Every Little Thing in the World

by Nina de Gramont

  “But listen,” I said. “All the other kids, my friends, they’re American too. You’re treating them. They don’t have health cards.”

  “The camp’s going to pay for their treatment,” said Dr. Colwin. “They can get reimbursed by their insurance company. But American insurance doesn’t cover abortion, unless it’s medically necessary.”

  Medically necessary. As easily as those words had been given to me, now they were taken away. I stared at the sympathetic doctor, not knowing what to do.

  “You didn’t tell anyone at the camp, did you?” I said.

  “No, I sure didn’t,” she said. “And I sure won’t, no matter what you decide. But Sydney, you are going to have to make some decisions here.”

  “I don’t have any money,” I whispered.

  “I know,” Dr. Colwin said. She had that look again, like she might start crying, and I thought that maybe if I just sat there, not saying a word, she would offer to pay for it herself. Or maybe she could take up a collection from the nurses and other doctors. Ten dollars here, twenty dollars there, and we would have the money in no time.

  We sat awhile in silence, and I could almost see the possibilities running through her head while they ran through mine. My stomach grumbled, and my muscles ached from the long, hard row. And before long I realized that I knew two things, definitely and without a doubt. The first: My abortion was not Dr. Colwin’s responsibility. It was mine. The second: After having come this far—this close—there was no way on earth I could walk out of this hospital still pregnant.

  Betty brought me a cordless phone. First I called my mother’s work number, but she wasn’t there. Probably she had spent a long early morning on the phone with my father, and people from Camp Bell, hearing about what had happened.

  There was no answer at home, either, so I called her cell. She answered on the first ring. Her voice sounded breathless and oddly young.

  “Mom,” I said, “it’s Sydney.”

  “Sydney.” Her voice cracked in a way that made me want to cry. “Sydney, where are you? Are you all right?”

  I knew how worried she must have been since getting that late-night call. I knew the words she wanted to hear most in the world: Yes, Mom, I’m fine. But I also knew if I said that, I wouldn’t be able to continue on and tell her the truth.

  “Mom,” I said. “Mom, I’m pregnant.”

  I could hear her breath suck in. “Oh, Syd,” she said. “Oh, honey. When? How?”

  I ignored that last, obvious question and said, “A little while before I left.”

  I waited for her to ask why I hadn’t told her, but she didn’t say anything. I guessed in that moment she knew exactly why I hadn’t told her, because the quiet on the other end sounded more sad than angry.

  “Mom,” I said. “I want an abortion.”

  “Honey,” she said, in that same watery and sympathetic voice. “Of course you do. Of course.”

  I hate to say it: It broke my heart a little, hearing her say that. Like, what other thing could you possibly want, faced with the nightmare of having a child?

  But then there was this little pause, and I could tell she was about to speak, and I knew exactly what she would say. Something she used to say when I was little but hadn’t said in a long, long time.

  “Sydney,” she said. “You’re my whole heart. You know that, don’t you?”

  I nodded at the phone. Because I did know it, as well as I knew that I myself wasn’t anywhere near ready—to have my whole heart outside my body, walking around in the world. Someday, maybe. But right now, I needed it for myself. I needed this to be over.

  And by evening it was. I lay in a recovery room—far away from my fallen tribe—coming out of the anesthesia from my D & C. Dr. Colwin didn’t perform the procedure, but afterward she came in and sat with me awhile. She even held my hand. Before she left, she leaned over and whispered in my ear.

  “Good-bye, Sydney,” she said. “I’m glad to have met you.”

  “Thank you,” I said, never in my life meaning the words so completely. “Thank you.”

  chapter fifteen

  whole again

  The next night found me alone at base camp while the rest of my group still recovered at the Keewaytinook Falls hospital. Mr. Dickerson and Mrs. Potter had motored Bucket Head and all our equipment back there. The dog had been waiting for me at the pier, and my pack had been waiting for me on a bunk in the cabin closest to the dining hall. Meredith’s and Natalia’s packs sat on the bottom bunks next to me. I moved Natalia’s to the far end of the cabin, then walked to the dining hall to eat dinner with the camp secretary and the camp cook and a few maintenance men. They thumped me on the back and smiled as I piled one plate of cold cuts for me and another for Bucket Head.

