by Heather Abel
Scott blew the whistle. Only he could blow the whistle. It was time to leave the river.
thirteen
First the Briny Silence, Then the Boom
The barn was always in existence. Even when nobody was there, somebody was there. The mice were there beneath the straw. The bats, draped by their wings, in the high rafters. The chit chit of spider feet. Brown recluse, black widow. The barn swallows with their forked tails had left for the day. Had the barn grown to expect the people in their bathing suits? This was the time of day when they usually came. The sunlight strobed through the seams in the wooden walls. It had been nice to smell the muck of the river coming off the people. The alluvial smell, the smell of green algae and scum. The dampness. The barn was so dry and brittle. But the people didn’t come. The mice woke from the quiet and fell back asleep.
“The way to think about it,” Rebecca said, “is that he’s too radical to simply publish a newspaper. He’ll do the one thing that can actually make a difference.”
She stood in the girls’ area with a group of counselors whom she’d waylaid on the way to their platforms. Still in their bathing suits and sneakers, they passed the torn-out editorial from hand to hand.
“It’s noble,” Saskia said. “He’s calling us all out on our complacency.”
“Nobody in my family would ever write something like this. They’re basically illiterate racists,” Nat said, looking over Saskia’s shoulder. “He’d hate them all.”
“What is it, then?” Saskia asked. “The one thing?”
“No, I’m not allowed to say. Not yet.”
“You know, though, right?” Kai asked, pulling her hair out of its ponytail.
Saskia handed the page to Kai. “Is it going to be inside the system or outside?”
Kai said authoritatively, “It’s got to be outside. Master’s tools and all that.”
Suze patted the pages of handwritten lyrics that Shauna had given her and whispered to David, “They named some grass after me?”
“Technically, a meadow.” David, his arms around knees, rocked forward, brushing up against Suze’s white shirt. “Although, sure, on the small side.”
“Petite,” she said.
“It was Caleb who named it that.”
“Caleb, Caleb, Caleb,” she chanted, then turned from him to watch Nicole, still in her bathing suit, beg her matchmaker to make her a match, a request which, as a child, David had interpreted as a literal need for a stick that created fire. They were rehearsing on the Great Overlook before dinner. Flashlights were piled like kindling in preparation for darkness, but the sun and heat remained, as recalcitrant as a child who wouldn’t go to bed. Suze had agreed to replace Caitlin as David’s wife, a gesture of generosity and spontaneity completely in line with the way he remembered her.
Nicole had been told to snap in time, and she was not snapping in time. Shauna insisted they “take it from the top.”
Suze glanced back at David. “He hasn’t changed in all these years, has he?”
“Caleb? Should he?”
“Right, if you know you’re the smartest person in the room, and by that I mean the proverbial room, because you never actually go inside a room, why would you change?” She laughed a little. “Can I talk to you?”
“Yeah! Of course. I mean, sure.” David blushed with the understanding that he’d failed in his attempt not to seem too eager.
She looked at him intently. “The whole reason I’m here. Well, of course, there’s you.” She hit him on his upper arm with the back of her hand. “You called. Adorably. But the reason I came when you called is . . .” She started to sing: “I’m getting married in the morning . . .” Then she laughed. “Well, in September. In the sterile splendor of Colin’s mom’s home in Greenwich, Connecticut. You know it?”
“No, but I . . .” He considered offering to learn about it.
“Land of McMansions. Land of everything Caleb hates. Nature manicured for our comfort. Five Dominican gardeners working full time.” She paused. Sucked in her cheeks. “So all summer, I felt Caleb’s disapproval. Like literally”—she pointed to the dirt—“Caleb standing right here, beside me in his cowboy shirt and . . . shall we say, pious demeanor, shaking his head when I paid eight dollars for a salad, rolling his eyes when I tried on a bazillion-dollar wedding dress, asking me how I ended up with someone like Colin.”
Okay, okay. David calmed himself. “Marriage” was a frightening word, sure, but she was here because she didn’t want it. She was heeding Caleb’s disapproval.
