It was as perfect a summer night as the one before it. We watched the stars from our place in the barn loft. We blew stolen pink bubbles bigger than our heads. We kissed again. Irene leaned toward me and I knew exactly what she was doing, and we didn’t even have to talk about it. Irene silently daring me to keep going every time I came up for air. I wanted to. The last time it had been just our mouths. This time we remembered that we had hands, though neither of us was sure what to do with them. We came inside for the night, drunk on our day together, our secrets. We were still telling those secrets when we heard Irene’s parents in the kitchen, maybe ten minutes after the phone rang. Mrs. Klauson was crying, her husband saying something over and over in a calm, steady voice. I couldn’t quite catch it.
“Shhhh,” Irene told me, even though I wasn’t making noise beyond the rustle of the covers. “I can’t tell what’s going on.”
And then from the kitchen, Mrs. Klauson, her voice like I’d never heard it, like it was broken, like it wasn’t even hers. I couldn’t hear enough to make any sense. Something about taking her in the morning. Telling her then.
There were heavy footsteps in the hallway, Mr. Klauson’s boots. This time we both heard him perfectly, his soft reply to his wife. “Her grandmother wants me to bring her home. It’s not up to us, honey.”
“It’s something really bad,” Irene said to me, her voice not even quite a whisper.
I didn’t know what to say back. I didn’t say anything.
We both knew the knock was coming. We heard the footsteps stop outside Irene’s door, but there was empty time between the end of those steps and the heavy rap of his knuckles: ghost time. Mr. Klauson standing there, waiting, maybe holding his breath, just like me. I think about him on the other side of that door all the time, even now. How I still had parents before that knock, and how I didn’t after. Mr. Klauson knew that too; how he had to lift his calloused hand and take them away from me at eleven p.m. one hot night at the end of June—summer vacation, root beer and stolen bubble gum, stolen kisses—the very good life for a twelve-year-old, when I still had mostly everything figured out, and the stuff I didn’t know seemed like it would come easy enough if I could just wait for it, and anyway there’d always be Irene with me, waiting too.
Chapter Two
Aunt Ruth was my mother’s only sibling and my only close relative save Grandma Post. She made her entrance the day after my parents’ car crashed through a guard rail on the skinny road that climbed the ravine over Quake Lake. Grandma and I were sitting in the living room with the shades drawn, with a sweaty pitcher of too-sweet sun tea between us, with a Cagney & Lacey rerun filling up our silence in gunshots and sass.
I was in this big leather club chair that my dad usually read the paper in. I had my legs pulled up to my chest and my arms wrapped around in front of them and my head resting on the dark dry skin of my bare knees. I had been in this position for hours, one rerun after another. I used my fingernails to dig half moons into my calves, my thighs, one white indentation for each finger, and when the creases faded away I did ten more.
Grandma jumped when we heard the front door open and shut. She did her fast walk toward the entryway to head off whoever it was. People had been stopping by all day with food, but they had all rung the doorbell, and Grandma had kept them on the front porch, away from me, even if they were classmates’ parents or whatever. I was glad for that. She’d say some version of three or four of the same lines to them—It’s just been a terrible, terrible shock. Cameron is home safe with me; she’s resting. Joanie’s sister, Ruth, is on her way. Well, there are no words. There are no words.
Then she’d thank them for coming by, and bring back to the kitchen another casserole dish of broccoli-and-cheese bake, another strawberry-rhubarb pie, another Tupperware bowl of Cool Whip–rich fruit salad, another something neither of us would eat, even though Grandma kept fixing us both heaping plates of the stuff and letting them pile on the coffee table, fat black houseflies buzzing over them, landing, landing, buzzing again.
I waited to see what she’d haul to the kitchen this time, but Grandma didn’t seem to be getting rid of whoever was at the door. Their voices in the entryway mixed with the voices on TV—Grandma saying accident, Cagney saying double homicide, the other voice in the entryway saying Where is she—I let them blend, didn’t try to sort them out. It was easier to pretend that it was all from the TV. Cagney was telling some detective that Lacey had “a black belt in karate-mouth” right as Aunt Ruth walked into the room.
