The Far Shore

The Job Nobody Wanted Me to Take

On the bus I made a list called Reasons This Will Be Fine, and I pressed the pen so hard the words went through to the next page.

1. It is a job. People have jobs.
2. Nobody here knows about last year, or the year before that.
3. I will be too busy to think.
4. Mom is four hours away and cannot see me.

I read it back twice and didn't believe a word of it, which is the thing about lists — they don't have to be true, they just have to hold still. The bus took a pothole and my whole row jumped, duffels sliding, a kid up front whooping like the world's worst roller coaster, and I caught my own face in the smeared window: a narrow, careful kid holding a notebook to his chest the way you'd hold something that might get taken. I put the notebook down. Then I picked it up again.

The driver had the kind of muffler that turns a hill into an argument. We climbed it groaning, pines closing over the windows, and then the trees let go all at once and there it was.

Maren Lake.

I want to tell you it was beautiful, and it was, but it was the beauty of something that used to be cared for by more people than were left to care for it. The water lay flat and pewter under a sky that hadn't decided about rain. There was a swimming dock with a diving board bleached the gray of old bone. There was a mess hall with green paint curling off the boards in long tongues, and behind it a row of cabins, half of them with their shutters latched like closed eyes. The boathouse leaned. I noticed that first, the way it leaned downhill toward the water as if it had spent thirty years thinking about getting in and never quite gone. And across the lake, far off, on a shore the road didn't reach, a single small cabin sat black against the trees with one dark window facing us like it knew we'd come.

Down by the shore, set into the grass apart from everything, a flat gray stone. From the bus I couldn't read it. I could just tell it was the kind of stone you read.

Camp Tamarack, said the sign over the gate, the second a gone to a ghost of itself. Since 1952. The Lake Is Calling.

"Cheerful," said the kid next to me, who I would later know as Boone, though right then he was just a wide, sunburned shape eating sunflower seeds out of his fist. He spat a shell with great accuracy out the window. "First year?"

"Junior counsellor," I said, which wasn't an answer to the question he asked.

"Yeah, you've got the look." He grinned, and it was an easy grin, no edge to it, the kind of grin some people are just born already holding. "Don't worry. Tamarack fixes you. It's the only thing it's actually good at anymore."

I wrote that down later. Tamarack fixes you. I didn't believe that one either, then.

─

Here is the part I usually skip, so I'll put it where I can't.

Two summers ago my little brother Sammy went off the end of a dock that wasn't this dock, at a lake that wasn't this lake, and the water took him down the way water does, without any drama at all, just a small splash and then nothing where a kid had been. I was nine feet away. I had time. I have run it back so many times I could narrate it — the green sandal he kicked off, the line of his shoulders going under, the exact pebbled gray of the planks under my own two feet that did not move. I stood there. I opened my mouth and nothing came out of it. A college kid we didn't even know went past me off the dock in his clothes and brought Sammy up coughing and furious and alive, and everybody said how lucky, how fast, how brave that boy was, and nobody said the other thing out loud, which was that the boy who froze had been standing right there.

After that I became a project. Mom counts breaths; I don't think she knows she does it, but in the night I'd hear her stop at my door and wait until she heard mine. I was the kid they sat near the wall. The kid somebody walked to the bus. When the camp letter came back saying yes, junior counsellor, report June 26, she cried in the kitchen and asked me — not told me, asked, which was worse — please. Please not this one. Anything but a lake.

So you could say I came to Camp Tamarack to find out if my mother was right about me. I'd have said I came for the stipend.

─

They put me in Cabin Nine.

It smelled like every cabin everywhere — cedar and bug spray and the ghost of forty summers of damp socks — and it had eight bunks and eight humans, which I learned were not the same number of problems but considerably more. Cricket Ng, the head counsellor, walked me up with a clipboard hugged to her chest and a lanyard so loaded with keys and whistles and laminated cards that she jingled like weather. She was eighteen and spoke entirely in the camp's own language.

