Perennials, page 19
“It’s, like, someone who’s kind of lame and who tells on people,” Steph explained to him.
“Yeah,” Fiona said. “That. That’s what you guys called me.”
“I don’t know what—”
“At the Super 8,” Fiona said. “I heard you.” She shoved Yonatan now, and he stumbled backward a few steps, not from force but from surprise. “I heard you!”
Now a crowd was forming around them. Steph put her arm on Fiona’s shoulder. “Fee, I know you’re upset that Rachel’s gone, but you don’t have to go making up things.”
“No.” Fiona pushed Steph’s hand away. “Don’t call me Fee.”
Jack approached the commotion.
“Maybe someone should walk you up to your bunk, Fiona,” he said. “You seem a tad worn out.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”
She stormed out of the staff lodge anyway and up to her section without her flashlight. She got to her tent and opened the flaps. Inside, it was quiet. Billie was asleep in the bunk above Fiona’s.
Fiona touched the top of the girl’s head.
“Billie,” Fiona said quietly, stroking the child’s hair. “Billie.”
The girl whimpered.
“Billie, can you sing that song again?” Fiona asked.
“What?” the girl asked, still half-asleep.
“That song. The lonely song.”
“Do I have to?” Billie asked.
“Yes, sweetie,” Fiona said. “You have to.”
12
By the eighth and final week of camp, Helen still had not gotten her period, which was just fine with her.
That last week was always a sad one for Helen. Camp was so much better than her life at home and her boring house and her boring friends, especially now that Marla was gone. But the summer had been a good one. She had been a color wars captain, and her team had won. She had kissed Mikey Bombowski underneath an oak tree. She had gotten really good at waterskiing. Sarah had suddenly become mischievous and brought pot that summer, and they had smoked it in the woods behind their tent at night without getting caught. They spent the following two hours giggling on a mossy log.
Sarah had gone from having the smallest chest in their section of girls to the largest over the course of one year. It was only Sarah’s body that had changed; her face remained more or less the same, so she looked like a little girl with a woman’s body, and she had the confusing mix of affectations to match: with boys, the prolonged glances and light touches of a young woman who had just learned of her power, the sudden confidence and claiming of responsibility that came with having to wear bras and change tampons. But she still had girlish tendencies, like the fetishizing of celebrities (Zac Efron was a favorite, and they had tacked up posters of him in the bathroom cabin) and the bouts of homesickness and the fun that came with making skits or playing four square just with the girls, though none of them ever wanted to admit that they often had more fun on single-sex activity nights than they did during the coeds.
On the last night of camp, all the girls from all the age sections made a campfire down by the lake. They sat around it in a “Kumbaya” sort of way with their blankets and their flashlights and their snacks. They sang the same sappy hippie songs every year and mourned the end of the summer and the friendships that would surely fade.
When Helen went to Sarah’s house during the school year, they would stay up late, watch R-rated movies, and steal Bud Lights from the back of the fridge. Sarah was an only child, but her parents never seemed to know where she was, what she was doing, and whom she was doing it with. Mr. and Mrs. Larkin implicitly trusted Sarah’s parents, who were white and well dressed and inhabited a large, clean home. But the specialness of Helen and Sarah’s relationship was never as special when not surrounded by other girls they could exclude or by the lush, endless trails and woods of Camp Marigold. Watching Wedding Crashers with a Bud Light buzz lost its luster after the third time they saw the movie, but getting lost in the forest at night would always be exciting.
By the first chorus of “The Circle Game” (“We can’t return. We can only look behind from where we came”), Helen and Sarah were clutching each other’s hands and letting the tears fall unabashedly down their faces. At these campfires, it wasn’t about fighting your tears; in fact, it was the opposite. The more you cried, the more you cared. Tears were a marker of how feminine, how much of a girl you were.
Fiona led the girls from her tent in singing “In My Life” by the Beatles. Fiona never cried at these things. In two weeks, she would go back to college, and she’d forget all about this summer.