“Oh sweetheart,” she said. “You poor girl.”
Ruth was a stewardess for Winner’s Airlines. She served on 757s that did daily Orlando-to-Vegas trips for retirees looking to strike it rich. I’d never seen her before in her uniform, but her normal clothes were always so put together, so Ruth. This person crying in the doorway and calling me poor girl looked like a clown made up like Sad Ruth. The skirt and shirt of her uniform—which were the exact same shade of green as the felt of a casino card table—were travel rumpled and creased. She had a brooch on her lapel that looked like a spread of poker chips, with WINNER’S in shiny gold across the arch, but it was pinned crooked. Her blond curls were messy and squashed on one side, her eyes pink and the skin around them puffed up like mascara-stained marshmallows.
I didn’t really know Aunt Ruth, not like I knew Grandma Post. We saw each other usually just once a year, maybe twice, and it was always fine, nice enough: She’d give me clothes I probably wouldn’t end up wearing; she’d tell us funny stories about unruly passengers. She was just my mom’s sister who lived in Florida and who had fairly recently been born again, something I understood only vaguely as a reference to the particular way she practiced Christianity, and something my parents rolled their eyes at when they spoke of—but not in front of her, of course. She was more a stranger to me than Mrs. Klauson, but we were related, and here she was, and I was glad, I think. I think I was glad to see her. Or at least it felt, just then, like it was the right thing, the correct thing to have happen, for her to walk into the room.
She wrapped up both me and part of the chair I was in in a tight hug that filled my lungs with Chanel No. 5. Ruth had always, always since I could remember her, smelled like Chanel No. 5. In fact I only knew of that perfume, its name and spicy scent, because of Ruth.
“I’m so sorry, Cammie,” she whispered, her tears wet on my face and neck.
I’d always hated when she called me Cammie, but it didn’t feel okay hating her for it right then.
“You poor thing. You poor, sweet girl. We just have to trust God in this. We have to trust him, Cammie, and ask him to help us make sense. There’s nothing else to do. That’s what we’ll do. That’s all we can do right now.” She told me this over and over and over, and I tried to hug her back, but I couldn’t match her tears, and I couldn’t believe her. Not one word. She had no idea how guilty I was.
After Mr. Klauson knocked on Irene’s bedroom door and ended my final sleepover with his daughter, telling me, as he scooped up my bag and my pillow, that I needed to go home, and then taking my hand and walking me out of the house, past Mrs. Klauson as she stood crying over the brown kitchen stove, and away from Irene’s unanswered shouts of Why does she have to go? But why, Dad?—I knew that all of this meant something probably more terrible than anything had ever been in my life, ever.
At first I thought that Grandma had fallen, or that maybe they’d found out about the shoplifting. But then, as he drove me, still in my pajamas, the forty miles back to my house, the whole trip telling me nothing more than that my grandma needed to speak with me and that I needed to be there with her, I convinced myself beyond a doubt that Irene and I were found out.
It was Mr. Klauson’s silence during that endless trip, silence filled only with the thick roll of tires over cracked highway and his occasional sighs in my direction, plus the way he shook his head to himself, that convinced me: He was disgusted with me, with what he somehow knew that Irene and I had do
ne, and he didn’t want me in his house for one more second. I sat all the way against the hard door of his truck, trying to will myself into something small and distant from him. I wondered what Grandma would say to me, what my parents would say when they got home. Maybe they’d come home early. Some park ranger had tracked them down to tell them about their weirdo daughter. I tried out various scenes in my head, none of them good. It was only a couple of kisses, I would tell them. We were just practicing on each other. We were just goofing around.
So when Grandma met us on the front steps in her purple housecoat, and hugged a stiff Mr. Klauson beneath the orange glow of the porch light, the millers swooping around their awkward embrace, and then sat me on the couch, and gave me the mug of now lukewarm, too-sweet tea she had been drinking, and wrapped my hands in hers and told me that she was just sitting down to watch TV when the doorbell rang, and it was a state trooper, and there had been an accident, and Mom and Dad, my mom and dad, had died, the first thing I thought, the very first thing, was: She doesn’t know about Irene and me at all. Nobody knows. And even right after she said it, and I guess I knew then that my parents were gone, or at least I had to have heard her, it still didn’t register right. I mean, I had to have known this big thing, this massive news about my whole entire world, but I just kept thinking, Mom and Dad don’t know about us. They don’t know, so we’re safe—even though there was no more Mom and Dad to know about anything.