"Cabin Nine's your bunk, you're paired with Boone, you'll love Boone, everybody loves Boone," she said. "Lights out is taps, taps is nine-fifteen, you do a head count at taps and you do not go to sleep until you have physically counted eight kids with your finger. You point at each one. Out loud. Don't trust your eyes, your eyes will lie to you when you're tired." She said it lightly. I wrote it down like scripture. Point at each one. Out loud.

"And you're helping Sol — sorry, you're helping at the nature lodge," she said, and something flickered and went by too fast to catch. "Nature lodge means you get the run of the place. Frogs, the trail, the boathouse cabinets, the slide projector that doesn't work. You'll like it. Quiet kids always like the nature lodge."

I didn't ask how she knew I was a quiet kid. It was the kind of thing that came off me, apparently, like a smell.

My eight were already there, in that feral first-day state where children test the walls of a new place by climbing them. There was a set of loud ones whose names I'd sort out by Thursday. There was one boy who was not loud. He sat on the lowest bunk with his duffel still zipped and on his lap, both arms around it, a small kid with a cowlick and the carefully blank face of someone working very hard not to do a thing in public.

"Hey," I said, and crouched, because I had read somewhere you crouch. "What's your name?"

"Petey," he said, to the duffel.

"Petey. I'm Augie. I'm your counsellor." Saying it out loud felt like a costume. I'm your counsellor. "You want the top bunk or the bottom?"

"My mom said I could call."

And there it was, the thing he was holding the duffel against. I knew it the way you know weather changing. "Phones go in the office for the session," I said, as gently as I had it in me. "But there's letters. We do letters. I'll help you write one tonight, first thing, okay? First thing."

His chin did a small terrible wobble and held. He nodded at the duffel. I stood up too fast and banged my head on the bunk above and three of the loud ones laughed, and I laughed too because the alternative was worse, and that was my first hour of being In Charge Of Humans: a bruise, a near-cry averted, and a promise I'd have to keep.

Boone clapped me on the shoulder on his way past with an armful of mosquito coils. "See? Fixing you already."

─

The first campfire was at the council ring, down where the trees made a bowl around a stone fire pit, the lake a sheet of black tin just past the last log bench. They handed out the camp song on damp photocopies, and we mangled it, two hundred voices and not one of them sure of the tune, until we got to a verse near the end that went different — slower, the words older than the rest somehow —

When the light goes from the near shore and the dark comes on to stay, there's a candle on the far shore and it's burning you a way.

— and even the loud kids went quiet on it, because some songs do that, they reach up out of the page and put a hand on the back of your neck. I didn't know yet that a fifteen-year-old girl had written that verse as a goodbye. I just felt it land somewhere and stay.

Then Cricket let the fire burn down to the orange part, and a counsellor I didn't know stood up to tell the story, and you could feel the whole ring lean in, because every camp has one and this was theirs.

"Thirty summers ago," he said, "there was a girl named Birdie Lott."

I felt the bench under me, the cold coming up off the lake, the small machinery of two hundred people holding still.

"Scholarship camper. Came up from nothing, smart as anything, everybody's favorite. And one night in August she went down to the dock by herself, after taps, when she wasn't supposed to. Nobody knows why. And she took a canoe out onto the lake." He let the fire pop. "And the lake kept her."

Somewhere behind me a small voice — Petey's — said, "What does kept mean," and somebody shushed him.

"They dragged the lake for weeks," the counsellor said. "Found her shoes set on the end of the dock, side by side, neat as you please. Never found her. And ever since, every year, the town floats a candle out for Birdie Lott so she can find her way. And that —" he pointed across the black water, to the one dark cabin on the far shore — "is the Outpost. Oldest cabin at camp. Condemned now. And some nights, if you watch, there's a light over there. Moving. Some folks call it the ghost light." He smiled the smile they all smile at this part. "Camp rule number one. You do not, ever, go to the Outpost."

