The Last Kid Left

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  God you must be so bored by now. I’m sure you’re not reading this letter anyway. You probably threw it away without even opening the envelope. I wouldn’t blame you. I’d do the same thing in your position. Nick, I think about you all the time. About you and us and about everything that happened. I wake up thinking about it. I have nightmares. I worry sometimes I’m damaged forever, do you know what I mean? I tell myself I’m not. Maybe I should see someone, I don’t know.

  By the way I got an email yesterday from Leela, the reporter. She got a job at a magazine in New York. She said she tried to write an article about us, but they didn’t like it. I guess I’m glad about that. I just want the past to be the past.

  None of that’s why I’m writing you right now. I’m writing because for weeks I’ve been thinking about us. One thing I told Meg yesterday is that you were the first person I ever really loved, that I got to love. Not the way I love Meg or Alex, or how I feel about my mom. With you I wasn’t a friend, I wasn’t a kid. I got to be myself. And you gave me that.

  All my life I’ve felt things so much more intensely than I can put into words. When we were together, all those feelings got channeled into one thing. It was almost too intense. It probably was, with everything else going on. Something had to break. The last time we saw each other, I was already gone, I wasn’t there at all. I couldn’t be anything to you anymore, not like we were, does that make sense? I hope so.

  I guess I’ve started to feel like I’m returning to myself. We’ll see how I am in a couple months, or who I am. Listen to me ramble on. You’re such an amazing person, Nick, an amazing boy, an amazing man. You’re going to do incredible things with your life. If you write back to me, I’d love to hear from you, how you’re doing, how Suzanne is doing. I just want you to know that no matter everything else, I still love you, I’ll probably always love you. Loving you made me a person for the first time in my life.

  I’m scared now, I’m really scared. But I’m less fragile than I used to be.

  Whoever I am, whoever I’m becoming, a lot of that is thanks to a gift you gave me. And I’m thankful for that. Forever and ever.

  Love,

  Emily

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to many people for their assistance with this book. In particular, in alphabetical order, Nikkitha Bakshani, Nora Barlow, Maya Binyam, Nic Brown, “Laurence” Bonaparte, Anthony Doerr, Leah Finnegan, Roxane Gay, Amelia Gray, Jamie Knowles, Joshua Knowles, Sean McDonald, PJ Mark, Sherri Murrell, the OCSC Writers Association, Daniel Riley, Nozlee Samadzadeh, Andrew Schopler, Marya Spence, Leslie Stetter, Andrew Winders, and Andrew Womack.

  This book was written in many places over the course of six years. For their great support I thank the MacDowell Colony, the Norway Historical Society, the Legruder Foundation, and the Miami Writers Institute. Thanks also to my students (especially Cruickshank and Jones), and those who talked to me under more anonymous circumstances, particularly the Emilys, Leelas, and Martins of this world. Much appreciation also goes to Sarita Varma and everyone at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  Most of all, for everything, Rachel Knowles.

  ALSO BY ROSECRANS BALDWIN

  Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down

  You Lost Me There

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rosecrans Baldwin is the author of You Lost Me There and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. He lives in Los Angeles. You can sign up for email updates here.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Cowgirl Comes to the Feast

  The Misbegotten

  Can’t Get There from Here

  Jury Selection

  The Claymore Kids

  Salamandra: The Emily Portis Story

  Girl Zero

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Rosecrans Baldwin

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  MCD

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2017 by Rosecrans Baldwin

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2017

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Baldwin, Rosecrans, author.

  Title: The last kid left / Rosecrans Baldwin.

  Description: First edition. | New York: MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016059403 | ISBN 9780374298562 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780374713010 (e-book)

  Subjects: BISAC: FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.A595446 L37 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059403

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  1. The Domain of Mount Washington: Sequassen Peoples in the Presidential Range, 1500–2000, Vol. 1 (2007).

  2. Prichard’s actual death is less reverent. Nine years after his Washington summit, he was killed in a bar fight, having been accused—rightfully, says one of his sons, Nathaniel Prichard, in his own memoirs—of stealing and selling a prize horse of a wealthy neighbor, in order to make payment to another man to whom he owed gambling debts.

  3. There’s actually a sign above the tree line for any visiting Québécois: BIENVENUE A LA ZONE ALPINE DU MONT WASHINGTON.

  4. The local rescue service, New Hampshire Volunteer Search and Rescue, has operated since 1949 out of North Conway, a village nearby. It responds to wilderness emergencies around the clock, and works in partnership with the United States Park Service’s Winter Ranger team. A recent visit found the staff to be highly trained, expertly equipped, fit enough to be featured on a calendar of topless firemen. They even have a helicopter at their disposal. Still, one rescuer told this reporter, “All the high-tech gear in the world won’t keep people from doing stupid shit.”

