by Kim Fu
Once Jan had knotted her own kayak into the anchor, she turned around and looked east, toward the mainland, the direction from which they’d come. Siobhan followed her gaze. The sun was firmly on the other side of the sky, well below its zenith.
Jan opened her mouth to address the girls and no sound came out. She coughed and cleared her throat. “Whew. Good job, sisters.” Her voice was raspy, drained of its cheery determination. “It’s getting late and we still have lots to do.”
Jan nailed in the posts and pitched the two tents. The girls hovered nearby, holding poles, handing them to Jan when prompted, like field nurses. “Are we going to have dinner soon?” Andee asked.
“It’s not even four o’clock,” Jan answered.
“But I’m hungry.”
“I’m hungry too,” Nita said.
“I thought you wanted to rough it,” Jan said. “This is roughing it.”
Siobhan was taken aback. Jan was tough, not mean.
“Do you girls remember what kindling is?”
“Small, dry sticks and twigs,” Nita volunteered.
Jan put her hand on Nita’s shoulder. “Right. You girls are going to gather some kindling for our fire, sticking as close to the beach as you can, and I’ll head into the woods to find some larger fuelwood.”
“You’re going to leave us alone?” Siobhan said, incredulous.
“I won’t be long, I promise.”
“But aren’t there cougars? And bears?” Dina said.
“Should we hang the food in a tree or something?” Nita said.
“We’ll do that before bed. Nobody has seen a cougar or a bear down on this part of the island,” Jan said. But it’s an island, Siobhan thought. It’s not like the cougars and bears can leave. “Just make lots of noise, like little girls do.”
When Jan reached the edge of the trees, she turned around and waved at the girls, who hadn’t moved. They must have looked frightened, because she added, “Be brave, sisters! That’s what Forevermore is all about!”
The girls wandered, gathering bits of wood. Some kind of prickly bramble grew thick on the ground, poking out from the woods and running almost all the way to the water. It was obviously too supple and alive to burn, the vines a mix of green and pinkish brown, so tangled and abundant Siobhan felt like she could see it growing, lengthening and knotting around itself.
Siobhan followed Dina away from the others. She glanced at the spot where Jan had entered the woods as they passed. There was no obvious path. She had just stepped between two trees with her machete in hand and disappeared. Siobhan stuffed her pockets with scraps of driftwood and fallen twigs. Dina scanned the ground intently, her head tipped forward, apparently finding nothing. She tossed her long bangs out of her eyes.
“What if Jan doesn’t come back?” Dina said.
Siobhan stopped and stared at the other girl, who continued with the pretense of searching, her gaze at their feet.
“What if she gets lost? Or hurt? Or eaten by a cougar?”
“She said there’s no cougars on this part of the island,” Siobhan said.
“It’s an island,” Dina said. Siobhan didn’t admit that she’d had the same thought. After a moment, Dina continued, “She’s old. Like, ninety.”
“She’s not ninety.”
“I heard her say she first came to Forevermore in 1934. That’s like a zillion years ago.”
“Sixty. That’s exactly sixty years ago.”
“Okay, so that would make her what? Seventy?”
“Between sixty-nine and seventy-two. If Forevermore was for girls the same ages then as it is now.” Siobhan was unnerved that Dina couldn’t figure that out for herself. She didn’t want a stupid best friend.
“Okay, so that’s, like, really old. She could just keel over and die for no reason.”
“People don’t die for no reason.”
“Yes, they do,” Dina insisted. “My grandpa did.”
“No, he didn’t. He died of something.”
“No, my mom said he just died for no reason.”
“They didn’t want to tell you the reason.”
Dina’s head jerked up. Siobhan remembered when she’d told her kindergarten best friend that there was no Santa Claus, and how that had been the end of that friendship too.
Without any outside signal, the girls regrouped by the kayaks. They dumped their finds into a pile, and then they sat down and sorted them by size, as Jan had instructed. When they were finished, the wood arranged in a gradient from small to large along the sand, there was nothing left to do but stare into one another’s worried faces.
