3 Willows: The Sisterhood Grows

  “She says you are her boyfriend. Are you?”

  He smiled -while shaking his head. “Settle down, Clarence Darrow. I don't know -what she says. How do I know?”

  Jo -was getting annoyed too. “Let me put it this -way: if I told her you'd been trying to stick your tongue in my mouth for this entire summer, -would she have a problem -with it?”

  Zach pushed his hair around on the top of his head. He'd stopped smiling. “Jo. Come on.”

  Until that moment she'd actually thought that he thought her name was Goldie.

  Hours later, the sun -was casting a pink light, and Ama was losing hope. She walked more slowly now, preparing to accept her early, solitary death.

  She wished she could find her -way back to last night's campsite. It had finally occurred to her, after hours of panicky twists and turns, that when the group noticed she wasn't there, they would logically send somebody back to the campsite to find her—the last known place where the group was intact—and she wouldn't be there. If she had just stayed put, she would probably have been found and would probably not be facing an early, solitary death. But she hadn't. She'd long ago lost her bearings. She no better knew how to get back to the campsite than how to get anywhere else.

  It doesn't matter whether I keep walking or not, she told herself. But she kept walking anyway.

  She walked until she spotted a slight clearing and a signpost. Her heart surged. She put a hand to her chest to keep it from jumping right out of there. Was the sign a mirage? She stumbled toward it, grabbing on to it with both hands, making sure it was an actual thing -with actual mass.

  It was a trail map. It showed a hiking trail, of course, but more importantly, it showed a ranger station. Would the station still be open? Would somebody be there?

  She printed the map on her brain. She started walking fast, vaguely aware of how easy it had become for her to follow trails. She followed the markings at top speed. The distance disappeared under her boots. If she had any nagging blisters she couldn't feel them.

  She exulted at the sight of the wooden structure as she came upon it. She threw her pack down, raced up to the door, and pounded on it.

  “Please be there,” she begged of the door. She wasn't even sure if she said it out loud or just in her head. “Please, please, please.”

  The opening of the door startled her so dramatically she staggered into the building. A very tall middle- aged man in a green ranger outfit and hat stood staring at her as she picked herself up and pulled herself together.

  “My group left without me. I got lost,” she burst out. She wished she could present herself with a little more poise, but she couldn't. She tried to catch her breath.

  The ranger, -whose name turned out to be Bob, gave her some time to calm down and then asked her the relevant questions. She figured she made at least a little sense in answering them, because he led her to a phone at a desk and pointed at it. “All yours,” he said. “I'm going to try to find the number for Wild Adventures.”

  He went to another part of the building and left her alone sitting at the desk -with the old- fashioned phone.

  She picked it up with a shaking hand. Her fingers instinctively called home. She pictured her mother and heard her mother's voice. She hoped she could keep from crying until after she'd explained the problem. But her mom didn't answer. Nobody answered. The answering machine picked up. Ama left a halting message, giving the station's number and asking her parents to call back right away.

  Where was her mom? What day was it? What time was it? What time was it here? What time was it there? Was it two or three hours’ difference between here and home? What state was she in, anyway?

  What a strange set of questions for a person -who always prided herself on knowing exactly where and when she was. She thought of Esi, with her giant watch that told the time in all twenty- four time zones always around her -wrist.

  Ama couldn't remember her father's cell phone number. She couldn't remember the number of his dispatcher. These were numbers she kept in the memory of her cell phone rather than in the memory of her head. Her mother didn't have a cell phone, and she was almost always at home. Except for now!

  She knew Esi's number by heart. She should call Esi. But what should she say? I'm lost? I'm an idiot? I got left and forgotten? Nobody even noticed I was missing? I'm the worst camper in the history of Wild Adventures? By the way, they are giving out grades, Es, and I'm getting an F? Remember how you thought I could go to Princeton just like you?

  She called Esi's number. It rang and rang. She hung up without leaving a message. Esi was spending the summer before medical school -working in a chemistry lab. Esi always turned off her phone when she was in the lab or in the library and those were the two places where she almost always was.

  Now -what?

  Ama rested her head on her arm. No crying yet, she -warned herself.

  There -were two other numbers she knew by heart. They -were numbers that she'd known -well before the day she'd gotten her first cell phone.

  Ranger Bob came into the room. “Any luck?”

  “So far, no one's picking up. Do you know -what time it is?” Ama asked.

  “Five after four,” he said after checking his -watch.

  “Do you know -what day it is?” Ama asked timidly.

  Bob smiled at her. “It's Friday, last time I checked.”

  Ama nodded. She was too embarrassed to ask him -what time zone they were in. Maybe her mom and dad and Bob had gone to Aunt Jessie's for dinner. She wasn't their real aunt but an older friend of her mother's from church. “How about you? Any luck?” Ama asked.

  “Not yet. They're looking it up for me at the main station.” Ranger Bob went back into his office and Ama stared at the phone.

  She called the number of the one person, besides her mother, -who was almost sure to pick up.

  “Hello?” came the voice after the first ring.

  “Is this Polly?” Ama asked.

  “Ama, is that you?”