  5. A typical report, from 2006: “At 19:11 on February 21 USPS Winter Rangers were informed that a Skier, 25y/o male, had not returned from attempted climb / ski descent in Wilkens Ravine. When Skier signed the book at Pindell House, he communicated plans to ascend the North Gully. Beginning at 21:15, (2) rescue teams of (3) members canvassed access routes into Wilkens. Snow was precarious, with stability concerns. Therefore rescue teams did not actually reach avalanche terrain until the following morning. 08:20 Skier’s body was discovered on top of debris. Skier was littered and transported to Pindell. In regards to snow stability, choosing another gully would have been a safer option.”

  6. What’s called contemporary Rust Belt, albeit more mariney: a harbor town struggling to survive in the backwash of departed industry. Think: the collapse of Newfoundland fisheries. Think: Gloucester, Mass. Think: embittered Marky Mark in The Perfect Storm, probably with a newfound opioid addiction, given the times and economy.

  Even today people in Claymore persist in calling their harbor “the Mouth,” because it’s what their parents called it and their grandparents called it, before overfishing killed the stocks. Because from the Mouth were their own mouths fed, and into the Mouth were some ancestors lost.

  7. They also needed to stay in state, to not break the rules of the Boy’s release.

  8. To be honest, it wasn’t until then that the Journalist realized that, by doing just so, she was in effect behaving exactly how the Girl and Boy expected a typical journalist to behave in such a scenario, repeating what all
the other journalists had done: telling the Girl who and what she was.

  9. It should also be confessed that the Journalist was still pretty shocked and even a little weirded out that she’d been invited on this trip. Who does that? And yet, as explained to her on the telephone, she’d been picked from a pool of many writers who’d expressed interest in the Claymore Kids’ story to be the single person granted access to write their official account—after which point the Boy and Girl planned to never again speak on record—all because, they said, the Journalist had befriended the Girl before anyone else, and seemed “real,” not “bullshit.” And perhaps also because, in full disclosure, the Journalist is originally from the same dingy hometown, Claymore, and even attended the same middling public high school as the Kids, though several years earlier, and was classmates with the older sister of the Girl’s best friend.

  10. This reporter offered no compensation for this story, and indeed can barely afford her own rent.

  11. “The point was to own the story,” the Girl explained when asked, sounding like she’d said this before, or had been coached to say it. “Yeah, like literally own it,” her boyfriend chimed in, laughing uncomfortably.

  12. Email verification was obtained for most offers. Also, not only was an Azuretory representative eager to speak on the telephone and confirm their offer, she then offered a commission if acceptance could be facilitated.

  13. If it’s not yet totally clear, or too obnoxious, the preference of the Journalist is to employ “Boy” and “Girl” in lieu of proper names. Partially because these are conventional titles in the romance genre—even if the pair is composed of a young man and a young woman, and they’re a couple whose romance is anything but conventional, not exactly fairy-tale material as commonly understood—but also for respect for straightforward fact: people already know these names. You know their names. But such proper nouns can no longer be employed with accuracy, in relation to the persons who bear them, because to apply the names now, outside of court documents, is to guarantee imprecision, to dabble in myth. Is Oprah Winfrey really “Oprah Winfrey”? Is “Gisele Bündchen” the supermodel, or is she the tired wife to whom Thomas Brady, or “Tom Brady,” wakes up? There’s too much innuendo and scandal here, too much smoke, at least as of this writing, and it’s this Journalist’s stipulation that the young woman and man, the Girl and Boy, are simply not the persons believed to correspond to their names.

  14. Still, even devotees won’t know that the Girl, during the drive, would cite Singin’ in the Rain as her favorite movie, and that her favorite scene from the movie was not, she said bluntly, the same one that everyone else likes, when Donald O’Connor does his slapstick routine, but instead the eponymous sequence, Gene Kelly tap dancing through a downpour, twirling while he smiles, smiles, smiles before a crabby patrolman gives him a look like he thinks Kelly is nuts. “He isn’t crazy, that’s what’s crazy,” the Girl said meaningfully. “He’s just realized he’s in love.”

  15. The Girl’s father, the sheriff, who’d recently been taken into police custody, twice refused requests from the Journalist to visit him in jail.

  16. An interview for which the Girl said she was paid twelve hundred dollars for a thirty-minute conversation, plus photographs.

  17. More on this in a moment.

  18. The fact that her décolletage was so abundantly on view, indeed glimmering dewily in the picture, was because, the Girl explained, (1) the photographer had asked her to squeeze her boobs together with her arms; and (2) his assistant moistened the Girl’s cleavage from a spray bottle. “Like she was watering a plant.”

  19. When approached, the kid denied this story, full stop. Though it’s worth noting that on the same day that the truck of three (Boy, Girl, Journalist) departed for Mount Washington, the Office of the Attorney General of New Hampshire announced that it was launching a probe into theft and distribution, targeting the same boy. And when reached that afternoon for comment, the boy hung up the phone, then a lawyer returned the call on his behalf a day later, to protest his innocence and refuse participation in this article.

