by Kim Fu
“Evan,” Nita said, starting the car. “How many boys are there on your tee-ball team?”
“Eighteen.”
“So if I wanted to divide them into groups of six, how many groups would there be?”
“Three.”
“If I wanted to give everyone two cookies each, how many cookies would I need?”
Evan swung his legs, bored. “Thirty-six.”
“If I wanted to divide them into equal groups of five, how many groups would there be?”
“You can’t.”
“Why is it called tee ball?”
“I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
A pause, pleasingly brief. “The thing we hit the ball off, it’s called a tee.”
“Why is the big-boy version called baseball?”
“Because there are bases.” Evan considered. “But tee ball has bases too. So that’s a stupid name.”
Sometimes Nita even envied Evan—his genius was blossoming earlier, he was a boy, and he was growing up in a time, place, and socioeconomic stratum where children were as worshipped and minutely studied as saints.
Nita rounded the corner at the end of their street. “It is a stupid name.”
After a few moments of thoughtful silence, Evan said suddenly, cheerfully, “I love you and I hate you, Mommy.”
Nita knew what she should say, the talk she could begin, but no one else could hear them. Except Mati, staring peacefully out the window. Mati, who adored everyone, nuzzled anyone, was liberal with his toothless smiles. His eyes were full of slow-dawning delight. Evan, as an infant, had had a frank, discerning stare that made adults feel the absurdity of their cootchie-cooing. Mati slept through the night on schedule and had an oddly neutral smell for a baby—he smelled like baby powder and enclosed rooms, not the sweet-shit animal rankness that Evan had had from birth. Mati should have been the favorite. The good baby. As Sadiq was a good man, her parents were good parents, all this plain-faced, dutiful love.
“I love you and I hate you too,” she said. In the rearview mirror, Nita and Evan smiled at each other, their secret smiles.
Holly arrived after they came home in the afternoon. Dopey, well-meaning Holly, who came by for a few hours every now and then. When they’d hired her, she’d never changed a diaper, but she’d perkily assured them she’d practiced on dolls in a course at the Red Cross.
Holly played awkwardly with the boys in the grass, chasing Evan around with a stooped back, while Mati turned his head back and forth, giggling and trying to follow their movements. Nita was folding laundry on the screened-in back porch. “How’s school going?” she asked Holly, through the mesh.
“Okay, I guess. The SATs are coming up.”
Nita paused a moment before speaking, deciding that there was no harm, Holly was no one. “I got fifteen-ninety on mine. There was this boy in my year who got sixteen hundred. God, I hated him. I still remember his name.”
“Um, that’s nice,” Holly said. Evan squealed and cut a sharp left turn to get away from her.
Nita continued, “I was sixth in my class in med school, and I still remember the names of the five people who were ahead of me. I used to recite them, like a mantra.”
Holly laughed nervously.
“I’m sure you’ll do fine,” Nita said.
“Not as well as you, though,” Holly said. “Evan? Where’d you go?”
Screams.
Evan appeared from around the corner of the shed, swatting at his face, stumbling, screeching at the top of his lungs. He seemed out of focus, somehow blurred. Nita realized why. He was a walking cloud of bees.
Nita bolted out and across the yard to snatch Evan up. The buzzing had a different frequency than usual, a confused tone. A few of the stings on Evan’s face were already starting to swell. Holly ran alongside them as Nita hurried back into the enclosed porch. The bees didn’t follow. They remained in a formation centered on the hive with the overall shape of a hand, the palm hidden behind the shed, wavering, tapered fingers of bees extending outward.
“Let me see,” Nita said. She examined Evan, who sobbed and howled. To her relief, he had fewer stings than she’d thought, and only on his face, neck, and hands.
“We should go to the ER, right?” Holly said.
“No, I think I can handle it.”
Holly had to raise her voice to be heard over Evan’s crying. “Really? He looks so messed up.”
“It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“But, like, how do you know?”
Nita stared at Holly. “I’m a doctor.”
“I mean, I know, but, like . . .”
“You know what,” Nita said. “I need supplies. Can you go to the drugstore and get aloe vera and calamine lotion?”
