Camp (16 page)

We rounded everyone up. We didn’t say “lion,” though. We simply said it was time. The code word would have made this a game, and now we were certain it wasn’t.

Rory walked right past the lineup by the door, not stopping to question, not pausing to gloat. As her new boyfriend hustled her outside, she didn’t even look back to see if adults were watching. Maybe she knew she didn’t have to worry: Takawanda counselors danced with their Saginaw counterparts; Patsy and Uncle Ed seemed to have vanished; and Aunt Helen hurried back and forth from the kitchen, replenishing cookies and carrying pitchers of bug juice.

“We’ll give them a few minutes to get hot and heavy out there,” Erin reminded me, “and then we nail ’em.” She pulled me over to Donnie. “I think he’ll keep her busy for a while,” she told our gatekeeper, “but if they want to come in, don’t let ’em.”

Erin turned to me. “Now we find your uncle, which shouldn’t be hard. I saw him talking to your aunt right after he chewed Andy out. Maybe said he wasn’t feeling well or something, ’cause he went upstairs. So this is it. Let’s get him.”

Erin and I skulked up the steps. She pushed me to my knees at the top rung. “Stay low in case anyone looks up here. We’ll try one room at a time. And when we find your uncle, you tell him there’s a problem and you need him to come outside right away.”

Two empty bedrooms and a bathroom. The fourth door was closed. “I’m opening it,” Erin whispered.

“You can’t just barge in.”

“Do you want to be polite, or do you want to get Rory?”

“Get Rory,” I answered, knowing that politeness didn’t count anymore. The only thing that mattered was Uncle Ed’s catching Rory in her final false move.

Erin reached up to turn the knob, then shoved the door open. She pushed me into the room, where Patsy sat at the edge of the bed. Uncle Ed stood facing her, very close, his back to us. He whirled around, hand on his zipper.

I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t move. Erin yanked me from the room.

We ran downstairs, hunched over so no one would see us. “Get your aunt,” Erin ordered.

“Oh my God. No.”

“Just so she can catch Rory,” Erin explained.

I looked around at the dancing, the campers, the Saginaw boys—all hazy and unfamiliar. “I don’t see Aunt Helen,” I told Erin.

“Try the kitchen. Say anything to get her outside. And hurry. I’ll meet you by the door.”

I babbled something about noises when I pulled my aunt away from the refrigerator. We raced across The Lodge, parting dancers as we pushed through. Erin followed us out.

What greeted me made my breath catch. It wasn’t just Rory and her new boyfriend, but Robin and a boy too. The guys explored the girls’ breasts while the girls simply tilted their heads back, eyes closed.

Aunt Helen grabbed Robin’s arm. “What in the devil’s gotten into you, Robin? You should be ashamed of yourself!” She pried Robin from the Saginaw camper who gave her up without argument. “Just wait till I tell your father about this.” She dragged Robin to the porch steps, ignoring the boy who had massaged her daughter’s chest, disregarding Rory and her beau.

Robin chuckled. “Yeah. Go ahead and tell Dad, if you can find him.”

Aunt Helen pulled her toward the door. “For your information, he’s upstairs resting.”

“Right, Mom. Believe what you want. What do I care?”

Rory smirked at Erin and me. We watched her guide her boyfriend toward the side of The Lodge, away from view.

Erin steered me inside. Our gang blitzed us with questions. I let Erin explain how Uncle Ed was upstairs, and how Aunt Helen hadn’t even noticed Rory. “And for this I gave up the boy of my dreams,” Paula said. “Nice work, Erin. We still have Rory, and now I don’t have a boy to dance with.”

We still have Rory.
Those words pounded in my brain with images of Patsy and Uncle Ed upstairs; Rory grinning at Erin and me.

“Look it, you guys,” Erin said as we huddled with our group. “We’ll find a way. We’ll make another plan. But there’s nothing else we can do tonight. So let’s just enjoy the rest of the social.”

Paula and Karen hustled to find the boys they had left for guard duty. Donnie and Fran headed for refreshments.

“Not to worry, Ame,” Erin said. “If things get really bad, we’ll tell your uncle he has to send Rory home or we’ll spill his little secret.”

Confusion and anger pressed like bricks on my chest. “No,” I told Erin. “I can’t blackmail my own uncle. And I don’t want you to tell anyone either.”

“Okay, I hear you. We’ll just come up with another plan then.” Erin spoke as Chubby Checker sang “The Twist.”

“But right now, Ame,” Erin continued, “let’s dance.”

I couldn’t believe she went on as if nothing had happened. Just thinking about what Uncle Ed and Patsy must have been doing made me want to throw up.

Erin swiveled her hips to draw two boys. “Yes, we’d love to dance,” she said, before the Saginaw campers even asked.

I didn’t notice Uncle Ed come downstairs. I didn’t see him come over to me. “You stop that gyrating this instant, young lady, or I’ll call your father and tell him about this indecent behavior.”

I couldn’t look at him, though I knew I had more to tell than he did. I turned from my partner before the tears came.

Uncle Ed followed me to the wall of chairs. “And don’t you ever tell anyone what you saw upstairs. ’Cause if anyone ever hears about it—and I mean
anyone
—you’re in big trouble.” Then he walked away, leaving me alone.

Erin found me on the sidelines. “Uncle Ed’s really mad,” I told her. “He said he’d call my father if I kept twisting.”

“So let him. I’ll bet your father would be happy to hear you were dancing. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do at a social?”

“He said I was being indecent.” Tears finally broke through. Erin put a hand on my back. “Come on. He’s just trying to scare you so you don’t snitch on him. I mean, who’s the indecent one here?”

