Camptown Ladies (27 page)

There was no mistaking that tone in her voice, but I tried to tell me I had not heard it, and I wished I had left right then instead of braving one more glance at her. She was no longer the Erica I knew, and I supposed, might never be again. The old Erica was cool, confident, and unreadable. People understood this at her first firm handshake, as I had. But this new Erica—she seemed unsure,
and worse, much worse, she looked scared and . . . sadly hopeful, just like Vince had looked so many times after she came to the campground.

She said she was OK with putting out the fire, so I left her there.

“Goodnight,” I said, and I walked away into a night that had turned unexpectedly cold.

Vince was yelling at me. “Tell me it’s not true!”

My mind raced. I needed to lie to him. But how could he already know, when I just learned it tonight? Had he seen us sitting together on the bench? Or, maybe he had seen it long before I did. Maybe Lisa had suspected and told him.

He knew me well enough to suspect how I looked at her, and more suspicious, how I avoided looking at her. Why had Lisa asked her to come? Why couldn’t that damned tiny voice have shouted out sooner what I should have known all along? When Lorn left me, it was Erica I had craved seeing. For comfort, I had told myself. Ridiculous, I told myself now. Erica was not a person you look to for comfort. I had wanted something I wouldn’t let myself admit.

And now, somehow, Vince knew.

I felt a violent crack across my face, the sound ringing loudly in my ears. Had he hit me? My baby brother whom I loved more than anything in the world? Even in childhood when we fought as siblings do, we never conceived of raising a hand to each other. My jaw throbbed like it does when I clench my teeth at night, and tears stung my cheeks as if he had caused an open wound. It burned. Had he been wearing a ring when he struck me? I glanced at his hands and saw his wedding ring, the edges glinting sharply in flashes of light. Why was he wearing his old yellow terry cloth robe? Had he married Erica? Please tell me he hadn’t married Erica—and why couldn’t my boobs insulate my chest from this pain? Everyone could hear the loud thudding now, it sounded like thunder. Another violent clap of pain in my ears, this time with a blinding flash of light. I deserved it, but he couldn’t have hit me.

Of course Vince had not hit me. I sat up in my bed and thunder cracked above the roof again. I had been asleep for only two hours, yet it felt like I had destroyed several lives within that tiny space of time. It had been a terrible dream, but before I could sort it out, another crack of thunder released a heavy deluge of rain. I could hear the gutters outside my window overflowing and I flew out of bed to throw on whatever clothes I could find. I had one thought: the roof of Dove Gaio Mangia. I had to go check on what my sister thought was the heart of Camptown Ladies. Maybe it was knowing what a big day it would be for Lisa tomorrow, or maybe it was the freshness of the dream that made me want to avoid my brother, but I decided to let them sleep and head back out to the campground alone.

Twenty-Two

Stormy, Stormy Night

I told myself I was overreacting to the severity of the storm, since I didn’t want to believe it was my dream that made me not want to wake my brother. My heart was still pounding from the memory of it, yet as I drove through the night, I told myself it was the storm that seemed to be building in strength. I knew better than to ask the trees a friggin’ thing, since the pines were bending as if they were made of rubber, so I would not like their dramatic answers.

It seemed to take a ridiculous time to get to the camp as mini flash floods covered some of the dirt roads, and I had to push through very slowly or risk the car stalling out. It turned out I had not overreacted, and now that I had arrived, I thought it was stupid not to wake Lisa and Vince. I was reaching for my phone when I saw Erica’s truck was already there.

I wasn’t surprised. Of course Erica would be there. I saw the white of her jacket moving back and forth from her truck to the Dove dining hall, and the huge flash of blue from the largest tarp being pulled off the buffet table. I was no sooner out of my car and into the thick mud when she started barking orders at me.

“Help me hoist this onto the roof!” she screamed, but I could barely hear her over the storm.

I saw the source of her panic. A leak had started from the roof and was bleeding a steady stream of water into the main seating area of Dove Gaio Mangia. Erica had already moved the tables away and constructed a makeshift trough from a piece of half pipe lined with a tarp to direct the water off the floor and safely away from the building. Remarkably, under some protection of the nearby pine
boughs, our campfire was still smoldering, but now it emitted the sickening odor of a burned-out building.

With the main floor and tables protected, Erica’s concern now shifted to the roof. “Hold this,” she said, stuffing the folded wet tarp into my arms as she grabbed one of the columns and hoisted herself up onto the railing before I could protest. I knew it was no use trying to talk her out of it, despite the danger of the storm. For a moment, I was paralyzed with fear, imagining her slipping off the wet roof or, worse, getting struck by the lightning that lashed dangerously close at the woods surrounding us.

Erica leaned dangerously over the side of the roof and extended both arms. “Toss it!” I threw the heavy tarp and she caught it, and as I feared, the weight of it nearly pulled her over the edge. She regained her balance and disappeared with the tarp, and I, with a lot more effort than her, hoisted myself onto the railing and tried to pull myself up to the roof to help her.

Erica yelled, “What the fuck are you doing?”

“You need help, now give me a hand, will you?” I yelled back.

She grabbed my hand and, with great effort, helped to pull me up, but directed me to stay clear from the new clay tiles, which would be very slick in the rain and likely to break under my unskilled footing—though she didn’t phrase it quite like that.

