When we got home, Aengus was there, drinking iced tea on the veranda. Bummer went immediately into his Harry Potter reenactment, and I slumped gratefully into a rocking chair. It was still breathlessly hot, but the long shadows over the browning lawn gave the illusion of coolness. I had scarcely finished a glass of iced tea and given Bummer some lemonade when Carol came through the hedge.
For one startled moment I thought she had somehow fallen into water. Her hair was drenched, plastered to her head. Her shirt and slacks were sticking to her skin. Her face, too, had the greenish-white, puckered look skin gets when it has been a long time in water. I rose to my feet; so did Aengus. Bummer, soaring high above Hogwarts on his broom, did not notice.
“Carol…”
She looked down at herself and then forced a smile. It might have been a rictus of pain.
“Just to put the finishing touch on this glorious day, the air conditioner in the SUV is out and we’ve been stuck in Friday afternoon traffic for over an hour.”
“Sit down, and let me bring you something cold….”
“No,” she said wearily. “I’ve got them under virtual house arrest next door, but I don’t know how long I can enforce it. You were wonderful to take Bummer.”
She was about to crumple, perhaps literally.
“Let me come home with you and Bummer,” I said. “I’m not heavy-duty, but I’ve got staying power. I’m good backup.”
She shook her head. “No. I think tonight’s covered. All the other parents are hanging tough on this; none of the kids are going out. But I might need Aengus sometime late tomorrow. Just a stern man’s face, like showing the flag. They need to realize I’ve got resources, too… oh, God. This shouldn’t be happening. I shouldn’t even think about getting you all involved in my problems with my damned children.”
She dropped her face into her hands.
Aengus went over and put his arm around her shoulder. “I’ll be your resource whenever you need me, but I can’t tomorrow night. I promised Big Jim Mabry I’d go up to that camp of his and tell tales around the fire. But any other time.”
She leaned into him, nodding her head that she understood. Then she lifted her head and her face suddenly blazed.
“Aengus, can you get Big Jim to take the boys into that camp? I know it’s supposed to be just for their kids, but it sounds like just what Ben and Chris need. The way those kids change… Aengus, please. If you ever wanted to do anything for me, do this one thing. Big Jim can make that happen; he may be the only one who can! I could pay—”
“Hush,” Aengus said, hugging her again. “Hush. There’s no question of anybody paying anybody. Of course I’ll ask him. But I thought they hated the idea of camp—”
“I will get them there if I have to do it at gunpoint,” Carol said. From her tone I thought she well might.
Bummer came trotting up, covered in sweat and grass stains.
“Hi, Mom. We went to see Harry Potter. It was the werewolf one. Did they put handcuffs on Ben and Chris?”
“Oh, Bummer, of course not! Come on. We’ve got to get back.”
They turned to go home and I said, “Listen, why don’t I come over and keep you company tomorrow evening for a little while? Aengus is staying over and it’s the first time he’s ever left me alone.”
I looked at him and smiled; he grimaced and then smiled back.
“I’ll bring supper,” I said.
“I’d love that,” she said, managing a watery grin. “I’ll make dessert. We can slide it under their doors.”
Over dinner Aengus and I talked about Carol and her children.
“I don’t really know how bad it is,” I said. “I don’t know what kids do today. I know she’s convinced her ex will sue for custody if this goes on. No matter how she jokes about them, I know that she’s crazy about her kids. I wish I could think of something we could do to help her. Maybe it’s just their age….”
“It’s bad enough,” Aengus said. “Bad enough at least to make me glad they aren’t mine. The police and the famous juvie aren’t just mischief level. They’ll be in real trouble if they get involved with the cops again. Those kids just don’t realize how good they’ve got it. Carol is a sweetie, and they have a great house, and a pool—”
“And a father who just took off and left them flat,” I said.
“Yeah. There’s that. Half the problem, at least. Still… I don’t know if that camp is the answer.”
“I know; it’s enemy territory. But if there is such a real difference in the kids who come back from it…”
“I’ll ask, of course. Meanwhile, I’m going to turn on the air and send you to bed. You’ve had a tough day. I need to fiddle around with whatever I’m going to do tomorrow night, but I’ll be up before long.”
But by eleven o’clock he had not come to bed and I could stay awake no longer. The blessed cool of the air conditioner and the freshness of the new sheets I had put on the bed claimed me as surely as sleeping pills would have, and when I finally woke the next morning he was in the shower singing something mournful and Celtic and the clock said 8:15.
When he left for Coltrane he was carrying, in addition to his briefcase, a small weekend bag. It looked as if it had seen a great many weekends in its life. I knew that he was spending the night at Camp Forever, of course, but still that bag spoke to me, absurdly, of loss.
He saw my face and put his arms around me.
“I can drive back tonight, you know.”
“No. It’s a long way, and those mountain roads… and besides, the most fun is after the campfire, anyway.”
“That’s right, you did campfires at that camp of yours, didn’t you? And what possible fun did you get up to after your campfire, seeing as they were all preadolescent girls?”