“We should make noise,” Siobhan said. “To keep the bears and cougars away.”
“We could sing a song,” Dina said. “Or play tag?”
“I’m too tired,” Nita said.
“Me too,” Andee said, stepping sideways, closer to Nita. Apparently they had made up.
“I can teach you guys a clapping game,” Dina said.
“Okay,” Nita said, in a grudging voice. “I guess.” For some reason, they all turned to Isabel for the final vote of approval. Isabel nodded. The girls sat in a cross-legged circle and played Dina’s game, chanting its singsong rhymes at the top of their lungs, a parody of carefree fun as, somewhere, a cougar stalked, and the sun continued to cross the sky.
When Jan finally returned, the girls could tell something had gone wrong. She had an armful of downed wood, as promised, but her machete was missing, and her pants were streaked with something dark, with a tear low on the right leg. “Whew,” Jan said, her voice even hoarser than before. “The woods have changed since the last time I was here.” She flung her arms open and the wood tumbled out, clunking loudly as the branches struck one another and the ground, like she’d dropped a bunch of anvils in a cartoon.
Jan kneeled beside the wood, her hands on her knees. “Oh, boy. Whew,” she repeated. She wiped the sweat from her forehead with her sleeve. Underneath her reddened cheeks, her face was ashen.
“What happened?” Nita said. Andee crossed her arms, eyeing Jan suspiciously, like she was an imposter.
“Were you attacked by a cougar?” Dina asked.
Jan laughed, throwing her head back, showing her teeth. She was missing some in the back. It was the first time they’d heard her laugh, and it didn’t sound at all the way Siobhan would have expected. A witchy cackle, almost hysterical. “No cougar,” she said, catching her breath. “I just tripped on some of those darn vines.” As if remembering this was supposed to be an educational trip, she added, “They aren’t native to this area. They came over from Europe, and now they’re taking over.”
“That’s called an ‘invasive species,’” Nita supplied.
“Where’s your machete?” Siobhan asked.
“What?” Jan fumbled at her belt. “Oh, drat. I guess I lost it.”
They carried the wood and supply bags up from the beach, at Jan’s request, and reconstructed their kindling gradient on the harder dirt ground near the tents. The light was falling, the sun spread like a thin layer of jam across the horizon.
Jan explained what she was doing as the dryer lint she’d brought caught the flame from her lighter, then the matchstick-size shreds, the pencil-size twigs, and finally the branches she’d snapped into shorter lengths over her knee. She described the pyramid-shaped structure she’d built and how the fire would burn over time. She didn’t seem to notice that the girls were standing an odd distance away, where they could hear her but were beyond arm’s reach. Something, they thought, had changed about Jan. She was talking too fast, and each of her sentences ended with a wheeze, a hummingbird flutter of an inhale-exhale, before she barreled on again. Her face, lit from below by the growing firelight, had a skeletal quality, her lips drawn into her mouth, her eyes sunken in their sockets.
The girls perked up once the food came out. They wrapped baking potatoes in tinfoil and shoved them near the fire. Jan whittled the ends of five twigs to points with a small foldable knife, bemoan
ing the loss of her machete, and the girls roasted hot dogs and marshmallows. Jan showed them her secret technique for making s’mores, wedging a square of chocolate into the marshmallow itself. Siobhan looked across the fire and saw a smudge of chocolate on the side of Nita’s face. Jan drank from a battered tin cup of fire-boiled tea, made from plants she’d picked up on her walk. She showed the girls its ingredients—dandelion, pine needles, rosehips, all the edible delights the forest had provided.
Darkness freed the stars and made everything more than a few feet from the fire disappear. Whenever there was a lull in their talk and laughter, they could hear the water lapping against the shore. Jan asked if the girls could point out any constellations. Nita sketched out the Big Dipper with her finger. Andee said the stars around it looked like something, and Jan said, “Very good. That’s Ursa Major.” Siobhan was annoyed that that counted as an answer, but more annoyed that she couldn’t draw any lines between the scattershot lights of the sky, or remember any of the other times someone had tried to explain to her the heroes and creatures that were supposedly there.
