Seeing Crows

by Matthew Miles

  “The first time it was a summer job,” she explained, her voice turning a little more serious and commanding my attention. “I think it was his way of trying to get me thinking about college because I didn’t want to go.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I met Craig and fell in love.”

  “Did you go to college?” I asked.

  “I followed him back to Bonafide, took a couple of classes, lived in an apartment with him. He sold pot so I mostly took care of that for him while he waited tables and went to school.”

  “Sounds really romantic,” I said, without much sincerity. I didn’t remember him from Bonafide at all. It was a small college, it sounded like our time frames would have intersected. And that meant Charlie would have been around campus, or town, while I was there too. I’m certain I would have noticed her.

  “I got pregnant,” she said, sounding even less romantic.

  Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed her then.

  I was beginning to regret coming out here. She was an attractive woman, without a doubt, and it would be pretty cool to swim under some falls as the sun rose with her, but the question-asking and the truth-spilling were really turning this trip into something else, something less comfortable, given the truths that were being spilled.

  I wondered why she brought me out here.

  Dragging me into the woods at dawn to let me see her naked suddenly seemed a little too good to be true. I could hear the rushing cascade of the waterfall as we approached it. She had easily taken advantage of my faulty decision-making, a pretty common thing in my life.

  “You don’t look like you had a baby,” I commented, watching her sway as she walked in front of me, her muscular legs stretching out beneath her jean shorts.

  “I didn’t,” she explained as we arrived in a rocky clearing by a pool of water. A waterfall tumbled down, celebrating its own incessant white noise, and the stream trickled over rocks forever away from us.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled, genuinely so, but not knowing really what to say, or even how to feel. “That must have been tough.”

  “Craig wanted to get married,” she said, dropping to the ground to spread a blanket out on the ground. “Start a family.”

  “Not as in love as you thought?” I asked, trying to guess where the story was going, but afraid of making the wrong assumptions. Like I normally do. I really didn’t know what to say. I collapsed onto the blanket next to her as she sat down.

  “I came here to get away from the whole situation,” she said. “And Craig.”

  “It sounds like you might need some time to yourself,” I said, trying to express the right feelings when I didn’t have any, except confusion and a sincere, if unspecified, sympathy.

  “I do,” she confessed.

  I just sat silently, really not knowing what to say, not knowing what she really wanted from me, why she dragged me out here to tell me all of this. I just laid on my back, looking up at her sitting next to me, staring at her blonde curls tumbling in waves around her shoulders while I listened to the hiss of the waterfall behind her honeyed voice.

  “Craig’s a bad person,” she said, tilting her head and leveling her gaze at me.

  The sun was really cracking through the clouds and the trees around us now. Sunlight began to creep around us.

  “But I couldn’t leave,” she explained. “He wanted me to have the baby, and I thought I loved him. But I knew I wasn’t ready. We fought a lot, but I didn’t know what else to do. He hit me, but that was less frightening than leaving him. I was just very confused.”

  “You just hung in there,” I offered. “What else could you do?”

  “After the pregnancy ended,” she said, choking up a little as she kept spilling the story. I wondered why we described stories as spilling. “He became more and more violent. He said I stole his son from him.”

  I lacked the emotional depth really able to hear a story like this from someone - this was just too far out of the range of my experience - just too real - but I was beginning to feel truly awful for her, and struggled to communicate that somehow. I was rarely without words, and I felt like a jerk having to stretch so far to conjure any kind of response at all. “He couldn’t have known it would be a son.”

  “I stayed with him because I felt so bad disappointing him, and like I deserved to be punished,” she told me. “I just couldn’t get myself to go. But I could tell he hated me by then. He put me in the hospital a couple of weeks ago for a night. I didn’t know what to do. My mom talked to Uncle Phillips and he talked me into coming here.”

  “This’ll keep you away from all that,” I said. “You need some time to heal,” I told her, and reached out to touch her face, push her hair back behind her ear, a sincere gesture. I wanted to comfort her, to show some sorrow for her somehow, to soothe her.

  She sobbed once - a huge, heartbroken sigh, revealing a deep well of pain and vulnerability, the kind no one could ever grasp unless it was their own - and then choked it all back.

  “The sun’s almost up,” she said, forcing a smile at me, and I marveled at her bravery - both in sharing her infinite suffering, and then in controlling it so magnificently.

  Between the smile and the sun, the dark spell of her story began to dissipate, and I was only relieved to let some light back in on the conversation, longing to hear her laugh at my bad jokes again.

  “We better swim now if we want to say we swam during the sunrise,” I whispered, trying to say something that would help her. Or maybe I just really wanted to put an end to the conversation - not because I didn’t care, but because I didn’t know how to react, what to say. All of the tragedy even of September 11th - an abstraction our nation could come to terms with by labeling and defining it - terrorism, evil - didn’t prepare me for the personal tragedy staring me in the face right now, asking for help, for some kind of solution. I was a writer, I was supposed to be able to articulate what this meant, how to think about, how to feel.

  I was speechless.

  “I have scars,” she said.

