The God of the Woods

A different memory asserts itself instead: John Paul, in the Clearing, as he windmilled his arms, first in her direction and then in Lee Towson’s. John Paul with his rich-kid approach to the fight, brandishing his fists as if he were entering a ring. Lee wild and scrappy, still in his apron from dinner service. He made short work of John Paul, left him on the ground, blinking absently up toward the branches overhead.

There will be trouble today. There always is when John Paul gets the notion that she’s fooling around on him.

For the record: she isn’t, this time.

Annabel comes up for air. Puts a hand over her eyes.

“Do you know where Barbara is?” asks Louise. Cutting to the chase. There’s not much time: soon the girls in the other room will be waking.

Annabel looks confused.

“Van Laar,” says Louise, and then she says it again, more quietly. “Our camper.”

“No,” says Annabel, and collapses backward on her bed.

It is then, of course, that reveille sounds over the speakers mounted on trees throughout the campground—meaning that on the other side of the plywood partition, eight twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls are reluctantly waking up, making their small noises, exhalations and sighs, propping themselves up on elbows.

Louise begins pacing.

Annabel, still horizontal, now watches her—beginning to understand the problem.

“Annabel,” says Louise. “You need to be honest here. Did you go back out last night? After the campers were in bed?”

Annabel appears to hold her breath. Then she exhales. Nods. Her eyes, Louise notices, are filling with tears.

“Yes, I did,” she says. There’s a childish tremor in her voice. She has very rarely been in trouble in her life: of this Louise is certain. She is a person who has been told, since birth, about her value in this world. The ways she makes others happy. She is crying openly now, and Louise struggles not to roll her eyes. What does Annabel have to be afraid of? There’s nothing at stake for her. She’s seventeen years old. The worst thing that could happen to Annabel is that she might be dismissed, sent up the hill to her rich parents—who are friends, in fact, with the owners of the camp. Who are, at this very moment, guests at their house on the grounds. Meanwhile, the worst thing that might happen to Louise—an adult, thinks Louise, castigating herself—the worst thing that might happen is—well. Don’t make too many leaps, she tells herself. Just stay in the present.

Louise walks to the curtain. Pulls it back ever so slightly. In doing so, she catches the eye of Tracy, Barbara’s bunkmate, a quiet girl who stands paused on the bunk’s ladder in mid-descent, having noticed, apparently, the issue.

Louise drops the curtain.

“Is she missing?” Annabel says. Again, Louise shushes her.

“Don’t say missing,” says Louise. “Say she’s not in her bunk.”

Louise scans their little room, looking for evidence of their behavior last night. She gathers what she finds into a brown paper garbage bag: an empty bottle of beer that she drank on the walk back from the Clearing; the end of a joint that she smoked at some point; the vomit-filled potato chip bag, which she handles with two stiff fingers.

“Is there anything else you wouldn’t want someone finding?” she asks Annabel, who shakes her head.

Louise closes the garbage bag, folds it, makes it compact.

“Listen to me,” she says. “You might have to be in charge of the campers this morning. I’m not sure yet. If that happens, you need to get rid of this. Just put it in the garbage enclosure on the walk to breakfast. It needs to be gotten rid of. Can you do that?”

Annabel nods, still green.

“Right now,” she says to Annabel, “just stay here. Don’t come out for a while. And don’t—” She hesitates, searching for words that sound serious but not self-incriminating. She’s talking, after all, to a child. “Just don’t say anything about last night to anyone, yet. Let me think a few things over.”

Annabel goes quiet.

“Okay?” says Louise.

“Okay.”

She’ll fold immediately, Louise thinks. She will unswervingly tell every authority figure everything that happened and everything she knows. She’ll cry on the shoulders of her mother and father, who probably didn’t even understand the poem they named their daughter for, and she’ll be comforted by them, and resume her ballet lessons, and next year she’ll be pipelined into Vassar or Radcliffe or Wellesley by her prep school, and she’ll marry the boy her parents have chosen for her—already, she has confessed to Louise, they have one in mind—and she will never, ever think of Louise Donnadieu again, or the fate that will befall Louise, or the trouble Louise will have, for the rest of her life, getting a job, getting housing, supporting her mother, who for seven years now has been unable or unwilling to work. Supporting her little brother, who at eleven has done nothing at all to deserve the life he has been given.

