A whiff of woodsmoke tickled my nose. Outside Ameewagan, but not far off, someone was having a campfire. “I could sure go for a hot dog,” Luke said wistfully. A moment later I saw a glimmer of something ahead, but as we came closer I could see it wasn’t a fire.
There was a red tent in the woods, all lit up from within. It wasn’t a real tent—the kind with retractable metal rods and a zipper that you could buy in a store—which made it seem all the more mysterious. He’d found a red tarpaulin and cast it over a length of clothesline strung between two trees. For a moment or two I stood there admiring it. From here I could pretend it was a magic tent that I could step inside and find myself in the thick of a Moroccan bazaar.
“You made this?”
“Yeah,” he said. “For you.”
This is the first time I can remember feeling it. Standing next to Luke in the darkness, I breathed in the warm night air and found I could smell him down to the lint between his toes. He still had the stink of the lake on him, dank and rotten-eggy. He hadn’t brushed his teeth after dinner, and I could smell the chili powder from the sloppy joes every time he breathed.
It trickled over me then, making me shudder: the hunger, and the certainty. I didn’t know anything about Penny Wilson. I just had a feeling I had done something horrible when I was little and that I was on the verge of repeating it. The tent wasn’t magic, but I knew one of us wasn’t coming out again.
“I have to go back,” I said.
“Don’t be a wimp! Nobody’s going to find us. Everyone’s asleep. Don’t you want to play with me?”
“I do,” I whispered. “But…”
He took my hand and led me under the flap.
For a makeshift hideaway, it was pretty well stocked: two cans of Sprite, a package of Fig Newtons and a bag of Doritos, a blue sleeping bag, his shoebox of locust shells, an electric lantern, a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, and a deck of cards. Luke sat cross-legged and pulled a pillow out of his sleeping bag. “I thought we could spend the night here. I cleared out all the sticks. The ground’s still hard, but I figure it’s good wilderness survival training. When I grow up I’m going to be a forest ranger. You know what a forest ranger is?” I shook my head. “They patrol the forests and make sure no one’s cutting down trees or shooting animals or doing other bad stuff. So that’s what I’m gonna do.”
I picked up the Choose Your Own Adventure: Escape from Utopia. On the cover were two kids lost in a jungle, the ground crumbling into an abyss beneath their feet. Choose from 13 different endings! Your choice may lead to success or disaster!
Disaster. I had a feeling.
“Sprite?” He popped open a can and handed it to me. “Here, have a Fig Newton.” He took one for himself and nibbled around the edges. “But before I become a forest ranger I’m gonna do triathlons.”
“What’s triathlons?”
“That’s when you run a hundred miles, bike a hundred miles, and swim a hundred miles, all in one day.”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “Nobody can swim a hundred miles.”
“How do you know? Did you ever try?”
I laughed. “Of course not.”
“Well, now you know how to float forever. That’s a good start. I can float forever but I’ve got to be able to swim forever too. So I’m going to train and train, for as long as it takes, until I can. And then I’m gonna ride my horse across the Rockies and fight forest fires and live in a tree house I built myself. It’s going to have two stories, like a real house, except you’ll climb up to it with a rope ladder and come down again on a sliding pole.” He frowned as something occurred to him. “The sliding pole will have to be made of metal though, so I don’t get splinters.”
“How are you going to eat? You have to have a kitchen, but then you might burn your house down.”
“Oh, I’ll have a wife to cook for me. I just don’t know yet if the kitchen will be on the ground or up in the tree.”
“Will your wife have her own tree house?”
“I don’t think she’ll need her own house, but she can have her own room on another branch if she wants it. Maybe she’ll be an artist or something.”
“That sounds nice,” I said sadly.
“What is it? I thought you liked being outside.”
“I do.”
“I thought this would make you happy.”
“It does. But you’re going to get in trouble if you don’t go back to your cabin.”
