Every Little Thing in the World

by Nina de Gramont

  An hour or so later, when Natalia and Mick still hadn’t returned, Brendan and I walked together to the lake. We washed our faces in water that felt much warmer than the night around us. After all, the sun had been shining on its still surface all day.

  “Let’s go swimming,” Brendan said.

  I looked back toward the fire, to where my bikini still hung drying on a low branch. When I looked back to Brendan, he had already pulled off his jacket and shirt. Why not? I thought, taking some comfort that even in the strong moonlight I could mostly see only the outline of Brendan’s body. Still, I waited until his back was to me—the white glare of his naked butt heading into the water—before I disrobed. Wading into the lake, I placed my hand on my stomach, which still felt flat. I wondered if the pregnancy tests had been wrong. The label claimed the test was 99 percent accurate, but it also said to see a doctor for a blood test. Why would that be necessary if the result was a sure thing? I’d never taken a pregnancy test before. What if I had some weird condition that made my hormones register as pregnant? Or maybe I was just part of that 1 percent, an inaccurate result, a false positive. Never mind what Mick and Natalia might be discussing in the woods, or that if they weren’t talking, whatever they did would come back to haunt me. On a night like this, with the stars and moon above me, the peaceful wilderness around me, I felt so young, so untouched and unchanged. How could I feel that way if it weren’t just a little bit true?

  All I wanted was to float, stare at the sky, doing nothing. Doing nothing, I thought, should only result in nothing. It shouldn’t result in a pregnancy, or a baby nine months down the road. It shouldn’t result in anything.

  The water became deep quickly, my feet floating above the sandy, pebbled bottom. I couldn’t believe that another being swam inside me, the way I now swam in this cool, calm lake. I splashed over to Brendan, who treaded water, his head dry. “Are you okay?” I asked him. I hoped my voice didn’t travel over the water, back to the campsite. Brendan, either unaware of the acoustics of water or not caring, replied in a normal voice.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “The truth is that thing last night changed my feelings.”

  I swam closer. Underwater, our legs moved in and out of each other’s. “It was creepy, right?” I said. “Do you think anybody else knows? About the guy he killed?”

  “I don’t know,” said Brendan. “For all we know, he got in trouble for it. Maybe that’s why he’s here.”

  I pondered this. It seemed unlikely that Mick could be convicted of manslaughter one summer and go camping with normal kids the next.

  “I doubt the kids Mr. Campbell brings on this trip are murderers,” I said. “More like drug users and runaways. Don’t you think? I mean, he has insurance premiums to pay.”

  Brendan nodded. He reached out and placed his hands on my waist, then pulled me closer. My chin brushed against his shoulder. The air on our faces felt cold, but his skin under the warmish water felt smooth and good. I wrapped my arms around his neck and snuggled into him, tactfully avoiding his penis, which bobbed limp and harmless in the water.

  “Anyway,” Brendan said hopefully, “maybe it’s not true. It just weirded me out, the N word and everything. And how I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t true. It scared me.”

  “We could pretend to be a couple,” I said, tasting the drops of lake water on Brendan’s ear. “You and me. That way Mick would never guess about you.”

  Brendan laughed, as if he wasn’t worried enough about Mick to bother with plotting.

  “I’m cold,” he said, not agreeing to but not rejecting my plan. “Let’s go back in.”

  We toweled off onshore. When we returned to the campfire, bundled up but with dripping hair, Mick and Natalia sat on a log, sharing water from her Nalgene bottle.

  “Anyone else awake?” I said.

  “No,” Mick said. “Just us. Wanna play Truth or Dare?” His voice was a dare itself, full of jeering and menace. I stared at him for a long minute, now accustomed to that spark in his eye—a rabid dog waiting to be baited.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I think I had enough of that last night.”

  I turned, heading toward the girls’ tent. Behind me I could feel Brendan’s discomfort, not knowing whether he was welcome to stay with Natalia and Mick.

