Perennials, page 14
Mo noticed two parents standing silently outside tent three. The older girls all welcomed their parents’ initial arrival but seemed to remember quickly afterward—now ignoring their parents and giggling over magazines with one another on their tents’ front steps—that it was not cool to spend too much time with or to be too excited by the presence of one’s family.
“Hey, Rachel,” Mo said. “Could you go over and chat up the parents over there? They look a bit…idle.”
Rachel stood still for a beat and then, without looking at Mo, strolled over to the tent. Mo watched her put on a saccharine smile as she shook the parents’ hands.
Sheera came up to Mo’s tent hand in hand with a tall man in slacks and a fedora. “Mo, this is my dad,” she said proudly.
“I’ve heard so much about you,” the father said, taking both of Mo’s hands. Then he said more quietly, “Thank you for watching over my girl.”
Sheera stopped by Mo’s tent every morning. The other girls in tent three didn’t seem to understand Sheera, who lived in an apartment in the city instead of a house in the suburbs. Those girls had yards and dogs; they lied and said they had their periods to avoid swimming in the lake; they never signed up for activities at the nature lodge. Sheera ran from one activity to the next, hiking and going horseback riding and swimming in a lake all for the very first time.
“She’s a pleasure,” Mo said. Over Sheera’s shoulder, Mo saw Rachel laughing with the father at the tent, throwing her head back.
—
After a picnic lunch on the flag lawn, activity demos began. Each girl chose her favorite activity and participated in a show for the parents—a dance performance, a horseback-riding expo, a swimming or boat race. After the section was cleared of campers and parents, Mo walked down to the stables to help Nell.
Parents stood around the wooden fence of the arena with cameras around their necks. In the dim barn that smelled of leather and manure, Nell, Rachel, and the other riding counselors had already lined up the twenty campers from youngest to oldest. Since there were only twelve horses, they split the expo into two age groups. The counselors would walk alongside the younger group for the show; the older campers could go unspotted.
“God, there you are,” Nell said to Mo, pulling her by the arm. “Stay here.”
Mo watched the older girls in the barn while Nell and the other riding counselors went out with the younger girls. “Hi, Mo!” Sheera waved from the back of the line.
“Hi, Sheera,” Mo said, distracted by two ten-year-old Buckeyes shoving each other and bickering over who was first.
“Mo, I’m riding Micah!” Sheera called. “Your favorite!”
“Girls!” Mo approached the shrieking Buckeyes and physically separated them from each other. “You’re acting like kindergartners!”
Now she turned her attention to the arena, the ambling procession of horses and the girls sitting proudly atop them. The small girl riding Micah looked timid, unsure of what to do. He stood out from the pack, moving at a slow, almost lethargic pace, his eyes toward the ground. Every now and then he shook his head or blew out air or stamped an erratic hoof. Nell walked beside Micah and the girl; even though Nell wasn’t even touching the horse, you could sense her poise and her comfort in the arena. One could easily imagine her as a serious English riding competitor, showing horses in gray jodhpurs and freshly polished boots, a long red braid falling from under her helmet.
Behind them, a girl rode Firework, a younger horse with a shiny black coat, and Rachel stood by, chin up. The families clapped and snapped photos. The younger girls retreated to the barn.
“It’s gonna rain any fucking minute,” Nell muttered to Mo, and only then did Mo notice the clouds had grown darker. “Let’s get this over with.”
The younger campers dismounted, and soon after, the older ones cantered out to the arena alone. Helen led the procession, sitting up straight as she’d been taught in many years of lessons, jumping her horse, Dandelion, with seeming ease over the haystacks and hurdles. The other girls followed behind with slumped postures. Parents leaned against the fence with rapt attention. Someone’s digital camera flash illuminated the arena from the crowd.
“No flashes, please!” Nell strained in the parents’ direction.
