My brother, Reed, ran onstage next, in basketball shorts that matched yours. “Hi, everyone. I’ll be helping out with all the sports stuff. And just so you know, color wars are going to be epic!” He had this goofy-happy look on his face that only appeared at camp. Usually “goofy” wasn’t in his repertoire. Hanging out with Reed was like lounging on the quietest beach and listening to the wind. He was calm and wise and seemed to have a lot in common with the ancient oaks in our forest. I loved him to the moon and back.
Fern was beaming at him, and I was beaming at her.
This was my safe place. Summer. Under the same trees with my siblings. No more than a year and a half between each of us, we practically came into this world together. In elementary school, we had to draw self-portraits; each of us drew the three of us, holding hands.
When it was your turn, Dylan, you grabbed my elbow and dragged me up with you. “Showtime, Sawyer.”
“What?”
“Just roll with it.” Stepping to the front of the stage, your voice skipped across the crowd: “Hey, guys, I’m Dylan, but you can call me Your Favorite Counselor. This is the Fantastic Swimming Sensation, Quinn Sawyer, and we’ve prepared a little sample of song and dance for your opening-day entertainment.”
What?
Every year, we had a prank war; apparently you’d started early. I had the singing voice of a tone-deaf gorilla. “Dylan, no.”
“Nana? Would you do the honors?”
Nana scooted up to the front of the stage with two microphones at the ready. I threw her a look like Et tu, Brute? Then the speakers in the trees started playing a horrific karaoke version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.”
Oh my God, this is actually happening.
Dylan, you were snapping your fingers, begging everyone to clap to the beat. You pointed to me as if I were that small-town girl, living in a lonely world. “She took the midnight train,” you sang, “going a-ny-where.” You had a killer voice. Maybe I didn’t tell you that enough. I know you were joking and all, but it was smooth and silky and really something.
My brain flipped between choices: sing along, or fling myself offstage. Oh, screw it. “Just a city boy . . .”
In the back row behind the campers, Fern cringed, then started giggling, and Reed laughed his quiet laugh so deeply that he had to clutch his gut. By the chorus, it was painfully obvious that (a) I could not sing, and (b) this was just sprung upon me. But everyone seemed to love it—and, Dylan, your joy fizzed around you like sparklers.
I know that it didn’t happen right then. It was probably an accumulation of moments over fourteen years, like the way you cared for our mutual pet fish, Mr. Smitty, until he met his maker right before winter break (which was not your fault at all). Or when you let me borrow your favorite book, The Road, and I realized that you’d starred the best passages so I could know them, too. But still, really? Falling in love with you didn’t feel slow, like summer. It felt like springing from the high dive and plummeting into the deep.
As the song finished, all I could think was: Oh crap oh crap oh crap, don’t screw this up.
But as you know, in all camp stories, there are monsters.
In this one, there are two.
The sea monster.
And me.
October
No Salt Water Will Save Us
Six hours after rushing back through the woods with Hana, I wake up—the lump in my throat as big and prickly as a pinecone. Luckily for Galileo, I don’t bolt upright, because he’s nestling around my head like a Russian hat, his plastic cone of shame poking into my pillows. Outside, it’s still dark and a bit eerie with before-dawn blue, perfect for Halloween. Usually my sister and I dress Galileo up like a pumpkin and time how long it takes him to tear the felt to ribbons, but I doubt that’ll happen this year.
My rose-gold headphones are tight against my ears, right where I slipped them last night. The Sunshine Hypothesis, my favorite podcast about fantastical animals, is still going. The axolotl with its beady eyes appears alien and yet unnervingly human. The host’s name is Indigo Lawrence; she’s got this amazing pink Afro, and always wears high-waisted jeans, red lipstick, and earrings that dangle to her collarbone. I know this because she’s also a singer in Portland’s most famous indie rock band, Spark Nation—so Indigo is everywhere, in magazines and newspapers, even peeking out from street art. When she’s not absolutely slaying onstage, she tells the world about animals that should only exist in the imagination, but creep and swim and crawl on Earth. Each episode features a different animal. I’ve listened to all of them. Now I’m relistening, paying extra attention to the monsters.