“Oh, I don’t mind wiping tables in the mess hall tomorrow,” he said with a careless wave of his hand. “This is worth it.”
Tomorrow. The word sounded strange, like it didn’t mean anything anymore. “That’s not what I meant.”
“You can worry about it in the morning. Sit down next to me and we’ll play some old maid before we go to sleep.”
I sat down beside him and he picked up the deck of cards. We began to play. He held up his cards, and I picked one (the old maid, sure enough). I stuck it into my hand and offered it to him, and he shook his head and told me to shuffle. I couldn’t think about the game. I just kept smelling the chili powder and the rotten eggs and the cotton lint. His eagerness, his spirit, his thirst for the outdoors: all that had a smell too, like wet leaves, and salty skin, and hot cocoa in a tin cup that knew the shape of his hands.
“I don’t want to play anymore,” I whispered. He won’t grow up. He’ll never be a forest ranger. He’ll never ride another horse. He won’t fight forest fires. He’ll never live in a tree house.
Luke dropped his cards and took both my hands. “Don’t go, Maren. I want you to stay.”
I didn’t want to. I really, really wanted to. I leaned in and sniffed him. Chili powder—rotten eggs—cotton lint. I pressed my lips to his throat and felt him stiffen with anticipation. He put a hand to my ponytail and stroked it, like he was petting a horse. He breathed on me, I smelled the chili, and just like that there was no going back.
* * *
I stumbled out of the red tent toward the lake, out to the edge of the dock, and flung the grocery bag into the water. Then I pulled off my pajamas and threw them out as far as I could. I watched my Little Mermaid T-shirt sink below the surface of the lake, heard the plastic bag gurgling as it filled.
I fell onto the dock, rocking back and forth with my hands clamped over my mouth to keep the scream in, but it pounded against my face until I felt like my eyeballs were going to pop out. Finally I couldn’t hold it in anymore, so I lay down on the boards, dunked my head, and let it out until the water came up and burned my nose.
It was only as I walked back up the path through the pine trees—wet, cold, and shivering on the outside, horribly warm and full underneath—that I thought of my mother. Oh, Mama. You won’t love me anymore once you hear what I’ve done.
I crept back into my cabin as quietly as I could and put my spare pajamas on over my bathing suit. If anyone asked I’d say I’d only gone to the bathroom. I lay in bed shivering, curled up tight as if I could keep the world out. I wanted to be a cicada. I wanted to pull my skin off and leave it in the bushes and nobody would recognize me, not even my own mother. I would be a completely different person and I wouldn’t remember a thing.
* * *
In the morning it was raining, and my fingernails were rimmed in red. I put on my poncho, hid my hands, and ran to the bathroom. I scrubbed and scrubbed under the faucet, and even then I could still see it. Somebody came out of the stalls to wash her hands and gave me a funny look. My nails were as clean as they were going to get.
I followed the other girls to the mess hall, so numb I couldn’t feel the ground beneath my feet. I stood in line at the buffet counter. I took a waffle, but I couldn’t taste it. The camp director stood up in front of us and switched on his microphone. “We are very sorry to have to tell you that one of your campmates is missing. For your safety we have notified your parents, and all of you will be picked up this afternoon. In the meantime you will finish breakfast and return to your cabins. No
one will be allowed anywhere else on the campsite until their parents arrive.”
We filed out of the mess hall and found vans from the local news stations in the parking lot. The camp director wouldn’t speak to the reporters.
The girls in my cabin huddled around the picnic table at the center of the room. “I heard the director talking outside the bathroom,” somebody whispered. “They think Luke was murdered.”
The others gasped. “Why would they think that? Who did it?”
“Girls,” our counselor cut in from across the room. She was standing with her arms folded at the screen door, watching the rain turn to mud in the walkway between the trees. “I don’t want to hear any more of that talk. That’s enough, now.” She’d been fun before, always willing to braid our hair or go in on a game of go fish. It was my fault she wasn’t smiling anymore—my fault Luke was gone—my fault everyone had to go home. I lay on my bed facing the window, pretending to read.
