“Any questions?” T.J. asks.
A counselor called Sam raises his hand. He’s new this summer. He’s just finished high school and is heading off to college in the fall, making him one of the youngest counselors on the grounds.
“Was her brother a camper?” he asks. “The Van Laar boy?”
A shocked silence. Louise isn’t entirely certain why, but there is a universal understanding at Camp Emerson that Bear Van Laar should be spoken of only in whispers. And certainly never mentioned to T.J., who knew him, who was said to be close with him.
Louise is probably the only counselor who remembers his disappearance well. She was nine, just a year older than Bear, when it happened. She’d never met him, but she remembers every single resident of Shattuck—her hometown, five miles from the Van Laar Preserve, and the source of all of its staff—participating in the search.
T.J.’s expression changes for a moment. Something passes over her face that Louise can’t identify. She fears it’s anger. Braces for impact. T.J. rarely raises her voice, but when she does she is frightening to behold.
Instead, she speaks gently. “No,” she says. “No, Bear was never a camper here.”
Some of the counselors are glaring openly at Sam, who looks confused. Uncertain what he’s done.
“All right,” says T.J. “Get going.”
• • •
Louise has been assigned to the Staff Quarters.
On the way she passes the trail toward the lake. Decides, instinctively, to turn down it.
Here is Lake Joan: named, she has been told, for the wife of an English settler. She scans the opposite shore, watching for movement; and while she looks, she ranks her worries.
The most pressing one is Barbara Van Laar, and where she has gone, and whether she is safe.
Next comes the worry of John Paul, and his whereabouts at this moment, and how likely he is to come to her—Louise. To punish her in some way, as he has done in the past.
Then there is the worry of being let go from this job. The worry of where she will live, if that happens.
Back to Shattuck, she thinks. To the house she grew up in. Back with her mother—whose behavior has become, in recent years, something untenable—and her younger brother Jesse, eleven years old, whom Louise loves like her own child, whose sweet disposition cannot possibly withstand for much longer the constant parries of their mother at her worst. Lately, Jesse has shown worrying signs of an inability to learn anything at all in school, and this is her fourth worry. Louise dreams often of rescuing him, bringing him to live with her, raising him on her own: a goal she hopes to realize before another year goes by.
If she were to be let go from her job, she would have no option but to move home to Shattuck—despite the fact that her entire life, to this point, has consisted of one attempt after another to escape.
Growing up there, she tried to sideline herself, simply sit out the teenage politics that dominated life at the central high school. But she continually found herself entangled in tricky situations without meaning to be, and at last she resigned herself to the idea that in a place as small as Shattuck, no one was permitted to be invisible. Like everyone else in the township, she had certain marks in her favor and certain liabilities. She had the advantage of athleticism, and the disadvantage of extreme poorness. She had the advantage of intelligence, and the disadvantage of a mother who was constantly, notoriously drunk. But it was her unusual prettiness that set her apart, that shuttled her to a place of social notoriety without her consent, that caused a sort of unrest all around her that she generally wanted no part of.
If anyone bothered to ask her, back then, what she did want, she would have said: to listen to music, Zeppelin and the Dead most importantly, but also Procol Harum, and Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell; to see George McGovern elected someday (now that Bobby Kennedy was dead and gone); to go into a line of work that would make a difference in the world; to meet a good man who took her seriously; to travel the country and the world. But nobody asked her, and so she kept these wishes quiet, writing them only in journals, summoning them to the forefront of her mind whenever a birthday or a well or a star presented her with a formal opportunity to make them known to the universe.
While she waited for these wishes to be realized, she focused on her studies. She was prized and uplifted by the central school, where she was the salutatorian of her graduating class. She got a full ride to Union College, with some help from a guidance counselor whose brother worked in admissions. But at Union she had struggled. Couldn’t afford even her books. By the end of her first year, she’d dropped out.
The one lasting thing that came out of her education was a boyfriend—John Paul McLellan—one year above her, a philosophy major who’d grown up in Manhattan. He was different from any of the boys she’d grown up with, and although a lot of girls liked him, he was infatuated only with Louise, a fact he made known to others two weeks into her time on campus, as if staking a claim. His friends told her at a party, pointing across the room: He’s in love with you. And there was John Paul, leaning against a wall with his arms crossed, laughing appreciatively at something someone was saying. Handsome in an understated way. He wore glasses, which Louise took as an outsized sign of responsibility and intelligence.
When she dropped out, he suggested that she take a job at the summer camp owned by his godparents.
“Camp Emerson,” he had told her. “A couple hours up the Northway, on the Van Laar Preserve.”
Louise had looked at him, startled. “I know it,” she said.
• • •
That John Paul had never before mentioned his connection to the Preserve—despite the fact that Louise had spoken with some frequency about where she grew up—should not have surprised her. He never spoke much of his family; what she knew of them she had gleaned from casual remarks John Paul had made and from gossip she’d heard. She knew he had a very Catholic father who came from money and had founded a law firm in Manhattan; she knew the McLellans were said to be close friends of the Bouvier family. Still, the fact that John Paul himself had not made the connection between Shattuck—just a few miles from the Preserve—and the summer home of his godparents was evidence to Louise that he listened very little to anything she said.
Because to Louise—to all the residents of Shattuck—the Van Laar Preserve occupied a place of importance in their lives that was simultaneously acknowledged and resented. Following the closure of Shattuck’s paper mill, which had been for three generations the main employer in the town, the Preserve with its summer camp functioned as a sort of industry unto itself. It provided decent full- or part-time work to two dozen of the townspeople of Shattuck year-round; in the summer months, with the camp open, that number tripled.
It did not escape Louise that of this number none were counselors, a position seemingly reserved for wealthy alums of the camp, college students who wanted summer work that might also be a good time. All the Preserve employees Louise knew from Shattuck, meanwhile, occupied roles that required their hands, their bodies.
When John Paul suggested, therefore, that she apply for this particular job, Louise tried to express her concern in a way that made sense to him, that didn’t provoke the annoyance he often displayed when she questioned his ideas, but—in typical fashion—he waved her off. He was practically related to the Van Laars, he reminded her. Mr. Van Laar was his godfather. Their fathers worked together: the Van Laars as the founders of the bank that had financed all of Albany and much of New York City, too; the McLellans as their legal representation. One day, John Paul said, he would take over the bank for both families. John Paul could easily get Louise a job at the camp, he said. All he had to do was ask.
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.