I stood still in the darkness of our early-morning foyer and heard a slow, deep voice saying, Didn’t anybody ever tell you that Zeus was a serial rapist?
Nick Abrams’s voice.
“Not much, to be honest about it,” I said, my face going hot.
“Then I won’t, either. See you in the morning, love. Take you to brunch at the Ritz if you like.”
He kissed me and was gone out the front door. In the open doorway the heat eddied and coiled, and then retreated as he shut it. Another hot day, then. My heart sank.
And then I thought, What possible difference can it make? and went to take my own shower and feel my way into this barren day in which he was not coming home.
By the time I had been at Carol’s house for an hour or so that evening, the sky blackened and lightning forked and thunder crackled, and we fled onto her screened porch just as the first great drops fell, sizzling on the pavement around the pool.
“Thank God,” she said. “I think if this heat breaks, everything might get back to normal, or nearly.”
Chris and Ben and Bummer scrambled out of the pool and dashed into the house.
“Stay close, guys!” she called after them. “Dinner in less than an hour!”
Nothing from Ben and Chris, except the sounds of the doors to their rooms slamming. Bummer called froggily that he was going to play video games in the den.
“They’re still mad, I take it,” I said. “Chris and Ben, I mean.”
“Of course. It was obviously my fault that they were impelled to shoot an old man with water guns and steal his fudgesicles.” She sighed.
Then she turned her yellow head and looked at me. “They’re really good kids, Thayer. I don’t know what’s gotten into them this year. It’s just such a major change. And I don’t even know exactly when it started. It’s funny about the big life changes, isn’t it? That you don’t even realize that they’ve happened until long after, and then you can’t remember when. Or what happened that might have touched them off.”
I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her close on the big glider on the porch. She was all bird-fine bones and a steady, tiny shivering. Outside, the rain poured straight down, making its own music and sendin
g us the intoxicating smell of wet earth and grass.
“Things can change back,” I said. “I don’t think anything is written in stone, Carol. They are good boys. You all will laugh about this someday.”
“Way better than crying,” she said. “I’m glad I have you around, Thayer. All my other friends in the neighborhood have kids, and there’s always a little of the Well, at least my kids didn’t get hauled down to Juvie, going around. How nice to have a friend with great good sense who doesn’t have kids yet.”
I said nothing. This was an entire subcontinent that I meant to keep unexplored.
I had thought I would be restless that night and sleep poorly, but with the air off and the windows open and the cool murmur of the retreating storm outside, I was asleep before I even had time to miss Aengus.
I slept late, until almost ten, and jumped out of bed thinking that perhaps he had gotten an early start and was already home, letting me sleep in. But he was not in the house, nor outside. I put on jeans and a shirt and went out to tend my battered flowers.
He was not home by lunchtime, either. At two o’clock he called to say that he was not getting in until about six.
“The steps to the swimming float are busted and I told Nog that I’d help him fix them before I left. It won’t take very long.”
“Oh, Aengus… isn’t there somebody else up there who could help him?”
“Not at the moment. Big Jim left early this morning, and the older counselors have lit out for Atlanta. It’s their afternoon off.”
“Do they just go off and leave all those little boys by themselves?”
“Nog can handle them,” he said. “They idolize him. He just needs another pair of hands for the float. I’ll be home soon.”
This last was said rather crisply, and so I said only, “Fine,” and we hung up.
He was, indeed, home by 6:00 p.m. He came into the kitchen, where I was making gazpacho, and hugged me from behind and swung me around.
“You really must have had a good time,” I said, laughing, as he put me down and finished up with a little riff of a dance. I cocked my head at him. I had perhaps seen this Aengus once or twice before but not often: joyous, gleeful, every inch of him lit with a living fire. He seemed at once distracted and as focused as a burning glass. He could not seem to be still. I stood just looking at him, afire in my kitchen, smelling the smoke of his burning.
“Wow. Can I go with you sometime?”
“Well, I will be going again, I think, maybe once a week. Those kids are incredible. It’s as if they were created for the sole purpose of hearing these old myths. I never saw anything like it. But I don’t think you could go. Strictly for the menfolks. No women allowed except on Parents’ Day. Besides, it’s not exactly comfy. I’ll tell you about those top bunks sometime.”
At the dishwasher, I froze for a long moment.
He came up behind me and kissed me again, on the neck.
“Believe me, our bed is a fine sight better.”
“Oh,” I said. “Did you remember to ask Big Jim about Carol’s kids going to the camp? She’s really between a rock and a hard place with them.”
He took his arms away, and I heard him walk over to the counter on the opposite wall. For a long time he said nothing, and then he said, “Yeah. Big Jim said for her to come by anytime and they’d talk about it.”
“Oh, that’s great. Will you call her and tell her?”
Again he was silent, and I turned and looked at him. His face was closed, his fires out.
“I’m a bit fagged out at the moment. Will you call her?”
Still looking at him, I picked up the telephone on the counter. What had gotten into him so suddenly?
Carol was ecstatic.
“Give Aengus a big hug for me,” she said. “I’m going over there right now.”
