That was four years ago. She has worked at Camp Emerson every summer since. She has never once met the Van Laars in person, despite John Paul’s connection to them. They function as a distant presence on a hill to the north, frequently sighted local celebrities about whom the children and counselors of Camp Emerson speculate and gossip. The other three seasons of the year, she works at the Garnet Hill Lodge, a resort at the base of Gore Mountain, running programs for the children of guests who spend each day skiing or hiking, and most nights drinking in a smoky, upscale lounge. Throughout this period, she has somehow maintained a relationship with John Paul—who has finally finished his degree at Union, though it took him six years and two forgiving deans to do so. When they have seen each other, it has been in Schenectady during John Paul’s semesters at college, or at the Garnet Hill Lodge, or—in summers—at the Van Laar Preserve, where he stays with his parents for a couple of weekends each season. During the first of these weekends she made the mistake of suggesting that he try to sneak her, Louise, inside of Self-Reliance, to sleep in a real bed for a night. In response, he looked at her as if she were stupid. “They’re my hosts,” he said. “I would never do something so rude.” Instead, they had, and still have, uncomfortable sex in his car, in the parking area adjacent to Self-Reliance; or sometimes pressed up against a tree in the woods, or sometimes on a bed of pine needles on the forest floor. Louise is the one who remembers to bring the towel.
Sometimes, with a certain self-reproach, Louise asks herself why she has stayed with him all these years. What, after all, do they even have in common anymore? She feels more and more distant each year from the person she was when they met. Indeed, sometimes it shocks Louise to remember that she was ever a college student at all. Today, she thinks of her year at Union almost with embarrassment: another life, a youthful folly, a waste of time.
When she allows herself to be honest, the answer is queasily obvious: Louise has stayed with John Paul because he represents to her the possibility of a better life. For herself, yes; and also for her brother Jesse.
They’re engaged, Louise reminds herself. They’re getting a ring, even, as soon as John Paul gets a job. Someday, she tells herself, they’ll have a house together. They’ll have a comfortable bed. A big one, with too many pillows. They’ll have two children. They’ll have four bedrooms, and the extra one will be for Jesse, whom she will bring to live with them while he’s still young enough for it to meaningfully alter the trajectory of his life, to prevent him from becoming angry, or depressed, or submerged in the beery haze that permanently afflicts most of the boys she grew up with.
For this future, she is prepared to wait. Because in the wake of John Paul’s graduation from Union, and before he joins the family business, the work he’ll do “for the rest of his life”—a phrase he says with a sigh—John Paul has decided to take a year to travel, to visit friends in places as far-flung as Los Angeles and Vienna, and as close to Louise as the Van Laars’ house at the top of the hill.
Indeed: for the past week John Paul has been staying with his family at Self-Reliance, for a long-planned celebration of the Preserve’s one hundredth birthday. Embarrassingly, Louise allowed herself to look forward to his visit. Perhaps, she thought, the special occasion—and the length of his stay—meant that she’d at last be invited up to Self-Reliance, introduced to the elusive Van Laars, whom she’d otherwise only glimpsed in passing, as they drove by in their dark cars. Perhaps, on her one day off, she’d be asked up to the main house for cocktails, or dinner. Presented formally to the Van Laars and their guests as John Paul’s fiancée.
But none of this has come to pass. As usual, Louise has seen him only twice: once on his first day on the premises, when he wandered down from a cocktail hour on the lawn, tipsy, and kissed Louise in front of her campers; and then once more last night, in the Clearing with Lee Towson, after she’d almost given up on seeing him at all.
She certainly hasn’t seen John Paul’s family, his mother and father and sister—who have introduced themselves anew, with polite detachment, each of the three times they have met Louise, and who seem to be operating under the assumption that John Paul will find someone more suitable to marry when the time is right. In the past, Louise has been able to reassure herself that John Paul has his own mind about things, almost to a fault; he has said to her repeatedly that one of the things he likes about her is that she’s not like other girls he dated in the past. Girls his family has approved of.
But after last night, she sees the McLellans’ assumption might prove to be correct. And a feeling of humiliation descends upon her. Four whole years sunk into a wish for a future that isn’t meant to be.
On the bank of Lake Joan, a loon calls, sending chills down her spine. Louise, roused from her thoughts, sets off again.
• • •
According to her watch, it’s 7:10 a.m. This, to Louise, is a relief: it means the Staff Quarters will be largely empty, since almost everyone who lives inside is a kitchen worker or a member of the grounds crew, and all of them are up and out before reveille every day. Louise is friends with many of them; she knows some of them from Shattuck.
But among them there is one person she doesn’t want to see.
• • •
Lee Towson arrived at the start of the summer and immediately caused a stir. He was hired to work in the commissary as a prep chef and dishwasher. Traditionally, staff members don’t mingle much with the counselors, but Lee was noticed straightaway. He is fine-looking and tall, with thickly lashed eyes and shoulder-length hair that he keeps tied in a low ponytail. He gives an impression of speed and lightness. Once, while waiting in line for her tray, Louise caught a glimpse of him juggling utensils at the rear of the kitchen. When he noticed her watching, he fumbled them. Pulled a face. Laughed at himself, with her.