  After dinner, I carried the day’s worth of hospital-quality sanitary napkins in a paper bag down to the fire pit by the lake. There was nobody to stop me from building a fire—me, feeling like the lone surviving camper from Group Four. I used the foolproof technique that Jane had shown us, a small tepee of twigs followed by slightly thicker sticks, and then—once the embers had taken—a small log. When the flames climbed and crackled toward the sky, I placed the bag on top of it, participating just this once in the ritual—though there were plenty of clean, unused trash cans I could have used instead.

  Earlier, in the bathroom mirror, my face had stared back at me, weirdly unfamiliar. My eyes in a deeply tanned face seemed paler and not as large. My hair curled more crazily and hopelessly than I could ever have remembered, and streaks of blond shot through the dark, unruly mass. My white T-shirt had gone gray, stained with blueberries and dirt. I looked like some kind of girl Tarzan. Who could guess what she’d been through, that primitive girl in the mirror, after all those years in the jungle?

  Now I sat on a log with the dog at my feet. I watched the smoke climb into the sky. Carrying so much away with it. Carrying possibility and sorrow, I couldn’t deny. But at the same time, carrying my life—my future, my self—back home to me.

  I stood up and walked to the water. It was a clear, starry night. I heard loons and crickets. Mosquitoes feasted on my bare arms, but I barely even felt them anymore. The lake lapped the shore, soaking my sneakers, and I knelt down to fill my palms with water. I splashed it on my face, then filled my palms again and drank in a deep slurp. The dirt on my hands made the water taste gritty, salty.

  In a few minutes I would douse the fire. I would walk up to the bathroom and shower away the grime and oil of three and a half weeks. The blood of more weeks than that would spiral down the drain, as it now spiraled in the smoke, climbing back up toward the sky.

  In the light of the fire, I took off my clothes and walked into the water. The lake gathered around my body in a clingy, delicious chill—crisp and heavy enough to bring me down, if only I weren’t so strong: strong enough to reclaim my life, and stay afloat.

  I remembered then the last lines of that Robert Frost poem, the one that Natalia had tried to recall back at the abandoned village. And the words—about what’s discovered after losing your way—filled me up with the greatest finality, and the most complete relief. I closed my eyes and let myself sink just under the surface, while the last lines of the poem surrounded me as entirely as the lake. I lunged up, out of the water, and after I took in a deep, soul-cleansing breath, I spoke the words out loud.

  “‘Here are your waters and your watering place,’” I called up to the starlit sky. “‘Drink and be whole again beyond con-fusion.’”

  chapter sixteen

  northern lights

  For the other campers, the return to base camp felt like a celebration. Everyone was so happy—to have toilets and beds, and showers, and hot meals served indoors, with no plates or pans to scrub in the lake. By afternoon the camp was full of campers, freshly showered but still wearing their filthy clothes.

  Group Four arrived by motorboat somewhere near evening. I walked down to the launching pier to greet them. They looked amazi
ngly healthy, considering the pumped stomachs and intravenous fluids. The hospital staff had done laundry for them, so they were the only campers wearing clean clothes. They all had thick gauze bandages on each arm. They stepped off the boat one at a time and gave me a hug. They smelled like the strangest combination of antiseptic and campfire smoke.

  Mick got off the boat before Natalia. He swept me into a bear hug that cracked the back of my ribs. I hugged him back, thinking how familiar his scent had become to me—the faraway but lingering odor of Tide, the acrid scent of Brendan’s Off !, and his own indefinable sweat, a very personal fingerprint.

  I waited for a second after he let go. Natalia stood in front of me, her hair pulled off her face by a cloth headband. She had her hands in the back pockets of her denim skirt. “Guess what?” she said in her old cafeteria voice.

  “What?”

  “I looked at Jane’s chart,” she said. “She’s only seventeen.”

  “No way.”