“A frog in heating water, you know?”
He didn’t.
“That’s how it happened.” She went on to say that in the first years after she left, she tried to keep up with most of the Llamaloian tenets. Lived in shitholes that gave her scabies, co-ops with stoned strangers always sleeping in the living room—roaches on the unwashed dishes, maggots in the bulk rice, blind mice babies born in her sleeping bag. She still bought nothing, not even a broom, before checking Dumpsters, borrowing from friends.
“But little by little . . .” She mimed stabbing her heart. “Kill me now—I succumbed to the delights of buying a new sweater. The wonder of Gore-Tex. I moved to San Francisco, where any experience of the great outdoors must be mediated by a truckload of expensive gear. And then I met Colin. He’s great. He’s a good person. He’s not some idiot who hasn’t considered the downside to consumption. His family gives a shit-ton of money away.” She started accordion-folding a page of the lyrics in a way that seemed frenetic and sure to piss off Shauna. “Our mattress was handstitched by nuns! It’s four layers of . . .” She looked away, then back at him. “Who gives a shit? I love my bed. I just thought, if I came here again . . . I wanted to be the person I was here. Do you even remember that person?”
“But you still are!” he said, although he didn’t entirely believe it. “You’re her.”
A fake, tinny laugh. “I wish. Do you remember? I was like a queen here. Like the center of everything.”
“But now you’re here again,” he said, a hopeful reminder.
She was staring at something beyond him. “Where else do you get some grass named after you?”
“Technically, a meadow,” he repeated, but she didn’t laugh this time.
“He didn’t ask me a single question. He talked, for what? Forty-five minutes? Not ‘How are you, Suze?’ Not ‘What’s your life like?’ Nothing. He won’t change. I mean, I can see the attraction. That’s easy. I can see why at twenty-two, twenty-five . . . All that intense focus—who wouldn’t want to be the object of it? But then you remember what it’s actually like.”
A question? That’s all she needed? But anyone could ask a question. Surely, Caleb would soon ask her a question. And Suze would be satisfied. They’d live here together, with him and Rebecca, although he’d pissed off Rebecca without meaning to. An intestinal cavity to the left of his navel began throbbing with a sour pain. His anxiety was back. The usual last-week-of-camp anxiety: minutes ticking by.
“You’re so sweet to listen to all this.” Was she crying? She rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands and then laughed in that horrible way again.
Now he was anxious about feeling anxious, because it seemed likely that anxiety was generative. The very act of worrying that something terrible would happen was creating that likelihood.
“Are you bored?” she said. “I’m bored. It’s so fucking gorgeous here, and we’re spending our time singing Catskills vaudeville? I’ve always hated this stupid musical.” Turning to the singing girls, she said, “Hey, can I give a little suggestion?”
The girls ignored her.
He told himself not to think any further, and yet thought’s filamental whisper floated by: You’re anxious about being anxious about being anxious.
Louder, Suze called, “David and I need a different song.”
Nicole stopped singing. Shauna said, “What?”
“Come on. This story, this . . . shtetl matchmaking stuff, what
does it have to do with Llamalo? With the great and powerful Caleb? With Aemon’s wondrous plateau? David and I want a song that makes us cry.”
“We’re cool doing it this way,” Shauna said.
Suze jumped up and put a reassuring hand on Shauna’s arm. “This’ll be great. What’ll we call it? Fiddler on Aemon’s Mesa? No, see that’s the problem—nobody fiddles here. I got it! Guitarist on the Roof . . . On the Mesa. Who plays guitar?”
Suze’s emotions seemed to David a dangerous, unpredictable force, and he needed to do whatever he could to assuage them. Ask her questions. Sing a different song. Whatever would calm her down. “I do. I play guitar.”
Suze gasped in either mock or real delight. “Everyone loves a guy who plays guitar. Don’t we, girls?” She pushed him. “Well, go. Go. Get it.”
