The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore

by Kim Fu

  “She can graduate early. She can go to college early,” Miss Taylor said.

  Nita’s mother turned to Nita. “Are you annoying your teachers? Is that why they want to get rid of you?”

  Nita rolled her eyes. She knew her mother was joking, but she also knew her dry delivery was going to fly over Miss Taylor’s head. Miss Taylor’s office was decorated with inspiring messages on yellow construction-paper suns, written in black cursive with big, kid-friendly loops. No irony lived here.

  Miss Taylor said, “I don’t think you understand. This is an opportunity. We think Nita is . . .” She glanced down at Nita, and Nita grinned back at her, knowing she wasn’t supposed to hear this. “We think she’s very gifted. A genius.”

  Nita’s mother snorted. “Do you know what she did this morning, at breakfast? She noticed there was some writing on the bottom of her milk glass. Just the manufacturer name. So she tilted the glass to read it. While it was still full of milk. Spilled milk all over the table and the floor.” She touched Nita’s hair affectionately. “My little genius. Pah.”

  “Aren’t you worried about her being bored? Unstimulated? Wasting her potential?”

  “Are you bored at school?” Nita’s father asked her.

  “Yes,” Nita said.

  “Are your classmates bored?” her mother asked.

  “Yes. School is boring.”

  “No offense, Miss Taylor, but I don’t think kids are supposed to find school terribly exciting. That’s not really the point, is it? Reading, sums, keep them from killing each other. That’s all we’re asking for.”

  “I really think . . .”

  “We’re her parents, or aren’t we?” Her mother stood and her father followed suit. Her voice was self-possessed. “So let’s not keep Nita from class any longer. Enough of this nonsense. She’ll not be a high-schooler at twelve.” She guided Nita out the door by the shoulder without saying goodbye to the gawping Miss Taylor.

  They walked Nita to her homeroom. The meeting had lasted less than ten minutes. “Now, Nita,” her mother said, “you’re to keep this to yourself, all right? Don’t go bragging to your friends. And don’t think you can start slacking off. All this tells us is there’s no reason you shouldn’t be acing all your courses.”

  Nita had seen the teenagers on the other side of the linking hallway, their hulking flannel forms and sullen, craggy faces, their discontent as alarming as that of peasants on the cusp of revolution. They bore no resemblance to the sexy teenagers she watched on TV.

  All the same, whenever she watched Doogie Howser, M.D reruns, Wolf’s head across her lap, Nita felt a twinge. She’d pledged since the age of three to become a doctor, like her father. As the blond wunderkind performed surgery on-screen, Wolf seemed to understand Nita’s murky jealousy better than she did. He jumped up and rushed the television, knocking it from the stand with a savage toss of his head. The bubble-shaped Zenith exploded into shards and a brief symphony of sparks.

  The turn happened around puberty. She was speeding up, or everyone else was slowing down. Her body became a hindrance. She couldn’t believe how long it took to write something out, her mind sparking ahead of her wrist, the close-up tedium of each pencil stroke. She could see every answer on an exam at once, the sheet overlaid with answers as clearly as a photograph, as though seeing forward in time. How slowly she talked, how slowly everyone talked, their jaws opening and closing, their heads dipping to the right as impulses dawdled on the way from their ears to their brains to their smacking lips.

  Her body could do one task while her mind did several others. She could be talking to friends, placating them, saying what was expected, pretending to study with them, pretending to lose at games that were absent any challenge, while mentally constructing her science fair entry, turning its problems over in her head. She found that everything, even art class, even sports, even conversations, could be approached like an algebra problem. Broken down into components and reconstituted to the desired result. She was valedictorian, captain of the field hockey team and the debate team and the mathletes. She could have been more, if she weren’t limited by corporeality, if she could only divide her brain among a thousand bodies, an army of soulless golems lurching toward collective perfection. If she could only outsource eating and sleeping. A torrent of thought, of insight, was trapped inside the mechanical bend of bones, snap of tendons, fragile and unreliable and always, always slow.

