The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (7 page)

“I guess.” Shuffling backward, I made a stumbling movement toward the door when I felt his hands on my shoulders, his fingernails digging into my flesh with an intensity that went right to bone. I caught my breath—I knew what it meant to be a rabbit snatched from the long grass by a raptor. Jerked skyward, my feet left the ground and as he lifted me higher I felt certain that he was going to throw me into the tack room where I would shatter into a million tiny pieces.

“Are you sure?” he teased, lowering me back down to the ground. “Aren’t you the least bit curious about what’s behind the door?”

I had never been less curious about anything in my life. I turned my back to him and started walking.

“Wait!”

I willed myself to turn around.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Gula had Vera tucked into the crook of his elbow. His gaze locked on mine, he shoved the puppy rudely into my arms, her long ears flattening against the velvet dome of her skull in sweet submission. She licked his fingers in misguided appeal, the tip of her tail fluttering.

Holding Vera tight against my chest, I turned around and walked slowly toward the stable door. I was remembering something I once read and kept repeating it as if it were a prayer: I want to live for another thousand years. I don’t know if it’s true that there are no atheists in foxholes, but there were no twelve-year-old unbelievers in the stable that day.

The barn door was within reach, my hand was on the handle, when I heard glass shatter, reverberating like a minor explosion coming from inside the tack room. It was followed by a long low moan, lonely and disconnected, with only a tenuous claim on consciousness, and all I could think of at that moment was, Thank heaven that’s not me. Urine streamed down my legs as Gula sprang toward the open tack room door; I felt a cold rush of air as he pounced, the door shutting behind him in a heartless thud.

I ran. Ran from whatever was going on behind that door. I ran from the yellow barn, Vera in my arms, straw blowing in the wind. I ran through the grazing pasture, the horses lifting their heads in unison, ears slowly twitching, idle antennae signaling their indifference. Gin’s old Shetland pony, Judy, chased Vera and me from the field, sent us clambering over the old wooden fence and into the forest, propelled along a path that represented the long way to our house.

I ran toward home. I ran and I ran. I kept running. I ran for another thousand years.

Chapter Six

C
ARS LINED THE DRIVEWAY, FOUR OR FIVE OF THEM IN VARIOUS
shades of dark blue, parked on the diagonal next to one another. I sprinted past them and up onto the verandah. The screen door banged shut behind me as, shaking from exertion, throat burning, I leaned for support against the staircase in the hallway.

“Riddle?” My mother called out to me from the living room. I could hear voices, men and women, exuberant voices I didn’t recognize, Camp’s voice, everyone excited and happy. “Is that you? Did you find Vera?”

She wandered out into the hallway carrying a glass of wine. “What happened?”

Vera hopped from my arms. My mother dropped to her knees, smothering the joyful puppy in kisses. “Thank God. Where did you find her?”

“Gin’s,” I said. “I found her in the woods.” I was lying and though I didn’t fully understand why, I knew enough. I knew that something had happened in that barn, something bad. I just wanted it to be over, to be done. I wanted to make the events of the afternoon vanish, as if nothing at all had happened. I didn’t tell my mother. I didn’t tell my father. At that point I didn’t even tell myself, but I can never say that I didn’t know.

So I lied. The tiny voice in my head that urged me to tell was no match for the thunderous knocking of my knees. It didn’t stand a chance against the living memory of Gula’s hands on my shoulders, in my hair. In those days, I was all about the soft landing, especially when I was the one plummeting through the atmosphere, the earth rising up to greet me. Something wasn’t right with what had happened in the yellow stable, but I was determined never to know what was wrong about it.

“When are they going home?” I couldn’t catch my breath.

“When the booze stops flowing. As usual, your father reneged on his promise. You can’t believe a word that man says. Oh, Vera, you dear little thing! Whatever would we have done without you?”

Camp came around the corner. “Whoa,” he said, mildly taken aback when he saw me. “Jimmy! Are you all right?”

I glanced at myself in the hall mirror. My knee was cut. My lip was bleeding. My skin was so white I looked as if I had been systematically stripped of pigmentation. My hair, on the other hand, was so alarmingly red it was standing in the middle of a crowded theater screaming “Fire!”

“I’m fine, just . . . Judy chased me across the field,” I said. “I scraped myself on the fence when I was trying to get away from her.”

“That pony is a menace,” my mother said. “She came after me last week, too. Gin won’t hear a word against her. He insists that she’s ‘complicated.’ Crazy. Heavens, Riddle.” She got back to her favorite pastime, assessing my dishevelment. “You look as if you’ve been in a bar fight.” She inhaled and grimaced. “Good God. Is that urine I smell? Riddle! Look at you. You’ve wet yourself. What’s happened here?”