In front of her, Annabel gags. Recovers.

Louise puts her hands on her hips. Breathes. Slow down, she reminds herself.

She squares her shoulders. Pulls back the curtain. Begins the work of feigning ignorance and surprise for this small group of girls who—she swallows her shame like a pill—who look up to her, admire her, frequently come to her for advice and protection.

She steps into their room. Pantomimes scanning the beds. Furrows her brow in a show of confusion.

“Where’s Barbara?” she says to them, brightly.

Tracy

Two Months Earlier

June 1975

Three rules were given to the campers upon their arrival.

The first concerned food in the cabins, and the way it was to be consumed and stored (neatly; tightly).

The second pertained to swimming: an activity that was not, under any circumstances, to be undertaken solo.

The third—the most important, as evidenced by its display, in capital letters, in several communal locations—was WHEN LOST SIT DOWN AND YELL.

At the time, this admonition struck Tracy as almost funny. It would be repeated later that night, at the opening campfire; its logic would be explained. But presented as it was in that moment, forthrightly, succinctly, by a tall male counselor who spoke the words without punctuation or emotion—the phrase made her look away, swallow a nervous laugh. WHEN LOST SIT DOWN AND YELL. She tried to imagine it: Sitting down right where she was. Opening her mouth. Yelling. What noise, she wondered, would escape her? What word, or words? Help? Help me? God forbid—Please find me? It was too embarrassing to consider.

Her father had paid her to attend.

This was what it took, after a week of negotiations that had concluded with a weekend-long standoff in her room: cold hard cash, a hundred dollars of it—fifty percent of which would be waiting for her upon her return.

What she had wanted to do with her summer was simple: she wanted to spend all day in the living room of the Victorian in Saratoga Springs that her family had rented each racing season for a decade. She had wanted to lower the blinds halfway and open the windows halfway and point all the fans in the house in her direction and lie on the sofa, only rising to prepare herself elaborate snacks. And she wanted to read: reading was the main thing.

This had been her routine for five summers in a row. She had hoped that the summer of 1975 would be no different.

Instead, her father—divorced from her mother for less than a year—had, in quick succession, gotten a girlfriend, a fancier rental house, and the notion that Tracy shouldn’t lie around all summer with nothing to do. This was what he said to her, anyway, on their ride up from Tracy’s mother’s house on Long Island in mid-June. (She couldn’t help but notice that he’d waited to reveal the plan until they were more than halfway to Saratoga.) The real reason, she thought, was so that she would be out of his hair for two months. So that he and the aforementioned girlfriend could have the run of the place without a sulking twelve-year-old underfoot. Why had he fought to have custody of her all summer, Tracy asked herself, if he was only going to turn around and send her away?

He hadn’t even bothered to drop her off at Camp Emerson himself. Instead he’d outsourced that task to Donna Romano, the girlfriend, still a first and last name to Tracy.

“It’s a race day,” her father said, when Tracy cornered him in the hallway, begged him to come. “Gotta drive down to Belmont. Second Thought’s running at two.”

Her father was a jockey’s son who’d grown up too tall to follow in his footsteps. He’d become an exercise rider instead, and then a trainer, and then an owner, the circumstances of their lives changing with each job. When Tracy was born, the three of them lived in an RV in her mother’s mother’s driveway. Now they lived in a new large house with a silver front gate in Hempstead, New York. Well, Tracy and her mother did, anyway.

“What will we even talk about,” she demanded, but he only shook his head, put two imploring hands on her shoulders. She noticed suddenly that she was eye level with him: her own father. She’d recently gone through a growth spurt that put her in the vicinity of five-eleven and made her slouch vigorously whenever she wasn’t in motion.

