Every Little Thing in the World

by Nina de Gramont

  The letter from Natalia’s parents didn’t mention anything they’d revealed before she left. It was just chatty news and loving words. No mention of Steve or Switzerland or even Margit—other than that she sent her love. Natalia pored over it again and again, trying to find something between the lines that clarified her new, strange situation. Finally, giving up, she tossed it into the fire. “At least you have something to throw,” I told her.

  She patted my knee. “Maybe she didn’t get hers out in time,” she said.

  All I’d got in the mail was a single postcard, written by Kerry and signed by her and “Dad,” not an actual signature, but in Kerry’s handwriting. When Mr. Campbell handed out the mail, we’d all crowded around him, waiting for our names to be called. I stood there as all the letters were handed out, not realizing how much I wanted to hear from my mother until it became crystal clear she hadn’t written. Now, sitting next to the fire, this seemed so frankly mean that it brought tears to my eyes. What had I done that was so bad? What, beyond my inconvenient existence, had earned me such a hostile rejection? Before being left almost empty-handed and clearly waiting in the midst of all the other kids waving their letters from home, I had almost begun working up my resolve to tell her about the pregnancy. I knew that she would take everything finally and completely out of my hands. But now, all I could think of was how she would find the pregnancy proof of me as all-around bad kid. I thought I would almost rather have the baby than let her rescue me—in all her self-righteous fury—from my reckless teenage self.

  We’d left our drop-off point plus one dog, minus two people. Lori motored off in Mr. Campbell’s boat, waving happily, the first time I’d seen her smile in the two weeks I’d known her. I stood on the shore with Meredith, waving as if we’d been friends, wishing her clear skin and feather pillows for the rest of the summer.

  Charlie motored out on the same boat but didn’t bother waving. He sat in the front seat, on his way to join a group who’d lost a camper to acute appendicitis (the kid had been airlifted out in the first week, to the hospital in Keewaytinook Falls). I wondered how, without cell phones, they had managed to contact a helicopter. Maybe Silas had an emergency one, stashed in his pouch with the surprise wads of cash. But when I asked him, he just laughed. “There’s no reception here, kemo sabe,” he said. “No cell towers hidden in the trees. Your modern technology’s no good on Lake Keewaytinook.”

  That first night after the drop-off point, the letter from home burnt along with the last of her tampons, Natalia allowed Mick to claim a tent for them. Silas and Jane had already gone to bed, and Mick stood up and pulled back a flap, letting mosquitoes buzz inside by the hundreds.

  “Not so fast, little man,” he said to Sam, who knelt to throw his sleeping bag inside. “Tonight this is for the lady and me.”

  Sam scurried away like a frightened puppy. I watched Natalia, waiting for her to make some sort of snotty refusal. At the drop-off camp she had avoided Mick, repelled by his rowdy association with the two token thugs. But now she only paused for a second, then shrugged and followed him into the bug-filled tent.

  Brendan, Meredith, Sam, and I climbed into the other tent. I pulled the down of my sleeping bag up around my ears to drown out any sounds that might drift in. Condoms had not been an item on Camp Bell’s list of necessities; they hadn’t even made the suggestion column. I hoped that if nothing else, my current state would operate as a cautionary tale and keep them from actually having intercourse. Not that I felt superconfident Mick would allow Natalia to refuse him, if he wanted to have full-on sex.

  The thought made me pull the sleeping bag away from my ears. What if Natalia yelled out for help? I needed to be on the alert, so that I could rush to her rescue if she needed me. And if there wasn’t much I could do on my own, I would at least be able to wake Silas. Tall and leaner by the day, with his hero’s disposition, Silas would come rushing to Natalia’s aid without a second thought.

  I lay awake, imagining different scenarios where Silas would protect each of us from Mick. He would stop Mick from punching me in the gut and causing a miscarriage. He would stop Mick from cracking Brendan’s head open upon discovering he was gay. He would stop Mick from grabbing Jane’s naked breasts in an uncontrolled, animal moment. Before I fell asleep, I imagined Silas in that underpass in Pittsburgh, how he would step between the mugger and Mick’s brother. He would step between Mick and his victim, stopping the whole thing with one careful shove—so that nobody would wind up on the ground, bleeding. Nobody would end up dying.