The potatoes took so long that they were the last things the girls ate. Jan split them open with her knife, and steam rose from the dry, fragrant flesh. While they stuffed their faces, Andee expressing disbelief that it tasted so good without butter or sour cream, Siobhan noticed Jan pulling up her pant leg. Jan turned her leg this way and that, examining her scraped shin. Jan caught Siobhan looking and smiled at her, dropping her pant leg back down over what had appeared, for a moment, to be dried blood and mud matted in hair.
Jan declared it was time for bed, and the girls let out a collective whine of disappointment. “Ohhhhh.” Sleeping bags were unfurled, the fire doused, food bag hung, flashlights clicked on and off. Siobhan got her wish, squeezing in beside Jan and Dina. As if Dina had forgotten their conversation while gathering kindling until now, her bad feelings temporarily assuaged by hand-clapping and marshmallows, Dina gave Siobhan a look of pure hate as she rolled away from her in her sleeping bag. Siobhan wished she were bunking with Isabel, whose shyness now seemed mysterious, even comforting.
Siobhan couldn’t sleep. The outside was noisy: waves, crickets, and an unidentified rustling. Dina snored. Each time Jan or Dina moved in their sleep, their sleeping bags rubbed against each other or the walls of the tent with a grating, plastic-friction sound. Siobhan fingered the heart-shaped zipper pull on her jacket, trying to soothe herself with its smooth, metallic texture.
At Forevermore, the girls weren’t allowed to have watches, so Siobhan had no idea what time it was. It seemed like hours passed as she lay there, completely awake. She knew that in the morning she’d be irritable and have that dehydrated, cotton-in-the-brain feeling she got after sleepovers, from not getting enough sleep, and then she’d have to paddle all the way back.
A new sound made Siobhan jump. A low, agonized moan. Ghost, Siobhan thought. There’s a ghost! Her hand flopped inside her sleeping bag until it closed around the flashlight she’d kept at hand for exactly this reason. She hesitated about turning it on, not wanting to wake Jan and Dina. She knew how this went in TV movies. Only she would be able to hear the ghost, and everyone would laugh at her.
When she heard the moan a second time, she clicked on the flashlight, still held down near her thigh. She slowly lifted her arm out of the sleeping bag and pointed the light in the direction of the sound.
The beam caught Jan right in the face. The next moan was interrupted as Jan woke with a start, a moment of choked silence. “Wha—what?” Jan said.
Siobhan tipped her light sideways, so it illuminated Jan’s sleeping bag instead of her face. “You were making a weird sound,” she explained weakly. Realizing the noise had been coming from Jan did nothing to calm Siobhan. In the circular face cutout of Jan’s mummy-style sleeping bag, Jan looked more ghastly than any monster Siobhan could have imagined. Her skin was a waxy yellow-white, her open eyes bulging and burning with catlike intensity. “Jan?” Siobhan whispered. “Are you okay?”
Jan took a long time to answer. She wheezed, a ragged, painful-sounding inhale, before saying, finally, “Yes. Don’t worry. Everything’s fine. Turn off your light.” Dina’s snoring had continued unabated.
Siobhan clicked off her flashlight. She scooched lower in her sleeping bag and tried to erase the sight of Jan’s altered face. She knew something was wrong, but she didn’t know how to contradict an adult who said everything was fine.
Jan’s breathing settled down after a few minutes. Siobhan was starting to think Jan had gone back to sleep when Jan said softly, “Are you having trouble sleeping, Siobhan?”
“Yes,” Siobhan replied.
“Is something on your mind?”
Too many things. She asked Jan something she’d been wondering since she’d first heard that Jan had been around since the camp’s inception. “What was Forevermore like when you were a camper?”
“Oh, it was wonderful.”
“Was it different than it is now?”
“Yes, a little.”
“How?”
“We had horses. They got rid of those. And real bows and arrows. They hadn’t invented the safety ones you girls will be using next week, during the archery course. And I think the trees were thicker, and there were more songbirds about—heavens, they were loud—but it might have just seemed that way because I was younger.”
