The Summer Before Boys

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  Eliza always got the blame when I was here. It was like Aunt Louisa was afraid of upsetting me. I could hear Eliza breathing steadily as if she were fast asleep.

  How did she do that?

  I squeezed my eyes shut. At least I was facing the wall but I couldn’t hold my breath much longer.

  Finally, Aunt Louisa pulled the covers over our shoulders and left the room. I heard the screen slide across the floor and click into place. The TV sounds came on, the gray light moved across the ceiling, from light to dark, and dark to light, like a moth was batting against a bare bulb.

  “She would have said something if she knew,” Eliza said. “She would have asked.”

  I let out my breath. Aunt Louisa wasn’t the secretive type. If we were in trouble we would know by now. The heat pressed down on the sheet, on my legs. I inched my feet out the bottom and let out my breath.

  We had gotten away with it.

  I had gotten away with it.

  So why did I feel so guilty?

  twenty-four

  Marion Crandell was the first American woman to be killed in World War I and she wasn’t even a soldier. Or a nurse. She was a French teacher from Iowa and she was working in a YMCA kitchen giving out food to French soldiers. The place where she was working—dishing out beans, maybe cole slaw, maybe pork?—was hit by a German artillery shell only two months after she got there.

  And she was killed.

  On March 29, 1918, there was a small mention from the Associated Press from Paris. The headline read: AMERICAN WOMAN KILLED.

  Pam always kept a bench piled with newspapers by the door to her gift shop. Sometimes guests requested a particular paper be delivered for the week of their stay. But she always had The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and I always avoided looking at them.

  “Hi, girls,” Pam greeted us. “Hot enough for you?” She was fanning herself with a magazine. It was early. Monday morning, the hotel was still quiet and mostly empty. Voices were low. Eliza and I had gotten a ride with Uncle Bruce. After a whole Sunday of doing nothing, even Eliza was anxious to get out of the house.

  “Yup,” Eliza answered. “It’s hot enough.”

  “Maybe you two could take a paddle boat out. Before the guests get up,” Pam suggested.

  “Yeah, let’s do that,” I said, poking around the gifts and souvenirs.

  Eliza looked at me. “But just a second ago you said you didn’t feel like it.”

  She was right. I had nixed every idea Eliza had come up with if I didn’t think it would somehow increase our chances of running into Michael. But now it seemed like a good idea. Besides, it would use up time until lunch, I thought—until Michael was done working in the stables. He told me he helped his dad every morning before lunch and then the rest of the day was his. He was free. He always went swimming in the afternoons. That I knew already. I made sure Eliza and I had our bathing suits on under our shorts.

  “Well, now I do. Do you feel like it?” I asked Eliza. I put down the glass globe with the miniature version of the hotel inside and turned back to the counter.

  I didn’t want to glance at the newspapers. But there it was.

  US MILITARY DEATHS IN IRAQ WAR AT 1,486

  At first it didn’t even make sense. The number was so big, so huge. I couldn’t imagine one thousand people. I couldn’t imagine five hundred. It was hard to see a hundred people in my mind at once. There were twenty-three kids in my class last year. Eighty in the grade. Two hundred and fifty in the whole school.

  What did one thousand, four hundred and eighty-six feel like? Sound like? One thousand, four hundred and eighty-six pine coffins? One thousand, four hundred and eighty-six American flags? More than a thousand empty spaces at the dinner table. Tens of thousands of books left unread? Millions of pieces of clothing, shoes, and gloves left in closets. What happened to all that stuff?

  It was too much.

  No brain could hold that all. No one could see all those faces, and shoes, and dinner plates, bedtime stories, and kisses.

  So I didn’t.

  It was just a huge, ridiculous number and so it meant nothing to me at all. Was I still staring at the newspaper?

  US MILITARY DEATHS IN IRAQ WAR AT 1,486

  No, it didn’t even register.

  Eliza looked at Pam and Pam looked at me. But I had gotten used to not seeing things that were right in front of my face.

