Bones & All (2 page)

I'd only ever been a burden to her. A burden and a horror. All this time she'd done what she'd done because she was afraid of me.

I felt strange. There was a ringing in my ears like you get when it's too quiet, except it was like resting my head against a church bell that had just chimed.

Then I noticed something else on the table: a thick white envelope. I didn't have to open it to know there was money inside. My stomach turned over. I got up and stumbled out of the kitchen.

I went to her bed, burrowed under the comforter, and curled up as tight as I could. I didn't know what else to do. I wanted to sleep this off, to wake up and find it undone, but you know how it is when you desperately want to get back to sleep. When you desperately want
any
thing.

The rest of the day passed in a daze. I never cracked
The Lord of the Rings
. I didn't read a thing besides the words in that note. Later on I got up again and wandered around the house, too sick even to think of eating anything, and when it got dark I went to bed and lay awake for hours. I didn't want to be alive. What kind of life could I have?

I couldn't sleep in an empty apartment. I couldn't cry either, because she hadn't left me anything to cry over. If she loved it, she took it with her.

*   *   *

Penny Wilson was my first and last babysitter. From then on my mother kept me in daycare, where the employees were overwhelmed and underpaid and there was never any danger of anyone taking a shine to me.

Nothing happened for years. I was a model child, quiet and sober and eager to learn, and over time my mother convinced herself I hadn't done that horrible thing. Memories distort themselves, turning over into truths that are easier to live with. It
had
been a satanic cult. They'd murdered my babysitter, bathed me in blood, and given me an eardrum to chew on. It wasn't my fault—it wasn't me. I wasn't a monster.

So when I was eight Mama sent me to summer camp. It was one of those places where the boys and the girls live in cabins on opposite sides of a lake. We sat apart in the dining hall too, and we were hardly ever allowed to play together. During arts-and-crafts hour the girls wove key chains and friendship bracelets, and later we learned how to gather kindling and build a campfire, though we never actually got to have one after dark. We slept in bunk beds, eight girls to a cabin, and every night before bed our counselor would check our heads for ticks.

We swam in the lake every morning, even on cloudy days when the water was cold and murky. The other girls only waded in up to their waists and stood listlessly in the shallows, waiting for the sound of the lunch bell.

But I was a good swimmer. I felt alive in the cold dark water. Some nights I even fell asleep in my bathing suit. One morning I decided to swim all the way across the lake to the boys' side just to say I'd done it. So I swam and swam, reveling in the feeling of my limbs cutting through the bracing water, only dimly aware of the lifeguard whistling for me to turn back.

I paused to check my progress, and that's when I saw him. He must've had the same idea about reaching the girls' side. “Hi,” he called.

“Hi,” I said.

We stopped there, treading water maybe fifteen feet apart, just looking at each other. The clouds seethed overhead. The rain would start any second. On both sides the lifeguards whistled frantically. We swam a bit closer, close enough to reach out and touch fingertips. He had bright red hair and more freckles than anyone I'd ever seen, boy or girl—so freckled you could hardly see any paleness underneath. He flashed me a conspiratorial grin, as if we already knew each other and had arranged to meet here, at the dead center of a lake no one else wanted to swim in.

I glanced over my shoulder. “I think we're in trouble.”

“Not if we stay here forever,” he said.

I smiled. “I'm not that good a swimmer.”

“I'll show you how to stay up for hours. All you have to do is rest easy and let your brain float. See?” He leaned back and let his ears sink beneath the surface. All I could see was his face in the water, turned up toward the sky where the sun should have been.

“You never get tired?” I said, louder so he could hear me.

The boy came up and shook the water out of his ears. “Nope.”

So I tried it. We were close now, close enough that he reached out and touched my hand. I bobbed up again and laughed as I drummed my fingertips up and down his arm. “I know,” he said. “I'm awfully frecksy.”

The lifeguards on either side of the lake went on blowing—I could hear the whistles even when I let my ears go beneath the surface—but we knew they wouldn't jump in and drag us back. Not even the lifeguards wanted to swim in that water.