She hasn’t been the only one to take note of him, of course; all the counselors have, male and female alike. Early in the summer, he was issued an invitation—a command—to join the counselors at the Clearing, and ever since then he has been a regular presence. He is said to have grown up in Queensbury, not too far from the camp; another boy she knows from Shattuck has claimed him as a cousin. He is said to deal a little here and there. Other rumors about him include a stint as a roustabout for a traveling circus, a stint in jail for possession of controlled substances, and a habit of sleeping around. But Louise mistrusts gossip implicitly, having been the subject of many false rumors herself.
For the past two months, Lee and Louise have engaged in low-level flirtation at every turn. At the Clearing, jokes between them turn into hilarity quickly, Louise doubled over, unable to breathe. Small touches straddle the line between friendly and more. The warmth of his hand on her back, on her shoulder; once, briefly—after several beers—in a straight line downward, from where it had been on her shoulder to where it stopped, on her ribs, just beneath her right breast: a memory that sparks the kind of desire she has rarely felt in her life. She imagines his body beneath his clothes. She imagines him gazing upon her unclothed body, then reaching for it.
This desire, in truth, was what drove her out of her cabin last night.
Over and over again, Louise replays the events of the night in her mind: first her campers, all nine of them, heading in a line toward their cabin as Louise waved goodbye from the Great Hall. This would have been at eleven o’clock, or thereabouts. Annabel, too, turned and waved as she walked behind them.
Annabel, who was supposed to be in charge.
Next in Louise’s memory: the warm night air, damp from an earlier storm; the walk to the Clearing, a small treeless patch just past the edge of the woods, a place that generations of counselors have outfitted with a stack of split logs and a firepit and turned into an after-curfew outdoor club; the pine branches, fat from rain, that doused her when she brushed against them; faint music from Lee Towson’s guitar; faint smoke from a bonfire. Then the back of Lee’s neck as he bent over the instrument, then the front of him as she rounded the fire, as he looked eagerly up at her, barefoot, his hair tucked behind his ears.
Where is everyone, said Louise, or Where’d everyone go, or something equally silly.
They both knew why they were there.
Louise settled onto a stump by the fire, several feet from where Lee was sitting. As she did so, she felt aware of where John Paul was in relation to them both: only a few hundred yards away, in one of the many guest rooms she had never seen at Self-Reliance. It was his last night on the property. After his first-day stroll down the hill to greet her, he had never returned. Each night, after her charges had gone to sleep, she had waited for him on the porch of Balsam. By the fourth night, she had grown angry. By the fifth, resigned. By last night—the sixth night that John Paul had been on the premises, the fifth he had not come to her—she had grown indifferent.
This was the night she had walked to the Clearing, where Lee Towson was waiting—apparently for her. And this was the night that John Paul had decided, at last, to go looking for Louise.
How he found the two of them in the Clearing, Louise still isn’t certain. Perhaps he had heard Lee’s guitar, or seen the small fire he’d built in the pit. Either way, at a certain moment Louise had spotted him standing between two trees, an apparition that startled her so much that she had yelped and clutched her chest, breathing hard.
“John Paul,” said Louise. “You scared me.”
She was prepared to make light of it, arranging her face in a smile, when Lee turned and John Paul lurched out of the woods in his direction. He was, Louise saw, drunk again. His face was arranged in an angry grin, and he swayed first to one side and then the other. Lee, light on his feet, rose quickly to face him.
For a moment, no one spoke.
And then they were on one another, John Paul the aggressor, but also the first to fall. In two quick swings Lee had him on the ground. He looked at Louise, almost in apology, as John Paul lay still beneath him. His glasses had been thrown from his face and now lay beside him on the ground. His eyes were open and unfocused. He blinked slowly.
“Boyfriend?” Lee said.
“Fiancé,” said Louise, and immediately regretted it.
She had never once spoken of him to Lee, though she imagined he might have heard that she was dating someone.
“You need any help with him?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“I’ll wait here,” said Lee. “Make sure he’s okay. You should go.”
John Paul was making small hurt noises now, turning his head from side to side. He seemed at first to be laughing, and then Louise understood the sound was a cough. He sat up slowly, shook his head like a dog, sending blood from his nose in all directions. He felt for and then found his glasses, which looked bent. His right eye, too, was damaged in some way.
When he was fully upright, he pointed one finger in her direction.
“Whore,” he said. The word was quiet, direct. She’d been called it before in her life. Once or twice by her own mother. Generally it did not faze her. But in front of Lee Towson, it stung.
“Yeah, sure,” she said, or something like that. “Okay. Whatever you say.” A half laugh, dismissive, a mutter, a roll of the eyes. The same things she’s always said, and done, when called a hurtful name. She doesn’t remember. Anything to show she doesn’t care.
Last night, it worked. John Paul stared and then retreated, first walking then trotting. Back to Self-Reliance. Back to his mother and father and sister, who do not know Louise’s name.
Next to her, Lee Towson shifted in place.
“Well,” he said. “Guess I’d better get going.”
She wanted to stop him, but her shame prevented her from speaking.
Then she was alone.
• • •
The Staff Quarters are inside the only two-story building at Camp Emerson. It sits on the banks of Lake Joan, just south of the creek and the boys’ cabins. Louise has never once been inside.
Now she ascends the steps to the interior. To her right, she’s greeted with a long hallway and a line of doors, some standing open, others closed.
“Hello?” she calls.
Silence.