Aengus wanted a shower and a nap, so I put the gazpacho in the refrigerator and poured myself a glass of wine. I felt fidgety and dislocated, not quite sure of where I was, nor why I felt that way. I gave Carol another hour and then called.
“How did it go with Big Jim?” I asked when she answered.
There was a long pause, and then she said in a voice so strange and robotic that I would not have known it was hers, “He’s going to take them. I’m going to drive them up tomorrow. Bummer, too.”
She said no more, so I said, “That’s wonderful. How on earth did you manage that?”
Another long pause, and then the robot voice said, “Don’t ever ask me that again, Thayer.”
Shocked and sickened, for there was no mistaking her meaning, I went to the door and stared out into the twilight. I thought about our conversation yesterday afternoon, about change. About how you could never tell precisely when it happened.
“You were wrong, Carol,” I whispered. “We do know when it happens. You know when it happened for you; you know the precise moment. I knew, really, when Aengus said he was going up to that camp. My mother knew when she came back from the family camp on Burnt Cove, on her honeymoon. And Aengus knew when he came home from camp today, knew that a great change had happened. He was vibrating with it.”
Camp. Camp Forever.
The camp on Burnt Mountain.
CHAPTER 16
In the middle of July I took a job. It was actually just a part-time job, selling books up at the little independent bookstore at the end of the small mall that housed the multiplex. Its name was Ephemera, which probably made no sense at all to anyone but its patrons, of which there were not a great many anyway. It could not and did not try to compete with the immense, rapid-fire disgorging machines like Barnes & Noble and Borders. It had a small inventory of quirkily wonderful books, by time-faded and contemporary authors, and there was no one on its staff who was not eccentric, immersed in books, and knowledgeable about them to an astonishing degree. I did not consider myself any of these things and was grateful when they hired me, but as Simon Morganstern, its owner, said, “You’re young enough and presentable enough and smart enough to kick our image up a notch without scaring off our old customers.”
Ephemera had a tiny cafe and a cat, as well as an old-fashioned cash register on which we did business. Its espresso machine, probably one of the first ever made, honked and hissed and whistled before delivering of itself a shot of inky, sludgy espresso, and the cat, Moriarity, was not a cuddly lap creature but a cranky presence that regularly spat at anyone who tried to pet him. I had been intimidated by everyone and everything at first but soon grew to love the customers and the espresso machine and Moriarity and the kinds of books we carried and, most of all, the people of Ephemera. It was almost like finding my lost tribe. The pay was abysmal but enough, as Aengus said, to help us through September, when my kindergarten teaching job began. And the job got me out of the house during his working hours, so that he would have no distractions. Aengus, that summer, was writing a book, but for a long time I did not know that.
Aengus’s first trip to Camp Forever had started us down a crazy path, so thicketed with the unexpected and the unimaginable that I could not see beyond its first curve. At first it was just his intensity, his sense of manic joy when he came home from Burnt Mountain. I had seen those before, on a smaller scale; it was still a part of Aengus. But soon he began to go two and then three nights a week. I drew the line at weekends, or I think he would have gone then, too.
“I’m married to you. I’m not married to Carol. I want to spend at least some time with you,” I had said when he suggested that Carol and I find something to do together on weekends, especially since all three of her boys were at camp now.
“Take up golf,” he said. “She plays well, I hear. Or have a tea or something and get to know the rest of the Bell’s Ferry women. You know, Thay, you really don’t have many friends.”
“That’s because I’ve always been with you, since you’ve known me, anyhow,” I said, stung. It sounded, incredibly, like he was trying to get rid of me, only simply that could not be. This was Aengus. This was
Aengus and me. Married under a tree on a mountain by a witch.
I did not worry a great deal about it, not at first. When he was with me, he was still totally with me. We still laughed at the same things…. We still gardened and sweated and cursed the heat and made fun of each other’s grubby face. And at night, in the big bed that still floated almost alone in the huge space on the third floor, he turned to me as eagerly, made even hungrier and more joyful love to me, cried out my name more often than he ever had.
Only now it was in Gaelic.
“Tainach! Alainn, nas aille….”
“English, please. This way I’ll never know whose name you’re really calling.”
“I’ll be calling no other woman’s name, ever,” he said softly into my damp hair.
And I do not think that he ever did.
Still, this new Aengus was a frequent burr under my saddle.
“What is it about that camp, Aengus?” I would say. “What does it have that holds you so? Why can’t I share it?”
He would look at me thoughtfully.
“I think… it’s the way the boys receive, Thayer. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but they seem so hungry for the old ways, the old tales. I’m just now realizing that I never really knew what teaching was. To… to have something that seems so necessary to someone else, to really give it… It’s as if these kids are missing sort of a vital nutrient or something and I have it and can give it to them. It’s… heady stuff. I don’t find that at Coltrane. I’ve never found it at any other school; if I did, I’d apply there in the blink of an eye. But I haven’t run into it anywhere, except at this camp. Oh, I know, it’s just a summer camp; it won’t last past the end of summer. But there hasn’t been anything else like it….”
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