The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore Page 2

  “I watched your tests yesterday,” Jan continued, “and it seems Nita is our strongest paddler. Nita, try to stay to the back of the group, and make sure we’re all together, okay?”

  Nita looked at Siobhan as she said, “Okay, Jan.” Not just to rub in that she’d done the best on her test, but also, maybe, to express something more sinister. Maybe she wouldn’t notice if Siobhan drifted away from the group. Maybe Siobhan would yell and yell and nobody would hear.

  Later, as an adult, Siobhan will have dreams where, instead of the brightly colored plastic of their individual kayaks, she and the other four girls row a single wooden skiff, with Jan standing at the bow. In these dreams, Jan wears a double-breasted jacket with gold buttons and epaulets, and the girls are in rags. Jan has one boot up on the lip of the boat, and points forward with the tip of her machete.

  Nita

  1

  At the end of her last, truncated summer at Camp Forevermore, Nita sat in a hard plastic chair in the police station. Her parents were in similar chairs on either side of her, and her feet were up in her father’s lap as she dozed, limp after days of burned adrenaline, her eyelids weighted with relief. An unfamiliar woman’s voice went back and forth with her mother’s. And then another voice, a man who wasn’t her father, added, “Don’t worry. She’ll be okay. You would be surprised what children can forget.”

  Nita stirred. In defiance, she wanted to hold on to this memory. The plastic chairs, the strangers’ voices. But she felt it slipping away from her even as it happened, becoming clouded with sleep and doubt.

  Nita had an impeccable memory for facts and figures. She had, almost accidentally, memorized a textbook page containing two hundred digits of pi as the single image of that page, rather than as a string of numbers, and could recite it for the amusement of her father and his colleagues. Yet, as her mother often pointed out, Nita seemed to have trouble with the events of her own short life. When asked, she couldn’t remember if something had happened this year or the last, yesterday or the day before. Nita didn’t mind. It felt intentional, like a superpower: she could clear out space for what mattered, replacing the dull homogeny of most days or the specifics of a bad day with more names, numbers, and information, until she was left with only a wordless remnant of how she’d felt. What had happened out in those woods? Fear, frustration. But also: power, control, knowing what to do and getting it done.

  Her father’s hands rested on a large blister on the back of her left heel, the skin translucent over a fat bubble of pus, and they both itched for him to pop it.

  Afterward, as the Prithis drove from the ferry terminal to the airport hotel where they would spend the night, her father said suddenly, into the silence, “You had quite the adventure.”

  Nita could see her mother’s profile only in snatches as they entered and exited the radius of each streetlight. Between two lights, her mother’s disdain became—or disguised itself as—amused affection. For the first time, Nita saw her parents as separate people, a man and woman who had lived for years before intersecting, before Nita. And she had a blueprint for the kind of man she could one day love. Someone like her father, affable and oblivious.

  That September, the pet store she passed on her walk home from school acquired a litter of golden retriever puppies. They bounced inside the window display like popcorn in an air popper. With their short snouts and black button noses, their pupils dilated to perpetual ecstasy, they looked like living teddy bears.

  The puppies were gone the next afternoon, either sold or moved deeper into the store. Their image floated up in Nita’s mind at night as she tried to sleep, and in that last hour of the school day, when even the teacher seemed twitchy and bored. She’d always wanted a dog, in an abstract way—a new toy, a special friend. The puppies made her feel something new, a goopy, aching sense of need. She had to have one.

  She started her campaign the moment her parents arrived home from work. Her mother was an administrator at the hospital where her father was an anesthesiologist. “Mummy, Daddy, I want a dog,” she announced, in a voice that failed to express the adult gravity, the serious and long-considered desire of her request. It had been three whole days since she’d seen the puppies. “I’ll walk it, feed it, clean up after it. You won’t have to do a thing.”

  “Ah,” her father said, “let’s not talk about this right now. I need my dinner.”

