She’ll fold immediately, Louise thinks. She will unswervingly tell every authority figure everything that happened and everything she knows. She’ll cry on the shoulders of her mother and father, who probably didn’t even understand the poem they named their daughter for, and she’ll be comforted by them, and resume her ballet lessons, and next year she’ll be pipelined into Vassar or Radcliffe or Wellesley by her prep school, and she’ll marry the boy her parents have chosen for her—already, she has confessed to Louise, they have one in mind—and she will never, ever think of Louise Donnadieu again, or the fate that will befall Louise, or the trouble Louise will have, for the rest of her life, getting a job, getting housing, supporting her mother, who for seven years now has been unable or unwilling to work. Supporting her little brother, who at eleven has done nothing at all to deserve the life he has been given.
In front of her, Annabel gags. Recovers.
Louise puts her hands on her hips. Breathes. Slow down, she reminds herself.
She squares her shoulders. Pulls back the curtain. Begins the work of feigning ignorance and surprise for this small group of girls who—she swallows her shame like a pill—who look up to her, admire her, frequently come to her for advice and protection.
She steps into their room. Pantomimes scanning the beds. Furrows her brow in a show of confusion.
“Where’s Barbara?” she says to them, brightly.
Tracy
Two Months Earlier
June 1975
Three rules were given to the campers upon their arrival.
The first concerned food in the cabins, and the way it was to be consumed and stored (neatly; tightly).
The second pertained to swimming: an activity that was not, under any circumstances, to be undertaken solo.
The third—the most important, as evidenced by its display, in capital letters, in several communal locations—was WHEN LOST SIT DOWN AND YELL.
At the time, this admonition struck Tracy as almost funny. It would be repeated later that night, at the opening campfire; its logic would be explained. But presented as it was in that moment, forthrightly, succinctly, by a tall male counselor who spoke the words without punctuation or emotion—the phrase made her look away, swallow a nervous laugh. WHEN LOST SIT DOWN AND YELL. She tried to imagine it: Sitting down right where she was. Opening her mouth. Yelling. What noise, she wondered, would escape her? What word, or words? Help? Help me? God forbid—Please find me? It was too embarrassing to consider.
• • •
Her father had paid her to attend.
This was what it took, after a week of negotiations that had concluded with a weekend-long standoff in her room: cold hard cash, a hundred dollars of it—fifty percent of which would be waiting for her upon her return.
What she had wanted to do with her summer was simple: she wanted to spend all day in the living room of the Victorian in Saratoga Springs that her family had rented each racing season for a decade. She had wanted to lower the blinds halfway and open the windows halfway and point all the fans in the house in her direction and lie on the sofa, only rising to prepare herself elaborate snacks. And she wanted to read: reading was the main thing.
This had been her routine for five summers in a row. She had hoped that the summer of 1975 would be no different.
Instead, her father—divorced from her mother for less than a year—had, in quick succession, gotten a girlfriend, a fancier rental house, and the notion that Tracy shouldn’t lie around all summer with nothing to do. This was what he said to her, anyway, on their ride up from Tracy’s mother’s house on Long Island in mid-June. (She couldn’t help but notice that he’d waited to reveal the plan until they were more than halfway to Saratoga.) The real reason, she thought, was so that she would be out of his hair for two months. So that he and the aforementioned girlfriend could have the run of the place without a sulking twelve-year-old underfoot. Why had he fought to have custody of her all summer, Tracy asked herself, if he was only going to turn around and send her away?
• • •
He hadn’t even bothered to drop her off at Camp Emerson himself. Instead he’d outsourced that task to Donna Romano, the girlfriend, still a first and last name to Tracy.
“It’s a race day,” her father said, when Tracy cornered him in the hallway, begged him to come. “Gotta drive down to Belmont. Second Thought’s running at two.”
Her father was a jockey’s son who’d grown up too tall to follow in his footsteps. He’d become an exercise rider instead, and then a trainer, and then an owner, the circumstances of their lives changing with each job. When Tracy was born, the three of them lived in an RV in her mother’s mother’s driveway. Now they lived in a new large house with a silver front gate in Hempstead, New York. Well, Tracy and her mother did, anyway.