Erica had her tool belt on, and hammered down the original tarp to the old roof shingles until it was secured, and even in the madness of the storm, I noticed she still kept her distinctive nail-tapping pattern, only at a faster pace. Then we laid the larger tarp over the first one, the pelting sound of the pouring leak immediately slowing beneath us, then stopping all together.

“It’s working!” I yelled. She smiled over at me, and my stomach flipped over as if I had tumbled off the roof, and at the next loud clap of thunder, I treated myself by mumbling an “Oh, fuck” that only I could hear.

Erica nailed down the second tarp, pulling up a few shingles and using those to trap the tarp at each corner and nail them both to the roof to stop the wind from pulling it up like a sail. Before she secured the last corner, it whipped up in the wind as the storm charged closer.

Without thinking, I quickly headed for it and slipped, which sent my foot crashing through a soft spot on the roof—so noiselessly compared with the thunder clapping over our heads, that Erica never looked up. Before I could think about what a bad idea it was, I had yanked my foot out violently out from the hole, which sent me flying down the side of the roof, the clay shingles too slick for me to stop sliding, until I got to the very edge. I pictured myself as Wile E. Coyote, having failed at one of his harebrained schemes, my legs flailing over the side of the roof like I was peddling an invisible bike.

“Erica!” I shouted, but the thunder droned me out, “Erica!” I yelled again, weaker this time, but the thunder had paused, so she heard me and whipped her head around.

She dove at me in an instant, grabbing both my arms with no fear that I would pull her over the side with me, though it seemed likely this would happen. Her face was pressed against mine and I said into her ear, “I think the fall won’t kill me, but I could break both legs.”

“You’re not going to fall!” she shouted into my face, her voice straining from the weight of me. “And don’t bother looking down. That’s not where you’re going!”

I was petrified, but somehow I managed to say against her face, “I’ll just look down your shirt, OK?”

“Yes, do that,” she said. Then she scared me with the panic in her voice, “Just don’t let go of me!”

Maybe the fall could actually kill me with a juicy head injury, I thought, the terror making my legs go numb so that I could no longer pedal into thin air, trying to catch the edge of the roof. Erica dug her fingers painfully into both my arms like the claws of an animal, and I held as tightly as I could to her jacket, slick from the rain and threatening to tear right off her from the heaviness of my grip.

“Don’t let go of me,” she said again, but this time her voice was soft in my ear.

I shivered, I hoped from fear. Then I said, “This
Grinch
re-enactment sucks.” Then the fear found my voice, and I said in a ragged breath, “Please don’t let me go!”

“No, never,” she groaned between her teeth. I could see over her head that Erica was using every bit of strength she had in her legs to create traction against the shingles so we both didn’t go hurtling over the edge.

I clung to her. “Every woman has, so far.”

This time, Erica pulled me hard enough to stop me from slipping farther, then several times more, and with each pull she said one word, “I’m . . . not . . . every . . . woman.”

She was right about that.

She managed to pull me forward a few inches away from the edge before having to adjust her grip. When she let go of my arms, I felt the pain where her fingers had dug into my skin, right through my shirt. Regretfully, I launched a scream into her ear, “Fuck!”, and I could feel myself start to slip backward again. I said, “If I go, don’t you dare fall with me. I don’t need you falling on top of me!”

Erica said, “I won’t fall for you. Fucking just hold on!”

I won’t fall for you?

I fucking just held on. It was then that I thought, Of course it’s her. Who else could it ever be for me? Was I in love with Erica? Had my world really tipped upside down and was I really left hanging by my fingernails like this? I was not only hanging from the edge of this roof. I could
not
feel this for her. I would not continue feeling this. But what else could I do? The crazy thought occurred to me, Could I let go?

Maybe for my brother? Judging by the way I was fighting, No, I couldn’t do that. I wasn’t enough of a hero to give up on life for anyone, even Vince. So, I hung on like that stupid old poster with the orange kitty that says: “Hang On, Friday is Coming!”—only I was dangling from a roof instead of a tree limb, desperate to have a life that could never be mine.

As I was dangling there, I wasn’t just desperate to live. I thought, Even if I get off this roof in once piece, there will be no way home from this, there will only be running away—and I doubted I had the strength to even do that. I would be dangling from this roof forever, now that I knew this. Even if I was saved, I was lost. And yet, I was fighting to live, as hard as she was fighting to save me.

Erica gave a gut-wrenching scream and yanked me up far enough so I finally could hook one foot onto the edge of the roof, then I kicked wildly with the other as she pulled once more, and somehow she managed to pull me over the edge.

I had been pulled over the edge, for sure.

I kept kicking and she kept pulling me long after she needed to, until I finally said, “I’m up, I’m up! You can stop!” and Erica released both of my arms and embraced me hard and I held on to her as if my life still depended on it.

We were both breathing against each other, ragged, deeply, and in exactly matched gasps, so I could barely hear her whisper as she rocked me back and forth in the rain, “I won’t lose you. I can’t lose you.”

I loved her. This time it wasn’t a voice inside telling me. It was just me admitting it: I loved Erica. I felt a deep tremble in her body against me, and I reminded myself her nerves had to be more shot than mine; she had done the heavy lifting, after all.