“This place is supposed to be top-notch. I mean really hoity-toity,” said her father—the same two embarrassing descriptors he’d used when first breaking the news. “I bet you’ll end up loving it.”

She turned toward a window. Through it, she could see Donna Romano adjusting her bra, inspecting her reflection in the window of the car. It was a new Stutz Blackhawk with shag carpeting on the floor and an engine whose roar reminded Tracy of her father’s voice. “Top of the line,” he had said, when he picked her up in Hempstead. It seemed to Tracy that everything in her father’s life was new. Rental house, girlfriend, Pekingese puppy, car. Tracy was the only old thing in his orbit; and even she was being cast out.

As it turned out, Donna Romano was a chain-smoker. In between drags she asked Tracy questions about her life that she’d clearly been stockpiling for the very purpose of this trip. When she was not busy answering them, Tracy snuck glances at Donna Romano. She was extremely pretty. Normally, this would have gone far with Tracy. She loved pretty women. She loved the most popular girls at her middle school—though revered might have been a better word, since a large part of her actually despised them. Still, she was fascinated by them, perhaps due to the fact that, physically, they were her opposite, and thus seemed somehow like specimens she wished to examine, at length, under a microscope. Where most of her classmates had long straight hair, parted in the middle, Tracy’s hair was large, red, and indefatigable. Where some of her classmates’ freckles were delicate, Tracy’s were so pronounced that she had been nicknamed Connect the Dots, or CTD for short, by a group of sixth-grade boys. She was supposed to wear glasses; she owned a pair that she never wore, which resulted in her squinting frequently. Her father once told her casually that she was built like a plum on toothpicks, and the phrase was at once so cruel and so poetic that it clicked into place around her like a harness.

The roads turned from asphalt to gravel to dirt. Ramshackle homes appeared every few minutes, their front lawns repurposed as graveyards for rusted-out vehicles. It was eerie, this contrast between natural beauty and man-made decay, and Tracy began to wonder if they were going the right way.

And then, at last, a sign came into view. Van Laar Preserve, it said. Their mailed instructions had indicated this was the sign to follow.

“I wonder why they don’t put the name of the camp on the sign,” mused Donna Romano.

Maybe it was so perverts couldn’t find it, thought Tracy. This, she knew, was what her father would have said. Against her will, she often heard his voice as a sort of narrative presence that underscored her life. That year—the first of the divorce—was the longest they had ever been apart.

The truth was that as a younger child she had been his shadow, had loved him unreservedly, following him everywhere, raising carrots, flat-handed, to the velvety muzzles of his favorite horses. Although she would have died before admitting it, Tracy missed him profoundly, and had spent the better part of her last school year anticipating a summer of being at his side.

The dirt driveway forked. An arrow to the right directed them to Camp Emerson: Where Lifelong Friendships Are Made. And then the trees broke open onto a lawn with several rustic wooden buildings in a row. In front of them was a lone counselor standing behind a folding table, from which hung a damp posterboard sign that said, unconvincingly, Welcome.

The counselor approached the Blackhawk with a folder, handed it to Donna through a window. Then he formally dispensed the Three Rules of Camp Emerson like a dutiful town crier—including the final one, the most important, a phrase that would echo in Tracy’s head for days, for weeks. For the rest of her life.

When lost sit down and yell.

Tracy had difficulty imagining how lost she would have to be before the option felt correct. Her voice, it seemed, had been continuously decrescendoing since birth, so that by age twelve, she could scarcely be heard.

Very, she decided, at last. Profoundly, irreversibly, lost.

“You’ll be in Balsam,” said the boy, interrupting Tracy’s thoughts. He extended a long arm to his right. Donna Romano tapped the gas, and the Blackhawk rolled forward.

Alice

June 1975

The last of the parents were leaving.

From the sunroom in the house at the top of the hill, Alice watched as their cars rolled by, wipers on, a slow parade.

Camp Emerson was a half mile away, but the Preserve’s main house—Self-Reliance, they’d named it—had been built on a high ridge in the land, and from it she could see all around her: Lake Joan to the east; to the west, the long driveway that led to the main road into town; to the south, Camp Emerson; to the north, the wilderness. Hunt Mountain and its foothills.