Another group sang “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” with the sign language that corresponded to the lyrics.
When they all had exhausted their sentimental-song repertoire, Helen’s favorite tradition began: the floating wishes. Each girl was given a paper lantern with a votive candle inside it. As each candle was lit, the girl made a silent wish, then sent the lantern out into the lake where, legend had it, her wish would materialize and eventually come true. When all the candles were lit, the lake glittered with the golden-yellow wishes, floating aimlessly as they burned.
—
“I’m not done with camp,” Helen whispered to Sarah that night in their bunks.
“What do you mean?” Sarah said.
Helen snuck out ten minutes before Sarah did; they met down at the stables. Without saying anything, Helen hopped over the fence and into the horse arena. Sarah didn’t have any choice but to follow.
“Isn’t the barn locked?” Sarah whispered.
Helen wasn’t sure how it was going to go, but in fact, the barn door had been left open, and she acted as if she’d known this all along. Truthfully, if she had known earlier that the barn was never locked, she would have snuck out to ride earlier in the summer.
She opened Dandelion’s stall and then Josie’s. Sarah could ride Fiona’s horse.
They saddled the horses in the dark and crept out into the night. They trotted behind the performing arts building, down the hill to the lakeshore. The paper lanterns were still burning.
“Look,” Helen said. “Our wishes.”
They kept going along the lakeshore until they got to the other side. When they were in a desolate enough area, they turned their electric lanterns on and continued to cross through the trails that traversed camp bounds and began in the foothills of the Berkshires. They stayed up in those hills for an hour or so, climbing up the narrow pathways between the trees.
“Do you know where we are?” Sarah asked, sounding worried.
“Of course,” Helen said, and she did. This wasn’t her first time in this part of the woods; earlier in the summer, she and Mikey had hiked up there one night, just to talk.
Finally, Helen suggested they take a break. They hitched the horses to a tree and then sat on a rock to drink from their water bottles.
“What was your favorite thing about the summer?” Sarah asked her friend.
“Color wars,” Helen said. “No question.”
“That’s a good one.”
Helen took another sip of water. It was a cool night, but she was warm from the ride, and the breeze felt good on her arms. “What was yours?”
Sarah was silent for a moment, thinking. “Well,” she said, giggling, “I think it would have to be hooking up with Danny.”
“What?” Helen swatted her friend on the arm. “You didn’t tell me.”
“He told me to keep it a secret,” she said. “But the summer’s over, so, whatever.”
“Why’d you have to keep it a secret?” Helen asked.
The wind was getting stronger; a heavy gust came over the mountains, and Helen gathered her arms around herself.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Sarah said.
Helen was silent.
“Okay, I’m lying,” Sarah said. “It’s because we did it.”
“You did it?”
“Yeah,” Sarah said. “It was kinda fun.”
“Why wouldn’t you be allowed to tell me that?”
“Well,” Sarah said, “I didn’t want to do it at first. But then he convinced me.”
Helen could hear a rustling sound from farther away, a crunching on the forest floor.
“I was worried that if we were gonna do it, he would go and tell people about it after. So he assured me that wasn’t the case.”
“I’m not just people.”
“But then we made a pact not to say anything, because fair is fair, you know?”
“Do you hear that?” Helen said.
“What?”
She could hear the rustling growing closer, and then she saw two beady eyes, almost at ground level, glaring at them.
Sarah shrieked and jumped off the rock. “What is that?” she shouted.
“Calm down,” Helen said, glancing over at the horses to make sure they weren’t startled. “It’s just a raccoon.”
The raccoon, scared too, turned around and scurried back into the forest, its gray and wiry tail disappearing into the bushes.
“Let’s go,” Sarah said. “I don’t want to know what other sorts of crawly creatures are up here.”
