Mother-Daughter Book Camp

  “Perfection on ice!” Eva Bergson calls to me from where she’s standing rinkside.

  Something must be wrong, though, because all of a sudden I hear her whistle. High and shrill, it pierces my slumber as she blows it again and again.

  Frowning, I crack open an eye. A split second later I’m bolt upright, scrambling for my glasses.

  What I see when I look out the window terrifies me.

  It’s not a dream—I really am spinning. And not just me, but all of Dreamboat.

  “Felicia!” I call in a panic.

  She doesn’t hear me. Raindrops—or is it hail?—detonate on the metal roof overhead, nearly drowning out the howl of the wind.

  How could anyone possibly sleep through this? Screaming my co-counselor’s name, I extricate myself from my sleeping bag and lurch to my feet. Grabbing at the metal frames of the bunk beds to steady myself, I make my way over to her.

  “Felicia!” I grab her shoulder and shake her roughly awake.

  She opens her eyes with difficulty and looks at me in annoyance.

  “The anchor must have come loose in the wind!” I have to holler to be heard. “We’re being blown down the lake!”

  Suddenly fully alert, she sits up and stares outside. Our campers are awake now and looking at us in confusion.

  “Get their life vests on!” Felicia shouts, and I nod. She rips open her sleeping bag and in a flash the two of us are stumbling across the roller coaster that is our floating cabin’s floor. Somehow we manage to grab the vests, pull our pale, stricken campers from their bunks, and wrestle them into their flotation devices.

  “Put yours on too!” I yell to Felicia, buckling mine over my pajamas.

  We gather our campers into the middle of the floor, huddling in a tight circle with our arms around them. Dreamboat is completely out of control, pitching and tossing as it’s blown this way and that by the wind. I’m hoping it’s my imagination, but I think it’s starting to list to one side.

  Our girls are sobbing, and I feel like sobbing too. This is far, far more frightening than the time we got lost on a mother-daughter book club camping trip, or the time some of our friends got caught in a flash flood in Wyoming. At least in Wyoming, I was safe and sound inside the ranch’s lodge.

  Which was anchored securely to the ground.

  This time, I’m spinning down a lake in an antique boathouse with three very small, very scared little girls in my care.

  I hear it again then, above the roar of wind—a series of shrill blasts from a whistle. There’s something familiar about the pattern the sound is making, and all of a sudden I realize that it’s Morse code.

  “Hear that?” I shout. “SOS—it’s a distress signal! I think they know we’re in trouble.”

  Felicia cocks her head a moment, then nods. “They might not be able to get to us while the weather’s like this.”

  We look at each other grimly.

  “Should we close the shutters?”

  Felicia shakes her head and points to the floor, which by now is clearly tilting to one side. She presses her lips directly against my ear. “If worse comes to worst, we might have to swim for it. We’ll need to be able to get out.”

  I feel the blood drain from my face.

  “I want to go home!” wails Tara.

  Me too, I desperately want to say, but I don’t. Instead, a passage from Understood Betsy flashes into thought: “What would Cousin Ann do if she were here? She wouldn’t cry. She would think of something.”

  This is hardly the time for literary allusions, but it spurs me into action.

  “Let’s sing!” I shout, remembering the book club camping trip. Singing helped bolster everybody’s spirits back then.

  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work this time. We can’t even hear ourselves above the wind, for one thing. After a feeble attempt to boost the girls’ spirits with “Blue Socks,” we give up and just sit there, holding on to one another for dear life as the cabin bucks and swirls.

  I really, really hope that whoever built this thing knew what they were doing.

  And then, just as suddenly as it started, it’s over. The wind drops from a roar to a rush to a rustle, the rain ceases, and Dreamboat slowly stops spinning. Its list is more pronounced now, though, and water is seeping in rapidly through the rear left corner.

  I look over to Felicia. “I think maybe it’s going down.”

  “We’d better get out of here.”

  Taking our campers by the hand, we scramble up the tilting floor and through the door onto the front porch.

