The Last Animal, page 13
“Danielle.”
“Yeah, her. They swam out in the lake. Kyle had his backpack there. I saw them fight on the raft.” He looked hopelessly around at us all, then said, “Anyway, she fell in the water. He jumped in after her. That’s all.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“That’s it?” Rachael asked, her voice high and impatient.
“No,” Sasha said. “You’re making him nervous. He’s not telling it right. Here, act it out with me. Show them what you saw.”
The boy squirmed a little as Sasha stepped into the center of our group. She mimed a square around her body, showing us where the raft would have been. Then she bent her knees as though about to dive into the water. The boy rushed up behind her and grabbed her around the midriff. Sasha struggled against him and fell forward with a cry.
“You said he kind of slashed her, didn’t he?” Sasha asked the boy, who had turned pink right up to the tips of his ears.
“Yeah.” Again he mimed grabbing Sasha’s torso, this time whipping one hand across her stomach. “Like that.”
“Good,” Sasha said. “Thank you. Run away now.”
The boy turned on his heel and bolted. There was an ecstatic expression on his face as he dashed down the path; it was enough to boost our confidence a little, that in his eyes, we were the coolest girls at Camp Reeds. His prestige would rise just because he had been in our presence.
“So you see,” Sasha said impressively.
“I don’t see,” said Elisheva at once.
Sasha clicked her tongue impatiently. “He stabbed her. She drowned. The end.”
“But dead bodies float, right?” Elisheva said. “They might sink for a bit, but they come back up. They get all—bloated.”
“Ew,” Rachael Schwartz said. “Stop it.”
“Don’t be a baby,” Sasha said.
“How can we be sure he really cut her?” Naomi began thoughtfully. “Do you think he had the knife in his hand? That kid didn’t say he saw it—”
At once a babble broke out.
“Of course he—”
“You have to admit it doesn’t quite—”
“Innocent until proven—”
Hannah Breckenridge gasped, “Ahh.”
Her chin was lifted, and her face wore an arrested look. We all paused and stared at her.
“What?” Sasha asked. “Are you cramping?”
“He cut her,” Hannah said. “He cut her across the stomach.”
“I just said that!” Sasha cried. “What’s the matter with all of you?”
“No,” Hannah said, leaning forward earnestly. “My dad’s a cop. There was a case he told us about, and my mom got mad at him, because it was pretty gross. He said that if a body goes into the water—” She swallowed hard, looking faintly sick. “It will float back up. Because of the gases. But if you happen to cut its stomach, then it sinks. The gases just go into the water—”
She broke off. There was a moment of silence. In the distance, we heard the drone of a lawnmower starting up.
“I don’t understand,” Naomi broke in shrilly. “Why would he cut her? Why would he?”
“He said it was an accident.”
“Are you saying Danielle is in the lake?” Chaya Stein said, turning pale. “Danielle is still in the lake?”
Rachael Schwartz made an odd little movement, as though shaking off cobwebs.
“I knew I was right!” she wailed. “I’ve always hated that water.”
At the edge of the field, Itsy-Bitsy rose to her feet. In an unpleasant, singsong voice, she called, “Girls! Time to resume play, I think!”
That afternoon we broke away from the other campers and gathered in our cabin. We were so upset that some of us had begun to manifest symptoms of illness. Julia Goldblatt was too nauseated to participate in the kickball game, and Tal Klein was running a slight fever. Naomi Cohen, whose mother was a surgeon, explained in clinical terms what we were feeling. There was one little nodule in the brain that was responsible for both excitement and fear. Up until now, we had been chasing clues, putting together facts, essentially riding the crest of excitement—but now, faced with the awful truth, we had switched over. We lay on our bunks, clinging to stuffed animals for comfort. We turned helplessly to Sasha Rosen. This was her usual position in the group—the oldest of us all, levelheaded and authoritative.