  At the mail drop-off, Mick had grumbled when we found out our parents weren’t allowed to send packages. His mother had promised to send him two boxes of Crunch Berries. I pictured Mick at home, shoveling pink and yellow cereal into his mouth, the box with its cartoon picture of Cap’n Crunch at his elbow. With this image in my head, it was hard to feel seriously frightened of him. Falling asleep, hearing no sounds at all from the other tent, I had one last and fleeting thought: that Mick would never hurt Natalia or do anything she didn’t want, for the simple reason that he loved her. For all my other fears, this last seemed like the truest realization, so much so that I immediately drifted off to sleep.

  I slept late the next morning, stirring and then drifting back off as the others left the tent one by one. I could hear the conversation by the morning fire and smell the by-now appealing aroma of coffee. But sleep glued me to the sandy ground, even as I heard Jane calling my name every five minutes.

  “It’s late, Sydney,” she kept saying, though of course she had no idea what time it was. We had all proved ourselves completely pathetic when it came to reading the summer sky. Finally Mick poked his bandanna-covered head into the tent. “Rise and shine, Syd!” he shouted, like an overenthusiastic drill sergeant. I could tell from his face—drawn and agitated—that this morning would star the bad Mick rather than the good, and it frightened me to be alone with him in an enclosed space. I sat up with a groggy and startled squint, waiting to see what meanness he would inflict.

  “Jesus, Syd,” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “You are butt ugly in the morning.”

  He let the flap fall closed, and I brought my fingers up to touch my face—outlining the puffy area around my lips and eyes, trying to recall the exact contours. I felt so convinced that what he said was true, I couldn’t bear to leave the tent, showing my butt-ugly face to the group. I changed into my clothes inside the tent and packed up my things. I could see the shadow of my crazy, unruly hair, curling in every direction. Outside, I could hear everyone else at work, taking camp apart.

  Finally Brendan poked his head into the tent and handed me a cup of coffee. “You’d better get going,” he said. “We need to take the tent down. And don’t listen to Mick. You look adorable.”

  I sipped the coffee, grateful for the reassurance but worried that if Mick heard Brendan use the word “adorable,” the jig would be up for at least one of us.

  It’s funny, how your relationship with your own looks changes when you go weeks without seeing yourself. None of us really knows what we look like, after all. In that nanosecond it takes for a mirror to give our faces back to us, our mind has already done all sorts of perverse rearranging. I’ve known too many girls—beautiful girls, skinny girls—who respond to their own reflections with “yuck”s and starvation diets. So I always tried not to overreact to what I saw in the mirror. A zit here, a lack of symmetry there. I seemed to be living the life of a passably pretty girl, so I tried to leave it at that.

  But of course insecurities will arise. On the river—with no guys of interest, other than unattainable and heroic Silas—this seemed to happen less. Every night Natalia and I dutifully splashed water on our faces, then went over them with a Stri-Dex pad that became completely black on first contact. We washed our hair once or twice a week (I don’t think Jane or Meredith had washed theirs at all since the trip began). Then we twisted it into ponytails, pulled on our filthy shorts, and went on with the day.

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nbsp; Mick’s comment, though, had done what he’d meant it to do. It cut me down to size, making me feel blue and worthless for the rest of the day. I rowed with Brendan, disliking this recent reduction to girl status, riding in the bow. My bikini top felt tight; the straps cut into my shoulders. Meredith’s mother had snuck a thin tin of butterscotch candies into her letter, and I could smell them on her tongue no matter how far away from me she paddled. The scent went straight through my sinuses, not so much unpleasant as bizarre in its intensity. If I hadn’t liked Meredith so much, and been so against littering, I would have found that tin and tossed it into the middle of the lake.

  At midafternoon we rowed up beside a waterfall that bordered our next portage. Silas shouted to us at the mouth of the vortex, and we all made a sharp turn just before we could be sucked into the fall’s undertow. After we’d hauled our canoes ashore, we stood for a while, watching the blue water. There were two currents. One ended in a perfectly calm blue pool. The other ended in the kind of steep, dramatic drop-off that Lara Croft herself would be unlikely to survive.