The kids ate it up. Even I felt the cold do its honest work up my arms. But here is the thing about being a noticer — you can be scared and counting at the same time, and the counting doesn't stop.

Found her shoes set on the end of the dock, side by side, neat as you please.

I turned it over. I didn't mean to. It's just what I do; I take the thing somebody hands me and I check the corners, because a thing that fits everywhere fits nowhere, and this one snagged. People who fall in the water don't take their shoes off first. People who fall don't set them down side by side. You set your shoes down neat when you mean to come back for them, or when you want somebody to find them and read them, the way I'd read that stone from the bus without being able to see a word — this is a thing you are meant to read. I didn't have the rest of it. I just had the snag, small and cold, filed away under a heading I didn't have a name for yet.

Off to the side, past the fire's reach, the cook was standing in the dark with a tray of bug-juice cups going warm in her hands. A big square woman, gray hair, a dish towel over one shoulder — Mim, somebody had called her at dinner, go thank Mim, she's been here since the lake was made. She'd been moving the whole time, refilling, collecting, the way someone moves who can't sit still at a story they've heard a thousand times.

She wasn't moving now.

She stood with the tray gone crooked in her hands at the exact word, at Birdie Lott, the cups tipping, and her face had done a thing I knew from the inside — gone somewhere else, gone two summers and nine feet down, the face of a person standing right next to a thing nobody is saying out loud. Then a cup slid off the tray and hit the dirt and she startled like she'd been touched, and bent to it, and was just the cook again, gathering bug juice in the dark.

I filed that too. I didn't know what it was. I'd learn.

─

"And they never found her," the counsellor finished, low, and let the lake have the silence.

And in the gap where his voice had been I heard mine. The one from two summers ago, the one I keep behind glass. Standing on a gray dock with my mouth open and Sammy's shoulders going under nine feet away and nothing, nothing, nothing coming out, the whole machine of me jammed — I couldn't move. I couldn't make a sound. I just stood there.

The fire ticked. Across the water the dark cabin watched.

I should have been thinking what everyone else was thinking, which was spooky, and going to bed. Instead I sat on that cold log with my notebook shut on my knee and a girl's neat shoes set in my head where they wouldn't sit, and I thought a thought I have never once been able to unthink since:

Maybe a place where a kid vanished is exactly the place to find out if I'd finally do something.

The Candle for a Girl

Things I'm In Charge Of Now. Item one: eight human children.

I wrote it the first morning, sitting on the edge of a bunk that smelled like cedar and old sunscreen, while across the cabin a boy named Petey Saylor cried into a pillowcase his mother had ironed. The list helped. The list was a way of holding the floor still under me. Item two: a footlocker full of inhalers, EpiPens, and a retainer in a case shaped like a frog. Item three: the propane lantern, which I was not, under any circumstances, to light. Item four, which I did not write because writing it would have made it real: do not let any of these eight people get near the water without me counting heads first, twice, the way somebody once should have counted, and didn't.

Cabin Nine was the last cabin on the slope, closest to the trees and farthest from everything that mattered, which Boone said meant we got the best of the morning and the worst of the mosquitoes. Boone Tucker had the bunk by the door because he'd had the bunk by the door for six summers and would have lain across the threshold like a dog before he gave it up. He was the size of a refrigerator and laughed like one falling down stairs, and within an hour of meeting me he had decided we were friends, the way some people decide the weather.

"Rule one," he said, hauling a duffel the size of a body bag onto the rafters. "Whatever the kids ask you, the answer is after lunch. Rule two, never let them see you check the schedule. Rule three—" he paused, scratched his jaw, "—I forget rule three. Cricket knows it."

Cricket Ng knew all of them. She was eighteen, head counsellor, and she moved through camp the way water moves through a sluice, finding the level of every problem and carrying it off before it pooled. She had a clipboard and a whistle and a way of saying your name that made you stand straighter. Augie. By the end of the first day she'd watched me drop a tray of bug juice, lose a camper named Wyatt for four minutes (he was in the bathroom; I aged a year), and read the swim-buddy roster upside down, and she'd said only, "You'll find your feet. Everyone does. Some of us crawl first." Then she'd handed me back the roster, right way up, and gone.