  I was fine.

  “So is it too early for ice cream?” Pam said, maybe a little more loudly than she needed to.

  I picked a Fudgesicle from the freezer because it felt most like breakfast since we hadn’t eaten anything yet. Eliza was about to take the same thing until I reminded her not to be a copycat and she took a vanilla Drumstick, which looked like the better choice after all but I couldn’t change my mind now. I’d look like a baby.

  “Thanks, Pam,” Eliza said.

  “Thanks,” I echoed and I held the door for Eliza to go first.

  The gift shop was air-conditioned but the hotel itself was not. And it had been cool outside early this morning when Uncle Bruce was ready to leave—we both wore sweatshirts—but already the air in the hallway was still and warm. Our ice creams seemed to feel the heat first and instantly soften.

  “It’s going to be a scorcher,” Eliza said as she peeled the paper from her cone and stuffed it into her pocket.

  “I’ll say.” I balled my wrapper up at the bottom of my Fudgesicle to catch the dripping.

  You could smell the olden days coming from the wallpaper and the wooden floors, holding on to the years like memories.

  We walked and licked and talked and licked.

  Then as we headed through the main hall, past the check-in counter, Eliza tried to take her sweatshirt off over her head while holding her cone in one hand at a time. She almost had it, but the phone rang at the desk, and when I stopped suddenly—because phone ringing always startles me—Eliza banged into me and the top of her cone landed right on the floor between the two of us. It started melting into the carpet immediately.

  So if I look back now I see all the little events that, if they had just gone another way, or occurred a second or two later, or a second or two earlier, would have made all the difference. If I hadn’t made that comment about being a copycat—Fudgsicles are much more stable than ice-cream cones. Or if the phone hadn’t rung at right that moment. Or if we hadn’t gotten a ride with Uncle Bruce that morning. If Mrs. Smith hadn’t happened down the hall at the very same moment. If we had run left down to the lake, instead of right toward the sky tower trail—

  I might still be friends with Eliza right now.

  twenty-five

  So yeah, we ran when we heard Mrs. Smith coming. We weren’t allowed to be eating in the lobby, or the hallway, or anywhere but the dining room, the tearoom, or outside. Technically, we weren’t supposed to be inside the hotel at all. And as Eliza and I stared at the odd form of vanilla ice cream melting into the green and amber swirls of the carpet, we heard the sound of Mrs. Smith’s high heels clicking on the tile floor just around the corner. So we ran.

  My heart was pumping and my feet were pounding with the excitement of fear, and by the time we made it outside, far enough away from the hotel, we were laughing and we had run all the way to the base of the sky tower trail, to the hiking trail.

  • • •

  The last and only other time Eliza and I had taken the hiking trail to the sky tower was at the beginning of the summer, over a month ago. That time we didn’t make it very far. At first the trail is easy, like a narrow dirt road. There are thick blue lines painted on the barks of the trees so you can look ahead and see where you are going. You can turn and look behind you to see where you’ve come from, and how to get back. We were playing Lester and Lynette when we lost the trail.

  “I don’t see a blue mark anywhere,” Eliza said.

  “Right here. We just passed one.” I turned to look at the low shrubbery we had just walked through. The ground was grassy
and there was no sign of a trail. I looked ahead and it looked the same.

  “Where?” Eliza asked.

  “I just saw it,” I said but I couldn’t remember how long ago that had been. Before we crossed the little creek or since?

  The ground felt dry and hollow; brown leaves were thick with croppings of rock and moss jutting out. This was definitely not the trail and there were no lines of blue paint on any trees anywhere to be seen.

  “Maybe we should go back a little bit until we come to the last trail marker we passed,” I said.

  “Which way is that?” Eliza was turning in a circle.

  “Don’t do that. You’re confusing me. This way.” I pointed.

  “No, we haven’t been that way. See that hairy grapevine hanging down. We didn’t pass that before. And not that big log either.”

