The view from the McDonald’s parking lot was the same as always. The muddy river, the concrete bridge. The strip of tourist shops along Main Street, the greasy spoon, and the Laundromat where they’d go on their days off to wash the damp out of their clothes and fill up on french fries and ice cream.
She always thought of the McDonald’s as the gateway to camp because it was where Amanda’s parents would stop to give them their “send-off meal” before dropping them off every summer. From the time she was ten, her parents let her stay with Amanda for a couple of weeks before camp started so she could arrive like the other campers, incognito. They never got to the McDonald’s this early back then, though, so it was burgers and fries they ate, not the Egg McMuffin, hold the egg, she was eating now. And they usually sat at one of the run-down picnic tables on the rough patch of lawn, letting the early summer sun mark their winter skin.
But the view was the same, and the smell was the same, and the way the paper that covered her sandwich crinkled in her hand was so familiar it erased the smattering of red leaves on the maples in front of her, making it wholly a summer view. She could’ve been seventeen again, with everything that meant and everything she’d rather forget.
She finished her sandwich, crumpled up the paper wrapper, and turned her car back on. The radio station that had kept her company from Montreal was a cut-in of static, so she tuned in to the local French FM station—CIMO, it was called—its position on the dial a muscle memory. They were playing Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy wit It.” My God. How many times had she and Amanda danced that stupid Will Smith dance their last summer together? Too many to count. Amanda was an amazing physical mimic and danced just like him. They’d even sung it that night on their paddle to the Island, their calls of na na na na na na na echoing and repeating off the water.
“Bringing you all the hits,” the announcer said as the song ended. “All the way back from the summer of 1998.”
• • •
The tires on Margaux’s car kicked up a cloud of dust as she drove down the long dirt driveway to Camp Macaw. Twenty years had passed, but nothing had changed. She was as stuck in the summer of 1998 as the radio station.
It unfolded like a slide show of her youth. There on the left was the path in the woods, where she and Amanda had shared their first cigarette and then almost got caught by her sister Mary. Mary would’ve told on them, too, which was why you never told her anything.
Now she was driving past the barns where Mary had come diligently every morning at sunup to muck out the stalls and exercise the horses. She spent so much time there that she always smelled faintly like horses. Mary had tried to get Margaux into riding, but she was too afraid. She could fake her way through her lessons so long as they kept to the ground, but when they were about to start jumping, Margaux knew her riding days were over.
Mary had her own stable now, not far from here. She wouldn’t arrive until later, after morning workout, but that was fine. Margaux wasn’t ready for the full earnestness of Mary yet.
She turned in to the parking lot, made up of weedy grass and the old rusted-out red truck her parents had abandoned there she couldn’t remember when. She parked next to the truck and pulled out her phone to check her messages. Shit. She should’ve done that back in Magog when she was at the McDonald’s. She had two texts from Mark but no reception. They’d never put in that extra cell tower on the neighboring farm, and so she might as well have been in 1998 as far as technology was concerned. Her parents had opposed the tower; they thought it was better for the campers to have a technology-free zone. Margaux agreed with the philosophy but felt antsy anyway. Mark wouldn’t be happy that she was unreachable for forty-eight hours. She’d better remember to call him from the landline before he freaked out and sent the cops in to check on her.
Someone rapped on her windshield. She shrieked and dropped her phone to the floor.
“Sean! Goddammit, you scared the living daylights out of me.”
He cupped his hand around his right ear, then made a motion for her to roll down her window. She pressed the button. Her window descended neatly into its slot.
“Hi, Margaux.”
“You shouldn’t creep up on people like that.”
“No creeping. I walked right through the parking lot. Didn’t you see me?”
“I was checking something on my phone.”
She reached down and picked it up, wiping the muck from the floor off the screen. She needed to get her car cleaned out, as Mark often, and annoyingly, reminded her. But there she was, making him sound as if he were her enemy. She didn’t know why she did that. She loved him.
“Those don’t work up here,” Sean said. His hands were shoved into the pockets of his cargo pants. His hair was still as red as ever, like a ripe orange, though he wore it close-cropped now. When he was younger, it had been long and curly, and the kids called him Clowney when they thought he wasn’t listening.
“I noticed,” Margaux said.
He shrugged but stayed where he was. She felt trapped. She wanted to get out of the car, but she didn’t particularly feel like a long, winding conversation with Sean. There wasn’t any helping it, though; he was as much of a fixture as the clay tennis court. Her parents had relied on him to keep the roofs from leaking and the docks from sinking, and if he gave her the willies sometimes, well, that was probably just her thirteen-year-old self remembering how he used to stare at her when he thought she wasn’t looking.
“I’m opening the door,” she said. He stepped back. She decided to leave her window down to air her car out. The sun was bright but not yet hot. She breathed in the scent of the pines, the dust, the tang of rusted metal. This was what home smelled like.
“Those are some bright shoes,” Sean said.