To mitigate Suze’s emotions, or so he told himself, David took Mikala’s guitar from where she stored it in the living room closet, although nobody was allowed to touch it but her. On the porch, he tried to come up with the perfect song for them to sing, but he was distracted by the worry that Caleb wouldn’t redeem himself by asking questions, and that even if Caleb did, the lack of questions was not actually all that bothered Suze. Because it couldn’t be, could it?
“I got it,” Suze said, thrilled, elated, the rising sun. “Do you know ‘Blackbird’?” When she leaned forward, her necklace touched his arm. He tried and failed to not enjoy the silvery feeling of this.
“All your life,” they sang, “you were only waiting for this moment to arise.” They practiced three times, and each time it made the pain in his stomach burn louder, until the first campers and counselors appeared on the lawn to wait for dinner and Suze stood and adjusted her tank top and said, “You grew up. I’m amazed how you grew up.”
He stood as well, holding the guitar by its neck. She was staring up at him. Was she expecting him to kiss her? He managed only monosyllables: “Uh. Yeah. Thanks. You. Too.”
She laughed, and a group of campers called from the grass—Suze, Suze, talk to us—and she went to them.
Caleb checked the temperature on the thermometer on the wall of the eating platform. It was official. The hottest day of summer. The high peaks of the Rocky Mountains were blocking passage of the air that had settled on western Colorado like a headache. On the lawn, campers took bets as to whether it was 105 or 115 degrees “in the shade.” At dinner, everyone was a lank of limp hair, was an untied shoelace stomped into dirt. It was 108 in the shade.
After announcements, which included Caleb’s usual end-of-summer speech about how much everyone had changed and would be missed, he gave the cast of Fiddler half an hour to prepare for the show and sent the rest of the camp to sweep their platforms and clean the ground beneath. He leaned against the porch railing, hands clasped in front of him, watching the preparations below. Matthew arranged traffic cones, pilfered from the parking lot, to demarcate a stage on the side of the Overlook closest to the ditch. Suze walked by, swinging hands with an eight-year-old girl. It was the space above her breasts, the tautness of skin so near that heaviness. She waved to Caleb.
Scott rang the first bell, and now David arrived with a guitar strapped to his back. Soon he was on the dirt, strumming, Suze crouched beside him. It was the space above her hips, the small of her back.
His hope sauntered up, past thirty now, his own age, wearing a leather jacket from a thrift store, feeling particularly sexy, feeling juiced, pressuring him to do something, say something. He ran down the porch stairs and across the Overlook and crouched behind Suze, pushing his face near hers.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, startled.
His mouth was dry. He licked his lips. The moon was just now intruding over the mountain.
His hope chanted: Come on, come on, come on. No problem, no problem at all. Piece of cake, slice of life, bowl of cherries. Meal time, swim time, no time like the present.
“Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Uh-oh,” she said to David. “I’m in trouble.” It was the space below her hips.
She followed him to the side of the house, saying, “Listen, I didn’t mean to completely derail the performance. Honestly, I didn’t think those girls would get so upset.”
“Who?”
She hit his arm. “Hasn’t the news spread? I gave some suggestions, and the girls got pretty offended.”
She’d changed into a blue tank top. Her arms were tan, and she now shaved her underarms. When she lowered her arms, the exposed skin puckered, and he even liked that.
“Doesn’t seem like a big deal,” he said.
She leaned against the wall, and he stood in front of her, legs wide.
“They’re not talking to us anymore. Total mutiny.”
“Suze.” This meant “Look at me,” and she did. “I don’t want you to worry about Kai.”
“Kai?”
“She’ll understand.”
“Caleb.” Her look and tone were indulgent, like someone half-assedly reprimanding a toddler.
“It’s okay. It’s you I want up there. In the yurt.”
“Just stop a second and listen. I love being here—”
“I know you do. And you can be. That’s what I’m saying. There’s no impediment.”
“This place. This place, if this is possible, is more beautiful even than I remember. The way I feel here, if I could somehow package that and bring it back with me. But—”
“No need. No need to package anything, Suze. Just be here.”