I have no idea how long we stayed that way, but I guess it couldn't have been as long as I remember. If this were anyone's story but mine, it would have been the first time I met my childhood sweetheart.

*   *   *

His name was Luke, and over the next few days he found ways of reaching me. Twice he left a note on my pillow, and one day after lunch he led me around the back of the rec hall with a shoebox under his arm. Once we'd found a sheltered place he took off the lid and showed me a collection of cicada shells. “I find them in the bushes,” he said, like it was some great secret. “It's the exoskeleton. They shed 'em once in a lifetime. Isn't that cool?” He plucked one of the shells out of the box and put it in his mouth.

“They're pretty tasty,” he said as he munched. “Why are you making a gross-out face?”

“I'm not.”

“Yes, you are. Don't be such a girl.” He took out a second shell. “Here, try one.”
Crunch, crunch
. “I gotta grab a salt shaker at dinner, they'll be even tastier with some salt.”

He put the shell in my palm and I looked at it. Something flickered then, in a dark corner of my mind: I knew about things that weren't meant to be eaten.

Then the whistle blew for afternoon roll call. I dropped the locust shell in the shoebox and ran away.

That night I found a third note under my pillow. He'd written the first two like he was introducing himself to a new pen pal:
My name is Luke Vanderwall, I'm from Springfield, Delaware
+
I have 2 little sisters, this is my 3rd summer at Camp Ameewagan
+
it's my favorite time of the whole year. I'm glad you're here. Now I'll have somebody to swim with even if we have to break the rules to do it.…

This one was short.
Meet me outside at 11 o'clock
, it said,
+
together we will go 4th
+
have many adventures
.

That night I had my bathing suit on under my pajamas. I lay in bed until I heard everyone breathing evenly, and then I unlatched the screen door and slipped out of the cabin. He was already there, standing just beyond the arc of the porch light. I tiptoed down to meet him and he took my hand and tugged me into the dark. “Come on,” he whispered.

“I can't.”
I shouldn't.

“'Course you can. Come on! I want to show you something.” Hand in hand, we stumbled past the rec hall back to the boys' camp. After a few minutes I could see the cabins through the trees, but then he drew me away from them, deeper into the darkness.

The woods were alive in a way I'd never noticed in the daytime. The slip of an old moon hung above the trees, giving us just enough light to see by, and fireflies hovered all around, flashing their green-gold lights. I wondered what they were saying to each other. There was a night breeze, so cool and fresh that I imagined it was the pines sighing out the good clean air, and the forest hummed with an invisible orchestra of cicadas and owls and bullfrogs.

A whiff of woodsmoke tickled my nose. Outside Ameewagan, but not far off, someone was having a campfire. “I could sure go for a hot dog,” Luke said wistfully. A moment later I saw a glimmer of something ahead, but as we came closer I could see it wasn't a fire.

There was a red tent in the woods, all lit up from within. It wasn't a real tent—the kind with retractable metal rods and a zipper that you could buy in a store—which made it seem all the more mysterious. He'd found a red tarpaulin and cast it over a length of clothesline strung between two trees. For a moment or two I stood there admiring it. From here I could pretend it was a magic tent that I could step inside and find myself in the thick of a Moroccan bazaar.

“You made this?”

“Yeah,” he said. “For you.”

This is the first time I can remember feeling it. Standing next to Luke in the darkness, I breathed in the warm night air and found I could smell him down to the lint between his toes. He still had the stink of the lake on him, dank and rotten-eggy. He hadn't brushed his teeth after dinner, and I could smell the chili powder from the sloppy joes every time he breathed.

It trickled over me then, making me shudder: the hunger, and the certainty. I didn't know anything about Penny Wilson. I just had a feeling I had done something horrible when I was little and that I was on the verge of repeating it. The tent wasn't magic, but I knew one of us wasn't coming out again.

“I have to go back,” I said.

“Don't be a wimp! Nobody's going to find us. Everyone's asleep. Don't you want to play with me?”

“I do,” I whispered. “But…”

He took my hand and led me under the flap.