Indigo says, It sounds like something out of a fantasy novel, doesn’t it? It’s so cool how her voice seems to linger in the dead spaces between words, like the afterglow of an image. I can sink into it. There’s a zebra fish poster on the ceiling above my bed, and I can pretend that I’m at the very bottom of the wild blue water, looking up.
How awesome is this? Its ability to regenerate severed limbs is—
Fern bangs the bathroom door shut.
She’s a door slammer now, especially when she thinks I’m sleeping. I’ve broached the subject of separate bedrooms, oh, about seventy million times with Mom. Seriously, just stick me in the attic, I’ve told her. But her response is always something akin to: yada, yada, you’re sisters and you really do love each other, blah, blah, that’s final, want some birch-bark tea?
Groaning, I set my headphones aside, slide out of bed, and gently knock, just twice, on the bathroom door.
From the other side: “What?”
“I need to pee.”
“Hold it.”
I knock again, harder this time, and rattle the glass doorknob. There’s rustling, the swift closing of cabinets. Fern yawns open the door, the skin around her eyes sunrise pink. Her hair’s imperfectly braided, loose loops and stray hairs; she’s missed two buttons on her blouse, and her purple, sequined cat ears are definitely on backward. She’s fifteen—less than two years younger than me—but I still have this urge to, I don’t know, take care of her? To be the older sister who fixes her hair. Her cat ears.
All the words I should say flutter up my throat, then dive-bomb back down again.
I’m sorry.
It’s all my fault.
Forgive me.
But haven’t I already said those things a gazillion times? She knows I feel like crunched-up crepe paper, too.
“Thanks,” I mumble.
Fern slinks into the hall (she’s really got the cat thing down) as about a half ton of bad juju radiates off her skin. “Oh, you’re very welcome,” she says over her shoulder. Her voice has something in common with razor blades—daisies no more.
I use the bathroom, then shrug on an oversized plaid shirt, roll the sleeves up to my elbows. Everyone at school will probably get dressed up—witches, sexy chipmunks, Super Mario Bros.—but really, what’s the point? If anyone asks, I’ll say I’m a lumberjack, a costume that also doubles as curve cover-up. The last thing I want is for boys at school to notice my boobs, which just—ta-da—appeared a few months ago. They’re like grief boobs or something, as if the universe said to me: I know last summer was unbearably shitty, so please accept these in consolation!
After running a comb one and a half times through my hair, I shuffle into the kitchen, where Fern says, “Good thing you didn’t forget your mask.”
“Pea,” Mom scolds from near the sink, where she’s sorting the last of the rhubarb for jam. Pea is Fern’s nickname, and Mom doesn’t know that she despises it. “Don’t talk to your sister like that.”
Knitting an orange monstrosity of a beanie by the breakfast table, Nana Eden agrees. “If you’re going to make fun of your sister, at least think of something more creative. We had that insult in my day, dear. So you’re about”—cocking her head so hard that her witch-hat earrings sway—“two hundred and seventy-five years out of the loop.”
“Well, sorry,” Fe
rn says, just not to me.
Mom throws a melancholy glance at both of us, then travels to the pantry to grab a few more mason jars, her wool cape trailing behind her. She’s a shawl wearer and a great knitter of anything that moves on its own. Hippie Earth Mother Clothing, Fern calls it. When winter comes, Mom will garb herself in enormous Icelandic sweaters and start growing microgreens in clay pots by the sink. She has to occupy herself now that camp season is over—and she can make any plant twitch to life, even in the iciest days. Take the vegetable garden outside our kitchen window: artichoke buds are poking through the snow, next to a blueberry bush untouched by the arctic weather. It keeps blooming and blooming, all year long. Sometimes the white-tailed deer trot up and nibble off every single blueberry, and the following day, they’re back, ripe as always.
