The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore

by Kim Fu

  To Kayla, a happy marriage was briefly interrupted by death and ended with a reunion in Heaven, but she didn’t say that. “Any children?”

  “No, thank God.”

  The car pulled up, and they slipped into its warmth and dark anonymity, as into black water on a moonless night. She’d prayed over this decision. For it was a decision; she was going to make something happen, not submit mindlessly to the desire of another, and if it was a sin, she had to take responsibility for it.

  Walter looked out the window, a circle of orange light passing over his face from each streetlight, between longer stretches of darkness.

  She’d decided, ultimately, that Jesus would forgive her if everything she did was in service of a holy union. If she learned to love Walter, as she often thought she could, and became his wife, gave him everything that a wife ought to give.

  She reached out and squeezed Walter lightly on the forearm. Hello, her hand said. I’m here! He turned to her. His expression was quizzical. She raised her hand to his chin. “Do you love me?” she asked.

  Walter spoke carefully. “I enjoy being around you. Quite a lot.”

  “I think you should kiss me.”

  She felt him leaning away from her touch. He said, “You don’t owe me anything.”

  Kissing Walter seemed logistically difficult, coming at him sideways in the close quarters of the car as he resisted. So she took his hand and placed it inside the neck of her dress, just to the left of her sternum, against her heart. He let out a hissing breath as though he’d been punctured.

  “Your skin is so soft,” he said.

  They stared at his hand as if it were an independent creature, both waiting to see what it would do.

  Later that night, choosing her moment, she asked again. “Walter, do you love me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I love you. I love you so much.”

  Kayla woke up cold on the sofa bed. Andee was gone and the blanket they shared was heaped on the floor. Kayla’s thumb was past the threshold of her lips. It took her a few minutes to remember where she was, how old she was, that she hadn’t regressed or fallen through time in the night.

  She sat up and assessed the room. Her mother was banging around in the kitchen. The bathroom door was closed and light leaked out from under it. Presumably Andee was inside. Kayla went into the bedroom to get a shirt from their now three-way-shared closet. She noticed a new cigarette burn in the bed, a singed hole that went all the way through the sheet, down to the mattress. At least the beddings hadn’t caught fire, she thought.

  Kayla followed the smell of something else burning, back to the kitchen. “I’m making pancakes,” her mother called, standing over the stove.

  The pancakes weren’t causing the smell. Kayla put on the oven mitts and pulled a cast-iron pan of blackened bacon out of the oven. “Thanks, but I don’t have time. I have to go to work.”

  Her mother’s mouth curled downward in distaste. “Andee said the same thing. I try to do something nice and you two just don’t have time for me. For your poor old mother who made this nice breakfast that’s going to go to waste.”

  The lower half of the smoke detector hung on its cord from the ceiling, where their mother had pulled it out. Kayla coughed and waved an oven mitt over the smoking remains of the bacon. She was amazed that her mother was able to ignore it, blithely flipping a pancake two feet away. “Thank you,” Kayla said again. “If you put some pancakes in the fridge, I can eat them later.”

  Andee flew out of the bathroom. She was fully dressed, in her bookstore uniform, but her hair was sopping wet, dripping down her back. “Where is it?” she demanded.

  Their mother continued to poke at the side of her pancake. “What?”

  “You know what. The jar.”

  “I took it to the change-counting machine at the grocery store for you. What’s the sense in keeping a jar of pennies and nickels under the bathroom sink?”

  Andee didn’t bother arguing about the contents of the jar. “What did you do with the money?”

  “I bought stuff to make my girls breakfast.”

  “And?”

  “What do you mean, ‘and’?”

  Andee was shouting now. “Where’s the rest of the money?”

  She shrugged. “I owed a friend.” She slid the first pancake onto a platter at her elbow. “Why are you getting all worked up? You two big shots, always running around, in and out of here at all hours. Can’t spare a little bit of change for the woman who raised and protected you. Nickels and pennies, that’s all it was. Barely covered the bacon.”