She’d been standing there for two hours. Ninety-one cars had gone by so far. Inside all of them was a parent or parents, leaving a child or children behind.

This had been Alice’s ritual for the twenty-three years she’d been married to Peter Van Laar. Each first-day-of-camp since she was eighteen she’d stood at this window at the front of Self-Reliance, watching, sometimes with a child in her arms, sometimes alone. She liked to imagine the families inside the cars. Liked to invent names for them, and problems.

The final car disappeared from sight. Alice straightened. She checked the clock behind her: 4:45. Her daily countdown was underway: at five o’clock, she was allowed one of the pills Dr. Lewis had prescribed her for her nerves. One was the recommendation—though two wouldn’t hurt her “on very bad days.” By this Dr. Lewis meant days when she was thinking too much about Bear.

Two, then.

A thud down the hall: the drop of the iron knocker against the front door. That would be T.J.

That morning, Alice had sent word down to the director’s office, requesting a meeting.

Now, from her pocket, Alice fished out the little glass bottle. Chewed her two pills, fifteen minutes early.

Then she closed her eyes, rehearsing in her mind the words she would use.

It’s Barbara, she’d say. She’d like to join in on camp.

It had been five years since T.J. Hewitt stepped in as director of Camp Emerson. She hadn’t wanted to; her father Vic, she insisted, was perfectly capable of continuing in the role he had performed beautifully for decades.

But Vic’s infirmity—first physical, then mental—became impossible to ignore during the summer of 1970, when he had frightened several campers by shouting at them nonsensically on the very first day of the session. In front of their parents, no less. The parents, incensed, stalked up to the main house to complain. And Peter had deposed Vic, then and there, assuring the parents that he would personally oversee that session, until a suitable replacement had been found.

They searched for one only briefly before Peter suggested T.J. take on her father’s former roles. Alice had been against it. She was so young, and a woman. Who had ever heard of a woman groundskeeper? But Peter had insisted. They’d find a replacement eventually, he said.

So far, they hadn’t. Not one who met with Peter’s approval, anyway. And so, like her father before her, T.J. now occupied both roles: Preserve groundskeeper in the fall, winter, and spring; camp director in the summer. She still lived in the cottage she’d grown up in, which also served as the camp director’s office, and now as Vic Hewitt’s convalescent home, as well, for most of the year.

In the threshold of the sunroom, now, T.J. cleared her throat. She looked uncomfortable, unhappy—though to be fair, this was her expression anytime she was inside of a building. The woods were her domain.

“Hello, T.J.,” said Alice, and T.J. nodded, avoiding a direct address. For as long as Alice had known her, T.J. had never once called her by name. There was a haughtiness about her that Alice had always found irritating. She wasn’t like this with Peter, thought Alice—no, with Peter she was deferent.

“Have a seat,” said Alice, and then watched as T.J. turned in a full circle, searching for whatever perch would convey the least commitment, the greatest sense of haste. She settled at last on an ottoman. Sat at its very edge. Elbows on knees. Head down.

Her hair was newly short, lopped into a bowl shape, so crooked and wrong-looking that Alice imagined T.J. must have done it herself. It was difficult to reconcile the woman sitting before her with the girl Alice met twenty-three years ago, when she’d first set foot on the grounds: three years old, always in motion, following her father from place to place. She’d been Tessie Jo at the time, a frilly name, a name for a doll or a cow or some sort of entertainer, all wrong for such a stoic child. By sixteen she’d adopted the more androgynous T.J. as her name, but she’d worn her hair in a thick braid for a decade longer. Until now.

“How are you?” Alice asked. She took a mint from the bowl beside her, which the staff kept well stocked. The pink ones were the best.

“Arigh’,” said T.J., in that accent. That accent. Alice had been in the region more than two decades and still found it hard on the ears.

“Is your father well?”

“Well enough.”

“Any problems with the facilities this year?”

“Naugh,” said T.J. She swatted at something invisible at the back of her neck. Examined her hand.