I didn’t know how long Patsy had been watching us, but once I started crying, I suppose she felt safe coming over. “I just want to say nothing happened upstairs. I mean I just went up to find a bathroom, and Mr. Becker was up there. So we were just havin’ a little chat, that’s all.”

“Yeah, sure,” Erin said, pulling me off my chair. I sideswiped Patsy as The Tokens started singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

Donnie, Paula, Fran, and Karen giggled as they wandered over. When Nancy finally arrived, she found us huddled in the corner, everyone singing but Erin and me.

“I thought you’d all be dancing,” Nancy said. “But it looks like you’re having a great time together. And that’s what camp’s about: fun and friendship.”

She forgot the third part: secrets. But I didn’t need a reminder about that.

Chapter 12

It’s Our Secret

T
he night of the Saginaw social, I dreamed of a white door. I stand on tiptoe and, with little-girl fingers, grab the old- fashioned glass doorknob. Locked. I push, try again. A whisper. A moan behind the door. Who’s there? I squeeze the knob. Turn harder. Still locked. Locked out. Always the same, this dream that came again and again.

I stirred in my camp bed. In the haze between sleep and awakening, the door filled my mind. I drifted back to sleep, back to a time before Charlie—a time before we had a house, when my parents and I lived in an apartment. My father’s at night school. I try not to bother my mother. She vacuums the living room while I sit in the big chair where Dad reads to me on weekends. In his absence, I trace with my index finger illustrations in
The Tall Book of Fairy Tales
: Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel. I tell the stories, voice hushed so my mother won’t get angry. She fluffs the cushions on the sofa. “Remember the rules, Amy. Don’t tell your father I had company today.”

The doorbell rings. “It’s our secret,” my mother warns. She sends me to my room, across from my parents’. “And if you come out before I tell you, you’ll be punished.”

I curl up with Puppy, my stuffed animal, and listen for noises. Footsteps in the hallway. Then whispering. The floor creaks by our bedrooms.

I open my book to the picture of a gingerbread house. My father’s squeaky voice plays in my head:

Nibble, nibble like a mouse. Who is nibbling at my house?

“Stupid goose!” cries the witch when Gretel refuses to poke in the oven to see if it’s hot. So the witch shows her how. Gretel pushes her all the way in, slams the oven door, and runs to save her brother.

I finish the story and squirm, the urge to pee so strong I clamp my legs. My mother will punish me if I leave my room. Yet I have to go so badly that I’ll wet my pants if I wait. And the one time I did that, she got really angry. “Big girls don’t make sissy in their clothes, Amy.”

I sneak out and hear my mother moan. Is someone hurting her? I stand by my parents’ door and listen to my mother whimper, then something that sounds like a slap. “No,” she whispers. “Oh, no. No more.”

Urine runs down my leg. I have to save my mother, chase that bad visitor away. I reach for the glass knob. But then I hear my mother cry out, “Yes. Oh yes!”

Is she hurt or is she happy? If the visitor is hurting her, I have to help. If I don’t, she’ll be mad. She’ll say I should have heard her calling. She’ll say I should know when to break the rules. And if she’s happy, she won’t be angry with me for breaking them.

I stand in a puddle of pee. My mother speaks again as I grab the doorknob. “We can’t keep doing this. What if Lou finds out? Or Helen?”

I put my ear to the door.

“I can’t stop, Sonia,” the visitor says in a voice I recognize. “I need you.”

I unglue myself from the floor and fly into the bathroom.

“Jesus Christ!” I hear Uncle Ed say. Has he stepped in my puddle? I stiffen behind the closed bathroom door. “Could Amy have heard us?”

“Of course not,” my mother answers. “She just waited too long to use the toilet.”

Footsteps—away from me now. I keep my ear to the bathroom door until my mother comes back. She flings a pair of underpants at me. “Well, don’t just stand there, Amy. Clean yourself up.”

Words sit like pebbles in my throat.
I’m sorry. I won’t tell.

I put on dry panties as I hear my mother mopping the floor. Disinfectant dizzies me when I step into the hallway.

“Now go to your room for wetting your pants like a baby,” my mother says. “And if you ever tell anyone I had a visitor, you will stay in your room for a day.”

I awoke in my Takawanda bed. The dream turned in my mind. So many details. Too vivid. Too real. And that’s when I knew: It wasn’t a dream, but a memory that had surfaced while I slept.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Uncle Ed and my mother. And my father? “Brothers support each other,” he had told her. A sour taste filled my mouth as I searched the past. Like Hansel, I needed bread crumbs to guide me. How often had Uncle Ed visited? And when had my mother started hating him? Clearly she did now, telling my father she didn’t care what Ed said about anything.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Uncle Ed and Patsy too. How could she sit next to me at breakfast and pretend nothing had happened?

“Why so quiet this morning?” she asked, calling for conversation, which didn’t come. “I guess you gals are still plumb worn out from all that dancin’ ya did.”

A grin crept up Rory’s face as she picked the grapes from her dish of canned fruit salad. “Well now, how would you know about our dancing? Seems to me you weren’t around much last night, Patsy.”

I jerked in my seat. Had Rory forgotten Uncle Ed’s warning about inappropriate behavior, or had her conquest at the social fueled her courage?

Patsy’s spoon hit the table. “Just what are you sayin’, Rory?”

“Seems clear to me.” Rory glared at Patsy as if daring her to stare back. “Yes indeedy. The more I think about it, the more it seems you and old Mr. Becker must have taken off before the boys even got there, ’cause I sure don’t remember seeing either of you around much.” She jabbed Jessica’s shoulder. “Am I right or am I right?”

I lowered my head, afraid to lock eyes with Rory and afraid to meet Patsy’s. If she thought I had snitched, Patsy would tell Uncle Ed. And he would find something awful about me to tell my father. Something much worse than twisting.