Sheera, looking over to her father, slacked on Micah’s reins. The girls in the barn were squealing from the excitement of having just shown off what they’d been working on for the past four weeks—one of their first instances of an adrenaline rush; Mo remembered the feeling well—and pulled at their shorts, at the bottoms of their shirts, asking to go see their parents. “Not until it’s over,” Mo repeated while keeping her gaze on Sheera and Micah. Nell, at the edge of the barn, was grimacing at the clouds.
When the thunder clapped, deafening and explosive, like it was retaliating against its daylong silence, Micah let out a yelp and reared onto his hind legs. Sheera fell off her horse with her legs in the air and landed helmet first on the dusty ground, her body following like a rag doll. Mo didn’t wait for the audience’s collective gasp to rush onto the field where Sheera lay motionless; her fiftysomething father jumped over the fence and ran at full speed toward them, his hat falling behind him. The rain began to pour in violent sloshes.
Mo heard herself yell that someone should call for an ambulance.
Someone else yelled from outside the arena that it was on its way, and Mo realized that her call for help was minutes later than anyone else’s.
Mo and the father knelt over Sheera while the rain soaked their bodies and made pools around them. The girl, her eyes closed, made no sounds. By the time the paramedics came, Nell and the other counselors had cleared the area of horses and children. Some parents, unable to be managed, still stood around like this was part of the show.
In the ambulance, Sheera remained unconscious. Her father asked Mo to take his hand, and they each joined their remaining hands with Sheera’s. The red lights and sirens circled around them as their ambulance sped down an empty country road.
“Oh Father, the source of all health and healing, please fill our hearts with faith, oh Lord, and heal our Sheera according to your will,” Sheera’s father said. Mo quickly looked up to see the man’s eyes closed tight and shut her own again. “Please stay with her, and give her the strength she needs to wake again. In Jesus’s name we pray. Amen.”
“Amen,” Mo said.
—
Mo woke up on a hard plastic chair under fluorescent lighting that gave no hints as to what time it was. Her pulse was erratic and all encompassing, like it could break through the skin of her throat.
Sheera’s father was in the room with his daughter. No one had come out to give any updates. Sheera’s father shouldn’t leave her side, after all, and no doctor or nurse had any responsibility, really, to relay messages back to Mo. She was not family or even a close friend. She was a foreigner to these people and to this place.
A quiet American hospital on a Sunday night in rural Connecticut. Mo had not had many moments in life when she looked around and thought, How did I end up here?
She looked at her watch. It was only eight P.M.; the horse expo, Mo remembered, had been at one. She’d fallen asleep in the middle of the day, exhausted by a trauma that wasn’t even hers. Then she realized that it was hers, that she was responsible for the well-being of these girls and that being at the hospital at all was, in itself, a failure.
She walked up to the reception window and asked if she could use the desk phone.
“There’s a pay phone down the hall,” the woman at the desk said without looking up.
Mo searched her pockets, realizing she had nothing on her. “I was so frantic when I left…” There was a quick, sharp feeling of fear and desolation. The overhead lights buzzed and reflected off the shining linoleum floors—clean, sterile, lifeless.
“Please?” Mo asked the nurse, who looked up and around and, seeing there was no one else there but a man anxiously pacing the waiting room, rolled her eyes, sighed deeply, and pushed the phone across the desk.
“Press nine to dial out.”
“Camp Marigold, this is Nan,” the camp secretary said on the other end of the line.
“Nan, it’s Mo.”
“I’m so glad you’re calling, dear. How is she?”
“I don’t know. No one’s come out yet. I’m just sitting here waiting.”
“Shit,” Nan said. “We’re praying with all our might over here.” It was odd how religious Americans were. “Do you need anything?” she asked. “Should someone come and pick you up?”
“No, I’m going to stay,” Mo said. Her voice shook. “Could you do me one favor? Could someone go fetch Nell and get her on the line?”
Nell sounded breathless when she came on several minutes later. “What’s going on?”
Mo explained the situation again. “I just feel so tired,” she said. “Everything in my body feels like it’s working on overload.”
“Of course it is,” Nell said. “This is terrifying.”