Nana puts aside her knitting to stand up and flick Fern’s purple cat ears. “I like these—fancy schmancy.” And then to me, placing both hands on my shoulders and whispering into my (human) ear: “The next time you sneak out, Cookie, tell Hana not to bang on the window like the British are coming.” That’s her nickname for me—Cookie, after the Cookie Monster on Sesame Street (I had a very serious Chips Ahoy! phase).
But . . . Oh. Oh, crap.
A whole conversation occurs with only our eyes.
Me: So you know?
Her: I am an all-seeing, all-knowing master of the universe, and you should be aware of that by now.
Me: Please don’t tell Mom.
Nana ha-ha-has and tries to kiss my forehead, except she’s quite a bit shorter than me—if you don’t count her hair, which is piled high on her head. It conceals things like bobby pins, nail files, pencils. I have a sneaking suspicion that if you tipped her over, an entire drugstore aisle would tumble out. This is one of the things Grandpa Michael loved most about her, or so says the handwritten list of One Hundred Things framed above our fireplace. When Grandpa proposed in the 1950s, he said he wanted to buy her an Eden to match her name: a hundred acres of summer-camp land, where he’d plant a hundred types of wildflowers, and they’d have a hundred children. Now she and Mom run the camp with the help of two permanent staffers in town, while Dad’s role is more ceremonial: posing for camp snapshots, lighting a few bonfires, digging up daylilies and trimming hedges when he has free time.
Throwing Nana another plea for mercy with my eyes, I ask Mom, “Do you think I could take some rhubarb jam for Hana when it’s ready?”
Mom twirls over to me. She loves to dance, especially when there’s no music. That way she isn’t restricted by the beat. She says, “Sure. You can give it to her the next time you two slip off in the dead of night.”
“Nana!” I say.
“I didn’t breathe a word, Cookie.”
Mom continues, her voice jokey and light, but there’s strain beneath it—a ripple in the calm. “You weren’t up to anything illegal, I hope. No running away to join a biker gang?”
I tap the countertop with bare fingernails. “I don’t think Hana would do well in a gang. She’d try to name the bikes after minor celebrities or something. . . .”
“I can see that.”
“Are you mad?”
“No, I’m not . . . but you need to tell us these things, okay? What if I woke up in the middle of the night to check on you, and you weren’t there?”
I shrug, because what do you say to that?
Part of me liked it better when she was completely hands-off. Reed comes home smelling like liquor? He’ll feel sick in the morning—that’s punishment enough. But now Mom has new crinkles on her forehead. Last summer, it finally dawned on her: when she’s hands-off, we become slippery. It’s hard to get a grip.
“Okay,” she says. “But you’re doing the dishes for the next two weeks.”
And what’s Fern’s punishment for sneaking out literally all the time? Should I really keep covering for her? “Fine.”
“You’ll be done before you know it.” She reaches into the nearest cabinet and pulls out a pack of herbal supplements. Mom insists that ground-up green things will help me get through this.
But what if there is no through?
“Now sit, sit!” she says.
This is part of Mom and Nana’s attempt to get us back on the Sibling Track: commanding us to assemble at breakfast. Every. Freaking. Morning. Today, the table is loaded with pumpkin-seed-and-hemp waffles (which are actually pretty delicious, if you get past the grassy aftertaste), along with six steaming mugs of homemade herbal tea (just don’t ask what’s in it). Nana circles the table and drops sprigs of fresh mint on everyone’s plates.
We always have family breakfasts in the weeks before camp begins, when the weather is nice enough to eat in the garden and Dad picks blueberries for fresh juice, but in the fall it’s different. It’s wrong. All of us know these forced meals are Mom and Nana’s excuse to gather us at one table, like sharing a pot of tea will suddenly make things okay.
Fern grinds her teeth and sits.
I grind my teeth and sit.
Nana smiles like everything is normal.
Then: boom, boom, boom—my hulk of an older brother lumbers downstairs, silver-blond hair already tucked under a Vancouver Canucks cap. Hats are his new thing. He keeps the brim down low, so he doesn’t have to look anyone in the eye—especially me. I bet he’s been awake for hours, riding unicorns across the desert or whatever the hell happens in his video games. Either that or doing his Arnold Schwarzenegger impression in the mirror, lifting those gargantuan dumbbells. I think about ants that carry twelve times their body weight on their backs. One day, maybe he’ll be that strong—strong enough to hold . . . everything. But until then, all the boxes marked REED’S DORM ROOM will probably remain stacked in our hallway, right where he plunked them after dropping out of the UMaine forestry program three months after his eighteenth birthday.