  Eliza was right, but it did look like a good place to sit.

  “What do we do now?” I don’t even know if either one of us said that out loud but I heard it in my head. And my heart started to thump.

  “We’ve got to keep walking,” Eliza said. “We can’t be too far from anything or something. C’mon.”

  We kept moving, without talking at all. Whereas just a few minutes before we had been escaped slaves scanning the skies for the direction to freedom, now we were plain old kids at a family resort—lost.

  “What were they looking for in the sky?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Harriet Tubman? What did they see?”

  “I don’t know.” Eliza sounded nervous.

  Stars? Wind? Cloud formations? Birds flying south for winter? I had no idea—except that we didn’t know how to get back, and what reason would anyone have to come looking for us until well past dinnertime?

  Thinking of dinner made me hungry.

  How long had we been out here? The sun was high in the sky, nearly straight above our heads. If we didn’t get back in time lunch would be over, cleaned up and packed away. Then I looked over at Eliza’s face and I knew we had much more to worry about. She looked like she was about to cry. We were really lost.

  I am not sure how long we wandered around, looking at the floor of the woods, pine needles and leaves, and up at the trees, at which side the moss was growing on—even though neither one of us knew which direction we needed to be heading.

  Down felt right. We chose the steps that took us in that direction. The sun grew hotter, our feet hurt. I wondered how long a person can just walk. And walk and walk.

  “I hear someone,” Eliza said. “I think.”

  We both stopped to listen. It was certainly footsteps, then voices.

  “Hikers,” I said.

  “We’re back on the trail.”

  It was a young couple, a man and a woman holding hands, both with backpacks, khaki shorts, and straw hats. We followed them back to the hotel just in time to catch the end of the buffet lunch service.

  twenty-six

  Oh, no. Mrs. Smith almost saw us,” I said. I could hardly catch my breath, from running, from laughing so hard.

  “She must have seen the ice cream by now.” Eliza, too, had her hands on her knees, doubled over laughing.

  Starting up the hiking trail this time was more or less a non-decision. When we finally stopped running, we just kept walking, and before we knew it, we were well into the trail that led up to the sky tower where you could see four states at the same time.

  “No, six,” Eliza said.

  “Six?”

  By my calculations we had at least two hours before Michael would be done working for his dad, plenty of time to hike up to the sky tower and head back down on the easy walking trail. We could pay attention, walk carefully. Maybe this would be the first time we’d make it all the way to the top.

  “Yeah, six,” Eliza answered me.

  “Which ones?” Sunlight rested on the top leaves and filtered down, dappling the dirt path. It was straight up from here.

  “Well, New York,” Eliza said.

  “We’re in New York.”

  “So, that’s one. And New Jersey.”

  “Maybe Pennsylvania is one. And Connecticut.”

  “Maybe Delaware?” Eliza tried.

  “Nah.”

  We kept walking. It was hot and I was carrying the backpack with our sweatshirts. I worried about sweating. Maybe if I took little steps.

  The trees bent their heat-weary heads like puppy dogs lolling their tongues. We were so far from anything modern, nothing to remind us of the real world. The moss on the rocks, the dirt under our feet, the blue, blue sky above our heads could be from any time, any century, any world—when Indians lived, when fairies flew, when friends held hands and made believe.

  And for a little while at least, I stopped thinking about Michael, whether I was sweating, or what time it was, or Mrs. Smith, or Iraq, or even my mother. We even stopped trying to figure out the last two states.

  Instead I worried the bottom of my long skirt would get caught on the brambles as the trail got steeper and narrower the closer we got to our campsite. The rest of the children would be gathering wood to get us through the coming winter. Cousin Eliza had just reminded me about how we lost little Jack during the coldest months last year. He caught a chill and just never recovered. Everyone was waiting for us to return with the mail. A package had come from the Sears & Roebuck Company.

  Olden-Day Eliza could hardly contain her excitement. “I can’t wait to find out what’s inside,” she said.