  20. It was a strange facet of her childhood, she would see later, that for as long as she could remember, Emily had always called her father Father, her mother Mother, in mimicry of how they referred to themselves: Father does this, Mother does that.

  21. Sometimes her mother sang to herself at night in the kitchen while putting the dishes away. Almost always it was the same song: “Down in a willow garden, my true love and I did meet, and while we were a-sitting discoursing, my true love dropped off to sleep.”

  22. Emily said she was spanked for punishment until she was ten, on occasion with a strap folded in half.

  23. She hates orange now: orange flavoring, orange juice, orange candies, anything.

  24. At home, Father skinned the animal from hooks in the woodshed. Emily would watch, force herself to be brave, the whole time holding her protests in her mouth, in case he might order her indoors. One early time out hunting she’d not been quiet, too excited; and she couldn’t remember why, only that she’d said something too loudly and frightened away a prize buck; and Father had ripped down her pants and spanked her roughly as punishment, and then left her in the woods to find her own way home.

  25. Salamandra salamandra, usually found in Europe. They don’t, in fact, have the capability to set anything on fire, but they do defend themselves by exuding toxic secretions when grasped by a predator.

  26. It was from her mother, Emily said, that she initially learned how to sew, to operate a sewing machine, to use freezer paper to make dress patterns.

  27. These visits, which became biannual events, were endorsed by Father, Emily believed, primarily because they enabled those back in Claymore to have more private time together. To do things like candlepin bowling, an old favorite of her father’s, or just stay at home.

  28. One Sunday, after chores, she found Mother in her room and yelled, “Don’t you love us anymore?” Instantly she felt so guilty that she burst into tears and threw herself into her mother’s lap. “I don’t expect you to understand,” Mother said. “Of course I love you.” Which didn’t make any sense, all things considered, but Emily allowed herself to be held for a minute. But then her mom started making whimpering sounds like a cat, and Emily had to extricate herself.

  29. One memory from a year later: Mother returned one night from town and brought in what appeared to be a rack of clothes in plastic bags. All sizes included, infant to teenager, pants and shorts and sweaters. Emily was going over her homework with Father. At first she was excited. So many bags! Mother beckoned her over, smiling, and told her to pick through the bounty. “None of these will fit,” Emily said after a minute. “You got the wrong sizes.” “Don’t be dramatic,” her mother said. “I know what size my own daughter wears.” Father opened one of the bags and held up a pair of boy jeans, with cargo pockets. “These are for boys,” he said quietly. “They’re made for boys.” Emily ran upstairs to her room before the shouting started.

  30. That same year, Emily started curtailing what she ate. Eventually only a very specific list of foods was allowed. Strawberry Jell-O. Salted nuts. Rice cakes. Some candies. Lots of apples, lots of water, with ice and lemon. On her worst days she’d eat an entire box of ice-cream sandwiches, but would always need to cut each bar down to at least a dozen bite-sized pieces first, and actually she found that whole process more tedious than satisfying, so she didn’t break bad very often.

  Family dinnertimes, in the beginning, she made excuses: that she’d eaten already, after cross-country practice, or eaten a late lunch at school. Eventually she stopped making excuses and became difficult. She’d ask for bread, cut huge slices, not touch them. She made pyramids of butter slabs.

  She’d figured out that, short of hospitalization, one thing Father could not do was make her eat. Though he’d say she couldn’t get up until she ate her food. So he’d yell and threaten, one time he pulled her hair. She’d pinch herself, un
til she started bleeding under her T-shirt. And sometimes she slipped, lost focus. But still she kept her lips shut and stayed in her seat. Then Father would really lose his temper, pound the table and bellow, demand pity and sympathy, threaten to knock her off her chair. Two nights she slept at the table, with a bowl of venison stew by her face. And every second, every second, was worth it. Because she knew she was winning, and she liked winning. And to the winner was awarded penalty, punishment, and control.

  31. Until that day, said Emily, her life had been one long failure to feel love. She once wrote in her diary, “I want to be crazy in love. I have so much love I could give to someone.” She had kept a diary most of her life. Entries were little things like the weather, animals, her feelings. Recently, she found a pair of old journals in her bedroom, from when she was seven or eight. “Clouds today. I got in trouble again with Mother. Because I pretended to be a princess from China and spilled all the milk when I was trying to finish my dance. I am sick and tired of being such a silly girl!”

  The entries were irritating mainly, she recalled, for their tedious self-consciousness, their hopeless naïveté. Things like: “I can be so young and excited sometimes. I am not always a good girl. Father doesn’t have to tell me, I know I can be stupid. I will try harder to be good, but it’s so hard. But Father says he believes I can do it, and I am a very lucky girl that he loves me anyway.”

  She recounted this to the Journalist and laughed lightly, staring at the wall. “What a little idiot.”