  “Wow,” I say, looking around. The white picket fence has vanished, ripped away by the wind. Ditto the window boxes. Plus, I have absolutely no idea where we are. Camp is nowhere in sight, and the shoreline seems very far away. Farther than the Cherry Island swim, that’s for sure.

  “How big is Lake Lovejoy again?” I ask.

  “Thirty-four kilometers long and fourteen point five kilometers at its widest point,” Felicia says crisply.

  “In English, please.”

  Felicia rolls her eyes, but I detect a glimmer of a smile. “About twenty miles long and nine miles wide, at its widest point.”

  “We could be anywhere, then.”

  She nods.

  I sigh. I’d suggest raising a flag—we could use a pillowcase—but there’s nobody around to notice. The wind saw to that.

  Peering over the edge of the porch, which is now just a precarious deck, I spot the rope used to tie up the canoes. It’s still there, drifting in the water. “I might be able to tow us to shore,” I tell Felicia, frowning. “Or we could just swim, if we have to.”

  Tara, who had stopped crying once we got outside, looks like she’s on the brink again when she hears this.

  “Sweetie, look at me,” I tell her, crouching down. “You guys, too,” I say to Meri and Pippa, drawing them close. “I’m your swim teacher, right?”

  Three little heads nod in unison.

  “So I know better than anybody what good swimmers you are, right?”

  Again the trio of heads bob up and down.

  “Plus, you may have noticed that we’re all wearing life vests. Nobody’s going to sink. We can make it to shore, I promise. Felicia and I will be with you every inch of the way.”

  They don’t look convinced.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I continue. “I’ll make you a deal. If we end up having to swim, once we get back to camp I’m going to pass all of you straight to Sharks. No more Guppies, no more Minnows or Dolphins. Straight to Sharks. How does that sound?”

  This gets their attention.

  “Some of your friends in Twin Pines didn’t even make it to Sharks this summer, and they’re two whole years older,” I remind them.

  That clinches the deal.

  “Okay,” says Pippa, and the other two nod in agreement.

  We drift for a while, watching for boats or signs of life from the distant shore. The lake is so peaceful, if it weren’t for the litter of branches and shore debris floating by, you’d never know there had been a storm. And then I hear two things: rumbling tummies—it must be getting close to breakfast time—and Dreamboat, which is starting to make ominous creaking noises.

  I turn to Felicia. “This is it,” I tell her. “I’m going to hop in and see if this thing is even towable first. If not, I want you to hand the girls down to me one at a time. No point hanging around on a sinking ship.”

  I walk to the edge of the deck, and just as I’m preparing to jump into the water, I hear it.

  A whistle!

  Turning around, I spot boats—a whole flotilla of them—rounding a point of land in the distance. It’s a rescue party! We all start jumping up and down, waving and screaming at the top of our lungs. The rescue party spots us and surges forward, with Camp Lovejoy’s water ski boat leading the way. Sergeant Marge is behind the wheel and Cassidy is beside her, blowing her whistle like mad. I’ve never been so happy to see anybody before in my life.

  Close behind
them I spot Lake Lovejoy’s game warden and an assortment of motorboats and jet skis.

  “Hey, it’s Jake and Chase!” I tell Felicia as the boats pull up beside us. She tries to look disinterested, but I catch her waggling her fingers at Chase. He grins broadly and gives her a big thumbs-up. I remind myself to tell my friends about this development—maybe the Felicia Project isn’t a lost cause after all.

  A few minutes later, we’ve been plucked from the foundering Dreamboat and are safely aboard The Lady of the Lake, being swaddled in towels as everyone talks at once.

  The story comes out in a tumble, starting with how Cassidy first spotted the cloud—a microburst, the game warden calls it, explaining that it’s sort of the opposite of a cyclone, pushing air down instead of sucking it up.

  “They can be just as dangerous as twisters,” he says, eyeing our floating cabin, which by now is tilting at an alarming angle. “You ladies are mighty lucky.”

  “Your whistle woke me up,” I tell Cassidy.

  “It woke everybody up,” says Sergeant Marge. “Cassidy is a hero.”

  Cassidy, who almost never blushes, turns pink. “I just happened to be in the right place at the right time,” she says modestly.