They went back to camp the way they came, down the foothills toward the other side of the lake. When they got back to the lakeshore, all the candles had burned out, and the lake just looked like it was littered with wax paper bags.
—
Back at the stables, they put the horses in their stalls and left the barn unlocked.
“That was fun,” Sarah said, draping her arm over Helen’s shoulders. It wasn’t as fun for Helen as she had thought it was going to be. The raccoon and Sarah’s weird confession had cut it all short. Helen couldn’t explain why, but she felt uneasy now about Danny, about the way he had told Sarah to keep things between them a secret.
“You okay?” Sarah said, stopping and turning to her friend. Helen was starting to get that dizzy feeling again, the one she’d had with Marla in the woods back in the spring, right before she’d fainted.
“I’m fine,” she said, “just tired,” and they walked themselves up to their bunks, tucked themselves in, and whispered good night.
—
Helen had a dream that she was in the swimming pool in Florida with her brother, Liam, again. She was grown, but he was holding her like a child, rocking her back and forth, and singing “The Circle Game” to lull her to sleep.
“Take your time, it won’t be long now
Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down.”
She fell asleep in his arms, and then they went underwater, where he continued to sing.
13
The new counselor for tent three—the one who had replaced Rachel—opened the front flaps of the head tent so wide that Mo knew, even in her just-awakened state, that something was wrong.
“What is it?” Mo croaked. Nell, in the bunk across from Mo’s, stirred and turned toward the wall.
“I don’t—” the counselor began. “I think—”
“What?” Mo said, though she was already pulling herself out of bed, readying herself for a crisis. Over the past eight weeks, she had come to know, almost instinctively, if someone was panicking for no good reason.
“I can’t—” The counselor shook her head, unable to say what she really needed to. “Just come to the tent now.”
Mo stood and followed, in her pajamas, across the section circle to tent three. She saw that five girls were standing outside, also in their pj’s, bleary-eyed and disoriented and shivering, even though it wasn’t very cold that morning. This tent seemed to her a glutton for tragedy. Sheera hadn’t come back to camp after her accident, but the girls in her tent talked about her often, as if she were their martyr, as if they had been friends with her the whole time. And then after Rachel left, they did the same thing—idolized her, talked about her like she had died.
Four of the girls were huddled together, but Sarah, the fifth, was standing away from the group with her arms wrapped around herself.
“Mo’s here,” Sarah said. “Mo. She’s not waking up, Mo.”
The other girls looked up at Mo as if she could make it better. Staring at the begging faces and with possibilities swirling through her own mind, she took quick stock of the girls in front of her and then came a razor-sharp thought: Helen is missing. Helen is in there.
Helen seemed like a confident, happy girl, the kind who was so fun and carefree that other, more anxious girls flocked to her. Mo had observed her spending a lot of time with Mikey Bombowski, but it seemed so innocent. The way she stood apart from him when they were together, like she was afraid to touch him, afraid of what might happen to her if she did. Mo understood the feeling well.
The girls watched Mo as she walked into the tent with what she hoped was a fearless expression on her face. She did feel a certain power come over her; it would be crass to call it an adrenaline rush, but it was something akin to being entirely out of her head and in her body. All she experienced was that she was moving—not like she was willing herself to do it, but like her body was progressing on its own, one step coming after another. Not unlike the way she felt when she had run onto the field after Sheera had fallen off the horse. She watched her feet ascend the two steps to the tent and her hand opening the flap. She briefly let the light in before letting the flap drop. Then it was dark again aside from the thin slivers of light coming in through the cracks in the canvas.
She could just make out Helen on the top bunk. Perfectly still. Mo stepped onto the wooden frame of the bottom bunk to gain some height. She put her ear to the girl’s mouth. Mo touched the girl’s forehead, half believing that all it would take for her to wake up was for Mo to place a hand on her sleeping body.
She wasn’t warm, but not cold either. As Mo’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, she was able to make out Helen’s face: eyes closed and lips turned upward in a closed-mouth smile, as if she were in the middle of a nice dream.
