• • •
She smelled it before she saw it: fresh paint.
There, across one whole wall—the largest in the room—was some sort of—mural, Alice supposed, though she wouldn’t have used such a dignified word to describe the terrible pictures that loomed over Barbara’s bed.
The main motif was flags. A British one. An upside-down American. Then safety pins, axes, handcuffs, knives.
In one upper corner, a sun and a moon bearing human faces smiled and frowned at Alice.
So this, she thought, was what Barbara had been doing behind the door she’d kept closed for the better part of June. Blasting her terrible records and painting this terrible mural.
She had done this in Albany, too. She had painted her walls as a ten-year-old girl, but at least in that instance she had had the decency, the common sense, to ask Peter for permission. That mural was innocuous: a sun and clouds and mountains and what seemed to be Lake Joan.
This one was disturbing.
A surge of competing emotions rose inside Alice. One was fear: there would be hell to pay when Peter saw this. But some other emotion was present, too. And at last she realized, with a pang, that it was jealousy. Never once in Alice’s life had she ever felt the freedom to do something like this. To simply decide—I’m going to paint a mural today—and then undertake the project.
• • •
In a little room off the wine cellar were all the supplies used to maintain the house. There, Alice searched through racks of paint for the color she had chosen, when Barbara was born, for the room that would be hers at Self-Reliance.
There it was: Fawn Pink.
A beautiful shade of light rose.
• • •
Returning to the scene of Barbara’s crime with a roller and bucket in hand, Alice set to work.
By the time Peter returned from wherever he was, there would be no trace of the mural, or the lock.
Tracy
June 1975
Their first week of Survival Classes had centered on orienting oneself in the woods. Their second week would center on keeping warm and sheltered.
T.J. Hewitt had led them to a quiet place in the forest. Now she stood still, hands on hips, one foot up on a root.
“What do you see?” she said.
Silence.
Then a younger girl raised her hand. “Trees?” she said.
Quiet laughter from the group; the girl reddened. She had not meant the answer to be funny.
But T.J. pressed on. “Very good,” she said. “What else?”
Rocks, they said. A boulder. Leaves. Pine needles. Dirt. Branches.
T.J. nodded. “All of these can be used in an emergency to keep you warm. The woods can be dangerous, but the woods are also generous in that way.”
She turned abruptly and walked ten feet in the direction of one of the shorter trees in her vicinity.
“This,” said T.J., “is a balsam fir. It’s one of the denser trees nearby, with nice thick foliage, and also one of the younger ones. See how it’s shorter than its neighbors? This means that its lower branches will form a nice shelter for you in the rain or snow, or even the cold.”
T.J. demonstrated: she angled her long body beneath the lowest branches of the tree, lying in a C shape around the trunk.
“I could stay here for the length of a passing storm,” said T.J. “But if I wanted to stay for longer than that, I’d have to get creative.”
And she continued, discussing how to build makeshift walls, sending the campers off in different directions to locate fallen conifer branches.
• • •
Tracy was paying only partial attention. The blackflies were at their peak, and all the people nearby were waving at their faces with increasing desperation. Aside from that, two extremely distracting figures were tugging at her gaze: Barbara Van Laar, on her left; and Lowell Cargill, standing opposite her.
Lowell was swaying to his right and left, arms crossed around his middle, listening intently and respectfully to T.J.’s every word, seemingly impervious to flies and heat and boredom.
It made him even more attractive.
• • •
That evening, Tracy sat on her bed with her journal in her hands, writing. This was how she spent her time on nights when they had no other scheduled activity.
Most of her cabinmates had chosen a different pursuit. Until lights-out at ten o’clock, they were permitted to roam from cabin to cabin, so long as they remained on the porches. Usually, they found their way to the porch of Pine, the cabin on the other side of the stream, where the oldest boys were housed.
The only other camper who had also stayed behind was Barbara—who, on several occasions over the past week, had tried to strike up conversations with Tracy. But each time, Tracy had stumbled, tongue-tied, unable to produce appropriate responses.
Now—the night after their first lesson on finding shelter in the woods—Tracy was writing sentences and questions in her journal. Something she could read aloud to Barbara: this felt more possible than unscripted speech.