“I hate that I can’t do anything.”
“Just try to breathe, love. It’s out of our hands.”
She imagined Nell in her hoodie and shorts on the other end of the line, twirling the phone cord around her finger, her mouth close to the receiver.
“I will,” Mo said.
“Call the office first thing in the morning, okay?”
“Sleep tight,” Mo said in a quiet, tender tone that surprised her. “I’ll see you soon.”
—
Jack arrived at the hospital in the morning and, in his authoritative way, gleaned the important information about Sheera from the on-call doctor. She had woken up as soon as they’d put her in the hospital bed, confused and crying, complaining of a terrible headache. She’d thrown up once in the middle of the night. But the CT scan showed no signs of bleeding or permanent damage. These were just symptoms of a moderate concussion, and she should be feeling like herself after a few days of rest.
Jack took Mo back to camp in his two-door sedan, which smelled like body odor and cut grass. He drove fast; she rolled down her window and watched the woods and the green farmland blur by.
When they arrived at Marigold, Mo noticed neon yellow caution tape around the fence of the horse arena. DO NOT ENTER, it read.
“Is that really necessary?” she asked.
“Unfortunately, yes,” Jack kept his eyes ahead of him. “It’s just temporary. Just to show our concern to the parents and donors.”
“What will the horses do?” Mo asked.
“I’ve talked to Nell and Rachel,” he said. “The three of you can still ride them as normal to give them some fresh air and exercise. Just no campers for the time being.”
He parked his car in front of the camp office. Mo opened her door but Jack remained still.
“Micah’s lived a good life,” Jack said. “He’s our oldest horse here. Did you know that? Twenty-eight years old.”
“Yeah. I did.”
“Mo,” he said, turning to look at her, “we’ll be putting him down tonight, after the campers are asleep. It will be easy and painless.”
“It’s not because he’s old, though,” Mo heard herself saying. “I woke him up too early yesterday morning. You saw. It was a long day, and he was tired.”
“I know you’re upset, Mo,” he said. “We all are.” He put his hand on her knee. “You can come down to the stables while we do it if that’ll make you feel better. Maybe it will give you a sense of closure,” he said. “I know how you loved him.”
She pushed his hand away. “Don’t touch me.” Before he could respond, she got out and slammed the car door.
When she got back to the Hemlock section, she found the girls running around getting ready for breakfast and Rachel standing on top of the picnic table in the center, shrieking out warnings. “Five minutes to flag raising!”
Mo approached Rachel. “You can get down,” Mo said. “I can take over.”
Rachel looked startled. “I didn’t realize you were back. Is she okay?”
Mo nodded.
“What about Micah? Is he hurt?”
Mo hesitated. “Really, I can take it from here,” she said, stepping onto the bench of the picnic table.
But Rachel shook her head. “What’s going on?”
Mo was not equipped to deal with as much catastrophe as she had had to that day. She took a deep breath and said in what she hoped was a calm but empathetic tone, “They’re going to put him down tonight.”
A gasp came out of Rachel, and then she put a hand over her mouth, as if doing so would hide her reaction. “Oh,” she said, composing herself.
“I’m so sorry,” Mo said, putting a hand awkwardly on Rachel’s forearm. She hadn’t known that the horse had meant anything to Rachel.
Rachel looked down at Mo’s hand.
“Why don’t you get some rest?” Rachel said. “You must be exhausted.”
It was true; she’d hardly slept in the brightly lit waiting room.
Rachel turned away from Mo and called out to the girls again: “Five minutes till flag raising!”
Mo descended from the picnic table, then walked into the head tent. Nell was just rousing herself from her bed; she was a late sleeper.
“How is she?” Nell asked, and stood.
“She’s going to be okay,” Mo said. “I don’t know if her father will let her come back, though.” She decided not to tell Nell about Micah just yet.
“That’s really sad,” Nell said. “You look so tired.”
“I am.”
“Go to sleep,” she said. “I’ll take care of the girls.”