  “Nonsense,” Marge replies, nodding at Eva Bergson’s whistle. “You had the right equipment and knew exactly what to do with it. You’re a credit to camp, sport.”

  I don’t think Cassidy minds that nickname anymore.

  Jake and Chase, who had been checking on Dreamboat, zoom back over to join us.

  “I think we can stabilize it with one of our jet skis,” Jake tells Marge. “With any luck and a little help from these volunteers, we should be able to tow it back to camp for you.”

  They head off with the other boats to put their plan into action, and we say good-bye to the game warden, thanking him for his help.

  “You wouldn’t believe how brave these three were,” I boast, nodding at my campers as we speed across the water toward camp.

  “Absolutely amazing,” Felicia chimes in.

  “Doesn’t surprise me in the least,” says Sergeant Marge. “They’re Camp Lovejoy girls.”

  Meri and Pippa and Tara lap up the praise.

  “Can we still be Sharks?” Meri wants to know.

  I wink at Felicia. “We’ll talk it over back at camp, okay?”

  Rounding Hairbrush Island a few minutes later, we all fall silent, gazing soberly at the wreckage from the storm. Recalling the romantic reunion with Stewart that I had pictured for us in the Gazebo, I can’t help feeling sad when I see that it’s completely gone.

  The wind has flattened all the trees on the Point, snapping them off at the roots like matchsticks. Half of the roof on the Director’s Cottage is missing, the H dock is in tatters, kayaks are scattered helter-skelter along the shore and in the shallows, and all the windows on Lower Lodge that face the water ski beach have been shattered.

  “It doesn’t look like it, but we were extremely fortunate,” says Marge. “As it hit land, the microburst sheared off down the Point. If it had continued in its original path, there’d likely be nothing left of Lower Camp.”

  “We can rebuild,” says Gwen, addressing us all a little while later as we gather for breakfast. The power is still out, so Ethel and Thelma are busy making pancakes on the gas grill out on the Dining Hall deck. “Things are replaceable; people are not. The main thing is, thanks to Cassidy Sloane’s presence of mind and our head counselor’s quick action, everyone is safe.”

  “What about our banquet?” asks one of the CITs, sounding worried. The CITs are in charge of the decorations for the end-of-camp party tonight, and they’ve been slaving over them in secret all week.

  “What about it?” says Gwen. “We’re not going to let a little thing like a storm stop us from celebrating, are we?”

  “NO!” we all shout.

  The camp director smiles. “That’s the Camp Lovejoy spirit! We have a lot to celebrate tonight—and a lot to be grateful for.”

  The morning passes in a flurry of activity as everyone pitches in to help put camp back together again in a SCUM-style cleanup. Artie has called in a team of workers from Pumpkin Falls to begin the repairs, and our efforts are accompanied by the sound of chainsaws and hammers.

  After lunch, Artie and his team take a siesta while we’re given an extended rest hour. I sleep straight through the entire stretch. All of us in Nest do, exhausted from our eventful morning.

  Refreshed by our naps, Felicia and I turn to the task of helping our campers start to pack. Their parents will finish the job tomorrow, but Gwen says it helps to give them a head start.

  “Hey!” I exclaim as I pop into my cubie to grab a broom and discover another gift from my shell waiting on my dressing table. It’s a spiral-bound notebook with a picture of an old-fashioned typewriter on the cover. Beneath it is written: “We write our own stories.”

  My shell has given me the best stuff this week. Cool pens, two books of poetry, a T-shirt that I know came from Lovejoy’s Books that says SO MANY BOOKS, SO LITTLE TIME. I even got a bag of chocolate chips! She seems to know exactly what kinds of things I like. So much so, in fact, that I suspect she’s one of my book club friends. I’m guessing Megan, maybe, or even Jess.

  Which would be ironic, since Jess is my peanut.

  I steal a few minutes to slip up to the Art Studio, where I have something special up my sleeve for my campers, and then I head back to my cubie to put the finishing touches on my final present for Jess. It’s a pretty notebook filled with my favorite quotes from all the authors whose books we’ve read in our book club these past seven years, starting with “I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship,” by Louisa May Alcott. It’s my favorite, and it’s especially timely, considering our experience this morning.