Jan was whispering excitedly, with the exuberance of someone talking about their favorite thing in the world. Siobhan started to relax. “That sounds really cool.”
“Some of the changes were for the better, though. For example, at least four of you wouldn’t have been at Forevermore back then.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well. I assume you’re Catholic, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Forevermore was only for white Protestant girls when it started. So you wouldn’t have been allowed to come, and neither would Nita, Dina, or Isabel. I’m not sure about Andee. There were other camps for Catholic girls—you could’ve gone to one of those.”
Siobhan thought about this. And what would have happened to Nita, Dina, or Isabel? She was too tired to dwell on it further. “Was the song the same?”
“Yes. The camp anthem has lasted all this time. I’ve heard it sung by hundreds of girls. We used to have more songs, though.”
“What kind of songs?”
“Other songs about camp, and about being a girl, and some about God. They’d sound pretty silly today.”
Siobhan had an idea, a way to test whether or not Jan was truly okay. “Can you sing one for me?”
After a pause, Jan said, “I’m not supposed to do that.”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
Another pause. “Okay,” Jan said. “We used to sing this one on hikes.” She cleared her throat, coughing just a little, and began to sing in a quiet, rumbly voice. “Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,/With the cross of Jesus going on before.”
Without meaning to, Siobhan dozed, slipping under and half waking, sinking completely as the hymn wound to a close, leaving Jan alone in the conscious world.
Kayla (Andee)
1
The day Kayla and Andee’s father left, three years before Andee went to Forevermore, he said only, “Well, I’m going now.” He took only the folding knife he carried in his pocket, his wallet, and the clothes on his back. Kayla understood this as a fundamental difference between men and women: men could leave, women had to stay.
In the kitchen, their mother tore one of the cabinet doors off its hinges, less out of anger than that she momentarily forgot her own strength and the door’s flimsiness. Their parents had referred to their house as “the shithole,” but Kayla thought it was actually quite lovely, a shotgun cottage on its own patch of grass outside of Waco, cornflower-blue with shutters, the ground overtaken by mustard flowers, dandelions, and morning glories. The two girls had slept on the veranda off their parents’ back bedroom, ordered to bed b
efore the sun had set, listening to the cicadas and watching the trailing flight of dandelion seeds. Kayla remembered it as the nicest place they ever lived.
Two days later, their mother had packed the car. From the backseat, Andee asked, “Where are we going?” Beside her big sister, Kayla sucked on the ear of a stuffed rabbit, its once-white fur soiled and sticky.
Their mother pulled out onto the main road before answering, drove full-tilt over a gouged-out spot in the asphalt, causing the girls to bounce off the seat. “I have friends all over the country—did you know that? We used to live on a farm together in California. Now they’re all over the place. Sea to fucking shining sea, and down in Mexico too. Your daddy never thought too kindly of my friends, but he’s gone now, so we’re going to go see them. Isn’t that great?”
Kayla nodded, as she sensed she was supposed to. Andee insisted, “But where are we going?”
They went first to Austin. In Austin, their mother’s friend gave Kayla a ukulele. He taught Kayla how to play on his acoustic guitar over several weeks. She understood these lessons to be transactional: she learned to play in exchange for sitting on his lap while he lifted her hair to his nose, closed his fist around thick locks of it, stroked her chin, and told her she had “big blue kitten eyes.” Andee wouldn’t sit on his lap, so she didn’t get presents. Then one night, Kayla woke to find their mother had carried her out to the car while she slept. Only her sister, her sleeping bag, and the ukulele were there. Her clothes and toys, such as they’d been, had been left behind.
They drove for seventeen hours, out of Texas, through Arkansas, across Tennessee. Kayla spent the time listing everything she’d lost: “My bunny. My nightgown with the ice cream cones and the lacy shoulders. My yellow socks. My yellow sweater. My blue socks. My blue T-shirt. My penguin T-shirt . . .”
“We’ll get you new stuff, honey,” their mother said.