For a makeshift hideaway, it was pretty well stocked: two cans of Sprite, a package of Fig Newtons and a bag of Doritos, a blue sleeping bag, his shoebox of locust shells, an electric lantern, a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, and a deck of cards. Luke sat cross-legged and pulled a pillow out of his sleeping bag. “I thought we could spend the night here. I cleared out all the sticks. The ground's still hard, but I figure it's good wilderness survival training. When I grow up I'm going to be a forest ranger. You know what a forest ranger is?” I shook my head. “They patrol the forests and make sure no one's cutting down trees or shooting animals or doing other bad stuff. So that's what I'm gonna do.”

I picked up the Choose Your Own Adventure:
Escape from Utopia
. On the cover were two kids lost in a jungle, the ground crumbling into an abyss beneath their feet.
Choose from 13 different endings! Your choice may lead to success or disaster!

Disaster
. I had a feeling.

“Sprite?” He popped open a can and handed it to me. “Here, have a Fig Newton.” He took one for himself and nibbled around the edges. “But before I become a forest ranger I'm gonna do triathlons.”

“What's triathlons?”

“That's when you run a hundred miles, bike a hundred miles, and swim a hundred miles, all in one day.”

“That's crazy,” I said. “Nobody can swim a hundred miles.”

“How do you know? Did you ever try?”

I laughed. “Of course not.”

“Well, now you know how to float forever. That's a good start. I can float forever but I've got to be able to swim forever too. So I'm going to train and train, for as long as it takes, until I can. And then I'm gonna ride my horse across the Rockies and fight forest fires and live in a tree house I built myself. It's going to have two stories, like a real house, except you'll climb up to it with a rope ladder and come down again on a sliding pole.” He frowned as something occurred to him. “The sliding pole will have to be made of metal though, so I don't get splinters.”

“How are you going to eat? You have to have a kitchen, but then you might burn your house down.”

“Oh, I'll have a wife to cook for me. I just don't know yet if the kitchen will be on the ground or up in the tree.”

“Will your wife have her own tree house?”

“I don't think she'll need her own house, but she can have her own room on another branch if she wants it. Maybe she'll be an artist or something.”

“That sounds nice,” I said sadly.

“What is it? I thought you liked being outside.”

“I do.”

“I thought this would make you happy.”

“It does. But you're going to get in trouble if you don't go back to your cabin.”

“Oh, I don't mind wiping tables in the mess hall tomorrow,” he said with a careless wave of his hand. “This is worth it.”

Tomorrow
. The word sounded strange, like it didn't mean anything anymore. “That's not what I meant.”

“You can worry about it in the morning. Sit down next to me and we'll play some old maid before we go to sleep.”

I sat down beside him and he picked up the deck of cards. We began to play. He held up his cards, and I picked one (the old maid, sure enough). I stuck it into my hand and offered it to him, and he shook his head and told me to shuffle. I couldn't think about the game. I just kept smelling the chili powder and the rotten eggs and the cotton lint. His eagerness, his spirit, his thirst for the outdoors: all that had a smell too, like wet leaves, and salty skin, and hot cocoa in a tin cup that knew the shape of his hands.

“I don't want to play anymore,” I whispered.
He won't grow up. He'll never be a forest ranger. He'll never ride another horse. He won't fight forest fires. He'll never live in a tree house.

Luke dropped his cards and took both my hands. “Don't go, Maren. I want you to stay.”

I didn't want to. I really, really wanted to. I leaned in and sniffed him. Chili powder—rotten eggs—cotton lint. I pressed my lips to his throat and felt him stiffen with anticipation. He put a hand to my ponytail and stroked it, like he was petting a horse. He breathed on me, I smelled the chili, and just like that there was no going back.

*   *   *

I stumbled out of the red tent toward the lake, out to the edge of the dock, and flung the grocery bag into the water. Then I pulled off my pajamas and threw them out as far as I could. I watched my
Little Mermaid
T-shirt sink below the surface of the lake, heard the plastic bag gurgling as it filled.