  Andee had a little money, Kayla knew, in a bank account. Everything Kayla made went either to their shared expenses or back to the church, directly into the collection plate or, when it was her turn, toward the cost of the food and supplies for the recruitment picnics. Kayla felt this was more than fair—more than just her Christian duty, she knew the church would take care of her if something happened, if she needed it. Better than a savings account. The Lord provided through the sharing and good works of men.

  The jar was a silly thing between the two of them, years of small change filling a one-gallon pickle jar Kayla had taken home from the café. They meant to do something fun with it, someday, together, joking about things the jar could never cover: a jet, a boat, a trip to Paris.

  Kayla went to Andee, meaning to comfort her, but Andee jerked away before Kayla could touch her. She entered the kitchenette and picked up the platter with both hands. Kayla had time to remember where it had come from—a hand-me-down from another parishioner, gifted shortly after Sally left and they first needed to furnish the place—before Andee hurled it to the floor. The dish shattered at their mother’s feet, the lone pancake lolling like a tongue. Their mother didn’t flinch, didn’t have the involuntary, autonomous reaction to a loud sound that almost anyone would, her senses selectively dead.

  Kayla had waited and waited, submitted in every way she could think of. Abject. Compliant. Couldn’t Walter see what a good wife she’d be? Still he hadn’t asked, hadn’t even feinted toward it. Until, finally, she pulled away from him for the first time, sat up in the bed of his riverfront hotel room, and said, quietly, evenly, “You’re never going to marry me.”

  “Hmm?” Walter was slow to come out of the fog, the pleasure-fugue.

  Her chin lowered to her chest, her hands limp in her lap. “All I can do now is pray for forgiveness.”

  Walter pulled himself up on his elbows. “Say again? You want to get married?”

  “We have to get married, and soon. Or I can’t keep doing this.”

  He held very still, as though she were a skittish animal, primed to flee. He beheld her for a long moment, her trembling lip, the blond hair down almost to her waist. “You can see,” he said, slowly, “how I would feel trapped.”

  “I’m not trying to trap you.”

  “I don’t think you understand what you’re saying.” He nudged her arm in a fumbling, jocular gesture. “What if we went away together for a bit? On a trip? Would you like that?”

  She shook her head. “You don’t get it. I should go.”

  “No, wait.” He sat up. “Listen. I’m not as rich as you think I am.” He gestured around the room. The open partition to the bathtub, the fireplace, the view of the Willamette. “This isn’t how I live. I can afford to spoil you like this when I visit, but I couldn’t do it all the time. It wouldn’t be what you expect.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Let me finish.” He took her hands. “I know you’re not some gold digger who wants to get in and wait for me to die. I’m not accusing you of that. And you know I’m still paying alimony to two other women. You know my family will protect the money this time, that they’ll keep it from you once I’m gone. There’ll be a prenup and they’ll defend it until you’re dead too. You must know all of that. God knows you’ve listened to me talk about them enough. I’m trying to tell you that I don’t have the energy for you. To treat you the way you deserve to
be treated. What we have now, that’s all I can manage.” He paused. “I’ve thought about it. What it would be like to have you with me all the time. In my house. To take care of me. It’s cruel. It’s too cruel.”

  They were both exposed to the waist, two feet of empty bedding between them. She felt embarrassed to look at him and vulnerable in her nudity, in a way she never had before. Perhaps, she thought, I never loved him until now.

  She said, “Shouldn’t that be for me to decide?” When he started to speak again, she interrupted. “I want this. For lots of reasons. Please trust me.”

  She drew his head down to rest on her shoulder. He let out a shuddering breath and she felt him relax, the surprisingly heavy weight of his skull. Her blood pulsing, her skin warm and young as life itself.

  “I’m engaged,” Kayla announced.

  “To who?” their mother shouted. “You’re still a fucking baby!”

  Andee, as though she’d been waiting, as though this clinched it, said, “I’m going to Alaska.”

  Walter signed a one-hundred-year lease to the church.