  “Hopefully I won’t see them in the dark,” I chided her, still missing the mark on saying the right thing. As uncomfortable as being speechless was, I wanted to slap myself with every idiotic utterance, amazed that Charlie didn’t do it herself.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll see them. I had to tell you before you saw,” she explained.

  “I understand,” I said, watching her fingers intently as she wrapped them around the bottom hem of her T-shirt. I looked up into her eyes; saw they were even more anxious than mine. “It’s okay,” I said, convinced the pleasure of seeing her without a shirt on would outweigh the horror of any scars.

  “Were you really there on 9/11?” she asked.

  It was like the day had given me some kind of magical power over people. “Yes,” I said, resisting the urge to help her remove the shirt, the anticipation rivaling the August heat.

  But I relaxed and let her do it herself, holding my breath as she lifted it and exposed first her pale skin, until eventually the scars began to reveal themselves, creating a roadmap on her stomach and I traced my eyes along one and Charlie inhaled sharply, scaring me, but she pulled the shirt over her head any way, a dark blue bikini tip stretched in contrast over white flesh, guaranteeing I wouldn’t look much at the scars.

  “Is it bad?” she asked, and I realized that was all she needed, that maybe this is what the whole trip was about. Maybe she felt safe with me, felt some empathy in us both surviving our traumas, of trying to move on in our lives. It wasn’t coincidence that she picked me out at the camp; I wasn’t just the first person she ran into. She had sought me out. I was ashamed, but I couldn’t tell her it was a lie now.

  “You look great,” I said, marveling at her, and the opportunity to stare at her, at the startling intimacy she suddenly allowed between us. I was taking advantage of her, I knew, but at the same time, was compelled to stare, and to hold my hand on her hip where it had landed after tracing her scar
s. I felt both wonderful and awful doing it.

  A massive crack suddenly sounded in the woods down the trail and we both snapped - me upright, her into a crouch - that’s how startling it was - looking over our shoulders toward the sound.

  “Probably just a bear,” I said, looking back at her, but the moment was gone. As though a bear would be a cause for relief. I don’t know what we feared really was there that made a bear seem like nothing to worry about.

  “Let’s get in the water,” she said softly.

  “You know,” I joked, trying to lighten the mood in the wake of another brutal failure to get a woman naked. “Every time a woman teases me like that, a tower collapses somewhere.”

  She didn’t hear me, running away, beckoning me as she plunged into the water.

  Not wanting to be responsible for any more evil in the world, I followed.

  *7*

  I woke up a tangle of both joy and frustration that afternoon. It had been wondrous to behold Charlie, scars or no scars, as we swam together and watched the rays of the sun stretch across the ripples we made around us. But to be so close yet so far with two women in two days reminded me painfully of what I had been missing in my life since I decided to become just another of millions unable to connect in a city that made an art of connecting everything to everything, but no one to no one.

  I couldn’t get the images of her out of my head. Nor did I want to.

  The campers began arriving this afternoon, though, and I had to get up and start meeting them as they showed up, getting my group together, introducing them and showing them the camp. I was the counselor for a group of six students – four guys and two girls, split into pairs to share guest cabins, which were on the other side of the Lodge’s clearing.

  I had to register my campers as they arrived and show them where their cabins were. There was a cookout later in the evening so I would have to give them a quick tour of the grounds so they knew how to get around. I took a shower quickly and rejoiced under the stream of cold water, an icy relief from the swelter both outside, and inside, of me

  Lester was in the cabin when I stepped out of the bathroom. “Sorry,” I said, wrapping my towel around me.

  “Keep it covered, buddy,” he said, with a grin. “I saw you sneaking off with that hot chick this morning. Where were you guys headed?”

  “Where were you?” I asked, remembering he wasn’t in the room when I had left. Maybe he’d had better luck than I had - after making out with Dalia last night, before getting interrupted by Winewright, and then chasing Charlie around all morning, I was about to burst.

  “Ha,” he laughed. “Just getting home.”

  “Some late night fun?”

  “True that,” he laughed, and then quickly changed the topic, maybe avoiding having to spill any details about what he’d been up to. “You heading down to the registration?”

  “Yeah, let me get some pants on, though,” I said, digging through my laundry and trying to guess who he might have been with. Hard to figure that it could have been Dalia or Charlie, so I guess it didn’t matter much to me in the end. “This is no way to greet high schoolers.”

  At the registration booth, two guys showed up, toting duffel bags and pushing each other in line, fake boxing and throwing karate kicks. Other kids were getting bumped into and knocked around. Counselors were registering the kids in line one by one and I was just hovering behind the table so I went out to deal with them.

  “Hey guys,” I said, getting them to settle down a little just by walking up to them. “You want to come over here and I’ll get you guys registered before you hurt someone, or piss someone off?”

  “Cool,” said the shorter of the two, a kid with shaggy hair and a scruffy face. “Uh, thanks,” the other said, his short hair parted on the side, wearing a team jacket. In the peak of a simmering summer heat wave, it raised my temperature ten degrees just looking at him wearing that thing.

  “This isn’t a reward for acting like punks,” I warned them as they followed me over to the side of the table. “This isn’t a gymnasium and other kids don’t feel like putting up with your crap.” It felt odd being the adult. “What are your names?”