  Nita followed them into the kitchen, aware—but unable to stop it—that she was losing her composure, devolving into a little-girl whine. “I promise to take care of it all by myself. I want a dog! Oh, please. Oh, please please please.” It was infuriating, this gap between her thoughts and feelings and what came out of her mouth. Her voice, low for a just-turned-twelve-year-old-girl, was nevertheless still in the high child-register the world was accustomed to ignoring. Whole universes stirred inside her, she felt, but she couldn’t form them into words.

  “Go upstairs, little elephant,” her mother said. “I’ll call you for dinner.”

  Nita stomped up the stairs, proving the nickname she resented. She lay down on her stomach in her bedroom, her ear against the heating vent, where she could hear her parents’ voices in the kitchen if she strained. She thought the battle was lost for the day, and was surprised to hear her parents discussing the possibility of a dog in earnest. “I’m glad she wants a dog,” her mother said. “Sometimes I’m afraid that . . .”

  Nita’s father prompted, “Yes? Afraid of what?”

  After a long pause, her mother changed the subject. “Do you remember why we sent her to that camp?”

  “Because she wanted to go. She begged to go.”

  “No, the first year. It was my idea. I thought she was too bookish, spent too much time inside. I was shocked that she loved it so much, that she wanted to go back every year. And it was so expensive and hoity-toity-seeming, and I was proud that we could manage it.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Nita’s father said. “It was that crazy woman. Putting them in that situation. Pretending like she wasn’t sick.”

  “No, I know—it’s not that. It’s just . . . Nita’s just a little girl. She talks like a little girl, she wants little-girl things. She laughs when I’m silly. That’s all I can see. I can’t quite believe she did the things they say she did.”

  “She’s a hero!” Her father raised his voice. “I’m proud of her. She saved herself. She saved the others. She deserves . . .” He faltered on what Nita deserved. “A dog,” he said finally. “If she wants a dog, let’s get her a dog.”

  That Saturday, Nita’s parents left the house without telling her where they were going. She used their outing as she often did, a chance to graze through the cabinets, looking for any hidden treats. Finding nothing, she ate a handful of the raisins her mother used for cooking and a spoonful of jam.

  She heard the front door open and her father’s voice. “Go on, go on,” he said. As Nita wiped the jam from her face, an enormous German shepherd crept into the kitchen, her parents walking behind. His tail was tucked between his legs and his head hung limply downward. Nita’s parents beamed. Probably seeing an appealing show of submissiveness, a dog who knew his place. “Poor thing. He’s been tied to a post in Cousin Harjeet’s yard for two years,” her father said.

  The dog went immediately to Nita, who had stayed, terrified, in a chair at the kitchen table, her stomach sinking to her knees, the feeling that accompanies getting what you thought you wanted. What have I done? she thought. The dog quietly put a paw on each of her thighs and stretched to stand tall. Not excited and slobbering like the pet store puppies, those limp-tongued, golden bundles of pure joy in the shop window. Just poised there, sniffing her face, his breath as hot as a blast of air from a furnace and reeking of rotten meat. Up close, his brown eyes were disconcertingly humanlike, intelligent and probing.

  “Hey, get down,” Nita’s mother said. The dog didn’t react. To Nita, she added, “You’ll have to teach him not to do that.”

  Nita touched
the dog’s ears gingerly. The dog dropped abruptly and turned to face Nita’s parents, pinning Nita in the chair with his body, standing pointedly between her and them, claiming her.

  In a delivery room, more than twenty years later, Nita’s thoughts were a slurry of effluvia and voided pain. Her sweat-drenched hair was plastered to one side of her face, the bones of her husband Sadiq’s hand clutched in hers. The room was oddly dim beyond the reach of a standing work light pointed directly between her legs, as though she were giving birth to the sun. Like this was for them, the observers in sterile blue paper, and not her, her head kept purposely in shadows. Infinity eked out in seconds, each moment discrete, each one asserting its presence, demanding to be counted.

  Her son, Evan, took his first breath. He transmuted from amphibian blue to shrieking red, screamed with the pain of the new world. The nurse beamed just like Nita’s parents had while coaxing the dog forward, and Nita’s stomach dropped in just the same way. The same thought: What have I done? And then, again: love, love like madness, love like murder.