“What will we even talk about,” she demanded, but he only shook his head, put two imploring hands on her shoulders. She noticed suddenly that she was eye level with him: her own father. She’d recently gone through a growth spurt that put her in the vicinity of five-eleven and made her slouch vigorously whenever she wasn’t in motion.
“This place is supposed to be top-notch. I mean really hoity-toity,” said her father—the same two embarrassing descriptors he’d used when first breaking the news. “I bet you’ll end up loving it.”
She turned toward a window. Through it, she could see Donna Romano adjusting her bra, inspecting her reflection in the window of the car. It was a new Stutz Blackhawk with shag carpeting on the floor and an engine whose roar reminded Tracy of her father’s voice. “Top of the line,” he had said, when he picked her up in Hempstead. It seemed to Tracy that everything in her father’s life was new. Rental house, girlfriend, Pekingese puppy, car. Tracy was the only old thing in his orbit; and even she was being cast out.
• • •
As it turned out, Donna Romano was a chain-smoker. In between drags she asked Tracy questions about her life that she’d clearly been stockpiling for the very purpose of this trip. When she was not busy answering them, Tracy snuck glances at Donna Romano. She was extremely pretty. Normally, this would have gone far with Tracy. She loved pretty women. She loved the most popular girls at her middle school—though revered might have been a better word, since a large part of her actually despised them. Still, she was fascinated by them, perhaps due to the fact that, physically, they were her opposite, and thus seemed somehow like specimens she wished to examine, at length, under a microscope. Where most of her classmates had long straight hair, parted in the middle, Tracy’s hair was large, red, and indefatigable. Where some of her classmates’ freckles were delicate, Tracy’s were so pronounced that she had been nicknamed Connect the Dots, or CTD for short, by a group of sixth-grade boys. She was supposed to wear glasses; she owned a pair that she never wore, which resulted in her squinting frequently. Her father once told her casually that she was built like a plum on toothpicks, and the phrase was at once so cruel and so poetic that it clicked into place around her like a harness.
• • •
The roads turned from asphalt to gravel to dirt. Ramshackle homes appeared every few minutes, their front lawns repurposed as graveyards for rusted-out vehicles. It was eerie, this contrast between natural beauty and man-made decay, and Tracy began to wonder if they were going the right way.
And then, at last, a sign came into view. Van Laar Preserve, it said. Their mailed instructions had indicated this was the sign to follow.
“I wonder why they don’t put the name of the camp on the sign,” mused Donna Romano.
Maybe it was so perverts couldn’t find it, thought Tracy. This, she knew, was what her father would have said. Against her will, she often heard his voice as a sort of narrative presence that underscored her life. That year—the first of the divorce—was the longest they had ever been apart.
The truth was that as a younger child she had been his shadow, had loved him unreservedly, following him everywhere, raising carrots, flat-handed, to the velvety muzzles of his favorite horses. Although she would have died before admitting it, Tracy missed him profoundly, and had spent the better part of her last school year anticipating a summer of being at his side.
• • •
The dirt driveway forked. An arrow to the right directed them to Camp Emerson: Where Lifelong Friendships Are Made. And then the trees broke open onto a lawn with several rustic wooden buildings in a row. In front of them was a lone counselor standing behind a folding table, from which hung a damp posterboard sign that said, unconvincingly, Welcome.
The counselor approached the Blackhawk with a folder, handed it to Donna through a window. Then he formally dispensed the Three Rules of Camp Emerson like a dutiful town crier—including the final one, the most important, a phrase that would echo in Tracy’s head for days, for weeks. For the rest of her life.
When lost sit down and yell.
Tracy had difficulty imagining how lost she would have to be before the option felt correct. Her voice, it seemed, had been continuously decrescendoing since birth, so that by age twelve, she could scarcely be heard.
Very, she decided, at last. Profoundly, irreversibly, lost.
“You’ll be in Balsam,” said the boy, interrupting Tracy’s thoughts. He extended a long arm to his right. Donna Romano tapped the gas, and the Blackhawk rolled forward.