  “Well, be careful. Don’t shake it. It might break.”

  “It’s too heavy to break.” Eliza frowned and then, from inside my backpack my cell phone buzzed.

  Or maybe it was the other way around, but either way it took me a while to register what was going on. It was the same feeling as when I am reading a really good book and I forget I am reading at all. The real world—a voice, the sound of the television—feels like an intrusion. The way you can fall in a dream and wake up in your own bed, wondering which is more real.

  Michael.

  It must be.

  Everything fell away, the long dresses and high button boots, the package wrapped in brown paper, even the memories of little Jack and long, cold winters. The trail was narrow, and I let my step fall back behind Eliza. I was able to reach inside my backpack and quietly take out my cell phone.

  It was from Michael. I recognized the number. And there was a text message:

  CAN YOU MEET ME IN GAZEBO AT THE LILY POND

  I knew the lily pond. There two old pictures of it around the hotel. One in the hall to the dining room that showed a group of girls all dressed in sailor suits, all holding insect nets, with a man in a dark suit and straw hat standing behind them. The square brass plaque underneath says it is a nature expedition.

  PROFESSOR ARTHUR WHITWORTH; CIRCA 1896.

  And the other black-and-white photograph taken at the lily pond shows two people sitting inside the wooden summerhouse, just like the ones Uncle Bruce takes care of all year long. You can’t really make out the people in the picture, but it is clearly a man and a woman with their arms wrapped around each other and their lips pressed close together. There is no plaque underneath this photograph, which hangs, out of the way, in a far corner of the tearoom behind the cherrywood and red velvet settee. You’d have to step over the furniture and then stand facing the corner to really see it, but anyone and everyone who has bothered knows that the photograph is called “The First Kiss.”

  twenty-seven

  We can’t go back now,” Eliza shouted. “We are much more than halfway to the tower.” “No way,” I tried. “We’ve only been hiking for a few minutes. We can go back from here.” But the truth was, I really had no idea. A hundred years had come and then gone. Lester, Lynette, photographs, and wagon trains, and generations of Villiator families, tease-y groups, and hair color camps disappeared in a second, in the single second it took for a text to buzz.

  “Julia, c’mon, why do you want to quit now?”


  “I’m not quitting.”

  I was already imagining Michael waiting at the lily pond. I needed to get there even though I was terrified at the thought. Nothing else mattered. I stopped walking and looked behind us. Down is easier. Faster.

  “No, Eliza. Let’s go back. It’s late already. And I’m so hot.”

  But Eliza hadn’t stopped with me. She was way ahead, determined.

  “C’mon, Eliza. We can do this another time.”

  And that’s when she stopped walking. She kept her back to me for such a long moment, I wondered what she was looking at but I was afraid to ask. I didn’t want anything to distract me—or now us—from our task.

  I had no idea how I was going to get to the lily pond alone, but I couldn’t worry about that yet. One thing at a time. First, to turn around and go back to the hotel.

  “You think I don’t know?” Eliza’s voice projected deep into the woods ahead.

  “What?” I had tried to make sure Eliza hadn’t seen it but maybe she heard it buzz. So I said it again with even more disbelief. “What are you talking about?”

  “Julia!” Eliza shouted.

  There are those times you know it’s over but you act like it’s not. You know you are caught but you try to ignore that for as long as possible. I watched Eliza slowly turn around and face me. Her eyes were shot with red and her lips were so tightly pressed together, white.

  “Julia—” When she finally spoke again it was softly. “I know everything. I know why you wanted to go to the outdoor movie. And all the times you made me walk by the stables. Up the mountain, down the mountain. You think I don’t know why, Julia?”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. Faking innocence just seemed like a waste of time, and besides, time was still moving forward. I needed to get somewhere. I needed Eliza to just start walking back with me.

  “I know, Julia. And I didn’t say anything. Ever. But this is different. We were having fun.” Then she tried one last thing. “You can’t betray a Villiator.”