He used to walk like leaves traveling across the ground. I used to sense a calm inside him. Now there’s this typhoon that’s spinning and spinning, and won’t seem to break out of his skin. It stays firmly inside, whirling through his ribs and his guts and his heart. When he’s not working at Leo’s Lobster Pound, he’s the assistant basketball coach at Winship High. And he’s dating someone. Charlie.
“Anyone seen my gym bag?” Reed calls out, voice like a craggy mountain.
“Check the foyer,” Dad says, trundling down the stairs as well. His beard is reaching mountain-man lengths.
“How would Willie Nelson know where Reed’s gym bag is?” I ask Nana.
“That’s not Willie Nelson.” She laughs. “That’s clearly one of those men from— What’s that show called?” She snaps her fingers. “Dark Dynasty?”
“Duck Dynasty,” Dad corrects her. Up close, his beard is hypnotizing, like one of those inkblots that could be either a butterfly or a bunny. It’s difficult to tell if he’s a beard with a human attached or the other way around. Growing it is his way of trying to convince Mom, after all these years, that his city self can handle the wild. He grew up in Boston but met Mom at Winship U, the liberal arts school in town, where he now teaches marine biology.
“My beard could beat any of those Duck Dynasty beards in a fistfight,” Dad says. “Just remember that.”
“Beards don’t have fists, Henry,” Mom counters, kissing him full on the lips. Most of the time my parents are sweet together, but sometimes I think all that sweetness is strangling me slowly. Flipping through their Niagara Falls wedding pictures is one thing; watching them practically grope each other in the kitchen—where their children eat their food—is another.
Instinctively, I roll my eyes, noticing that Fern and Reed do, too, and for a split second we forget not to smile at each other. When we remember, even the room sighs, all the hardwoods letting out a collective whoosh.
Fern glowers and clears her throat, probably one second away from telling our parents to get a room.
“Go ahead,” Mom announces, breaking the kiss. “Everyone eat.”
None of us want t
o disappoint her (disappointing Mom is kind of like upsetting the Dalai Lama), so we start forking waffles under a canopy of wishes. There are seven rows of exposed wooden beams on the ceiling. At the end of each weekly summer session, every camper writes a wish on a slip of paper, and Nana hangs them from the beams with string. They’re good luck, she claims. All this hope is bound to do us some good.
As I take my first bite of breakfast, attempt number 19,584 to engage us collectively in conversation begins.
“So I’ve signed up for a new course at the artists’ colony,” Nana says. “Anyone want to guess what it is?” Last year, she carved a seven-foot-long canoe from a felled log, and the year before that was an oil-painting ode to Maine’s wildlife; now there are like seven thousand pictures of waterfowl in our downstairs bathroom alone. Peeing has never been more terrifying.
“Sculpting?” Mom offers.
“In a way, but not quite. Quinn, what’s your guess?”
“Uh, soap making?”
Nana shakes her head. “No cigar.” And when no one else volunteers anything, she steamrolls on. “I think it’s a brilliant idea, actually, especially with the high elderly population in town. I’m really surprised that no one’s thought of it before.” She swipes the air with her hand, like she’s revealing the letters in Wheel of Fortune. “Get Buried in Your Work: Build Your Own Coffin.”
Dad chokes on his tea.
“I must’ve heard that wrong,” Mom says.
Nana still isn’t grasping the shit storm she’s unleashed. “Well, I think it’s genius. Finally something practical. Let’s face it, I’m never going to use that canoe.”
To which Reed growls, “Stop it.” Except he’s not snapping at Nana but at Fern, who’s loudly clanked down her fork and pushed back her plate, angry hands and angry eyes blackening the air.
Wild Blue Wonder Page 2