Mo had the dual sensation of both wanting and not wanting to do what she did next: take her own hand from where it was resting on the forehead and move it along the jawline and to the pulse. There was nothing.
Was her hand on the wrong side of the girl’s neck? Perhaps it was.
Mo traced her hand across the neck to the other side. She put her two fingers where a pulse should be. Surely she still wasn’t trying the right place. She put her fingers on her own pulse to remind herself what a healthy heartbeat felt like. Then she put them back on the girl’s neck, searching every inch of skin to find it.
She put her ear to the girl’s mouth, to see if there was some sign of breath, and then to her nose. She moved her ear to the chest, listening for a heartbeat, though of course logic would tell her later that when there’s no pulse, there’s no heartbeat either. She was jittery, on edge, because she was sure that Helen would awaken at any moment and startle Mo, and Mo would jump and say, “Jesus Christ, you scared me.” She took her two hands and pumped the girl’s chest: right in the center of her chest, between the nipples, just as she had been taught in staff training. She pumped forcefully, creating a steady rhythm, working up a sweat. She paused to open the girl’s mouth and breathe some life into it. She pumped again.
She sensed light coming into the tent while she worked.
She heard Nell’s voice. “Oh my God.”
Mo looked up. “Call an ambulance,” she managed to say.
Mo had no idea how much longer she was in there by herself, but at some point, men in navy with stethoscopes around their necks came into her line of vision.
“Someone keep that thing open,” she heard one say, and the light stayed.
“Ma’am, how long have you been here?” they were saying, and “Ma’am, please step aside,” and “Ma’am, what happened to her? What can you tell us?” So many words being thrown at her that she couldn’t begin to respond or do anything they were asking of her. Arms were pawing at her, but she just kept pumping.
“Mo, stop,” she heard. But it wasn’t until Nell took Mo’s hand and physically pulled her out of the tent, and Mo saw the men in navy carrying Helen prostrate on a stretcher and no one in the section but Nell and Jack and Fiona and the ambulance parked there and the men in navy putting the stretcher in the ambulance and Nell and Jack and Fiona climbing in and pulling Mo up with them and someone shutting the ambulance door behind them, that she understood.
They tried to move as fast as the paramedics did, which was, of course, pointless. The paramedics pushed Helen on the stretcher through all the double doors until a doctor and two nurses appeared. The doctor was asking the paramedics questions filled with medical jargon that Nell couldn’t understand, and then they were gone, through doors to the hallway marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
The four of them stood there in the ER waiting room, the senseless chatter gone through those last double doors and everything now silent. Mo had lost all color. Nell knew that the situation was bleak, that there was nothing so disastrous as no pulse for that amount of time—and who knew when in the night it had stopped?—but she also kept thinking, The girl’s thirteen. She’ll wake up somehow. Don’t young bodies just know how to do that? It was an idiotic thought, but she wouldn’t let go of it.
She took Fiona and Mo to two plastic chairs in the waiting area and sat in between them. Fiona was shivering and intermittently gasping for air. Nell found herself rubbing circles on Fiona’s back with one hand and keeping her other arm around catatonic Mo. Somehow Nell had become, in the past ten minutes, the caretaker of these women. What was it in her DNA that allowed her to remain so stupidly calm in the face of disaster? She realized this was the first time she had touched Mo in weeks—the two had been speaking only out of necessity—and then she hated herself for thinking about something trivial like that. Jack paced across the linoleum floor, back and forth.
Helen and Fiona’s parents lived two hours away. Nell tried not to think about what that car ride might be like; she didn’t know how much Jack had told them. They would have already been coming to camp that day; it was the last day of the summer. The only other person in the waiting room, besides the four of them, was the receptionist. She was typing away at her computer as if it were any other kind of morning. Nell watched the clock above the desk. She counted the second hand making its rotation six times around.