  “Brian Jones,” the clean cut one said.

  “Mike,” the other said. “Moose.”

  “Wouldn’t you know,” I murmured, recognizing their names. They had been assigned to me. So my work began. “I’m your counselor. My name’s Jones,” I told them.

  I went behind the table and marked them as having arrived and collected their registration packets – some reading material, Bonafide notebooks to write in, and name tags. “You guys are staying in Cabin 4,” I told them. “Here you go, Mike.” I handed him his packet. “That’s got your schedule and your key and a bunch of other stuff you need.”

  “Call me Moose,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “And here you go, Brian. I’ll take you guys over to your cabin so you can settle in, but do me a favor,” I asked. “Head back over as quickly as you can. I’ll introduce you to the rest of your group and give you a little tour before the cookout.”

  “Sure,” Brian said.

  “So what’s your first name?” Moose asked.

  “It’s just Jones,” I said, opening their cabin door for them. They shuffled inside, much calmer now that they weren’t around the other kids. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad, after all, once I got used to being the adult. “Come back to the registration area soon,” I instructed them.

  “No problem,” Moose said.

  Dalia approached me as I arrived back at the table. She seemed anxious, troubled by something, which made me uneasy too. “I stopped by your cabin this morning and you weren’t around,” she said.

  I tried to shake the feeling she was stalking me a little bit, remembering, though, that I hadn’t actually been too hard to catch the night before.

  “I hiked out to the waterfalls,’ I explained. Then, thinking more about it, as I traced my eyes over the frilly black lace decorating her skin above the low cut hem of her shirt, added, “We should go check them out if we get time.”

  “We got to deal with the kids,” she bemoaned.

  “Yeah, I just checked two punks in,” I said, shaking my head. I wanted to get off the topic of how I spent my morning, not wanting to tell her I’d been out there with Charlie. Just trying to keep my options open. “I forgot what idiots teenage boys are.”

  “I’ve got girls,” she said. “I get to be queen bitch.”

  “You could be nice to them,” I suggested.

  “Girls aren’t nice to each other.”

  “I didn’t know women were so competitive.”

  “Women like to take each other’s things.”

  “Not much for the taking here,” I suggested.

  “There’s always something to compete over.”

  “Like water in a desert” I asked.

  “More like men,” she grinned.

  “How feminist of you,” I chided.

  “It’s very feminist,” she argued, narrowing her eyes at me, tightening her lips into a wicked little grin. There were definitely sides to her I didn’t know. “I pick the man I want, and then I keep him if I still want him.”

  “So who’s your man?” I asked, emboldened.

  “You,” she said, radiating mischief.

  I flashed her my best smile.

  “Don’t forget it,” she teased, smiling back.

  “I don’t think that’s possible,” I said, meaning it.

  “Jones,” Marianne interrupted from the table.

  More of my students - two girls - had arrived. “Look, your competition has arrived,” I teased, trying to inject some levity into the conversation. Not that I wasn’t excited, but something too about her forwardness and intensity scared me a little. But only a little.

  She just shot me a piercing look.

  I shrugged and grinned, heading over toward the table. I had work to do, but was thankful for the distraction too. Dalia’s attentio
n excited me, but her intensity made me feel a little awkward too. I was rusty.

  “They’re over there,” Marianne said, pointing to two girls standing quietly and waiting patiently. Typical of her, she had taken charge and made sure everything was getting done. “I gave them their paperwork, so they’re ready to go.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Do you want me to take any of your kids to their cabins?”

  “Nah, it won’t be long now,” she said. “Have you seen Charlie, though?”

  I pictured Charlie doing a backstroke away from me, rolling sideways before curling into a ball and then stretching her slender body back toward me. “Yes, I have,” I said, holding myself to only the slightest of grins.

  I found the two girls Marianne had pointed out, a frumpy girl with unkempt curly hair named Molly and a tiny girl with red hair named Tilly. “Hello ladies,” I said. “I’m your camp counselor, my name is Jones, and I will be escorting you to your cabin this evening.”

  “Hello, Mr. Jones,” Tilly said, “Nice to meet you.”

  “Please, call me Jones,” I said. “May I take your bags for you?” I asked, as Molly offered hers to me.

  “You will be staying in Cabin 13, near the rest of the girls. I hope you ladies will be able to refrain from drinking and chasing boys for the course of the week.”

  They giggled. “Molly loves boys,” Tilly said, causing Molly to slap the back of her head.

  “Well, here is your cabin,” I told them, opening the door and taking their bags inside. “Keep its location secret, and you’ll make my job easier,” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” Molly said.

  Back by the Lodge, Kevin and Tom were the last two to register – Kevin a lanky kid with curly blonde hair and Tom a goofy-looking chum with glasses.

  “This is a perfect place for a horror story,” Tom said. “Total slasher flick setting.”

  “Cool,” I said. “You should write a horror story. Dr. Phillips will dig it.”

  These kids were making me feel old; I didn’t have many occasions to play the venerable role model. Playing the responsible one made me chuckle at the slacker I knew myself really to be. “You like to write horror stuff, hah?” I asked him.