I had been bracing myself that whole pickup ride to hear how ashamed Grandma was of me, and instead she was crying, and I’d never seen Grandma Post cry like this, I’d never seen anyone cry like this. And she was making no sense, talking about some far-off car accident, and a news broadcast, and my dead parents, and calling me a brave girl and stroking my hair and hugging me to her soft chest, her talcum powder and Aqua Net smell. I felt a wave of heat prickle across me, and then the nausea, all-consuming, as if I was taking it in with every breath, like my body was reacting since my head wasn’t doing it right. How, if my parents were dead, could there still be some part of me that felt relief at not being found out?
Grandma clutched me tighter, heaving with sobs, and I had to turn my head away from her sweet smell, the smother of that flannel housecoat, and pull myself out of her reach, run with my hand over my mouth to the bathroom, and even then there was no time to lift the lid on the toilet. I threw up into the sink, onto the counter, and then slid down to the floor, let the blue and white tiles cool my cheeks.
I didn’t know it then, but the sickness, the prickly flush of heat, and the feeling of swimming in a kind of blackness I couldn’t have ever imagined, all the things I had done since I’d last seen my parents bobbing around me, lit up against the dark—the kisses, the gum, Irene, Irene, Irene—all of that was guilt: real, crushing guilt. From that tile floor I let myself sink down into it, down and down until my lungs burned, like when I was in the deep wells beneath the diving boards at the lake.
Grandma came to help me to bed and I wouldn’t budge.
“Oh honey-girl,” she said when she saw the mess in the sink. “You need to get into bed now, sweetheart. You’ll feel better if you do. I’ll get you some water.”
I wouldn’t answer her back and I stayed completely still, willing her to just leave me alone. She left but came back with a glass of water, which she set on the floor next to me because I wouldn’t take it from her. Then she left again and this time returned with a can of Comet, a rag. After all that had happened Grandma was going to clean the sink, clean up after me, another mess, and it was this moment that somehow made what she had told me take hold. Seeing her there in the doorway with that green can, her pink eyes, the hem of her nightgown peeking from beneath her housecoat, Grandma stooped over with a yellow rag, sprinkling out the cleanser, that chemical-mint smell puffing around us, her son dead and her daughter-in-law dead and her only grandchild a now-orphaned shoplifter, a girl who kissed girls, and she didn’t even know, and now she was cleaning up my vomit, feeling even worse because of me: That’s what made me cry.
And when she heard me crying, finally saw me with actual tears, she got down on the floor, which was painful for her, I knew, her bad knees, and held my head in her lap and cried with me, stroked my hair, and I was too weak to tell her that I didn’t deserve any of it.
In the days before the funeral, Irene stopped by the house with her mom, and she called to speak with me a few times after that, and all those times I asked Aunt Ruth to tell Irene that I was napping. People kept sending me all sorts of things, so I knew that even if I ignored her, it was only a matter of time before she sent me something too. It came the same day the swim team sent a big bouquet of sunflowers, a box of cookies, and a card that everyone signed. Coach Ted must have passed it around right after practice, because there were all these water spots where wet swimmers had handled it, smudged the ink. Most of the kids just signed their names. Some wrote I’m sorry. I wondered what I would have signed if I’d just been one of those wet swimmers, practice over, my towel around my waist, chewing on a granola bar and waiting for my turn to sign the card for the teammate who’d lost both of her parents. I decided I’d probably have been one of the ones who just signed her name too.