“Can you stop interrupting? Jesus. The thing is. I don’t know how to say this. You’re the same. The same as always.” A quick, hysterical laugh. “The same arrogant dick.”
His heart was a water balloon slipping through cupped hands.
“Caleb, I’m sorry.” She gestured vaguely toward the bushes. “I should check on the girls.” She walked away.
She didn’t mean it.
The sky was darkening. He stood in the middle of the flat ground. Everyone was arriving. He closed his eyes, but he could hear their voices, yaps like coyotes circling. Somewhere, a girl cried. He was needed everywhere and nowhere.
When he opened his eyes, he saw that apparently all the girls had spent the last half hour trading skirts and dresses and butterfly barrettes and one tube of mascara. Caleb watched them scuttle in groups across the Overlook as if to prom, even the girls with chopped hair, who never wore skirts. They giggled to be seen.
Apparently, all the boys had spent the last half hour eating candy or snorting coke, because they ran circles around the perimeter of the Overlook, pumping their fists in victory, following Jeremy, who sang, “We are the champions.”
“We are the champions,” they echoed in bathrobes and scarves from the costume shack.
Caleb needed everyone to stop moving.
Nicole, Tanaya, and Shauna, dressed in leotards (pink, leopard-skin, teal) and miniskirts, appeared at Caleb’s side. “We have to talk to you, Caleb. We have to talk to you.”
Around and around the Overlook, the boys ran with Jeremy, now singing “Stayin’ Alive.” Ah, ha, ha, ha.
Caleb turned away from the girls and took off running after Jeremy, to tell him to stop running.
“Everyone. Sit down,” David suddenly yelled.
Caleb stopped. David was standing on a milk carton on the makeshift stage. He wore a white T-shirt, on which he’d written in black Sharpie Father, Husband, Jew, and he clutched the neck of the guitar. “We have to start. Sit down!”
Caleb watched Tanaya, Shauna, and Nicole retreat to the sagebrush nearest the parking lot. He approached a group of younger girls and said, “Wanna sit here with me?” But they, too, wandered off. The wind screeched across the mesa, and he shivered, realizing the heat wave had broken.
Caleb had read that before a tsunami, the ocean recedes, exposing starfish and anemones and urchins, and then it comes. It was like that the first cool night after a series of hot days at camp: first the briny silence, then the boom.
&n
bsp; He needed them to shut up.
And still David shouted. “Be quiet. Sit down! Be quiet! Sit down.” But this only made it worse.
Caleb climbed between the few sitting kids to say to David, “Hold on. We need everyone to settle down before you start.”
Suze appeared from dust and dusk. “Let me help.” And Caleb, embarrassed, turned away to find Rebecca waiting.
“You have to talk to Shauna,” she said.
“I’m already headed there,” Caleb said with excessive pissiness.
In the center of the Overlook, Jeremy had started the boys doing jumping jacks.
“Hey, everyone,” Suze said. “I think that David and I will just begin with our song, and when the rest of the cast is ready, they’ll join. David, I’m going to start singing, and you start playing whenever you feel ready.” It was the right thing to say, and Caleb, turning to watch her, hated the wind and the cool air and every living thing.
“What’s he doing with my guitar?” Mikala said, coming up to Caleb. “Did you tell him he could use it?”
He didn’t answer. David and Suze were singing some sappy Beatles song. And guess what? Suze sang like an angel, and David did, too. Together, they sang like they were meant to sing together, her voice high, his low.
It hushed everyone. Kids who were up sat down. Kids who were already sitting leaned against each other. Caleb stood there, mesmerized. He hadn’t known David could play guitar and sing. Did David have a twang? Did David steal the twang Caleb had borrowed from Donnie? Did Suze dip and curve above his voice like a woman dancing, rubbing close?
All the while, Suze stared at David. David with his eyes half-closed.
After the song and applause, Suze said, “Let’s play another. We’ll give the residents of Anatevka a few more minutes.” David, confident now, started strumming the saddest song of the camp’s repertoire, and Suze began.