  “Hey,” I said to Brendan, loud enough for the other two to hear. “Want to come in our tent? It looks like Natalia’s spending the night with Mick.” I waited for Natalia to protest, but she didn’t say anything. That wide expanse of butterflies opened again in my gut. I couldn’t quite decide whether they represented fear for Natalia or a weird kind of jealousy, or simple sadness—that the closer Natalia got to Mick, the further she would get from me.

  “Sure,” Brendan said.

  I crawled into the tent and over Meredith and Lori, who already snored away. A few minutes later Brendan came in, dragging Mick’s crappy sleeping bag. Unfamiliar with our system, he let in a cloud of mosquitoes.

  “Hey,” I whispered. “You let the bugs in. Don’t you guys have a system in your tent?”

  “Yeah,” he whispered back, settling between me and the far wall. “Give me your flashlight.”

  He turned it on and shone the light at the wall. As mosquitoes gathered in the beam, we smashed them one by one. As we missed, he moved the beam from side to side. We smashed and missed, smashed and hit, cracking up between every blow.

  “Come on, girls,” Lori moaned. “I need to sleep.”

  We laughed again, then turned off the light. I moved my sleeping bag closer to Brendan and threw my arm over him—hoping the closeness of my body might make up for his flimsy sleeping bag. Within a few minutes, the zipper to the tent opened, and Natalia crept over Lori (more moaning protests) and Meredith. “Move over,” Natalia whispered, yanking her tangled sleeping bag out from under me.

  “What happened?” I whispered, and Natalia whispered back, fierce and offended:

  “Nothing. Of course, nothing.”

  I listened to the sound of her breathing, almost expecting a sob, or a whimper—some indication of a torn and restless heart. But all I heard was silence, barely even a breath, until she announced, “I love Steve.”

  This must have sounded as incriminating to her as it did to me, because after a minute she added, in a more honest voice, “It’s weird. He can be so sweet.” Two faces floated in my memory, the two boys. And though one seemed to me distinctly sweet and the other distinctly not, I didn’t have to ask Natalia which one she meant.

  The next morning, after Brendan left the tent, Natalia stuck her head out and called to Meredith, who sat by the water having her usual dawn communion with the loons. It may have been the first time Natalia had spoken to her directly, and Meredith responded with immediate obedience, trotting back to the tent at the fiercest clip I’d seen from her.

  “Listen,” Natalia said, in a low and definite voice. Sleep crusted her lashes, and her face looked puffy and creased, but she couldn’t have commanded more authority if she’d been standing at a podium. “I’ve decided definitely. I’m going home, and so is Sydney.”

  “What?” Sunlight cast moving pixels into the tent, blurring everyone’s face. I sat up, adrenaline pumping. “I never said that,” I said. “I am not leaving.”

  I could feel Natalia go pale, even if I couldn’t quite see her. On the other side of the tent, Meredith gained courage from my defiance. “I’m not leaving either,” she said.

  Lori burst into tears. Natalia sighed, exasperated, but her voice was also laced with tears as she issued the request that was clearly a command: “Could you two please leave us alone for a minute?”

  Meredith and Lori scuffled out of the tent with no hesitation. I sat up, still zipped into my sleeping bag below the waist.

  “I am not asking you,” Natalia said, her voice shaking with the unshed tears. “I am begging you. I need to go home. I need to see Steve. I need to get out of here. My parents won’t let me come home if you don’t also. They’ll think I ju
st want to see Steve.”

  “I can’t,” I said, surprised at the coldness in my voice. “I can’t leave.”

  “You won’t leave,” Natalia said, “because you’re in denial.”

  “This isn’t about me,” I said. “This is about you wanting to cheat on Steve.” A cloud passed overhead, graying the light around us. Natalia’s face looked less wounded than concentrated. I could see the panicked strategizing.

  “I had this thought,” she said, “that if you had the baby, I could take it.”

  I couldn’t help it. I burst out laughing. “You?” I said. “How can you take it any more than I can?”