  Neither Nita nor her parents had meant it when they said Nita would be the only one to care for the dog. Her father, especially, had relished the thought of a shaggy body warming his toes in the winter, cooking a secret ration of corned beef for the two of them. But Wolf kept them to their word. When Nita wasn’t home, Wolf sat and stared out the window, unmoving. Sometimes he fell asleep sitting up, but he never lay down to rest unless she was there. If Nita’s parents approached him, he backed away until trapped in a corner and then pawed at the wall, scratching the wallpaper. At first, he wouldn’t eat unless Nita sat on the floor beside his bowl, where he could keep an eye on her at the same time. He never seemed happy, or tired, the slack-jawed panting eagerness Nita had thought was the default for all dogs. The closest he came was a slight, dignified wave of his tail when he first spotted Nita through the window.

  “He needs toys,” Nita told her parents. “Treats.” Something else to love.

  They bought a squeaker toy in the shape of a giraffe, and a book for children on dog training. Nita put the giraffe down in front of Wolf in the backyard. He tested it lightly with one paw, and when it squeaked, he jumped and skittered away, looking at Nita as though betrayed.

  On the book’s advice, she wedged treats into the seams of the giraffe. Cheap nubbins of flour and peanut butter had no effect, so she upped the ante, covering the toy with bits of her father’s beef jerky.

  Wolf sniffed the changed scent and pounced. He held down the giraffe with both paws and tore it open in one pull of his maw. He dug quickly through the cotton batting until he found its plastic squeaking heart, took it into his mouth, and dropped it at Nita’s feet. He sat, waiting, as a soldier for his next command. He followed Nita around as she gathered up the cotton that had been flung across the lawn in the process. She left the jerky to the neighborhood cats and raccoons.

  The dog-training book seemed to be for an entirely different species from Wolf. It emphasized all the wrong things. She taught him the parlor-trick commands so quickly it was satisfying to neither of them. But his aversion to anyone but Nita, his sleepless days and joyless silence, his bottomless, demonic energy—the book had no advice for this.

  If his walks were too short, or if she just let him out into the yard instead, she would turn in her desk chair while doing homework and find Wolf lying on her bed, staring at her with a glinting intensity that made her lizard brain nervous. If she dared to skip a walk entirely, Wolf would quietly and efficiently destroy something. Never anything of her parents’, never anything expensive. A school project. The commemorative T-shirt from her first year at Forevermore. A book with dirty passages in it that she’d stolen from the library. Somehow Wolf seemed to know what mattered to Nita and Nita alone.

  She had only herself to blame. She should have taken him for a longer walk. She should have paid him more attention.

  The first time she went to a school dance, Wolf jumped out an open window, tearing through the mesh screen and wearing its frame around his middle as he ran down the block.

  They climbed into her long-suffering bed each night, and he stared directly into her eyes, nipped harmlessly at her clothes, gave a few restrained, tremulous licks, shuddered with pleasure as she scratched his neck—acts of worship, total immersion in her being. He lived uneasily, and only Nita gave him peace. Nobody loved Nita like this. Not her parents, nor her school friends, girls who had been quick with declarations of forever when they were young but now seemed to nod along to what Nita said and probably talked about her behind her back.

  She woke in the night
drenched in sweat, pinned by Wolf’s heft, dog hair already past her mouth and compressing in her throat, a crushing, stultifying embrace. She envied other dog owners, sometimes, the only other people wandering the suburban streets in the early morning. The ones with friendly dogs, emanating love in all directions, like a hazy corona of light. But sometimes she pitied them, that they would never know the focused, scorching beam of another creature’s obsession.

  Each graduate at her high school had a mandatory five-minute meeting with the guidance counselor in the autumn of senior year. The counselor on this side of the walkway was more battle-worn than Miss Taylor, her posture defeated and her eyes hollow, health- and social-services pamphlets instead of paper suns. “So,” she said, uninterested, almost sarcastic, “what are you planning to do with your life, Nita?”

  “I’m going to become a doctor.”

  The pitch of her interest, and one of her eyebrows, raised a fraction of an inch. “Really? Why? You hate people.”

