Alice
June 1975
The last of the parents were leaving.
From the sunroom in the house at the top of the hill, Alice watched as their cars rolled by, wipers on, a slow parade.
Camp Emerson was a half mile away, but the Preserve’s main house—Self-Reliance, they’d named it—had been built on a high ridge in the land, and from it she could see all around her: Lake Joan to the east; to the west, the long driveway that led to the main road into town; to the south, Camp Emerson; to the north, the wilderness. Hunt Mountain and its foothills.
She’d been standing there for two hours. Ninety-one cars had gone by so far. Inside all of them was a parent or parents, leaving a child or children behind.
This had been Alice’s ritual for the twenty-three years she’d been married to Peter Van Laar. Each first-day-of-camp since she was eighteen she’d stood at this window at the front of Self-Reliance, watching, sometimes with a child in her arms, sometimes alone. She liked to imagine the families inside the cars. Liked to invent names for them, and problems.
The final car disappeared from sight. Alice straightened. She checked the clock behind her: 4:45. Her daily countdown was underway: at five o’clock, she was allowed one of the pills Dr. Lewis had prescribed her for her nerves. One was the recommendation—though two wouldn’t hurt her “on very bad days.” By this Dr. Lewis meant days when she was thinking too much about Bear.
Two, then.
A thud down the hall: the drop of the iron knocker against the front door. That would be T.J.
That morning, Alice had sent word down to the director’s office, requesting a meeting.
Now, from her pocket, Alice fished out the little glass bottle. Chewed her two pills, fifteen minutes early.
Then she closed her eyes, rehearsing in her mind the words she would use.
It’s Barbara, she’d say. She’d like to join in on camp.
• • •
It had been five years since T.J. Hewitt stepped in as director of Camp Emerson. She hadn’t wanted to; her father Vic, she insisted, was perfectly capable of continuing in the role he had performed beautifully for decades.
But Vic’s infirmity—first physical, then mental—became impossible to ignore during the summer of 1970, when he had frightened several campers by shouting at them nonsensically on the very first day of the session. In front of their parents, no less. The parents, incensed, stalked up to the main house to complain. And Peter had deposed Vic, then and there, assuring the parents that he would personally oversee that session, until a suitable replacement had been found.
They searched for one only briefly before Peter suggested T.J. take on her father’s former roles. Alice had been against it. She was so young, and a woman. Who had ever heard of a woman groundskeeper? But Peter had insisted. They’d find a replacement eventually, he said.
So far, they hadn’t. Not one who met with Peter’s approval, anyway. And so, like her father before her, T.J. now occupied both roles: Preserve groundskeeper in the fall, winter, and spring; camp director in the summer. She still lived in the cottage she’d grown up in, which also served as the camp director’s office, and now as Vic Hewitt’s convalescent home, as well, for most of the year.
• • •
In the threshold of the sunroom, now, T.J. cleared her throat. She looked uncomfortable, unhappy—though to be fair, this was her expression anytime she was inside of a building. The woods were her domain.
“Hello, T.J.,” said Alice, and T.J. nodded, avoiding a direct address. For as long as Alice had known her, T.J. had never once called her by name. There was a haughtiness about her that Alice had always found irritating. She wasn’t like this with Peter, thought Alice—no, with Peter she was deferent.
“Have a seat,” said Alice, and then watched as T.J. turned in a full circle, searching for whatever perch would convey the least commitment, the greatest sense of haste. She settled at last on an ottoman. Sat at its very edge. Elbows on knees. Head down.
Her hair was newly short, lopped into a bowl shape, so crooked and wrong-looking that Alice imagined T.J. must have done it herself. It was difficult to reconcile the woman sitting before her with the girl Alice met twenty-three years ago, when she’d first set foot on the grounds: three years old, always in motion, following her father from place to place. She’d been Tessie Jo at the time, a frilly name, a name for a doll or a cow or some sort of entertainer, all wrong for such a stoic child. By sixteen she’d adopted the more androgynous T.J. as her name, but she’d worn her hair in a thick braid for a decade longer. Until now.
“How are you?” Alice asked. She took a mint from the bowl beside her, which the staff kept well stocked. The pink ones were the best.
“Arigh’,” said T.J., in that accent. That accent. Alice had been in the region more than two decades and still found it hard on the ears.
“Is your father well?”
“Well enough.”
“Any problems with the facilities this year?”
“Naugh,” said T.J. She swatted at something invisible at the back of her neck. Examined her hand.
“I’ll get down to it,” said Alice. “I imagine Mr. V has already spoken to you?” She paused, waiting for T.J.’s response—because in fact she had no idea whether Peter had talked to the girl. She’d had no word from him since Thursday, when he left for Albany. What she did know was that Barbara was still at home.
T.J. shook her head. No.
Alice exhaled. Of course, she thought—of course he hadn’t. If nothing else, she could bank on the promise that he would shirk every one of his duties, that he would fail her—fail Barbara—time and time again, that he would be absent from their lives when their lives became difficult. Which meant that, these days—the way Barbara was acting—he was mainly gone, usually without announcing his departure. His returns were similarly quiet.
T.J. shifted, straightened her back.
“Well,” Alice said to T.J., forcing herself to speak brightly, lightly. “Then this will be news to you. We’ve decided—Barbara has decided—that she’d like to join in on camp this year.”
She smiled a little, as if she were delivering good news.
She had known that T.J. wouldn’t like it. It was one of the reasons she’d been putting it off. For generations, there’d been a strict divide between the Van Laar family—Albany bankers, outdoorsy but staid—and the camp they owned, which was always the province of the Hewitts. First Vic. Now his daughter. And, too, there was the fact that T.J. liked things done in a particular way, in a particular order. She’d be annoyed, Alice guessed, by the lateness of the request.
But for an instant, something passed over T.J.’s countenance that Alice couldn’t categorize. Consternation? Anger? She wouldn’t meet Alice’s eyes. Since she’d entered the room, she’d been gazing steadfastly to the right of Alice’s head.
T.J. shook her head a second time.
“Sorry,” said T.J. “Can’t do it.”
Alice stared.