  The authors are represented in the order we read them. In addition to Louisa, there’s Lucy Maud Montgomery, Jean Webster, Jane Austen, Maud Hart Lovelace, and Charlotte Brontë. I add a final one from Dorothy Canfield Fisher, to make it complete. It’s from a Fun Fact sheet I gave out earlier this summer: “A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.”

  Somehow it seems appropriate, what with our work here this summer as counselors.

  I blow on the ink to dry it, admiring my handiwork. Now that I’m finished, I love the booklet so much I’m actually tempted to keep it, but I know Jess will love it too. I’m going to give it to her tonight during the Big Reveal.

  “Calling all Nesties!” It’s Felicia. She tromps through Cubbyhole, knocking on cubie doors. “Report back to our cabin in five minutes for skit practice!”

  I hide Jess’s booklet in my trunk and follow Felicia out the door. Ours is probably going to be the shortest skit in camp history, but it’s funny, and that’s what counts. Felicia and I coached Meri and Tara and Pippa in a medley of the best bits from my “Overheard” column this summer, including the cantaloupe-antelope-elopement mix-up. I think it’s pretty clever, if I say so myself.

  By the time the bell rings for dinner, we’re ready. I tuck Jess’s present in the pocket of my hoodie and head over with Felicia and our girls.

  “Wow,” says Pippa, gazing around in awe as we walk into the Dining Hall.

  The interior has been transformed. There are candles on every possible surface, and white tablecloths with snowmen for centerpieces. A fire crackles in the fireplace. Hanging from the ceiling is a blizzard of paper snowflakes, and the windowpanes are lined with cotton wool. A large paper banner strung with bright mittens is stretched across the mantel, proclaiming the banquet’s theme: WINTER WONDERLAND. It certainly looks and feels wintry. So much so that I’m suddenly in the mood for hot chocolate.

  Which is in the process of being served up. The kitchen is functional again, thanks to an emergency generator that Artie brought in, and in addition to cocoa we’re soon feasting on prime rib with Yorkshire pudding and all the trimmings.

  After dessert (“snowballs,”
which are actually cupcakes with coconut frosting), it’s time for the skits. Ours goes over as well as I’d hoped, and our trio of campers basks in the laughter and applause.

  Next up is the poetry slam. When it’s Nica’s turn, she flicks me a glance and smiles as she reads a free-form acrostic she wrote as a surprise for Freddie:

  Funny and faithful, my favorite friend.

  Ready for laughter that never ends.

  Inner secrets sharing—

  Ever kind and caring—

  Nearest on whom I depend.

  Dearest companion for days and days—

  Sisters are friends for always!

  “Thanks for your help with some of the words, Emma,” Nica whispers as she bounds over to my side.

  “I am so proud of you,” I tell her, giving her a big hug. She heads back to her seat, beaming at her twin—whose face is clean for once.

  It’s Balsam, though, that is the hit of the evening, with a hilarious fashion show of camp uniforms through the decades. Megan and Becca talked Gwen into lending them some outfits from camp’s historical archive for it.

  “You couldn’t make this stuff up,” Megan tells me, snapping pictures as Kate Kwan sashays across the stage in bloomers and a midi blouse from the 1930s. “This is going straight onto Fashionista Jane the minute I get home.”

  Home! It’s hard to believe we’ll be heading back to Concord tomorrow night. And after that, it’s on to college.

  Thinking about college brings all my fears crashing in again. British Columbia? What was I thinking!

  I can’t worry about that now, though. Now it’s time for the Big Reveal. I push thoughts of big scary Canada aside as I mill around the Dining Hall with my fellow campers and counselors, all of us searching out our peanuts and meeting our shells.

  “You were my shell? No way!” says Jess when I tell her.

  “You didn’t guess?”

  She shakes her head.

  I pass her the booklet that I made for her and she flips through it slowly, reading each quote. When she looks up again, her blue eyes are bright with tears.

  “I’m going to miss you, Emma,” she says, giving me a fierce hug.