She laid it out for us slowly. Sitting on the battered rug in the middle of the cabin, she gestured dreamily in the air. Danielle had been dating Kyle. But he had loved her, had wanted to marry her, and she had not felt the same way about him. For Danielle, Camp Reeds was a place of freedom, a loosening of the restrictions of daily life. Behind Kyle’s back, she had fooled around with Joshua, who met her in a kind of easygoing unconcern. He might not have been the only other man she was seeing. Maybe Danielle had threatened to break it off with Kyle. Maybe Kyle had simply realized that she did not love him. One night they swam to the raft together, a romantic spot, a full moon. Kyle had brought his backpack, which contained snacks and a few beers for them to share—as well as his trusty knife. But they had argued. Kyle brandished the blade, maybe just to scare her, to show her how serious he was. Sasha painted the picture for us clearly. We could all see how Danielle had tried to flee, darting to the edge of the raft and preparing to dive off. She was a strong swimmer. Kyle had clutched at her—the knife cut across her stomach—the artery was severed. Her body had dropped into the black water.
“And so,” Sasha finished.
Sprawled over our bunks, we avoided one another’s eyes. Sasha’s proud expression faded. We were all convinced. No one was nay-saying anymore. Danielle’s body must still be at the bottom of the lake—but it was deep and treacherous, with currents from the river that shifted the position of the shoals. The counselors had already dragged the shallows, holding hands in a long line, kicking their feet through the sand, their faces dourly expectant. The police had been there too, several uniformed figures scudding across the waves in a boat with its own siren and lights, shouting instructions by bullhorn and leaning over the side. The campers had collected on the shore to watch. But no one had thought to look in deeper water. We did not know what condition Danielle would be in by now. Was she still rotting away, being devoured by fish and snails? Had she been reduced to a bare skeleton?
Several of us began to speak and faltered. Our minds felt jammed. The sun trickled between the blinds as we huddled in the stuffy cabin. Sasha Rosen slipped almost unconsciously into the role of the teacher, allowing us to voice our thoughts one by one. Julia Goldblatt distributed chewable tablets of aspirin to the girls who were getting headaches from so much thinking. We could not agree on how to proceed. If we went to the police, they would likely not believe us—where was our proof? Hannah Breckenridge’s father, the cop, was always complaining about prank calls. We could hardly dial 911 and explain the trajectory of our realization, from the evidence of the Ouija Board to the vague testimony of a ten-year-old pudding-eating champion.
Elisheva Levy wanted to call her mother. Sasha just rolled her eyes at that one. Our parents would listen with an exasperated expression—that look we knew so well, from the times we had thrown tantrums about curfews or homework. Our fathers would tell us we’d been watching too much television, that we always let ourselves get carried away. Our mothers would blame themselves for not having brought us home from camp earlier. They wouldn’t really listen. We ourselves could barely believe that this time we weren’t making it up. The whole thing felt perfectly in keeping with our gruesome games of Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. We had once played Bloody Mary too, repeating the evil name forty times in a row, and several of us got so worked up that we had really seen a nebulous face peering out of the mirror. It wasn’t safe to talk about these things—not here, in the daylight, as though Danielle’s murder belonged in the realm of sunlit reality. Perhaps all along we had been seeking to disprove, rather than to verify, that someone had done away with her. We felt as though we had unearthed her corpse from the depths of the lake, as though she lay among us now, glistening and terrible.
Our eyes met at last, black and frightened. Elisheva drew a shaky breath.
“Of course if there was anything real—” Naomi began, but she was overridden as in a rush, almost in unison, we began to backpedal.
“Someone else would have seen—”
“She probably just ran off—”
“We’re being silly—”
Sasha Rosen’s bell-clear voice carried over the rest. “Kyle wouldn’t have killed someone,” she said. “Right, you guys? Right?”
Two days later we left for home. Camp ended on a rather anti-climactic note. Rain washed out our last jubilant bonfire, and it was still drizzling when our parents appeared, waving from inside their minivans, looking older than we remembered. The girls of Apache Bryn Mawr went through the motions; we clung to each other, sobbing, exchanging e-mail addresses, trading T-shirts and barrettes, those prized items that we had coveted from each other’s duffel bags. But beneath it all ran a current of shame. During that summer, each of us had grown up. We had learned, none too gently, that life was not always fair, that sometimes love went unrequited and crime unpunished. We were not able to give voice to such ideas—not yet, anyway. But in the deep place, in the dark and secret core of our natures, we all understood these things. We had proven ourselves to be cowards. It was a relief to drive away, waving dismally to one another, knowing that we would not keep in touch. That was how the world worked. The realm of camp was an insulated bubble that did not sustain itself on contact with the rest of our lives.
