well, thank you for showing me the bat cave. It’s perfect for making my next miracle,” said Cam.
“Not another one.”
“Yes, indeedy. The next one is a doozy.”
NINETEEN
“CAM! LOOK AT THIS. YOU HAVE GOT TO BELIEVE NOW!”
Cam had been so soundly asleep she had forgotten where she was. She tried to put it all together. She knew whose voice was calling her, but she thought she was still in Florida, and she couldn’t understand why it was so bright in her room. For a second she thought she had died.
“Cam!” Perry jumped on top of the bed and shook her awake, and Cam thought she was getting CPR. Maybe she had died. And then, slowly, with much work and concentration, she put it all together. Maine. The garden. Perry.
“Okay. Okay, Peri-stalsis. I’m up,” she groaned. “What?”
“Don’t call me that.” The word had something to do with the movement of the intestines.
“You’re the one who changed your name, Perimenopause.”
“Stop.”
“Well, what? What is so important that you need to jump on my bed? Is it Christmas? The Easter Bunny? What?”
“It’s Mom’s garden. You need to come see it.”
“Fine, fine. I’ll come see the garden. Can I have a cup of coffee first?”
“No. Right now.”
“Oh, God,” said Cam as Perry dragged her down the stairs and out into the backyard. Cam was wearing boxer shorts and a gray tank top, and her hair was sticking up in all different directions. A crease from her pillowcase stretched across her left cheek.
She didn’t know why, because she had been practicing her hope-averseness for a long time, but she noticed that she had a hope. She hoped that Asher was still asleep, so he wouldn’t see her like this. She must have begun caring overnight what he thought about her. An interesting development that, like her acceptance to Harvard, would go with her to her early grave.
Alicia was sprinkling the garden with a hose, and Cam shaded her eyes from the sun. Did it ever rain here? She stood back and admired her handiwork in the daylight. The sun reflected off of the heavy round tomatoes and the shiny aubergine eggplants. The zucchinis seemed to have grown two inches since last night.
“Can you believe this, Cam? I just planted these yesterday.”
“Well, you did use Miracle-Gro. That stuff really works, I guess.”
“Cam.”
“Okay, okay. That is seriously amazing.”
“It is,” said Alicia. “I’m going to make a pie and enter it into the pie contest today.”
Cam had forgotten that it was the Fourth of July. She had promised her mother she would go with her to the town celebration.
“What kind of pie?” Cam asked, surveying the garden for any kind of pie ingredients. She hadn’t stolen any rhubarb.
“Pizza.”
“Mom, you can’t enter a pizza in the pie-making contest.”
“Who says?”
“I don’t think they will recognize it as pie,” Cam said. “Honestly, I don’t think they will recognize it as food if it doesn’t have lobster on it.”
“Well, we have one of those. I can make a lobster pizza.”
“Don’t even think about it,” Cam said. “Homer is not food.” Maybe Asher was right. She should set him free. Let him see the world.
“Get dressed, Cam,” said Perry. “The parade starts in an hour.”
“You’ll have to take her to the parade, so I can make my pie.”
“It’s pizza.”
“Yes. Pizza pie. Tomato pie. That’s what they call it in Brooklyn.”
According to Cam’s iPhone, they were exactly 478 miles from Brooklyn. This was extremely obvious as she and Perry walked down to Main Street and the heart of Promise’s Fourth of July jamboree. Cam had never been to Brooklyn, but she guessed that they did
n’t have jamborees there. Or quilt shows in churches or lemonade stands run by Brownie troops or sack races or bouncy houses or stilt walkers dressed up like Uncle Sam. They definitely did not have prizes for the largest strawberry or a little kids’ bicycle parade complete with red-white-and-blue streamered handle bars and ribbons in the spokes.
When they got to the lobster pound, Perry squealed and pulled her toward someone dressed in knickers and a curly white wig. Asher was supposed to be one of the Founding Fathers, but Cam couldn’t tell which one.
“Who are you?” Cam asked.
“John Hancock.” He carried an enormous quill for signing the Declaration of Independence. He waved it at her now with a flourish.
Just then, the high school marching band rounded the corner playing a John Philip Sousa march, and Asher–John Hancock swept them all to the curb so they wouldn’t get run over. Out in front of the band was a blonde girl in white go-go boots and a sparkly red leotard. Her hair was up and she wore a tall white hat that shaded her eyes. But Cam recognized something about her. “Is that—”
“Sunny.”
“Whoa,” said Cam. She had not pegged Sunny as a joiner. And definitely not as a twirler.
“Her mom makes her do it,” said Asher. “Apparently she’s pretty good, and she can get a scholarship.”
“For twirling that thing around.”
“Ayuh.”
“Huh.”
“Yep.”
“Whoa.”
“Whoa.”
“I know.”
“Speaking of scholarships, Slasher: Doesn’t the quarterback of the state champion team usually get one of those? You get one of those, and then you marry the head cheerleader, go to business school, have three kids and a dog, become VP, CEO, chairman of the board, get a house in Malibu.” She counted the list off on her fingers. “That’s the trajectory of a champion quarterback, Asher. It’s written in the Stars ’n’ Stripes.”
“Ayuh.”
“So.”