The storm rages on, the water rising to your waist in a river of mud. You wander through the jungle for days, unable to find a dry place to sleep. Exhausted, you close your eyes and slip beneath the surface, and the current washes you away.
THE END.
I closed the book with a heavy sigh. I wish.
“He said Luke was out in the woods by himself last night,” the first girl continued, quieter this time. “They found his sleeping bag and it had blood all over it.”
“I said that’s enough.”
No one spoke again. The others started new friendship bracelets while I lay in the corner wishing I could disappear. After an hour the first parents came, and the girls went out with their duffel bags one by one.
My mother arrived, pale and silent, and led me out to the parking lot. Other parents stood in groups, arms crossed or nervously jingling their key chains. They whispered among themselves, but I could hear some of what they said.
“… ran wild … had no business being out in the woods … no discipline in this camp whatsoever … That director’s got his thumb up his ass all right.… I’m just thankful my Betsy is better behaved.… They say it definitely wasn’t a bear.… The sleeping bag was positively drenched in blood; they say there’s no way he’s alive.… Suppose they’ll be dredging the lake.… I hear they’re interviewing everybody within a ten-mile radius—they think it must be someone who lives nearby.…”
Where were his parents? If they showed up before Mama could take me away, would they look at me and know I’d done it? I dropped her hand and ran back to the cabin.
Everyone had gone, and all the bedsheets lay in a pile on the floorboards. I stumbled to my bunk in the corner and fell onto the bare mattress, burying my face in the lumpy old pillow. My mother came in and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Maren,” she murmured. “Maren, look at me.”
I lifted my face from the pillow, but I couldn’t bring myself to look her in the eye.
“Look at me.”
I looked at her. She was eerily calm for a person who knew her daughter had eaten somebody. “Tell me it isn’t true,” she said.
Again I hid my face. “I can’t.”
She had to carry me out to the car. Poor girl, the parents said. She’s taking it awfully hard.
* * *
Mama wanted to leave right away. Camp Ameewagan was a three-hour drive, but the director had our address on file, and if they found out I’d been with Luke that night they could trace us back. Calmly she explained all this to me and said I’d have to gather my things as quickly as I was able.
“We’re just going to leave?”
Pulling some slack on the seatbelt, I leaned forward and rested my chin on the front seat. I watched the wipers squeak across the windshield and the asphalt vanish in a blur under the hood of the car until my eyes milked over. I felt strange. Going to third grade at a different school?
“I don’t know what else to do.”
“You said I should always tell the truth.”
She sighed. “I did, and you should. But I’ve thought about this, Maren. We can’t tell anybody. No one will believe it.”
“But if I tell them about Luke, and you tell them about Penny…”
“It isn’t that simple. Sometimes people confess to a murder they didn’t commit.”
“Why would they do that?”
“For the attention, I guess.”
We drove on in silence, but Mama’s words hung in the air: a murder, and I had committed it. That made me a murderer. I thought of Luke and his horse and his tree house and his hundred-mile swim. I tried not to think of his fingers or the sloppy joe or how his blood was warm and tasted like old pennies.
There was a cicada in my ear. It wriggled out of its shell and sat humming behind my right eye. I slumped in the seat and leaned my forehead against the window, but that only made the humming worse.
I’m frecksy. Don’t be such a girl. I gotta learn how to swim forever.
My ear began to hurt, but I told myself it was nothing compared to what he felt. “But you said nobody ever really gets away with anything,” I mumbled.
For a minute or two she didn’t reply, and I thought maybe she wasn’t going to. “Someday you’ll have to answer for this,” she said, her eyes on the road. “Someday someone will believe you.”
I’d much rather answer for it now, I thought. I rubbed at my ear. Take me away, piece by piece. My life for his.
Mama looked at me through the rearview mirror. “What’s wrong?”
“My ear hurts.”