It is strange how someone who vanishes can be etched so clearly on the brain. There were other counselors at Camp Reeds who we knew just as well, if not better, than Danielle. We had been their campers for multiple summers; we had sung with these women, rubbed suntan lotion on their backs, let them see us cry. And yet they did not linger in our memories. We knew they were alive, moving through the streets of their hometowns, changing jobs, falling in love, aging. Our minds were able to let them go. But Danielle stayed with us; we could not shake her. Months afterward, we were still able to call up the freckle at the corner of her lip, the watery fall of bangs across her cheek. We remembered her voice, husky and dry. She came into our thoughts at odd moments. The slap of flip-flops on the street or the swish of a skirt passing through a revolving door would remind us of her. We were haunted by her—as the last and only keepers of her secret, as the campers who had loved her, as the ones who had, in the end, failed her.
Years later, several of us returned to Camp Reeds, now as counselors ourselves. Sasha Rosen worked with the eight-year-olds. Tal Klein took charge of Sioux Vassar. Naomi Cohen was the lifeguard, modestly dressed in a black one-piece. We were college girls by this time, dangerously sophisticated, sporting brash ponytails and bright red lipstick. It was both strange and delightful to find that the camp was almost entirely unaltered. We observed the same things that had held such magic for us when we were small—the face paint, the peace feathers, the crackling bonfire. We passed on the rituals and songs to our campers in the same way we might tell them about the tooth fairy, not believing it ourselves, but pleased by their acceptance. We took pleasure in strolling down the gravel paths. We made drip castles on the beach. We located the trees in which our initials were still awkwardly carved.
Around the bonfire on moonless nights, people would now tell a new ghost story—the love affair between two counselors that had ended with a body being dumped into the lake. According to the tale, this nameless woman was restless. You could hear her when the nights were still, pulling herself up out of the water, pacing around barefoot on the sand. Most of the campers had no idea that this fable might not be age-old. Shivering with excited dismay, they spoke of it as though it were written in stone somewhere on the grounds, as though it had always been the ghost story of Camp Reeds.
For us, the former girls of Apache Bryn Mawr, it was an oddly soothing tale. Danielle had often told us that the camp was her favorite spot, and it brought us a kind of peace to imagine that unquiet ghosts returned to the places they had loved, for their own comfort, and as a caution to the living.
ISAIAH ON SUNDAY
He wakes in a panic. It is Saturday morning—it is not yet time for work—the sky is still dark—something has startled him. Eventually his mind collects all of its straggling pieces. Someone is pounding at his front door.
Wrapped in a blanket, wiping the sleep out of his eyes, Isaiah lurches down the hallway. Through the window he glimpses that a steady downpour has begun; the panes are jeweled with moisture. The television screen flickers, bathing the walls in an unearthly glow. Isaiah likes to leave it on all night so he does not feel quite alone, with the volume low so as not to disturb his neighbor.
The hammering at the front door comes again. It sounds like cannon fire. Isaiah is fumbling with the bolt before he even thinks to look through the peephole. He steps back hastily as a dark figure bangs into the room.
His sister catapults into his arms. Frances is shuddering and dripping. She is drenched to the skin. Openmouthed, Isaiah stumbles backward as she wheels her bicycle past the hatstand and crashes it against the wall. Frances gleams like an apparition, her black hair in tangles, her skin beaded with wet. Her jacket is sodden; it takes a few tries for her to peel it from her shoulders. Then she grips Isaiah around the middle. She holds on, refusing to let go even as he negotiates their bodies like partners in a waltz so that he can close the front door.
Eventually he pries her loose.
“You’re not seriously here,” he says.
Frances begins to cry. “Don’t call them,” she says.
“What?”