  “Born exactly ten months before me,” Natalia said. “I knew it. I knew she was no kind of adult.”

  “Did you look at Silas’s chart?”

  “Yup. Nineteen years old.”

  “Now if you could just tell me if they’ve been having sex,” I said, and Natalia laughed. Then she caved in and hugged me. “Go for a walk?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  We’d had such good weather. All summer the sky had been kind to us, offering few days of rowing against headwinds, or sleeping and traveling under rain. Today was no exception. Mrs. Potter had told me that the canoe trails around Lake Keewaytinook were established over thousands of years by the Teme-Augama Anishnabai: the Deep Water People. Their ancient path, where Natalia and I now walked, was dappled with sunlight, a lovely warmth beating on the back of our necks, along with a cooling breeze. We couldn’t see a single cloud above us, not the barest wisp of white, only a clear blue sky. Tomorrow would be August. The air felt a little crisper, a little colder. Fall would come early here in the north.

  “Silas says we might see the northern lights tonight,” said Natalia. “Sometimes people do, in between trips, when it’s colder.”

  I didn’t answer, just looked up at the sky as if the spectacle had already begun. “So,” Natalia said after a while. “Have you thought any more about what you’re going to do?”

  We stopped walking and faced each other. Of course the question itself indicated that something had changed. After the days indoors at the hospital, Natalia’s skin had begun to peel a little; I could see a fresh pink layer underneath her eyes. Strange, very strange, that my secret had gone from being pregnant to not being pregnant. Strange, again, that such a huge event could take place—in my body and my heart and my mind—and still not be visible to the naked eye.

  “I want you to know,” Natalia said, “that I will still take this baby. I will take care of it, and I will love it just exactly as if it were my own.”

  She looked so earnest, and I wanted to love her for the offer. I wished for a cloud to float by and give us a little shade, a little darkness, to match the news I was about to deliver.

  “Natalia,” I said quietly, “there’s no more baby.”

  She stood blinking at me for a long moment. Then she said, “The hospital?”

  I nodded.

  “I thought so,” she said.

  I opened my mouth to say I was sorry, but thought better of it. Because I wasn’t sorry. I couldn’t be. In the end I had chosen hope when hope presented itself. I had chosen me, and a life beyond that fleeting craziness two months before. I had chosen this new wisdom and resignation over months and years of uncertainty and trouble.

  “I don’t know if I can talk to you for a while,” Natalia said.

  “I get that,” I told her. She reached out her hand and I took it. We stood there for a few minutes. And then she let go and walked away.

  Soon Natalia would be home. She would face Margit as her mother for the very first time. And maybe after that, she would see that whatever I had done—whatever I had given up— it had never for a single second been her.

  I saw Cody that night at dinner. I was sitting at a table by the window with Meredith. I saw him cross the dining hall and stop to talk to Mick and Natalia. Natalia pointed me out with a casual toss of her head. I hadn’t realized before that she’d noticed where I was sitting.

  “Hey,” Cody said, sliding in next to me, his tray piled high with sandwiches. “I heard what happened. I was worried about you.”

  My heart stopped for a moment, and then I realized he meant the food poisoning. “Sydney was the only one you didn’t have to be worried about,” Meredith said.

  Cody sat down across the table from us. I nodded toward his food. “Hungry much?”

  “Man,” he said, “I am starving. Absolutely starving.”

  “Me too,” I said. I reached over and slid one of the sandwiches off his plate. We sat there, eating together. Meredith and I filled him in on the tainted tuna and our dramatic rescue. “Sydney paddled for miles,” said Meredith, “to find us help.”

  “Well, it wasn’t miles,” I said, though I knew it had been. “And Silas was with me.”

  “Puking all the way,” Meredith said.

  “It wasn’t pretty,” I admitted.

  Cody reached under the table and placed one warm, oar-calloused hand on my knee. I could feel his skin through my worn jeans. “You’re my hero,” he said. I smiled at him. Across the room, Jane and Silas ate with the other counselors, Bucket Head wagging his tail at Silas’s feet.