Mo nodded and climbed into her own bunk, across from Nell’s. But just as Nell had been getting up, Mo had realized that Nell did not look the same to her. Nell could not look the same, not after Sheera’s fall. Not after Micah had been sentenced to death and Mo had seen Rachel’s reaction to it. Not after they had talked on the phone the night before and Mo had imagined Nell’s mouth near the phone’s receiver. Mo’s thoughts felt thick with exhaustion, but she understood thoroughly, instinctively, that everything had changed.
“Nell,” Mo said from her bunk, and Nell walked toward her.
Mo did not say “Come here,” because she already sensed that Nell knew to do so. She knelt down to Mo’s eye level. Mo had always assumed that she would be the one pursued and not the other way around. She could tell, by the way that Nell’s face looked so open and pure, like a blank canvas ready to be painted over, that Nell too was surprised to be the pursued, not the pursuer. When Mo pulled Nell’s chin toward her face, Nell exhaled, as if a sense of relief came from the submission itself.
9
Nell and Mo heard the gunshot because they were listening for it. They were lying in Mo’s bunk together in the tent they shared, side by side. Their fingers were intertwined. When the shot rang out—it easily could have been a car backfiring or fireworks to any unsuspecting ears—Mo jumped.
Nell and Mo had no beers of their own left, so when they were finished crying, they went down to the staff lodge.
They didn’t go to the staff lodge often because they didn’t like any of the other counselors. There were the Americans, the Brits, the Australians, and a handful of more exotic foreigners, whom the Anglophones were drawn to like mosquitoes to sweet blood. Marco from Portugal, who taught mountain biking, was short but tan and compact, and Philippa S. and Philippa J. sat with him at picnic tables on the athletic fields when they should have been watching campers and taught him “blow job” and “rim job” and other jobs they wanted to perform on him. Chloé, from France, ate everything, in moderation, and still looked thin in a bikini, and Devon and Alex and Blake chased after her, asking, “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?” though Finn from the Netherlands, who was apparently a basketball star in Ukraine, was already fucking her in the oar house every night.
Nell sat down on one of the couches with a can of beer. Devon, a lifeguard, sat next to her and offered her a joint.
Nell took a hit and blew smoke toward the ceiling.
“I’m sorry about your horse,” he said. He had a shaved head and a thick Manchester accent.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Fucking brutal, watching,” Devon said. “Wonder if the kids heard it.” Nell was the lead horseback-riding counselor, and Jack had asked her to be there to bring the horse out into the open field. She had refused. So a few of the men, including Devon, had done it instead.
Earlier that night, they’d also learned that Sheera’s father had decided not to let her return to camp.
Micah’s age had been his death sentence. Any horse could have done the same thing in reaction to such a loud clap of thunder, but twenty-eight was senior enough to make senility plausible, and a good camp just couldn’t keep around a senior horse that had given one of its campers a concussion. And, though no one would ever say it aloud, the fact that Sheera was one of the camp’s few black kids—well, that hadn’t helped his case either.
Nell took a deep swig of her beer.
“Tell me something, Red.” Devon leaned back, appraising her, the joint burning between his fingers. “When you started riding, you ever have that thing happen to you that you hear about?”
“ ‘Thing happen’?”
“Ya know, like”—he moved closer; his breath was coated with weed and whiskey—“you ever bleed some? Down there?”
Nell took the joint again. “I think that’s an urban myth.”
“I don’t believe you, Red.” He yelled across the room: “Philippa! Come here for a sec.”
The Philippa with bleached hair and a fringe tottered over.
“You rode horses as a girl, yeah?”
“Yeah, why?” Philippa sat down on one of his knees, then reached across to take the joint from Nell. He placed a hand on Philippa’s back, just above her ass.
“Did you ever, ya know, bleed when you got on the horse?”
Philippa broke into a cackle and swatted Devon on the shoulder. “You’re a fuckin’ pervert, Dev, ya know that?”
He grinned. “So you did, eh?”