“Nothing!” Embarrassed and at a total loss, I stamped my foot in a gesture of pure emotion. “I ran as fast as I could. I didn’t make it home in time. All right? Are you happy now?”

“Leave her alone.” Camp patted me on the back and looked admiringly at my bruises. “She fought the underbrush and Gin’s psychotic pony to bring home your lost dog.”

“The dog she lost,” Greer interrupted.

“Regardless.” Camp’s frequent use of the word “regardless,” his favorite arch dismissive, inevitably sounded like the precursor to a physical threat. “Riddle’s got more on her mind than how she looks.” He lobbed that grenade in my mother’s direction. My father despised personal vanity. He fought so many wars on so many fronts; among his softer targets were the great fashion houses of Europe. What did I expect? After all, this was a man who once watched a tank carrying one of his best friends blow up: “All that was left of him was a smoking black scorch of ash on the ground.”

A warrior in her own right, Greer bit back a retort; apparently she had decided to regroup. She dismissed us with an elegant but crushing wave of her wrist, the sun shining on her golden hair as if it had nothing better to do, her profile more devastating than all the bombs dropped on Dresden. I wondered if my father understood the battle was already lost.

“Come on. Clean yourself up. There is someone that I want you to meet,” Camp said. I stared at him, searching his face for signs, for confirmation that I was the same girl I had been when I left the house a few short hours before. Had the whole world changed? Was it just me?

“Riddle?” My mother touched my hand. “Did you hear your father?”

I nodded as both of my parents looked at me expectantly, slightly perplexed. I stared into their faces. I knew they were there, the problem was me. I wasn’t there. I was back in the yellow stable with Gula, his hands permanently affixed to my shoulders.

“I don’t want to meet anyone,” I said unreasonably, tears falling. “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

“Baffling,” my father said, watching me torpedo up the stairs. “What’s that all about? Crying never solved anything,” he called after me as I stopped on the second-floor landing, just out of sight, where I collapsed in a humid heap on the stairs.

“Well, that’s helpful advice, Camp. Honestly. What you don’t know about young girls would fill an encyclopedia. I’ll go talk to her,” my mother said, her voice following me up the stairs to where I sat, my head in my hands, her hand on the top rail of the staircase, her foot on the first step. She started up the stairs after me but Camp stopped her.

“She’ll be fine. Let her be. Expiation through conversation is a cliché, Greer. Anyway, you’re not exactly the picture of the sympathetic mother. You’ll do more harm than good. There’s a reason you and Donna Reed were never up for the same parts.”

I lurched to my feet and ran up to the third floor. Slamming the bedroom door behind me, I threw myself onto the bed and pulled the covers up over me, trying to obliterate the noise in my head. That obscene scrambling, that helpless scurrying—the furtiveness settled somewhere in the deepest, most primitive part of me. It was as if I had found a secret staircase that led to a hidden room, previously undiscovered and buried inside me. Gula’s damp detachment, those fingers in my hair. Repulsed, I threw off the covers and darted into the bathroom. I ran the water in the bath and slid down onto the floor.

Where had I gone? The brave girl I had only imagined myself to be.

Scrubbing myself with a bath sponge, steaming hot water skimming the edge of the old claw-foot tub, its porcelain flaking and chipped, I rubbed my skin until it was raw and red, but there wasn’t enough bubble bath in the world to sanitize the effects of that afternoon.

To this day I wonder how different things might have been had my mother simply yielded to her first impulse and followed me up those stairs.

I
T WAS LATE. EVERYONE
had gone. The house was silent except for the occasional muffled exchange between my parents. Crawling on top of the covers, my old bed creaking in aged response, I worked on revising my understanding of what had taken place in the barn.

Gula talked about a secret project. Maybe he was referring to the glorious secret that Gin was talking about. Maybe it was Vera running back and forth. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it had to have been Vera. As for the shoe, well, who knew? The shoe was no big deal. Gin had so many riding students, most of them from privileged backgrounds. Bare feet and topsiders—classic private-school boy insignia, the sheen of wealth encapsulating them like a glistening force field. The kind of boys I publicly ridiculed but privately yearned after.

The clump of hair probably belonged to a little creature attacked by a predator. It was a woodsy color, a color more wild than domestic. Poor dead rabbit.

The sound I’d heard. Thought I heard. Was it human? Unlikely. Or maybe it was me. Maybe I had cried out. Maybe I no longer recognized the sound of my own voice.

What else could I have done? Squeezing my eyes shut, all I could see was the inglorious sight of myself running away, fear elevating me several feet off the ground, the soles of my running shoes caked in straw and horseshit. It wouldn’t be my last experience with misguided supplication. I had a talent for asking myself the wrong questions.