“I’ll sleep on the couch—I won’t make any noise—” She looks up at him, her mouth working. One sharp fist lands against his chest.
“I missed you,” she wails.
“You biked here?” Isaiah asks. “It’s 2:00 AM.”
“Three,” Frances says. “They didn’t notice. They never notice anything.”
He stares at her, trying to gather his wits. With the onset of high school, his sister has begun to experiment with different styles. Today she has black mascara smeared around both eyes. Her T-shirt is decorated with a skull. The overall impression, as far as Isaiah can tell, is that of a vampire, pallid and moody. It does not sit well on the delicate bones of her face.
“Mom’s going to kill you,” he says finally.
Frances sneezes twice. She is trembling all over. Isaiah realizes that she is at the end of her tether; as a doctor’s son he recognizes the signs of fatigue and mental strain. The next few minutes pass in a blur. He leads Frances to the couch, but she refuses to lie down and make a watermark on his cushions. He digs out a pair of sweatpants, and she changes in the bathroom, commenting loudly on the state of his towels. After every blink Isaiah is astonished again to see her there, wringing her hair out between her hands, rolling the cuffs so that his pants don’t swallow up her feet.
At last she lies down, settling herself in the languid, boneless manner of a drowsing cat. Cautiously Isaiah sits on the armrest beside her.
“Frances,” he says softly. “What—?”
Her eyes slip closed. Isaiah shakes her shoulder.
“Frances.”
“Too late,” she says. “I’m sound sleep.”
He waits, watching her. At first she is simply pretending to doze, but very soon her breath begins to come in a deep, regular rhythm. Isaiah tentatively touches her hair and her clenched fists. She is really here, in his apartment. Her laundry is piled in his hamper. Her bicycle leans awkwardly against his wall. It is not, after all, a dream. He can even smell her on the air—rain-soaked cotton and stale perfume. She has grown during his absence. She is lankier and paler than before.
As though to shield herself from his prying gaze, Frances rolls suddenly onto her side. For a moment Isaiah can see that the vampire look is just a brittle veneer laid over his sister. If he took a chisel to the right place, he could chip it away in shards, revealing the familiar girl within.
The two of them were raised a world away, in Africa. Isaiah’s father was a doctor, his mother a frenzied proponent of God. During Isaiah’s early years, the family traveled the western half of the continent with such frequency that his memories run together in a rolling blur. The smell and taste of yam, pounded into pulp, folded into balls and served in soup. The beggars that lined the road, many of them children who had been maimed intentionally to garner sympathy and greater profits. The golden dust that rose and settled around his ankles. Frances as an infant, swaddled in a cloth sack that hung over his mother’s shoulder.
In the desert, the sky looked as though it had been baked solid in a kiln. In the port towns, the clouds were the size of mountains. His mother bargained in the market for every single thing she bought; people seemed almost insulted if you did not argue, and cry that the price was far too much, and pretend to walk away, as though you were not going to buy after all, before making any purchase. Isaiah remembers a bird that woke him one night, screaming and beating its wings outside the door. He leapt out of bed, fumbling for the flashlight. The bird vanished into the darkness, and Isaiah turned, the beam of his light bobbing over the earthen floor, to see three scorpions frozen beneath the bed with their tails uplifted. His mother later told him the bird was sent by God to warn and protect him.
At a very young age, Isaiah understood that it was his father’s job to heal people, his mother’s to convert them. She often spoke of her triumphs. There was the woman dying of burns on her cot who, with her final breath, sang the hymn that says, “I must go anywhere with Jesus, no matter the roughness of the road.” There was the witch doctor who gave up his wicked ways and set down his fetishes for good. One man walked four days to the hospital with two arrows protruding from his chest. He was a Fulani herdsman who had been shot during a dispute over his marriage to a third wife. Isaiah’s father explained that one of the arrows had lodged inside the left atrium of the man’s heart, the other in his right lung, and it had taken some doing to repair the sizable hole in the tissue while keeping the heart beating. But Isaiah’s mother, her face set in a hard, fiery look, talked only of how the man had been converted right there on the operating table. She had held his hand while the bandages were removed, and they spoke together about the realm of heaven.