“Yeah, sure. Of course.” After a brief pause, Holly said, “Where are your car keys?”
“What? You’re not driving my car. Walk.”
“It’s just—the nearest drugstore is kind of far, and it’ll take me a while.”
“Then hurry up! Go!”
Holly, still seeming bewildered, ran out the side gate. Nita brought Evan into the house. She’d just needed to get rid of Holly.
Nita held Evan down while she pulled the skin taut and removed the stingers with tweezers. She let him ice his hands while she iced his face and neck. “It’s cold,” he whined.
“It has to be cold to bring down the swelling,” she said.
“It hurts.”
“I know.”
Holly returned just under an hour later. She came in the front door, holding a plastic bag in breathless triumph. “I got the stuff,” she said. Evan was already calm, cuddled against his mother in an armchair, half asleep. Holly looked around. “Where’s Mati?”
Mati.
Nita jumped out of the chair, causing Evan to stir and whine.
Mati sat contentedly where they’d left him in the yard. In the sunlight, his face was flushed but placid. He faced the shed behind which the bees had retreated. As Nita picked him up, he turned to her with a slightly drugged-looking smile. Heatstroke. All his exposed skin—head, arms, and legs—was sunburned, but not terribly so.
Nita carried him inside, a bundle of heat, like a casserole dish straight out of the oven. His diaper was wet. Holly stood at the back door, mouth agape. “He’s fine,” Nita said hurriedly.
“You left him out there,” Holly said, “with the bees.”
“The bees didn’t bother him. He got a little too much sun, but he’s totally fine.”
“You just forgot him?”
Nita turned away. “Evan needed my attention, and Mati was fine.” She would say it over and over again until it got through to the girl. “And look, now I can use the aloe vera you bought.”
“You mean you didn’t need it for Evan?”
“You were panicking. I needed calm so I could think clearly and take care of Evan.” Evan came and stood beside his mother, wrapping one arm around her leg. She put one hand on his head, her other arm holding Mati tightly to her chest. He was starting to doze. “I’m a doctor, and their mother, and I’m telling you, he’s fine. Cultures all over the world and for most of human history didn’t hover over their children night and day the way we do.”
Holly blinked and pressed her thumbs into her eyes. When she removed her hands from her face, she looked the way she often did with the kids, dimwitted and strangely tortured, out of her depth. Nita tried to sound reassuring. “It’s okay, Holly. Accidents happen. Everything got a little chaotic, but the boys got out with only a few stings and a sunburn. Normal kid stuff. I’m going to take care of Mati. You can head home.”
Holly nodded. Nita carried Mati into his room, Evan trailing quietly, clutching on to her leg as well as he could as she walked. As she changed Mati’s diaper and soothed his burns, she could hear the garage door opening, the clacking track and low, mechanical hum. Sadiq was home.
She hummed softly to Mati as his eyelids drooped and fluttered, as she did with the bees.
The door connecting the kitchen and the garage clicked open. She heard Holly’s and Sadiq’s voices murmuring. Sadiq’s voice rising. And then the sound of his precious golf clubs clattering as he dropped the bag unceremoniously onto the kitchen tiles.
Mati twitched awake. Nita continued to hum and he settled again.
She reemerged with the children. Holly stood next to Sadiq, her arms crossed, the righteous, smug expression of a kid who’s just tattled to Daddy. And Sadiq had taken Holly’s words at face value. He trusted this outsider—who knew nothing about babies, bees, medicine, motherhood, anything, who was barely more than a child herself—more than he trusted her.
She pressed one hand to Mati’s back as he slept on her shoulder, and squeezed Evan’s hand tightly with the other. She kept her chin raised and her gaze level. Sadiq stared back at her, as if he knew something about her that he wished he didn’t, something he could never unknow.
Camp Forevermore
The girls set off toward the islands, flat slivers and small rises between wisps of low fog. At this distance, it seemed impossible that any of the islands was large enough to accommodate six people at high tide, even more impossible that the largest one contained what might be called a town.
