“Should we wait a day?” asks Barbara, but T.J. shakes her head, fast.
Tonight’s the last night of the party up the hill. It’s tonight—while the guests are on the grounds—or never.
And never means being sent away to Élan in the fall. Never means not seeing T.J. or Vic—her true family—for years.
• • •
In silence, they walk to T.J.’s truck, a canoe strapped to its roof; as quietly as possible, they close both doors. Then T.J. starts the truck, and it rumbles up the hill, past Self-Reliance on its right, past the parking lot full of cars.
“Were you able to get into it?” asks Barbara—gesturing toward John Paul McLellan’s blue Trans Am.
T.J. nods. “Clothes’re in the trunk now,” she says. “He won’t see them. But the police will, when they search it.”
“Why will they search it?”
T.J. grins. “That’s not all I planted in the car,” she says. “When he’s apprehended—they’ll have probable cause to perform a search.”
• • •
Once they reach the thruway, they continue for an hour. T.J. drives as fast as she can without risking the attention of the police: nine miles over the speed limit, exactly. She glances up at the sky as she drives, which is lightening with every minute that passes.
On the way, T.J. quizzes her.
What do you do about water? she asks.
Build a fire. Boil it. Use iodine.
What do you do if you’re sick?
Use the medical guidebook you’ve put on the shelf. Look for medicine in the cabinet.
The same instructions they’ve been over, again and again, during the nightly training sessions T.J.’s been giving Barbara all summer. Preparation for life in the woods—not forever. Just until she turns eighteen—at which point she’ll be legally allowed to make her own decisions.
Then, she can do as she pleases, without fear of her parents imposing their rules. Or their punishments.
If at any point she changes her mind: all she has to do is emerge. It’s Barbara’s decision, completely, T.J. says.
Barbara glances at T.J., taking in the contours of her profile, her kind face. When Barbara was a baby, a small child, it was T.J. who tended to her most. T.J. who helped her and taught her. The word motherly is not one that applies to T.J. Hewitt, and yet T.J. is the only mother Barbara has ever known. Her own, though living, has been unreachable for all of Barbara’s life. A walking shell.
“I put tea in your pack,” says T.J. “The kind you like. Some chocolate, too, for a treat at night.”
Then: “Will you have enough to read?”
Barbara nods. “I will,” she says. “And I’ll write if I run out.”
“I’ll be able to come to you soon,” says T.J. “In a month or two. I just have to be certain I’m not being followed.”
She glances at Barbara, pats her knee. “I know you can make it until then.”
“I can,” says Barbara—reassuring T.J. as much as herself.
But in truth, she does feel ready. T.J. has made her so. All of their training, every night; all of the preparations they made.
The one thing she’ll miss is music: this, she has had to leave behind.
Both of them fall into silence again. And then, just before the sun rises, T.J. pulls off the highway.
• • •
Two headlamps light their way as they dismount the canoe from the roof, and then portage it for a half mile through the woods.
T.J., Barbara knows, is growing nervous: the whole plan will fail if she isn’t back on the grounds of Camp Emerson before the rest of the staff wakes up. And so Barbara picks up her pace, despite the fact that her lungs are burning, despite the fact that the backpack she carries is weighing her down.
“We’re almost there,” says T.J., again and again.
• • •
The sun is rising as the two of them row quietly over the surface of the lake, toward an island in its middle. As they approach, Barbara can see—just beyond the tree line—the flat surface of a man-made structure.
“Remember there’s deer here,” says T.J., climbing out of the stern of the canoe and onto the shore. “You can always hunt for deer. There’s two guns in the house, and plenty of shot.”
Barbara has a sudden flash of her own mother following her, ghostlike, about the house—admonishing her not to eat so much. The opposite, always, of T.J., who throughout her life has fed her every chance she got—even coming to Barbara’s school from time to time to hand-deliver coats and clothing and other treats she knew Barbara liked.
She used to sneak in and out a window to do so.
It was never a problem, until the one time she was seen by the house mother from behind, and Barbara—flustered, in a panic—said that T.J. had been a teenage boy.
From there, things went terribly wrong.