  4

  Walter had a cold. Walter’s cold turned into pneumonia, and his age showed in a way it never had before. He’d always been thin, debonair and sharp-cheeked, straight lines in a tailored suit. Now his skin rested unimpeded against the bones of his eye sockets and hung loosely from his cheeks. His eyes seemed to bulge out of his skull. His wrists and ankles, which might have before been described as delicate, dancer-like, had the sheared-bone look of a corpse.

  Sitting on the examination table, Walter stared straight ahead as though he couldn’t see Kayla or the doctor, his body swaying slightly, dreamily, a reed in a faint breeze.

  “Shouldn’t we go to the hospital?” Kayla said.

  “At this point, no,” the doctor said. “His symptoms are relatively mild. Pneumonia can be serious at his age, but I’d just keep an eye on him for now.”

  So Kayla took Walter home and tucked him into bed, even as she was convinced he was dying.

  She was out of time.

  On the tray she usually used to bring him breakfast and the newspaper, she placed a glass of water and her Bible.

  Kayla didn’t love her new church, though she was trying. It had seemed similar to her old church on paper, when they’d first moved to Sherman Oaks to be near Walter’s now-deceased mother. Part of the same new evangelical movement, that same upstart feeling, informal, brightly colored, almost commercial. The pastor was married with children but he looked extremely young, baby-faced, like a boy in his father’s suit. He wore a headset mic and paced as he delivered his sermons, asked them rhetorical questions, spoke with the blunted, rangy anger of a teenager. There was no ambiguity to his sermons, no room for Kayla’s thoughts and compromises. No gaps for God. There was right and wrong, and so much was wrong. And the choir and the musical devotion band were full. Kayla could sing along with everyone else, she could lift her hands. It somehow wasn’t the same. She felt lonely for Walter, who never came with her. She felt muted rather than buoyed by the other congregants. Her voice would disappear and she would mouth along without realizing it.

  She put down the tray and took Walter’s temperature. He was still running a fever. As she helped him sit up, she saw what she took to be a shadow before realizing it was an imprint of his body in sweat. She rocked him in her arms and hummed. His body stayed tense, resistant, as though she were a stranger. He moaned.

  “Walter,” she whispered. “I’m going to baptize you. Do you understand?”

  “Why?”

  “So we can be together forever.”

  He turned into her neck and moaned again, a bovine lowing. “I want to be together now.”

  “We are. I’m right here.”

  “Hold my hand.” She twined her fingers with his and squeezed. He said, “I’m afraid.”

  She remembered her own baptism in Portland. They set aside a Saturday once every few months for adult converts, and together they dragged a freestanding steel tub out from storage. Her breath knocked out of her by the force of the water and Pastor Mike’s hand on her head. She was submerged long enough for thought and the end of thought, for the Kayla she had been to drown, mortal fear snaking through her belly and up out of her burbling lungs, released. Her first gasping breath after rebirth. The clarity. The ecstasy. The hollers of those standing by in witness.

  She whispered into the top of Walter’s head. “It’s time to get right with God. Are you ready?”

  His neck lolled forward.

  “I need you to say yes.” She rubbed his back. She felt the muscles beginning to give.

  Weakly, he assented. “Yes.”

  She reached across to the tray with one hand, without releasing him from her embrace. She took the glass of water. “Walter Groff, do you reject Satan? Do you repent for your sins? Do you accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior, as the one true God?” When he didn’t respond, she added, “Walter?”

  “What do I do?”

  “You just say yes.”

  “Yes.”

  She poured a trickle of water into the part of his hair, once, twice, three times. The water ran down his forehead, parted at his brow into multiple streams, passed over his eyelids, dripped, rejoined in the crevices alongside his nose. His parched mouth opened slightly, welcoming in the moisture. The water split again at his chin, running down his neck into the collar of his pajama top, joining the damp silhouette on the bed. “I baptize you in the name of Jesus Christ.”