  Hero: For the first time in my life, despite everything, I felt strangely deserving of the word. My mother had promised not to tell my father about the abortion, and I knew how proud he must be of my midnight rescue mission.

  “A bunch of us are going to sleep outside tonight,” Cody said, “to see if the northern lights come out. Want to join us?” He was asking Meredith, too, but he looked pointedly at me.

  “I still feel a little weak,” Meredith said. “I’m going to bed early, inside.”

  I could see Mick and Natalia, clearing their trays. At another table, Sam had reunited with Charlie, and I saw Brendan saunter out the door with Roger. Our little tribe had already disbanded.

  “Sure,” I told Cody. “I’d love to see the northern lights.”

  * * *

  The sun had just begun to set when I retrieved my sleeping bag from the bunkhouse. I had to grab my pack, too, and stopped by the bathroom to change pads. My stomach still cramped every few hours, and the doctor had said to be alert to body temperature changes. Every once in a while I brought my hand to my forehead, which felt cool and normal. I wondered if it would be best to just join Meredith inside, but I couldn’t bear to miss the northern lights, or one last night with Cody, even though I couldn’t imagine letting myself so much as kiss him.

  When I came out of the bathroom Mick was standing outside, leaning against a pine tree. I looked around for Natalia and saw from his steady gaze that he wasn’t waiting for her, but for me.

  “Syd,” Mick said. I walked over to him, and he put his hand on my shoulder. “Natalia told me what happened,” he said.

  It seemed funny, somehow, her name on his lips—though of course I’d heard him say it a hundred times before. But in that moment the word sounded so elegant, and he pronounced it as if nothing could be more natural. It was as if he really had been changed by his association with her. With us.

  “You did the right thing, Syd,” Mick said. “She’ll realize that before too long.”

  “Thank you,” I said, meaning this more than I could possibly express. His hand still sat, heavily, on my shoulder. I thought with a surge of happiness that it wouldn’t be like “Flowers for Algernon” at all. Mick would keep becoming his better self, growing into his potential more and more with every day that passed.

  “Mick,” I said, “do you ever think about that guy? Under the tunnel? Do you ever feel guilty about it?”

  He frowned for a secon
d, unsure what I was talking about. Then he remembered and took his hand off my shoulder. He waved it, pushing the question out of the air—dismissing it as ridiculous.

  “No way,” he said. “That was like a time of war. Him or us. I did what I had to do.”

  He cocked his head and smiled at me, and I nodded gravely. “Are you going to see if the northern lights come out?” I said.

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Mick told me.

  I took a step back, a little awkwardly. Then I raised my hand and waggled my fingers to say so long. As I turned and headed down the hill, my sleeping bag under my arm and my pack over my shoulder, Mick called out to me.

  “Keep it in your pants tonight, Syd,” he yelled. “No point starting in right where you left off.”

  “Shut up,” I yelled back. Leaves and mud squished under my feet, and my chest swelled with love. Still. If I never saw Mick again in my whole entire life, those last words—from both of us—would be completely perfect.

  I met Cody down by the water, with a gaggle of other campers that included Meredith. Apparently she’d changed her mind about sleeping indoors, and I felt glad. Somebody who had been so disciplined about watching the dawn deserved, more than any of us, the aurora borealis.

  “Want to go for one last swim?” Cody asked.

  “I can’t,” I said. When he cocked his head in question, I said, “It’s too cold.”

  We walked away from the others to find a place to lay down our sleeping bags. It was rockier than our last spot, on a small slope. As we settled down next to each other, the sky growing darker above us, I decided to level with him.

  “Cody,” I said, “I can’t sleep with you tonight. I can’t have sex, I mean.”

  He moved a little closer and put his arm around me. “That’s okay,” he said. “I figured you wouldn’t want to, after last time.”

  I let my head drop onto his shoulder, feeling grateful and amazingly comfortable.

  “Are you a virgin?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. And then, because he seemed like such a nice guy, and because from the start it had been so easy just to be with him, I told him the truth. “Two nights ago I had an abortion.”