  “It's me. Yes.” Ama felt an ache in her throat. It was strange to hear a voice so familiar to her in deepest back-country, in the middle of her long, strange ordeal. Ama had almost begun to think she'd made it all up.

  “Where are you?”

  “I'm … I don't know.” She could say that to Polly. Though it was more like something Polly would say to her.

  “You're on your trip, though, right? Your camping trip?”

  “Yeah. I'm in a ranger station. I got separated from my group and then I got lost.”

  “Oh, no.”

  Ama felt tears. “Yeah.”

  “Have you talked to your parents yet?”

  “No. They're not home. I left a message.”

  “Are you okay?” Polly was right there, and that made a difference. Polly always knew how to listen.

  Ama took a deep breath and shuddered a little bit. “I think so.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I want to go home.”

  “You mean home home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now?”

  “As soon as I can get out of here.”

  “Why?”

  Ama stopped. “Why? Because I hate this trip. I hate hiking. I hate my group. I hate my hair. I don't want to stay here.” You could complain to Polly. She would pretend to forget what you said if you needed her to, whereas a person like Grace always reminded you of the annoying things you did.

  “But don't you have to wait until the end of the trip?” Polly asked.

  “I don't care anymore. When my parents call back, I'm going to tell them I -want to leave now.”

  Polly was quiet for a moment. “Is it beautiful there, though?”

  “I guess. I don't know,” Ama said absently. She spent too much time looking at the ground to really know. “If I stay, I have to rappel off the edge of a huge cliff. And I can't do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Because I'd probably die is one reason. It's terri
fying. I hate heights.”

  “What about Pony Hill?”

  Ama paused, surprised and irritated. “What about Pony Hill?”

  “You loved it more than anyone.”

  Ama shook her head in disbelief. That was so like Polly, so completely immature. It was obvious at moments like this that Polly didn't know her at all anymore.

  “Polly, this has less than nothing to do with Pony Hill,” Ama said.

  Polly was quiet for another moment and Ama felt queasy with fatigue and displeasure. Why had she bothered to call Polly? Even -when they had been really close, Polly belonged at the bottom of the list in an emergency. “Anyway, why do you care if I stay or go?” Ama asked.

  “I don't. I just thought… you might be sorry if you came home without trying it.”

  “I would not be sorry,” Ama insisted. “I would be happy.”

  “Okay,” Polly said.

  “That way at least I can get an incomplete and not an F,” Ama muttered.

  “What?” Polly asked.

  Ama regretted saying that out loud. She felt like she'd let her gears show. It was another thing Polly would surely not understand. “Nothing. Never mind,” she said.

  “Just think of how far you could see, though,” Polly said wistfully.

  “How far you could see from -where?” Ama said. “What are you talking about?”

  “From the cliff.”

  “I don't want to see far,” Ama snapped. “I just want to come home.”

  Polly's favorite class at modeling camp -was The Photographer's Eye. Each day of class she sat listening intently to theories of color and composition, making tiny doodles in the margin of her notebook. Mr. Seaver, also known as Geoff, was her favorite teacher by far. He was young and relaxed. He was slight in build and wore running shoes and paisley shirts. All the other teachers were older women, most of them -with frozen faces and pointy shoes and hair too perfect to move.

  “Mr. Seaver is gay, you know,” one of the girls in the snack bar told Polly, like Polly should care. But she didn't.

  Mr. Seaver had noticed her doodles on the first day, and instead of getting mad at her, as most teachers did, he'd held them up to the light and studied them carefully. “Wow,” he said. “You're like a little Edward Gorey. Look at these trees. How do you come up with these?”

  Polly didn't know who Edward Gorey was and wasn't sure whether that was a good thing or not. She asked him if he'd rather she stopped doodling.

  “Oh, no. By no means.”

  She had worried at first that he was being sarcastic, but each day he checked them over and gave her an extensive critique at the end of class, mostly consisting of praise.

  After the second day, he let her stay and draw and talk in his classroom -while the rest of the campers went off to the mall.

  He'd showed her some of his photographs of landscapes and cityscapes and he explained that he made his living as a commercial photographer and a teacher, but he loved fine art photography.

  “Why do you want to be a model?” he'd asked her on the third day.

  She'd flicked her first two fingers against the desk. “My grandmother -was a model,” she'd said.

  Geoff had nodded. “Really? How fascinating. Was she successful? What was her name?”

  Here came the hard part. “I don't know.”

  “You don't know her name? Is she still alive?”

  “I'm not sure.”

  “Okay.” He'd waited for her to go on.

  “She's my father's mother. I don't know my father, so I don't know her. I just know she was a model.”

  “I see.”

  That same afternoon, as she was leaving, she'd put something on his desk.

  “What's this?” he'd asked.

  “It's a research report I did.”

  “For school?”

  “No. Just… for fun, I guess.”

  “ ‘The Lives of Supermodels,’ “ he read. He'd flipped through some of its many pages. “You did all this? All these tables and pictures and captions and everything?”

  She'd nodded. She'd felt a bit uncertain. She knew she overwhelmed people with her intensity sometimes.