Fifteen minutes in, Siobhan’s shoulders started to ache and she noticed her wet hands were forming blisters. Jan’s kayak glided with machine smoothness and consistency, like a moving walkway at an airport. Siobhan paused to rest for a few beats and looked behind her. First she saw Nita, paddling with the same kind of clean, methodical strokes, staring straight ahead, not looking down at the paddle the way Siobhan did. Beyond Nita, Siobhan could see the kayaks of other groups, that unmistakable neon against the gray-green, gray-brown, and gray-blue of water, land, and sky. Some of them were singing and chatting, distant girl voices like the nattering of birds. Jan’s group worked in silence. The larger group, all the girls of Forevermore, was beginning to dissipate and spread in different directions. Siobhan found the sight alarming. She wanted to corral them back together.
She started paddling again, a little faster to make up for her break. She started thinking about the night to come. It was amazing to her that they didn’t have toothbrushes or pajamas. Toothbrushing, bathing, and rules of civility would be suspended. She hoped she would share a tent with Dina and Jan, while Isabel would be foisted off on Nita and Andee.
“Count off!” Jan yelled.
“One,” answered Nita.
“Two,” said Andee.
“Three,” squeaked Isabel. So the girl could talk.
“Four,” said Dina.
Siobhan said, “Five.”
“All right!” Jan called. “Keep it up, sisters!” Her strokes sped up just slightly, with no change in her posture, no visible exertion, the distance between her kayak and theirs growing just enough for them to notice.
They slowed in the shallows of an island about the size of a closet, a peak of rock jutting just slightly out of the sea. They locked their kayaks together using their paddles and stayed in the boats, eating the snacks Jan passed around. Standard camp issue: two dry oatmeal cookies and an individual tin of peaches. Jan told them about sea otter families that hold hands as they sleep in order to stay together.
Jan glanced at her sports watch and announced, “We’re making incredible time, sisters.” She slurped the packing water from her can of peaches. “You’re such fast paddlers!”
Siobhan wanted to comment that the speed hadn’t been up to them. They’d been following Jan. And Siobhan, in fact, wouldn’t mind slowing down. Her hands were red across the base of her fingers. She’d put on her woolen gloves, but they’d gotten soaked immediately and were worse than useless. The lessons the day before had involved practicing on dry land first, and a lot of drifting around and chatting while the instructor was busy with someone else. The relentlessness of the morning’s journey, kayaking strictly as a mode of transport, like they were hurrying to catch a plane, had not been fun at all.
As Siobhan considered whether or not to speak up—she didn’t want to give Nita the satisfaction—Jan added, “We’ll probably be at Lumpen before lunchtime.” Siobhan relaxed. A whole afternoon to set up camp and play on the beach in the sunshine.
“I wonder . . .” Jan said, working something out aloud. “You were promised a full day of kayaking. Calling three hours plus breaks a full day was a stretch to begin with, and now it’ll probably only be two and a bit. Maybe we should change our destination and camp somewhere else, so you can have the real experience, like we used to.” Jan nodded to herself, deciding. “We’ll go to the big island.”
“But that’s cheating,” Nita said. “We’re supposed to rough it somewhere with no people and stuff. That’s the whole point.”
“Yeah,” Siobhan jumped in, begrudgingly grateful to Nita. “They have a motel and a restaurant and a ferry and—everything.”
“Don’t worry—it’s a very big island,” Jan said. “Lots of funny little nooks and crannies. I know lots of places we can camp that are miles and miles from anyone, where no one would ever stumble upon us.” Jan turned her attention to Isabel. All the others had wolfed down their snacks, their breakfast of limp toast and reconstituted egg burned off long ago, but Isabel was gnawing wetly on her first cookie like her teeth couldn’t quite break through. “What do you say, Isabel? Up for a little extra paddling?”
Isabel nodded with a grim expression, as though she’d been asked to weather an unavoidable storm and there was nothing to be done about it. You can say no, Siobhan thought, trying to communicate telepathically with Isabel. Tell Jan you’re tired.