“Riddle?” The doorknob twisted. I scrambled under the covers.

“Come in,” I said as my father entered the room, stopping at the doorway.

“How are you doing? We missed you at supper.”

“I’m fine.”

He hesitated, shifting awkwardly in place before approaching my bed and sitting down next to me. “Listen. I know this is a tough time for you, for all of us, your mother especially—as she reminds me on a regular basis. Running for office is sometimes more difficult for the family than for the candidate. After all, you didn’t sign on for this. In the end, you are sacrificing a lot in support of my goals and ambitions. I realize that and I sympathize . . .”

“It’s all right, Camp,” I said, interrupting.

“. . . to a point,” he said, completing his thought in a way that suggested his empathy levels were more reminiscent of a fast-drying creek bed than an overflowing reservoir. “So there have been some challenges in the past year. Big deal. It’s a pain in the ass but we’re in the home stretch. The election’s in November. We just need to keep our cool and remember that there are things greater than ourselves. It’s important to have a sense of humility. We’re at war. People are dying, Riddle, suffering, and not just Americans. Do you see that? Do you think about it?”

I nodded.

“Good. Because you should. You have a moral obligation to think about others, especially now with social upheaval everywhere. The country is undergoing fundamental changes; the world is changing. Democracy can’t function effectively when its leaders speak with one voice. I want my dissenting voice to be heard. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said.

Camp looked at me intently. “Do I sound as if I’m giving a speech?”

“A little bit.” We both laughed.

“You know, Jimmy, God never promised us a rose garden.”

He took my hand and held it in his, the clasp of his hand filling me with such warmth. I snuggled down into my bed feeling safe and secure. A calmness came over me, settling round me like a gentle mist. My father smiled. I smiled back. I would tell Camp everything.

“Camp . . .”

Bang! A broken branch, buffeted by a sudden loud and swirling gust of wind, hit the window, rattling the glass. I jumped. My father looked startled. A long, low, howling whistle signaled a sudden shift in the weather. Sitting up straight, startled and disoriented as if crudely ejected from a dream in which I felt loved and protected, I covered my heart with my hand.

“What were you going to say?” Camp asked.

“It doesn’t matter.”

Camp patted my hand, kissed me on the cheek and said good night. As the door clicked quietly shut behind him, I got up and walked over to the window. On my knees, I looked out onto the deserted road, randomly illuminated by stars and distant lights. The quiet deepened but for the intermittent rumble of thunder and the pulsating roar of the waves as they crashed against the shoreline. I heard the casual swish of my horse’s tail where he stood beneath the tree in the paddock. The flick of Eugene’s tail, the stamp of his hoof—I’ve imprinted both. I’m habituated to them. Like cues in a stage play, they announce the next entrance.

The shadows parted like theater curtains, and there he was, visible in the golden lamplight, a smoky puff of gloom and silence, soundless as suffocation, smoothly gliding like a snake across the surface of my fear. Tall and lean. His mouth hung open. Loose. A ramp with a broken hinge. Gula leaned slightly forward as he walked. He walked slowly. He had his mongrel dog with him, brown and sable, ears flattened against its skull, its tail hanging down, ribs visible, matted fur, tufts of hair missing, on a short taut leash. In the same hand he carried a large stick that rested rigid against the dog’s flank, a fixed reminder. They walked together, taking synchronized steps, moving in slow unison as if they were conjoined, cruelty’s ultimate cruelty.

The dog! Oh, Hanzi! They stopped at my mother’s perennial garden. Flashes of lightning overhead illuminated him in the blackness. I could see him clearly one moment and the next moment I couldn’t see him at all. He dropped the leash. The dog slid down onto the ground in a single slinking motion. The leaves on the trees rippled. I watched as he pulled an army knife from his coat pocket and began cutting wild roses in the rain. A sudden surge of wind and the whole world seemed to shift, then bend backward at the waist. Unhurried, he went from bush to bush, collecting orange, yellow, red, white and pink blossoms, oblivious of all that was blowing around him, unmindful of me.

I let the curtain slide slowly back into place as he and his dog vanished into the blackness. Gula was picking roses in a storm in the dead of night and I couldn’t have been more afraid than if I’d witnessed him digging his own shallow grave beneath the moonlight.

Back in bed, I tried in vain to sleep. After a while, it started to rain lightly, then hard. Rain sprayed through the open window and made tiny pools on the pine floor. I jumped to my feet and closed the window, the wind banging against the glass to get in. Raindrops from the giant oak tree clinked downward against the gutter, a cascade of individual coppery notes clanging like unlucky pennies.