  Nita’s parents had bought some rudimentary dog supplies, finding that Harjeet had none to give them. Still feeling festive, novel, Nita’s father placed a dog bed on the floor of Nita’s bedroom and gestured at it for the benefit of the dog, miming sleep with his hands tented under his head. The dog sniffed it once, and then climbed onto Nita’s bed and lay down, placing his head on his paws. He stared at the family as if to see what they’d do. Nita’s child-size bed frame, made of hollow, white-painted metal tubing, groaned in protest.

  “You’ll have to teach him not to do that,” her mother said.

  Nita changed for bed in the bathroom, too unnerved by the way the dog tracked her movements with his eyes to disrobe in front of him. When she returned, he hadn’t moved. She nudged his butt gently with the heel of her hand, feeling his back hip bones shift as though loose and malleable under the skin. “Off,” she said. “Off, you big wolf.”

  Sighing, she climbed into the bed with him. He gave off an extraordinary amount of heat. She was surprised the air didn’t steam off his flank.

  She rolled onto her side, turning her back to his collection of bad smells and the imprint of drool upon the sheet. She felt his nose prodding against her shoulder blade. And then a soft mouthing, a corner of her nightshirt clasped, teeth grinding on teeth. She stiffened. It seemed loving and threatening at once: I could eat you, but I won’t.

  The following morning, the dog woke Nita just after 5 a.m. He didn’t bark. He put all the force of his eighty pounds into his paws and bore down on her stomach. She screamed as her eyes popped open, his muzzle inches from her face.

  He knew “sit,” acquiescing as she attached the lead to his collar. Leash in hand, she opened the front door. While she was still processing her first thought, recoiling at the cold, vaguely frightened by the shadowy hedges in the streetlights, the dog bolted outside.

  She was yanked behind, trying to bear down on her heels, gripping the taut leash as it shredded her hands. He wasn’t running—the leash reduced him to an ambling speed, his feet scraping the concrete mechanically as he strained forward by the neck—but she was.

  “Stop! Heel! Wolf! Wolf, stop!”

  So she had named him.

  Forty minutes later, she succeeded in dragging Wolf back into the front hallway of their house. As soon as the door closed, he was once again alert and obedient, like nothing had happened. She unclasped the leash and saw his fur was forced against the grain around his collar. She massaged his neck, and he bore it stoically.

  She threw Wolf and a bowl of dog food into the enclosed backyard. “Here,” she said. “You can run and romp and play by yourself, with nobody choking you. Okay?” She had to walk backward and nudge his prodding nose with the sliding door to get it shut, with her on the inside.

  She passed through the living room again as she left for school. Wolf was still sitting by the back door, his breath fogging one spot on the glass, staring at her, the food untouched. Patient, ominous. He’ll get bored and explore eventually, she reasoned. As she walked by the tall wooden fence of their front yard, she saw his nose poking at the small gap at the bottom of the fence, tracking Nita as she passed.

  That afternoon, as Nita was leaving school, the guidance counselor, Miss Taylor, took a flying leap out of her office—formerly a section of lockers in the hallway and a closet in the principal’s office, hastily joined—and into Nita’s path. “Nita, I’m glad I caught you. I’ve been trying to get a hold of your parents to schedule a meeting, but no one ever answers the phone.”

  Miss Taylor was the tallest woman Nita had seen in real life. Her pulled-back hair was a whisper from the low ceiling, and her long, drooping necklace of wooden beads seemed to elongate her further. Her limbs were slender, her head ovular and in line with her narrow torso, but her hands and feet were gigantic, like a dramatic afterthought, extra turns added in a game of Hangman. Her tiny office seemed like a prank that had been pulled on her.

  “When did you call?” Nita asked.

  “I’ve tried every night this week. Around six, I guess.”

  “We unplug the phone during dinner. Am I in trouble?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. I just need to talk to them about something.” She held out a business card. “Can you ask them to call me?”

  Nita sensed she was lying about Nita not being in trouble. She stared at the card, almost hidden by Miss Taylor’s huge, slablike thumb. Taking it seemed like signing her own arrest warrant.