  She wiped the water from his eyes. She kissed him in the center of his forehead. She unbuttoned his wet pajamas, used them to dry his head, and tossed them aside. She took off her clothes and wrapped her body around his and the comforter around them both, on the dry side of the bed, and held him for what she thought would be the last time.

  In the morning, his fever had broken.

  To Kayla, the message was unequivocal. God had returned Walter to her. There was only one person left whose eternal torment she couldn’t bear.

  She called the last number she had for Andee.

  “I thought you were in Alaska.”

  “I was. I’m in Wyoming now.”

  “Can I come visit you?”

  “Not easily. We just lost commercial air service.”

  The cold glass screen of her phone against her cheek, Kayla tried to picture Andee’s face, to connect it to this impatient, distrustful stranger. “Do you remember,” Kayla said, “when we drove through Wyoming with Mom? You were amazed by all the animals.”

  A moment of dead air, and then Andee’s voice became familiar again. “I still am. I’m a ranch hand now. At least, for the rest of the spring and summer.” She paused, laughed at nothing. “I can pick you up if you can get yourself to Buffalo.”

  Andee parked her truck at the farmhouse. The two sisters walked along the highway together and recounted the last few years. A man who worked at the bookstore in Portland with Andee had been going to Alaska to work in a mining camp, and once Andee knew Kayla was leaving, she asked to tag along in his truck. They needed bodies. She ended up in the camp kitchen—fourteen-hour days, seven days a week in the summer, the initial adrenaline of the midnight sun and then the slow creep of madness, demented by the light. Enough money that Andee didn’t work at all come winter. She took a cabin, split her own wood, hauled her own water and propane, borrowed a snowmobile when necessary. She fell in love with a naturalist guide for tourists, on the same seasonal schedule, who seemed like the only other woman for a thousand miles. Magical winters spent in their shared cabin, the short days occupied with the work of staying alive, the endless night for talking, fucking, and heavy, restorative sleep. Lying out on the ice of the frozen river together, beneath the silent symphony of the Northern Lights. Huskies drawing one another into song from opposite banks.

  Then a miserable winter spent trapped together. Falling out of love. A miner who was leaving, returning south to work on a ranch managed by a former boss, and Andee caug
ht another ride.

  “What are you going to do when the season is over?” Kayla asked.

  “Not sure yet. I heard about a job in Yellowstone that sounds pretty all right.”

  Kayla told her story. Andee stopped walking. She looked at Kayla as though drawing from a deep well of sadness. “I always hoped for more for you,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” Kayla thought of all the material comforts of their home in Sherman Oaks. “I have a great life. And I just witnessed a miracle.”

  They walked under the big sky, the livestock close to the road, brought in from the hills for the springtime lambing and calving, dull eyes and open faces watching as the sisters passed. Some freshly sheared lambs huddled naked around a trough, deer and turkeys skipping in to steal bites of feed. Now that Kayla was here, she found it hard to get around to the reason she’d come. Andee had aged, from time and hard-weather work, but Kayla still could not accept that she would ever die.

  The highway forked and they followed the curve to the northwest. A small roadside chapel came into view, the size of a closet. Another sign from God, a reprimand to Kayla. “Let’s get out of the sun for a second,” Kayla said.

  They ducked under the archway into the cool shade of the chapel. Just walls, a roof, and a painted crucifix. “Do you mind if I say a quick prayer?” Kayla said. Andee shrugged.

  Kayla took Andee’s hand. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d held her sister’s hand, if she ever had. Kayla shut her eyes. “Lord, thank you for my husband, for bringing us together and then granting us a little more time together on this earth. Thank you for Eric—through him, I first came to know you. Thank you for my home church and that they may sing your praises for another century. Thank you for my sister. Thank you for all the people who took us into their homes while we were growing up. And bless and keep our mother, wherever she may be.”

  When Kayla opened her eyes, Andee’s head was titled back, tears running from the corners of her eyes to her upturned ears. Her face pointed up, Kayla thought, toward the Lord in Heaven.