  “I have more money,” she said. And although her statement was obvious, I felt somehow that I’d been punched in the gut. Natalia had everything. Everything. She had every guy on the face of the planet panting after her. She had Steve, and now she had Mick. She had two smiling, glamorous parents who doted on and adored her, and she had a sister who adored her just as much. So what if the family configuration had turned out to be a giant lie? At least the truth of the matter remained: a giant, daily lovefest. While I was threatened with a crappy public school, she would be outfitted in a fur-lined parka and sent off to the slopes in Switzerland.

  Natalia had come to the lake on the basis of a simple request, and in the space of three days had been outfitted with the most expensive equipment possible. I had borrowed equipment from the Stone Age and would spend August working on a farm to pay for July. Natalia had everything, and now she wanted my baby, too.

  “You don’t have any money,” I hissed. “Your parents have the money.” I found myself returning to the name by which I’d always known them—by which I still thought of them. “Your parents aren’t going to support you and my baby. How would you live?”

  “Oh, so you’re worried about its well-being but you don’t mind killing it.”

  I paused, shaken and confused. Not so much about what Natalia had said but about why it would bother me so much to hand something over that I didn’t even want.

  “My baby,” Natalia persisted. “You just said those words, my baby.”

  “That’s because you said it,” I whispered. And then, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and I didn’t want to continue like this, I said, “I’m not leaving.”

  Natalia’s tears stood up and made themselves known, pooling in her eyes but not quite falling. “Everything that happens next is your fault,” she said. “It’s your fault for not using a condom. It’s your fault for getting sent on this stupid trip and not deciding what you’re going to do. It’s your fault for wanting to kill your own damn baby.”

  Her voice had risen to a high, clear crescendo. She escaped the tent noisily, leaving the zipper wide open and flapping. I crawled out behind her tentatively. The cloud still hung over camp, so gray that I could barely make out the smoke wafting from the fire. But I could make out the faces of everyone who sat around waiting for breakfast: Charlie and Sam, playing Spit with a soggy deck of cards; Jane and Lori, locked in their own fierce conversation while Silas and Brendan strummed their guitars, the music loud enough to drown out the words—if not the tone—of our battle; Meredith, miserably chewing on an ancient piece of beef jerky. Only one set of eyes looked at me knowingly, and because they were strangely full of understanding and forgiveness, I walked toward them.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Mick said, as I sat down next to him. He put his arm around my shoulders. It felt strong and brotherly, like he had faced worse dilemmas than mine and lived to tell the tale. “It’s going to be okay, Syd,” he said again. And for that brief moment, knowing my secret was mostly still safe, I could almost believe him.

  * * *

  As we ate breakfast (marshmallows and Wattie’s baked beans), Jane made two announcements. One, that because we had been such lazy rowers (she eyed Natalia and me), we were two days behind schedule. We would have to step it up over the next five days if we wanted to arrive at our supply pickup on time. Two, when we got to the supply pickup, Lori would be going home, but Meredith would be staying.

  We all looked over at Lori, who stared ferociously at the ground—next to Meredith but several feet away. Her poor skin looked red, ravaged, and inflamed from days of sun and sweat. Jane’s visible disgust at Lori’s weakness made my own sympathy flare. Poor Lori couldn’t stomach the canned food, and she seemed particularly allergic to the Canadian mosquitoes. While the rest of us suffered bites that swelled and itched for half an hour or so, Lori tossed and turned all night, itching. The one thing that appealed to her on this trip was Brendan, and he not only didn’t return her crush, he wouldn’t even take her seriously as an aspiring actress. She had come to Camp Bell for adventure, to discover something new about herself and the world. What she had discovered was this: She hated the wilderness.

  Jane clearly found all of this hateful and inconvenient. She said again that Lori’s departure would give us an odd number of campers, so somebody would have to row alone. Portages would be even more difficult. “Maybe somebody from one of the other groups will be going home too,” Jane said. “Then we can take somebody new, or send somebody over.”

  “I would go to a different group,” Charlie volunteered. It might have been the first time I’d heard him do anything but mutter. His voice sounded surprisingly adult, deep and gravelly. I don’t know why I should have assumed that his silence meant he was content instead of miserable. Here I’d wanted to believe that except for Lori we were a happy tribe, rowing through our peaceful, postapocalyptic world. Now I realized we’d been more like a school cafeteria, with one group laughing at the elite table, and everybody else on the fringe. And now the elite table (Natalia on the other side of Mick, unwilling to meet my eyes) had started to break apart as well.