  He took it with him -when he left the class that afternoon and brought it back -with him the next day. She was already sitting in his classroom -when he got there. She liked to be early in case they could spend some extra time talking.

  “Polly, this is unbelievable.”

  She'd cocked her head. She'd gotten too many forked compliments in her life not to keep an eye out for them. “You think so?”

  “Absolutely, yes. This is like a doctoral dissertation or something. The teachers at your school must be very proud of you.”

  “Well, sometimes,” she'd said. Except for the teachers who taught algebra, Spanish, and Wind Instruments.

  “I never knew the lives of the supermodels could be made to seem so gripping. Seriously. It's like reading the lives of the saints, only -with -worse morals and better hair.”

  She'd laughed.

  Now, on her fifth day, it was the last hour of camp for the week, and he was letting her hang around in his quiet room -while he did paperwork. She didn't feel like having to talk about clothes or makeup or -watch model- related reality shows on the TV in the snack bar. She'd just rather sit here and -watch the fading pink sunlight slide across the floor.

  She had been thinking about Ama and it made her sad. She -was touched that Ama had called her from her -wilderness trip, but she felt like she had said all the -wrong things. She -wished she could take the conversation back and say all different things. She felt like she -was out of practice at being a friend.

  Mr. Seaver -was also less talkative than normal and a little sad -when he flopped her report down on her desk on his -way out the door. He shook his head absently and sighed. “Polly, -what are -we doing here?”

  “Here?”

  “In this place. At this camp.”

  She fiddled-with the pages. She looked at the image she'd drawn for the front cover. She thought about Jo and Bryn. “What do you mean?” she asked uneasily, although in truth she had a faraway sense of it. “Don't we like it here?” She realized she wanted him to answer because she didn't know.

  As she waited for her parents to call, Ama stared at a poster that hung in front of her on the rough, knotted wooden -wall. It showed a scene of nature: tall, magnificent black pine trees and a painter's palette of wildflowers against a backdrop of murky blue mountains. It was the kind of beautiful place her father had been imagining for her, but not the kind that she had seen.

  When at last the phone rang she snatched it.

  “Hello?”

  “Ama? Are you there?”

  It was her mother. Ama thought she'd gained control of her emotions, but when she heard her mother's voice, she realized she hadn't.

  “Ama, is everything okay? Where are you?”

  Ama didn't want to open her mouth. She didn't think she could be in charge of what came out.

  “Ama?Où es-tu?” Her mother shifted into French, as she sometimes did when she was rattled.

  “I'm here,” Ama squeaked. “I'm on the trip.”

  “Tout va bien? Qu'-est-ce qui s'est passé? Dis-moi, Ama.”

  “I—I got separated from my group. I'm okay now.”

  “Mais tu vas bien?”

  “Yes. I'm okay.” Ama felt the tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “You've found your group?” Her mom -was comforted enough to switch back to English.

  “Not yet.” Ama wished she had a Kleenex to blow her nose into.

  “Not yet? Where are they? Where are you? Your voice sounds strange, Ama.”

  Ama held the phone away and quietly blew her nose into her sleeve. It was disgusting, but what could she do?

  “I—I found a park ranger. He's going to find them for me.”

  “Do the teachers know where you are?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, Ama. Chérie.”

  “I got
lost. I didn't know where to go.” She let herself cry freely. “I hate it here, Maman. I hate this trip. I just want to come home.”

  “Chérie.” Amas mother -was clearly surprised. “I didn't know it was so bad.”

  “I didn't tell you.”

  “I'll call the Wild Adventures office right now. I have an emergency number. I'll call you back as soon as I speak to them.”

  “Okay.”

  Ama hung up the phone and stared at the poster, and cried. She got lost in the crying. She became so lulled by the rhythm of her sobs she forgot what she was crying about. The phone scared her -when it rang again a few minutes later.

  It was her father this time. “Ama, you are coming home.” Her peaceful father sounded as upset as she had ever heard him.

  “Really?” She tried to make her voice steady, but she hiccupped instead.

  “The organization is incompetent! Your group leaders do not even know where you are! We are arranging for you to be picked up and taken to the airport. You are coming home. You cannot stay there.”

  The relief was like a warm tide lapping at her feet. She looked out over its calm, boundless mercy.

  “They say the course won't appear on your transcript for credit if you don't complete it, but we can -worry about that later.”

  “That's okay. That's no problem!” Ama practically shouted. She could go home. Her parents were bringing her home. No more hiking. No more blisters. No more Carly. No rappel! God, no rappel! No F! Nothing on her transcript! It was too good!

  She sniffled. “Okay.”

  “Ama, please put the ranger on the phone. We need to speak-with an adult.”

  “But—”

  “Please get him.”

  Ama put the phone down and shuffled toward the other room of the building. She cleared her throat. “Uh, Bob?” she called timidly.

  She overheard him talking on another phone. “Excuse me,” she said. “I'm sorry to interrupt. But my dad would like to speak -with you.”

  Bob gave some final instructions, hung up, and strode from one phone to the other. “I made contact with the Wild Adventure people,” he explained to her en route, just before he picked up and launched into long and complex arrangements with her father.