  Nita’s mouth fell open. That seemed like something a counselor wouldn’t be allowed to say to a student. “I don’t hate people!”

  The counselor shrugged. “My mistake. Well, you have a plan. Let me know if you need help with your applications, et cetera.”

  “I don’t hate people,” Nita repeated, still stunned. “I once—” She stopped. She’d shuffled this memory in with other things forcibly half remembered: walking in on her parents having sex, dropping a heavy book on the head of another toddler at day care because she wanted to see what would happen. “I once saved four other girls at summer camp. We were stranded and almost died. I saved everyone.”

  “Is that why you want to be a doctor? To feel like that again?”

  Nita continued to gape. “I’ve always wanted to be a doctor. My father’s a doctor. It’s a good career. Isn’t that what your job is supposed to be? To direct us to good careers?”

  “Nita.” The counselor sat forward in her chair. She blinked, bleary-eyed. “You don’t need my help. You know that.”

  Nita lived at home while she attended college. She was still the one who took care of Wolf, but she was busier, staying late on campus most days. He hadn’t mellowed with age, as the vet had assured them he would. The only change was a break in his silence. He howled despondently at the ceiling when Nita was gone all day.

  She came home one night to find her parents watching TV in the living room. Wolf was outside, they said; he wouldn’t eat his dinner and they couldn’t take his cries anymore. They’d deal with the complaints from the neighbors tomorrow. Nita slid open the back door and called out Wolf’s name, expecting to hear him bounding toward her in the dark. When she didn’t hear anything, she worried he’d escaped and gone looking for her again. She stepped outside barefoot, onto the wet grass. She continued to call Wolf.

  As her eyes adjusted to the blue dimness of evening becoming night, she realized one of the neighbor’s cats was in the middle of the lawn, poised mid-run. The slim gray tabby watched her with yellow eyes. Cats never came into their yard anymore. Each one had met Wolf and not returned. This tabby Nita knew to be particularly brave, sometimes strolling languidly along the top points of the fence, staring down at Wolf as he snarled and jumped.

  Nita and the cat looked each other in the eye, and then the cat lay down, facing Nita, its tail drifting back and forth serenely. Nita’s heart lurched. “Wolf,” she cried. “Wolf!”

  She walked around the corner of the house and there he was, huddled against the foundation. She knelt beside him and lifted his head, heavier now, onto her lap. His body was still warm but his mouth had cooled. His tongue lolled from his loosened jaw. His eyes stayed mercifully shut. She lowered her face and murmured his name into his fur, which smelled as it always had, of wet dog.

  She went back in the house to get her parents. When her father saw the heap that had been Wolf, he said, “He looks like he’s just sleeping.”

  A savage voice inside Nita disagreed. Wolf had slept lightly, tensely, ready for flight, nostrils twitching and tracking Nita. The body in the yard looked defeated as Wolf never had. It looked like any dog, one she couldn’t have picked out from a lineup as hers. A German shepherd with typical markings, a black cape and a black snout on tan, with none of Wolf’s madness. She said nothing.

  Nita and her father carried Wolf inside. Nita sat on the floor beside Wolf, petting him absentmindedly as she had when he was alive. Her father called the vet and learned that cremation was $700. He called several other vets and discovered that theirs was the only one within a hundred miles who cremated animals. He called Harjeet and suggested he contribute to the cost, as Wolf had been his dog too. Harjeet laughed and hung up. Her father proposed burying Wolf in the backyard; her mother feared he would be dug up by another animal.

  Her father called the vet again and consented to the $700. Did they want an autopsy as well, for an additional $300? Her father ranted into the receiver that even in death that dog cost a fortune. Nita intervened, taking the phone, and said an autopsy wasn’t necessary. Animals were allowed to die mysterious, unquestioned deaths, as in nature, as though there were no unfairness to be exposed.