  “Maybe Lori will change her mind,” I volunteered out loud. “Maybe we’ll have so much fun in the next five days, she’ll feel like she just has to stay.”

  First Lori raised her eyes and looked at me, then everyone else did: as if they’d only realized at that exact moment that I was completely insane.

  If it hadn’t happened naturally, Jane probably would have insisted on it. But that day Brendan and I went in one canoe, Natalia and Mick in another. To preserve Brendan’s manliness, he took the stern. He’d actually become fairly good at steering, and the two of us immediately power stroked to the front of the group. Natalia and Mick didn’t fare as well, since neither had learned how to steer. Jane had to keep rowing back to them, shouting instructions. Still, we made great time and reached the place they’d planned to camp by lunch. Jane and Silas were overjoyed, confident that we’d reach our drop-off point on schedule. In three days we’d be eating raw bacon and reading mail from home.

  As we headed toward our lunch spot, we passed a fishing boat anchored in the middle of the lake. Two burly, overdressed men ate lunch, taking time out between bites to yell at a small butterscotch pit bull who cowered on the bow. As we floated past, Sam interrupted them. “What time is it?” he yelled up.

  “Three o’clock,” the one wearing the baseball cap called back, after consulting his watch.

  Jane looked deflated for a second, then perked up. “We still have hours of daylight left,” she said. “We’ll have a quick lunch and then get back to rowing.” As we floated toward a sandy, pine-lined campsite, Jane called out to us cheerfully, “Look at this place. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Lori must have been made brave by her impending departure, because she said, “It looks exactly the same as the last campground. Everything on this lake looks exactly the same.”

  “That’s because you have a bad attitude!” Jane barked back at her.

  We pulled our canoes ashore and walked to the fire pit. Not that we’d be cooking anything. As Jane lay out the lunch supplies—the last of the whole wheat bread and the jam she’d made the night before by adding sugar to mashed wild blueberries—Natalia walked over to me.

  “Hey,” she whispered, as if our earlier argume
nt had never taken place. “What happened with you and Brendan last night?”

  I stared at her, not quite willing to accept this olive branch. Her forehead scrunched up, uncharacteristically troubled, and I couldn’t help but cave. “Nothing,” I said, in a perfectly normal voice. “We just went swimming.”

  She stood, her face sweaty and dusty and difficult to read. In ten days we had rinsed off in the lake regularly, but we had barely washed our hair or soaped up our bodies. Despite liberal application of sunscreen, we were both several shades darker than when we’d begun. With her black hair and dark eyes, Natalia looked almost Native American. Her new sinewy muscles and the lack of makeup made it hard for me to decide whether she looked older or younger. I tried to remember my own face in the mirror, back at base camp. All I’d seen of myself since then was a murky reflection in the water. Sometimes I felt about my face the way Natalia felt about Steve’s. I could barely remember what I looked like.

  From the water, the two fishermen continued yelling at the dog. We heard a yelp; maybe it had been kicked. One of the men laughed. Ordinarily this would have been something for Natalia and me to discuss, to object to, to exclaim over. But she was too busy waiting for me to ask about what happened between her and Mick. “Nothing happened with Mick and me,” she finally said, as if this must be something I’d been desperate to know. “It wouldn’t have anyway. But I’ve got my period.”

  “TMI,” I said.

  Natalia blinked back at me, clearly hurt. When had there ever been that possibility, too much information between the two of us? “God, Sydney,” she said. “Please don’t be mad at me.”

  I sighed. In the past week, Natalia had deserted my abortion plans when I desperately needed her on board in order to carry them out. By pointing out my inferior financial status, she had broken a taboo that had existed between us since the dawn of time. She had betrayed her boyfriend, the dramatic love of her life. And there was so much more that I didn’t even want to be able to put into words.