I crawled.

What I had going for me was the thing two bad years had tried to file off me: I noticed. I noticed that Petey only cried in the hour before meals, when the silence got loud, and that the crying stopped if you gave him something to count. The second night I sat on the floor by his bunk while the others tore around outside in the long gold light, and I said, "I'm bad at this too, you know."

He looked at me over the pillowcase, suspicious. Eight-year-olds can smell a counsellor lying to make them feel better the way they can smell a tick check coming.

"At camp?" he said.

"At being away," I said. "At the part where you're somewhere new and your stomach does the elevator thing. I made a list."

That got him. I think it was the word list—it sounded official, like medicine. I tore a page out of the back of my journal and wrote across the top, Brave Things, and under it, 1. Sleep with the lantern off. I'd already done that one, technically, so I let him have it free.

"Your turn," I said.

He thought about it with his whole face. "Go off the dock," he said finally. "Not the deep part. The part where you can touch."

I wrote it down. 2. Petey: go off the dock (touch part).

"Now you," he said, and there it was, the trap I'd walked myself into, the kid handing me a shovel and pointing at the hole. I sat there with the pen, and the lake was right there past the screen, flat and pewter and patient, and I could feel the old thing reach up out of it and take hold of my ankles. I couldn't move. Two years ago I couldn't move. The whole camp was built on a lake because that's what kids are supposed to love, and I had come here to find out whether I still could.

"Three," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I was. "Augie: swim out to the float. The deep part."

Petey watched me write it like he was checking my work. Then he nodded, businesslike, and lay down, and was asleep before I finished the date. I sat on the floor a while longer with the list in my lap, and I did not cross anything off, and that was all right. The point of a list isn't the crossing off. The point is that the thing exists somewhere outside your own head, where you can look at it without it looking back.

────

I met Mars Reyes at the woodpile behind the mess hall, which tells you something, because everyone else I met at meals or at the dock or in the chaos of the cabins, and she had found the one place at camp where a person could be alone with an axe.

She wasn't using it. She was sitting on the chopping block with her knees up, watching the kids file in for dinner like she was taking attendance for a different list than mine. Junior counsellor's whistle on a lanyard, same as me. Hair scraped back hard. The kind of stillness that isn't peaceful—the kind that's a held breath.

"You're the new one," she said. Not a question. "Cabin Nine. You lost the kid this morning."

"He was in the bathroom."

"Sure." She looked at me a second longer than was comfortable. "You believe all of it? The way they tell it?"

"All of what?"

She tipped her head at the lake, at the whole golden postcard of it, the dock, the mess hall, the leaning gray boathouse down by the shore. "The story. The girl. The lake kept her." She said the last three words in someone else's voice, a hushed reverent voice, a counsellor-around-the-fire voice, and the mockery in it was so clean it took the skin off. "Thirty summers and they still say it like scripture. The water kept her. Water doesn't keep anybody. Water just does what gravity tells it."

"I heard it last night," I said. "The way they tell it." I'd heard it the way you hear a thing that snags—shoes on the dock, they'd said, set neat as church shoes. A vest still on its hook. A lake dragged for weeks. But I didn't say that part. I didn't know her, and the snag was mine, and I'd learned to keep the snags.

"And?" she said.

"And it's sad," I said, which was the wrong answer, I could tell, because something shut in her face like a door in wind.

"It's useful," she said. "There's a difference. Sad is for people. Useful is for places that need a reason you should keep paying to come back to them." She stood, brushed bark off the back of her shorts, and the lanyard swung. "You'll learn the verse by Friday. Everybody does. You'll be singing it before you know what it says."

She left me there by the woodpile not knowing a single thing about her except that she was angry at a story I'd thought was just a story, and that the anger was old, older than this summer, worn smooth from handling. I added her to no list. I didn't have a column for her yet.