They had lunch on Lumpen Island. The sun was a faded, silvery circle behind the clouds and fog, so faint Siobhan could stare right at it. They dragged their kayaks up the rocky shore. Jan tied all the boats together, and anchored her larger one to a loop she’d embedded in the rocks.
The rocks and sand gave way to moss and dirt as they walked away from the water, and a few thin black spruce that looked surprised to be there. Jan spread a tarp around where the sand ended, the border between beach and woods, and they sat down to picnic.
While Jan handed out their ham-and-cheese sandwiches, Andee leapt to her feet, pointing out at the water. “Oh my God,” she said. “Look! It’s a seal!”
Siobhan couldn’t see anything. “Where? Where?”
“Right there.” Andee’s finger jabbed at the air.
“I don’t see it,” Nita said.
“Right there!”
They were all standing now. Siobhan caught a flash of movement, a ripple, maybe a dark, slick head popping up and vanishing under again. “Was that it? I think I saw it!”
“I don’t see it!” Nita repeated, getting frustrated.
“There it goes again,” said Andee.
“I saw it that time!” Dina said. “I think. Maybe.”
“Is that it?” Isabel asked.
“Where?” Nita demanded.
“It’s gone now,” Isabel answered.
“Take your sandwiches, sisters,” Jan said. “You can keep looking while you eat.”
After the seal, they ate in silence, studying the water, hoping something equally magical would appear. Jan put a plastic container of baby carrots and a bag of chips in the center of the tarp. She tore the bag carefully, opening it up into a single, flat piece, then folding the edges into a bowl to hold the chips. She seemed startled that the girls were impressed by this trick and wanted to know how she did it.
Siobhan felt a rush of fondness for Lumpen Island, for the ground beneath her and the tarp keeping her butt dry. Potato chips had never tasted so good, so oily and salty. She felt sated. Sleepy, accomplished, an afternoon feeling.
“I like your hair,” she ventured, to Dina.
“Thanks,” Dina said. “I like your fleece.”
Nita turned away from Andee as she ate her sandwich. The seal seemed to have created a rift between them, and Siobhan tried not to feel good about it.
When it was
time to leave, Siobhan rose reluctantly. Jan waded out to the tops of her tall boots to help each girl clear the shoreline. The paddling felt twice as hard. Stiffness settled into Siobhan’s neck and shoulders. She started perspiring immediately, hot in her head and cold through her core, where her long-sleeved T-shirt sopped up the sweat under her fleece. She looked back at Lumpen as it receded behind them, at what could have been.
They could see the big island from Lumpen, but for a long time, they didn’t seem to be getting any closer. When the details of the land finally became clear, trees and sheer cliffs and high, abrupt edges, Siobhan tried to speed up—the end was in sight!—but her short, frantic, uneven strokes had the opposite effect. It didn’t matter: Jan was also slowing, her vigorous straight path becoming a series of large, swooping S-shapes as they traced the coastline. Birds began to pass overhead, gulls and terns with white-dipped wings that were unfamiliar to Siobhan.
It took forever for Jan to find the right spot for them to go ashore. Finally, as they rounded a corner and saw a crescent of white-gray sand and a relatively shallow slope, the whole beach only about five meters long, she turned inland. Even Jan seemed weary and beaten down. She didn’t say anything as she coasted into shallower waters and ran her kayak aground. When they’d arrived at Lumpen, there’d been lots of hearty yelling, warnings and instructions. This time, the girls were left to guess at what they should do, following blindly like ducklings. Andee had trouble with the turn. She overshot the beach and had to turn completely around to rejoin the group.
Jan helped them, one by one, out of the kayaks again. She was panting, out of breath. The girls leapt out of the boats as though they were on fire, rushing out of the water, abandoning the job of pulling the kayaks onto land to Jan. She dragged them one at a time up the shore, leaving them scattered haphazardly on the beach, their neon tips pointing in every direction. It was more work, after that, to gather them together so they could be tied. The girls watched, seeing the defeated curve of Jan’s back, listening to her labored breathing. They knew they should help, but they were too tired. And anyway, she was the grown-up, and they were only kids.