“I’ll get down to it,” said Alice. “I imagine Mr. V has already spoken to you?” She paused, waiting for T.J.’s response—because in fact she had no idea whether Peter had talked to the girl. She’d had no word from him since Thursday, when he left for Albany. What she did know was that Barbara was still at home.

T.J. shook her head. No.

Alice exhaled. Of course, she thought—of course he hadn’t. If nothing else, she could bank on the promise that he would shirk every one of his duties, that he would fail her—fail Barbara—time and time again, that he would be absent from their lives when their lives became difficult. Which meant that, these days—the way Barbara was acting—he was mainly gone, usually without announcing his departure. His returns were similarly quiet.

T.J. shifted, straightened her back.

“Well,” Alice said to T.J., forcing herself to speak brightly, lightly. “Then this will be news to you. We’ve decided—Barbara has decided—that she’d like to join in on camp this year.”

She smiled a little, as if she were delivering good news.

She had known that T.J. wouldn’t like it. It was one of the reasons she’d been putting it off. For generations, there’d been a strict divide between the Van Laar family—Albany bankers, outdoorsy but staid—and the camp they owned, which was always the province of the Hewitts. First Vic. Now his daughter. And, too, there was the fact that T.J. liked things done in a particular way, in a particular order. She’d be annoyed, Alice guessed, by the lateness of the request.

But for an instant, something passed over T.J.’s countenance that Alice couldn’t categorize. Consternation? Anger? She wouldn’t meet Alice’s eyes. Since she’d entered the room, she’d been gazing steadfastly to the right of Alice’s head.

T.J. shook her head a second time.

“Sorry,” said T.J. “Can’t do it.”

Alice stared.

There was such confidence, such finality, in T.J. Hewitt’s voice. As if she had a say over any of this, thought Alice. As if she were the employer of Alice, and not the other way around.

Alice breathed in. The mint in her mouth had dissolved completely. She took another from the dish and bit down before responding.

“It would mean a great deal to us,” she said. “I know you’re close with Barbara. I’m sure you’ve noticed that she’s been having—difficulty. Acting out. We think it would benefit her to be around some new friends.”

Well, Alice did, at least. Peter wasn’t certain. But there were so many reasons it made sense to let her go—not least of them that she would be out of the house for the party. The first one they’d thrown in fourteen years. They were having a hundredth-anniversary celebration for the Preserve, bringing two dozen friends and relatives to the grounds for a week in August. The last time they had had dinner guests in Albany, Barbara had emerged only once from her room. She’d been wearing a sort of—costume, really—her hair dyed some terrible color, her eyes lined heavily in black. Peter’s cousin Garland had burst out laughing, and Barbara had retreated, slammed the door. She’d kept the hair color and the eyeliner ever since, despite Alice’s exhortations.

They would have no such worries this time—if only Barbara could go.

T.J. looked down at the floor.

“Have you told her yet?” she said.

“About camp?” Alice said. “She’s the one who asked to go.”

“No,” said T.J. “About what’s happening in the fall.”

Alice paused. Shook her head.

“I’ll tell her at the end of the summer.”

Then, in a moment of inspiration: “I’ll tell her after the end of her session at camp.”

“Session’s underway,” T.J. said, in that way of hers.

“Just barely.”

“Cabins’re full.”

A slow incredulity was rising in Alice’s chest, and yet she also felt muted by something, unable to access her deepest reserves of rage, the ones she relied on with Peter when she really needed to be heard.

The pills, she remembered. The pills had their hooks in her, were loosening the tight knots in her shoulders, sending a flood of relief down her front and back, a waterfall of warmth and calm. Focus, she instructed herself.

She took in the objects in the room around her: a trick Dr. Lewis had taught her. Grandfather clock. Plants growing lushly. Stone-tiled sunroom floor.

She spoke again, careful to articulate. Her tongue was a fat slug in her mouth.

“You know Barbara as well as anyone does,” said Alice. Better than I do, she thought, against her will. “You know it will do her good.”