  Miss Taylor, seeing Nita’s hesitation, added, “Oh. Do they not speak English?”

  Nita saw an opening. “Not super well. You can tell me what it’s about and I’ll tell them.” Miss Taylor raised an eyebrow, so Nita hedged. “Or you can tell me when you want to meet with them, and I’ll make sure that they come. But I should be there too. So I can translate.”

  “Well, let’s see.” With one hand on the door frame, Miss Taylor swung her long body in and out of her office, swiping a leather-bound planner off her desk. “Do you think they could come in on Monday morning? Maybe eight-thirty?”

  “I’ll ask.”

  “And I’ll make sure to write you a note for homeroom.” Miss Taylor wrote something down. She looked up at Nita with an expectant, self-satisfied smile, the look of grown-ups as they bestow a gift and glow with their own benevolence, giving themselves the gift of a child’s reaction.

  Nita shifted uncomfortably. “Can I go now?”

  “Oh, of course. Let me know what they say.”

  Nita was still part of the first wave of kids to leave. The others had lingered at their desks and lockers, while she had been eager to get home. She’d been thinking of Wolf all day. She worried her parents would make him disappear as capriciously as they had produced him.

  Wolf sat at the bottom of the brick school steps.

  He was covered in dirt, snout to tail. He waited with the same troubling, ancient patience as he had that morning. She stopped in surprise, then walked down to meet him. “What are you doing here?” she murmured, rubbing his head.

  The other kids rushed to see the dog, gathering around, chattering excitedly, each trying to get Wolf’s attention. “Is he friendly? Can I pet him? Does he bite? Hi, Doggie! Hi!” He looked confused and stumbled backward. He didn’t snarl or growl or snap, which the kids would have understood. Instead, he raised his back hackles like a cat, and looked to Nita with panic and warning in his eyes. In a loud voice, she told the other kids to step back. She pulled Wolf away by the collar. They groaned in disappointment and yelled things after her, calling her selfish and mean for not letting them play with the cute dog.

  He trotted contentedly beside her all the way home, a far cry from that morning on the leash. She considered him warily. “I wish you could talk,” she said aloud. He turned to her voice with interest, then stopped to urinate into a bush.

  Nita spent the weekend helping her father fill in the huge hole Wolf had dug under the fence and lay con
crete blocks around the perimeter. On Monday morning, as Nita waited by the car for her parents, she heard Wolf’s nails scratching against the wood as he climbed onto one of the blocks and tried to scramble up the side of the fence. Just the black tip of his nose appeared over the top with each jump and fumbling fall.

  The faces of other children kept appearing in the window of Miss Taylor’s office—the window faced the hallway, as the room had no external walls. Nita’s parents and Miss Taylor seemed oblivious to this, the stuck-out tongues and curious head-tilts, the glee and incipient gossip.

  Miss Taylor looked even more like a giant behind her small desk, crammed in with Nita’s family, their stout threesome. Nita was almost as tall as her mother, who was only a few inches shorter than her father, all of them proportionally broad, firm-footed. Her parents had each shaken Miss Taylor’s hand as they entered. “It’s so nice to meet you,” she said.

  Her father said nothing. Her mother said, “Yes, yes,” not yet betraying Nita’s lie.

  “So. I’ve asked you here today because some of Nita’s teachers—all of her teachers, in fact—think it would be a good idea to skip Nita ahead a few grades. Which is to say, to the high school part of the building. We’ll have to do some testing to determine exactly what grade she should go into.”

  Nita’s father rubbed his chin. Her mother said quickly, “Oh. No, thank you.”

  Miss Taylor looked at Nita. “Can you explain it to them?”

  “She doesn’t need to explain anything to us,” Nita’s mother said. Miss Taylor, realizing she’d been duped, shot Nita a disapproving look. Nita shrugged. “We just don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “May I ask why not?”

  “She’ll be a little girl among women and men.”

  Nita thought of what she’d heard through the heating vent, her mother insisting that Nita was a little girl as though that had suddenly come into question.