────

The camp song happened at the council ring, after dinner, when the light went the color of a struck match. We sat on log benches in a horseshoe around a fire that Cricket built in about ninety seconds, and three hundred summers of campers' initials lived in the wood under us, and Boone put his arm around my shoulders and bellowed the words an octave under everyone else, on purpose, to make the little kids laugh.

The song was mostly what you'd think. Tamarack, Tamarack, the pines and the loon and the long blue water. Then it turned. There was a verse near the end that the whole camp dropped into without being told, all of them at once, the way a flock turns:

When the summer's gone and the cabins sleep, and the far shore calls me home, don't you grieve for the one the water keeps— she was always meant to roam.

They sang it soft. Even the loudest of them sang it soft, even Boone, his arm going still around me. Petey, three benches down, mouthed the words he didn't have yet and watched the bigger kids' mouths to learn them. It was beautiful. That's the part I want to be honest about. It was genuinely beautiful, the firelight and the small voices and the old sad pretty tune, and if I hadn't been a person who noticed things I'd have just been moved and let it move me.

But I noticed that the verse didn't sound like the rest of the song. The rest was the kind of thing a committee writes. This one had a person in it. She was always meant to roam. Somebody had meant that. Somebody had sat down and chosen roam over rest, over sleep, over any of the words you'd pick if you were writing about a girl the water kept. Roam is a word for the living.

I filed it. I didn't know I was filing it. You don't always know.

When the last note went up into the dark and the sparks went with it, Royce Faircloth stood up.

You could feel the whole camp arrange itself toward him. He was maybe fifty, soft in the way of comfortable men, with a voice you'd follow into traffic—warm, unhurried, the voice of someone who has never once had to raise it. His grandmother's camp, his father's, his. He welcomed us home. He called it home and the little kids believed him and the truth is so did I, a little, that first night. He talked about the season ahead, color war and visiting day and the loons coming back to the cove, and then his voice went gentle in a particular practiced way and he said this was a special summer. Thirty years. The thirtieth Last Night. There'd be a gala—alumni, friends of the camp, people who loved this place coming back from all over to remember.

"And," he said, and smiled at us all in the firelight, "to hear some very exciting plans for Tamarack's future. Big things. The right things. You're going to be proud you were here for it."

People clapped. Boone clapped hardest of anyone, his whole face open with it, because for Boone the future of Tamarack was the best possible news, the safest words in the language. I clapped too. Plans for the future is a phrase that sounds like a gift when you're sitting in a place you've just decided to love.

I happened to be looking past the fire, toward the dark edge of the ring where the path went down to the water, when Royce said it. And that's how I saw Mim.

I knew it was Mim because I'd already learned the back of her, the cook, the gray bun and the apron she wore everywhere like a second skin, hands that smelled of yeast and bleach. She wasn't watching Royce. She'd slipped down toward the shore while everyone faced the fire, and she crouched at the low pale stone near the dock—the memorial, I'd find out it was called, with a name carved in it I didn't know yet—and she set something down against it. A flower. Just one. I watched her hand do it, and I watched the hand not want to leave, and then she straightened and pressed her knuckles to her mouth for one second before she turned and went up toward the kitchen, away from all the singing.

And down past her, where the path met the road, a woman I didn't know stood at the edge of the firelight's reach. Town clothes, not camp clothes. Older, maybe forty-five. She didn't come in. She came as far as the stone, after Mim had gone, and she crouched the same way Mim had, and she put down a flower of her own beside the first one, and she stayed there with her head bent like she was listening for something the lake wasn't going to say. Then she stood and walked back into the dark toward Maren Falls, and the camp sang on behind us, oblivious, three hundred voices and two flowers and nobody counting but me.

Beside me—I hadn't seen her sit down, she had a way of just being where she was—Mars watched the whole camp give itself over to the far-shore verse, the soft pretty rote of it, the little mouths learning the words.

"They don't even know what they're singing," she said. Low. To no one.

I heard it.