Aunt Ruth had been putting everything on the dining-room table, but even with both of the extra leaves in, we were running out of room, and she started just setting stuff anywhere there was free space. The whole of the main floor smelled like a flower shop, and with the heat, the shades drawn on all the windows, that scent of roses and irises and carnations and on and on was almost cloudy, like a gas. It made me hold my breath. I found the bouquet of pink baby roses and an envelope with Cam written on it over on the oak buffet my dad had refinished. I could tell they were from Irene without even opening the card. I just could. So I peeled the card from the vase, took it up to my room. Alone on my bed with the door shut, the thick heat all around me, the card on my lap weighing almost nothing but seeming full of weight, I felt as criminal as I would have had it been Irene herself there with me.
The card had a night sky on the outside, dozens of stars spread across it, and on the inside something about stars being like memories in the darkness of sorrow. I knew right away that her mom had picked it out. But below that was Irene’s cramped cursive, and she had written:
Cam, I wish you would have seen me or answered the phone when I called. I wish I could just talk to you and not write in this card. I wish I didn’t even have a reason to send this card at all. I’m sorry and I love you.
She didn’t sign her name, but I liked that.
I felt flushed when I read what she’d written, and then I read it again and again until I was dizzy with it. I traced my finger over and over the ballpoint I love you, and the whole time I felt ashamed, some sicko who just couldn’t stop, even after her parents died. I buried that card deep beneath a pile of already-spoiled death casseroles in the metal trash can in the alley. I burned my thumb just taking the lid off, the whole can oven hot and reeking. That act of burial felt good, like it meant something, but by that point I had memorized every word she had written me anyway.
Grandma and Ruth were out getting things done that needed to be done, going to the funeral parlor, the church. They’d asked me if I’d wanted to go with them, but I’d said no, though I did spend the rest of that afternoon making my own kinds of funeral arrangements. First I hauled the TV and VCR from my parents’ bedroom, where Ruth had been sleeping, up the steep stairs to my own. I hadn’t asked anyone’s permission to do this. Who was gonna tell me no, or yes, even? It was hard work, moving that TV, more activity than I’d done for days, and I almost dropped the thing once, my sweaty fingers slipping on its film of dust, its sharp edges poking into my stomach, into my hip bones, while I steadied it against myself, staggered up another stair, rested, then did another.
Once I’d situated the TV and VCR on top of my dresser and got everything wired together, plugged in, I went back to my parents’ bedroom and straight to the bottom drawe
r of the dresser, where Dad kept neat rows of white cotton briefs and black socks with gold toes. He had a roll of tens and twenties hidden in the back, and I took it; and even though I was alone in the house, I stuck it in the waistband of my shorts, to hide it. And then I took one more thing. An important thing. A photograph housed in a pewter frame and sitting on their dresser top, which was cluttered mostly with snapshots of me.
In the picture my mother is twelve, her hair a stylish pageboy, her smile wide and toothy, her knees knobby in shorts, and she is surrounded by trees, the sunlight filtered around her just so, lighting her up. I’d known the story of that photo for as long as I’d known that photo. Grandpa Wynton snapped it August 17th of 1959, and in less than twenty-four hours the place where it was taken, Rock Creek Campground, would be torn apart by the worst earthquake in Montana history, and then that place would be flooded by water sloshing over an upriver dam, and it would become Quake Lake.
I put the picture right on top of the TV, so I couldn’t miss it. Then I put all that cash into the hollowed-out base of the high-point trophy I’d won at the divisional meet the summer before. All that cash except for one ten, which I stuck in the inside band of a sweat-stained Miles City Mavericks cap I’d had forever. Dad and I had liked to go to their ball games together and eat Polish sausages and laugh at the old guys who swore at the umps. That cap in my hand, its rim of crusty salt stain against the dark-blue background, made me almost lose it for a second, but I didn’t let myself. I squashed it down over my dirty hair, and then I was off.
Save my burial at the trash can, I hadn’t been outside since the night Mr. Klauson had driven me home. The glare of the sun felt good, even while it was almost immediately uncomfortable. I felt like I deserved it. My bike had been leaned up against the garage for days in that sun bake, and the metal scorched my legs when they brushed against it. I pedaled as fast as I could, let the sweat from my forehead sting my eyes, blur my vision for a few seconds. I took the alleys and concentrated on the sound of my tires over the loose gravel, on the whir of the gear chain. I came out onto Haynes Avenue and pulled into the parking lot of the Video ’n’ Go.