  “It’s a great slide,” Jane said. “You just have to make sure you turn out of it before the drop-off.” She pulled off her shirt and dove in, letting the current take her down toward the drop-off, then gracefully riding the currents to the right, into the gentle pool. I watched her plunge down under the water, then come shooting up for air, her tan, naked breasts bobbing in the water.

  We all lined up and rode the current, one at a time, as if it were an amusement park ride. The activity seemed to bridge the various gaps between us. I watched Meredith fly down the current, with her thick, chubby body and her unwashed braids. She laughed, her round face bright and happy. Meredith loved it here so much. Nobody at school would ever call her pretty, but I thought she was beautiful. The sight of her, along with the good water, washed Mick’s comment out of my head. I forgot the awful U word and returned to my animal self. My body, because it could do what I told it, was good. In this week after our supplies had been replenished we ate well—plenty of fresh protein still stored in the cooler. My well-fed and well-used muscles let the water carry me down its natural slide. Then I swam over to the appropriate fork at just the right moment. On the rock ledge that divided the two courses of water, Mick and Silas sat sunning themselves in a rare moment of peace. Both shirtless, Mick looked as muscular and imposing as Silas did lanky and meatless. At first Bucket Head had objected to our trips down the lesser waterfall, running alongside us and barking dire warnings. But now, exhausted, he resigned himself to lying down on the rocks and panting.

  I climbed out of the water, then walked upstream for one more slide. My legs felt slightly shaky as I eased myself in, but I wasn’t quite ready to give up the sensation. I floated into the eddy, letting the current take me down, down. And I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say for sure, whether that second I missed the turn was a flash of conscious decision or simple tiredness, or the sun blocking my vision at just the wrong time. But suddenly I found myself drifting to the left of that rocky ledge where two men and a dog rested.

  I didn’t have time to call out. Instead I tried to turn my body around and swim upstream, a useless effort that immediately backfired: The eddy dragged me under, and the more I tried to claw up out of the water, the deeper the current pulled me down. I could feel it as surely as if a pair of hands dragged me by the heels. At first there was a definite sense of fighting and pulling and clawing. But as I saw bubbles rising in that underwater world, rocks scraping the bottom of my feet and the back of my shoulders as I tumbled by, I felt myself go calm. I knew that the drop-off was fast approaching. I could see it, if not concretely, somewhere inside of myself. Soon I would be plunging over the waterfall, going down, all possibility of air and breath lost forever.

  And a feeling of peace and insight came over me, as if death were not something to fear but simply an answer to a question that had loomed over me ever since I first understood that I wouldn’t live forever.

  This, I thought. This is how it ends.

  But in the very second before I plunged down into the rapids, a hand reached into the water and closed around the top of my arm. It dragged me out of the currents like a mother cat retrieving her kitten—a simple and no-nonsense gesture. I knew Silas had saved me, and despite my previous calm the most profound adoration and gratitude swept over me.

  Onshore, I coughed out a minute’s worth of missed breath, then opened my eyes into the hot summer sun. Silas sat on the rocks, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his hands behind his back, propping himself up. Apparently he hadn’t even seen my almost drowning. I thought about calling out to him but wasn’t sure exactly what I would say. Bucket Head danced around me, celebrating my rescue with short, excited yaps. And standing in front of me, a happy sort of smirk across his face, stood my rescuer: Mick, cocking his head to one side, looking no more or less pleased with himself than usual.

  Mick gave my stomach two short, staccato pats. “Okay then, Syd,” he said. “I guess your soul belongs to me now.” He laughed and sat back down on the rocks. Exhausted, I sat down next to him, panting along with the dog, who covered my face with relieved kisses. Mick on one side, Bucket Head on the other—the only two who knew I’d almost died, and only one of them seemed to consider it a reason for celebration. But then, after a minute, Mick’s hand came down on my knee. It was wet and comforting, the least threatening gesture I could imagine. “You gotta be careful, Sydney,” he said.