By the time we pulled into the driveway the ache had all but eclipsed the horror of the night before. I could hear her muttering as she pulled me out of the car—“I knew that lake was polluted.… I don’t suppose they ever gave you ear drops after swimming.… I never should have let you go to that stupid camp.…”—but she sounded strange, like she was miles underwater. She put me to bed and shook a couple of Tylenol out of a bottle.
That night a man knelt by my bed and jabbed me through the eardrum with a knife so sharp it was invisible. Of course, I couldn’t see the man either, but I knew he was there, sticking me in time to the beating of my heart. Knife, twist, knife, twist. I dreamed he showed me my eardrum, stuck on the tip of his blade, and pressed it to my lips. His fingers were long and bony, and his breath was cold. Mama had left the light on in the hallway, but I couldn’t see his face. Maybe he didn’t have one.
I turned over, and a shadow fell across the doorway. “Maren?” My mother darted to the bed and put her finger in my mouth, just like when I was a baby. “What is it? What are you chewing?”
My eardrum.
She dropped to her knees, laid her cheek on the bed, and began to cry. She sees him, I thought. She knows who it is, but she can’t make him go away.
In the morning I heard her phone the temp agency and tell them she wouldn’t be able to finish her assignment. Then she came in with a glass of ginger ale, stirring out the bubbles with a tablespoon. “I know he’s punishing me,” I said.
She looked at me curiously. “Who is?”
“God.”
“Maren…” Mama sat on the edge of my bed, closed her eyes, and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “There isn’t any God.”
“How do you know?”
“Nobody knows. But I think it’s pretty safe to say God is something people invented to make sense of their lives. So there’s somebody to blame when terrible things happen.”
The words she stopped short of saying hung in the air once she’d left me alone. If there is no God, our lives make sense.
I didn’t eat for days. I didn’t drink the ginger ale, and I pressed my lips tight when she tried to give me an antibiotic. Spots swam across my vision, my lips shriveled and cracked, and there was a desert in my mouth, but I didn’t care. The pain in my ear had eased into a dull throb. I could hardly hear my mother when she begged me to drink.
“You’re so dehydrated.” She took me by the shoulders and tried to make me sit up, but I was a lead weight. “If you kee
p this up, I’ll have to take you to the hospital.”
I didn’t listen. I didn’t move. Soon enough I closed my eyes and everything fell away.
* * *
When I woke up I was in the pediatric ward. Mama was sitting in a chair beside my bed, nibbling on her thumbnail and staring at nothing, a dog-eared paperback splayed across her knee. A nurse hovered at my other side, smiling vaguely as she fiddled with the needle stuck into the inside of my elbow. “It’s all right,” the woman murmured, smoothing my hair back from my face as if she knew me. “You’re going to be all right now.”
Mama put the paperback on the windowsill and leaned in as the nurse moved to the far side of the room to fill a little paper cup from the faucet. She took my hand, but she didn’t say anything. Mama wouldn’t try to comfort me with things that weren’t true.
“Why did you bring me here?” Even after what I’d done, she wanted me to live.
“I’m your mother,” she said. “I had to.”
“Because you love me?”
She hesitated so briefly that no one else would have noticed it. “Of course,” she said, and let go of my hand as the nurse came back with the cup of water.
“You must be awfully thirsty,” chirped the nurse.
Later that day a woman who was not a nurse appeared in the doorway and asked to speak with my mother. They went down the hall together and were gone for a long time.
The nurse came in again with a new IV bag. “Well! I’m glad to see you’ve got some color back in your cheeks. Now that you’re awake, we can give you some real food. How about a hamburger for dinner? Jell-O or ice cream for dessert?” She hit the foot pedal on the medical waste bin and tossed the empty IV bag. “Or maybe Jell-O and ice cream?” She flashed me another smile, our little secret. “Tomorrow, as long as you start eating and drinking again, we’ll take you off the IV. You’re a lucky girl, Maren.”
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