  That night, as she lay in her ludicrously small bed, a bed she’d outgrown many years ago but hadn’t asked to replace, scarcely wide enough for her and Wolf, with her feet hanging off the end, she felt a sudden rush of relief. For the first time in seven years, the room wasn’t oppressively hot, and she wasn’t penned in between Wolf’s powerful form and the wall. She considered the possibility of sleeping in, without being pounced upon at dawn. A day not defined by monotonous walks, every day the same, the simplicity and relentlessness of Wolf’s demands. She was free.

  The guilt of this thought finally cracked her open, and she wept in gulping sobs for hours. She cried herself to sleep, she cried again upon waking, she cried until her throat was hoarse and her eyes felt pressurized, as though they’d burst out of her head.

  In the morning, her mother came in and sat at the edge of the bed. “I thought I should wake you,” she said. “Since you’re used to Wolf doing it.” When Nita didn’t respond, she added, “You should leave soon to make it to class on time.” And finally: “My love, it was just a dog.”

  Wolf was still on the floor of the living room, covered now with an old floral tablecloth. Nita touched one hand to the flowered lump before leaving. Her father took Wolf to the crematory while she was on campus. They kept his ashes in an unceremonious cardboard box in the basement. Nita felt nothing for the box.

  The air in the house changed, moved more easily. Her parents could finally relax in their own home. Nita grieved privately, every moment she was alone: on the city bus, in the bathroom, in bed. She saw the tabby in the yard more and more, a living reminder that she was the only one who mourned Wolf’s absence. She didn’t move out until she started medical school, where she met Sadiq, who was funny and gentle, the last in a series of nice, inoffensive suitors.

  She knew a kind of man existed who would love her as Wolf had. Who would hunt her every moment, carve her name into his arm, clutch her in his sleep with the same crushing force. Who would die without her. If Nita died, Sadiq would remarry, rebuild over the ruins until his first love was forgotten. As it should be. Nita resigned herself to never being loved like that again.

  And some part of her grieved until they handed her Evan, laid him upon her chest in his first blanket, and she saw the bottomless void of need open up once more.

  2

  After the accident, Nita tried out alternative versions of her story on strangers, people she wouldn’t see again. Seat neighbors on airplanes, and later, other mothers at hotel pools who were eager to commiserate. As an adult, her appearance belied her personality. She’d inherited her neutral expression and hooded eyes from her father, the face of a kind but not especially attentive listener. Her short, narrow waist was hidden by heavy breasts and broad hips, an inviting, maternal body. People were always trying to talk to Nita. Slow her down, get in her w
ay.

  Nita had a friend from med school who’d gone into emergency medicine and burned out from the stress, who just couldn’t weather another twenty-four-hour shift or watch another teenager die. Sometimes Nita told this story as though it were her own: a revelation in a hospital parking lot, sobbing against a guardrail. Her listeners liked this story, but Nita didn’t like the fallout. It made her sound weak, an open heart for them to fill with their confidences.

  More often, Nita told a story adapted from a scenario in a textbook: she was an internist in private practice on a routine visit to a patient in the hospital. She didn’t wear her white coat, not wanting to be confused with hospital staff or asked to consult on other patients. In a sweater and jeans, her hair pulled in a low ponytail, she sat beside the patient in the visitor’s chair and held her hand. The patient’s boyfriend walked in and mistook Nita for the lover he’d long suspected his girlfriend had. The boyfriend, unbeknownst to Nita and the hospital administration, was the one who’d put the patient there in the first place. He picked up his girlfriend’s breakfast tray and beat Nita across the face until an orderly came in and pulled him off. Ever since, Nita has had consciousness-splitting migraines that prevent her from practicing medicine.

  The flaw in this story is that Nita would never sit by a patient’s bedside and hold her hand. Nita abhorred non-diagnostic touching of any kind. She was an internist in private practice, when the accident happened, the newest and youngest of forty doctors in a physician-owned multi-specialty clinic, an all-in-one house.

  The real story, the one she was forced to tell friends, family, and colleagues, was that an employee of the linen service that the clinic used put a carton of sterilized gowns on a high, narrow shelf, a spot where they didn’t usually go, and didn’t notice the carton tipping forward as he closed and secured the closet door. The real story: Nita was the next person to open the closet, and the carton landed on her head.