  I nodded and let my head rest against his strong, sunburned shoulder. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, Mick.”

  Back on the water, I had the oddest sensation, one that I could only describe—however reluctantly—as a craving. I wanted a glass of lemonade. Not just any glass of lemonade, but Paul Newman lemonade, poured over exactly four ice cubes in one of the big Ball canning jars that Kerry used. I wanted it so badly I almost found myself whimpering as I rowed, and I prayed that this was not a symptom of pregnancy but a reaction to almost dying and wanting to experience some of the good the world still had to offer.

  It was so weird. Facing death, my life had not flashed before me like a movie, the way it was supposed to, so over the next few hours—portaging and then rowing—I tried to reconstruct it for myself. What were the important events? Which people had meant something to me? What had I done to make the world a better place?

  The last question was sadly easy to answer: NOTHING. As my father would probably sum it up, I had always been a consumer, never a contributor. And I certainly knew that my mother considered me nothing but a drain of resources. Quite probably the reason she hadn’t written was that she didn’t want to break the news yet of my reassignment to public school.

  I placed my paddle in the water over and over again, the wood biting into my increasingly calloused hands. Whenever I hiked with my dad, we always waited for the moment when we’d established what he called a trail rhythm—a consistent walk, conducive to observing nature and getting lost in our own particular thoughts. The same held true for these days on the lake. After a while our arms moved in a traceable, consistent rhythm. Some days we chatted. Others we all fell into private daydreams.

  I thought about my old boyfriend Greg. A year ago he had seemed like my whole world. Now I didn’t even know what he was doing this summer. He could be trekking in the Himalayas, he could be starring on The Real World, he could be doing anything for all I knew. Way back when, the loss of him had been painful, but I had survived it. Today, faced with my own mortality, the memory of Greg registered as a tiny, faraway blip.

  The bigger people: Mom, Dad, Natalia. All of them had their issues, particularly these days. But rowing that afternoon— my life a sudden luxury—my mouth watered for a drink that was weeks away, and I kept coming back to that last question: What had I done to make the world a better place?

  Certainly I had never done anything on the order of Silas’s rescue of Bucket Head. As if on cue, the dog jumped out of Silas’s canoe and p
addled in the water beside it. His tongue lolled out and his tail wagged happily in the water, an off-kilter rudder. If Silas had not been with us on that day, none of us would have saved him. The dog would have gone on in his unhappy life, never experiencing this free, frolicking happiness of shared raw bacon and endless tummy rubs.

  And if Mick hadn’t been along today, sitting on those rocks, or if, say, he’d been caught for the murder he’d committed last summer and sent to jail, maybe I and the small being inside me would have gone flying over those rocks, down the waterfall, my oxygen supply cut off. I imagined the umbilical cord squeezed tight, a thrashing and a gasping within my deepest regions. How strange, the small amount of space I took up: Within the small circle of my waist, an entire person was spinning into being.

  I tried for one minute to imagine that person, if that could be my contribution. I tried to imagine myself giving birth, and changing diapers, and carrying my own baby around in a BabyBjörn the way I carried Rebecca. All these images seemed just only impossible, like science fiction, like trying to imagine walking on the moon.

  I looked across the water at Mick. Although he would never admit it, would never even boast about it, I knew he felt proud of my rescue. I could tell by the way he paddled, and the way he looked at me—shy and then triumphant, then looking away. As much as Mick could still be a jerk—an insensitive, unfeeling, and downright frightening jerk—he also had these moments of touching vulnerability, even sweetness. Sometimes it made me think of that story we’d read in ninth-grade English, “Flowers for Algernon.” It was as if this trip, being with all of us, had made Mick a better and nicer person. But then we would get these glimpses of the person he had once been and would always become again. Two Micks, and I pictured the good one floating and falling over the waterfall, disappearing forever like I had almost done. So sad.

  But maybe saving my life would be a moment he could actually carry away with him. Maybe it could almost be redemption for what he had done, really through no fault of his own, last summer. And it struck me: Almost dying was the closest thing to altruistic that I’d ever done.