“What? Oh, these. Yeah, they’re ridiculous.” Her feet were encased in the new running shoes she’d bought the day before. She was in the middle of a marathon training sequence, and she needed to break in these shoes before her race in three weeks. She’d waited too long, and when she finally made it to the store, all they had left in her size was a pair of bright-pink shoes with orange accents. “I was hoping they’d get covered in mud so I wouldn’t have to look at the color,” she said.
“Not much mud this summer.”
“I noticed.”
He reached into the back seat and took hold of her overnight bag. It was made of battered leather, something she’d inherited from her maternal grandfather years ago.
“I got that.”
“Nah. You know. Mr. MacAllister would want me to take care of you, like always.”
“You can call him Pete. He told you to enough times.”
“Doesn’t feel right.”
Margaux held her tongue. Sean’s serflike attitude toward her parents was something she’d never understood, but it wasn’t going to change now. She let him carry her bag and lead the way out of the parking lot.
“I’m putting you, Kate, and Liddie in the French Teacher’s Cabin, if that’s all right? Unless you wanted to stay in the house . . .”
“No, that’s fine.”
They walked through a row of tall, fragrant pines to the tennis court. The gray clay was washed out and faded from the lack of rain. Margaux’s slide show started again. Up behind the court was the Staff Cabin, hidden in the woods, where she’d spent too many nights drinking and smoking and talking shit. On its other side lay the Maintenance Cabin, where the teenage boys who worked on the maintenance staff lived, a hotbed of hormones. She’d lost her virginity there to Simon Vauclair the summer she was sixteen. She’d whispered the details to Amanda afterward, breathless and a bit startled by the whole thing. Amanda had nodded knowingly even though Margaux knew for a fact that Amanda was still a virgin because she was saving it for Ryan. Margaux also knew for a fact that saving it for Ryan was a lost cause, because her brother was never going to give Amanda th
e time of day.
Saving it for Ryan. It sounded like the title of a cheesy B movie. But then, the first movie Margaux had gone to see after everything had happened was Saving Private Ryan, and she’d cried and cried. She couldn’t explain why. Maybe Amanda would’ve understood.
It was too late to ask her now.
“Is that all right?” Sean asked. “The cabin?”
“I said it was fine.”
“Just checking. Chillax.”
“Chillax? Honestly, Sean, are you ever going to grow up?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
They were on the road. Her parents’ house loomed behind her, though she didn’t turn to look at it. It was the last place she’d seen them, before they’d died in the spring.
“It’s just . . . camp,” she said. “Why are you still here?”
“I’m carrying your bag.”
“No, I mean here here. At camp. Living here.”
“This is my home.”
“But it isn’t.”
Sean dropped her bag onto the road, releasing a small cloud of dust. “Why are you being like this? I didn’t do anything to you.”
Margaux knew she was in the wrong, acting like a jerk. Already this day was wearing her down. The house, her parents’ empty house, was tugging at her, reaching out and making her into the person she used to be. Her summer self. That girl wasn’t who she wanted to be anymore, but sometimes you don’t get to choose who you are.
“I’m sorry, Sean. It’s this place.”
“You can’t blame a place for how you behave.”
“Can’t you?”
He rocked back and forth on his heels. A lifetime of summers in the sun made him look every one of his forty-five years.
“Your parents were good to me, you know.”
“I admire them for that.”
“Only for that?”
She finally looked over her shoulder. Their house was a 1950s rancher; it never fit in with the white clapboard lodge and the dark-green cabins that were scattered over the two hundred acres of lakefront property.
“Is that what you want?”
“What?”
“The house? You want to stay here and live in their house?”
“I never—”
The blare of a car stereo being played much more loudly than it needed to be cut off Sean’s words. They exchanged a glance, but they didn’t need to speak to know.
Ryan had arrived.
CHAPTER 3
BACK IN BLACK
Ryan
“Back in Black.” That’s what Ryan MacAllister, newly forty but still able to pass for thirty-five on a good day, was blasting from the speakers of his Audi A3. He’d had the car for only a couple months, and this was the first time he’d let the sound system loose. His wife, Kerry, thought he was going through something when he’d brought the car home, a midlife crisis or whatever. But he’d leased it instead of the sensible CRV they’d agreed on because when he’d taken it for a test drive on a strangely empty highway and gotten up to speed, it made him feel better than he had in a long while. If that meant he was having a midlife crisis, so be it.
It wouldn’t be surprising if he were in crisis. The last couple years had been pretty shit, what with his business partner turning out to be a criminal, and his business failing, and everything with Kerry, and then his parents dying. But this weekend, things were going to change. The will would be read and decisions would be made, and then Ryan could fix everything. Save his business. Make Kerry happy again and do some of the things she wanted—renovate their house, take a family vacation, spend less time at the office. Because that was what partnership was about, wasn’t it? Adapting to each other’s wants and needs? That’s what their therapist told them anyway.
Ah, fuck it, who was he kidding? What he wanted was to put the stereo up as loud as it would go and drive his car as fast as he could away from there. It wasn’t that he didn’t love his family—he did—but life had begun to feel like a weight around his neck that he couldn’t ever take off.
That’s what camp was like, too, his family, his sisters. He needed to unburden himself from all of it, all of them. Only then could he move forward. If he could break free from his past, then he’d be able to hit reset. Be a better father, husband, man.
In the meantime, didn’t AC/DC sound fucking awesome through these speakers? Bon Scott was the shit, man, he really was.
Ryan let the song end before cutting the engine. He was parked next to a beat-up old Acura, Margaux’s car by the looks of it. He found it annoying that she drove around in something that battered. She was the best-looking of his sisters, but lately, these last five years or so, she’d let herself go. Not in the traditional way—she hadn’t gotten fat; she ran too much for that—but in the ways that mattered to Ryan. She quit going to social events and took up with that Mark guy, a loser who’d never even make vice principal at the high school he taught at.
It figured that Margaux was here before him. He could’ve predicted that. If he’d had to place a bet, he’d guess his sisters would show up in the following order: Margaux, Liddie, Kate, and Mary. Only the first two were likely to be there on time at all.
Ryan was a right-on-time man himself. So here he was, right on time for his plan, which was to talk to Margaux before the meeting so he could get her on board and, through her, the rest of them.
Where was she, anyway?
He closed his eyes. If he were Margaux, where would he be right now?
He got out of the car and grabbed his bag from the back seat. He cut left, taking a path through the woods that brought him to his parents’ house. He went to the front entrance, an unassuming door with a small concrete stoop, and let himself in with his key. The furniture was draped in sheets, as if it were something precious to be protected rather than stuff they’d have trouble giving to Goodwill. He dropped his bag in his bedroom. It was painted a deep blue and was the only room in the house where there was no evidence of his sisters.
His phone beeped in his pocket. There wasn’t any cell signal at camp, but when he’d left Kerry and the girls two summers ago because he’d had to clear his head, he’d stayed here and had Wi-Fi installed with a password only he knew.
That was the summer he’d learned that his partner, John Rylance, stole their prototype money. The shittiest things always happened in summer. It got so that he started getting anxious when the days turned longer and didn’t feel secure again until it was dark before he left the office.
He read the text. Have you spoken to Margaux? Kerry had written.
Ryan tracked down the landline in the living room and called her cell. It was an old handset, one of those ones with a rotary dial that his kids thought belonged in a museum. It took Ryan three tries to get all the way through the digits of Kerry’s number without making a mistake.
“You arrived okay?” Kerry asked. Ryan could imagine her standing in their bright-white kitchen, an army of ingredients lined up on the counter. She always cooked for the week on Fridays so she didn’t have to do it on the weekend. That was Kerry through and through: everything planned to the last detail.
“I did.”
“Where are you?”
“In the house.”
“Isn’t that a party line?”
“Don’t worry. Only Margaux’s here.”
“There’s Sean too, right? This is important. Maybe I should come down there.”
“We agreed. It’s my family and I’ll handle it my way.”
“Fine. Just don’t screw it up.”
Ryan lowered the receiver and tapped it against the table. He did this instead of throwing the whole phone through the plate-glass window, which was what he would’ve done twenty years ago, when his temper felt ungovernable. This was why he’d come here when everything happened with John. Kerry had a l
ot of great qualities, but letting him figure out his own shit was not one of them.
“That’s the plan.”
“This is my life, too, Ryan. My future. Our kids’ future.”
“I know exactly what it is.”
“Good. And don’t get all broody with Margaux, either, once you start drinking.”
Ryan caught sight of her as Kerry said her name. She was walking toward the cabin that overlooked the lake. The French Teacher’s Cabin, they’d always called it, because one summer his parents’ friend stayed there. She was supposed to teach the American campers French, but since her French was limited to ordering in restaurants, the plan failed, as had so many others his parents had tried to implement to make camp more than a shoestring operation. The friend left at the end of the summer; the name stuck.
“I’m not going to get all broody with Margaux.” Drinking, on the other hand . . .
“That’s what you said before the funeral, too. Fast-forward eight hours and you’re sitting in front of the fire, your arms around each other’s shoulders muttering, ‘I love you, man.’ ”
Margaux turned and said something to someone hidden by a tree. They stepped into view. It was Sean. Ryan wasn’t surprised; Sean was always hanging around Margaux, ever since they were little. Amanda used to tease her about it and say that one day, she was going to marry him. Margaux had a way of laughing that off that let everyone know this was never going to happen, Sean included. Which was kind of shitty of her, and kind of dangerous, too.
No man likes to be laughed at.
“And you’re remembering wrong,” Ryan said petulantly. “We never got to the ‘I love you, man’ stage.”
“Whatever.”
“You sound like the girls.”
“They’re infectious.”
Ryan smiled for the first time since he’d turned off the AC/DC. His three daughters were the loves of his life, the reason he and Kerry stuck it out through all the bullshit. He’d do anything for those girls, though that might surprise most people who knew him. Despite the drunken I love you, mans that occasionally came out of his mouth, no one expected him to be sentimental.
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