“Tomorrow. Maybe we can go swimming or take a walk, or something.”
“Sure,” said Emma at the door to her cabin.
Ryan smiled in the moonlight. He had nice teeth, she thought.
“Tomorrow,” he repeated and gave her a jaunty salute.
Emma went to her bunk and lay on her back, arms crossed behind her head, staring up at the bunk above her. She had the sense that life was going to begin for her, a new door opening to her future. She thought of fooling around with Donovan behind the mirror and made a face. Probably a dumb move.
Outside her window, she heard, “Psst. Emma . . .”
“Go to bed, Donovan,” she said, bored, and rolled over.
* * *
Sometime in the night she woke to a cry outside. She sat up and opened the slats above the screened window. Holy shit. Was that fog, creeping in like a thief, slowly moving inside? It was August. Maybe it hadn’t heard that it wasn’t allowed this late in the summer.
Shivering, she rose from her bed and stared through the window into the night, smothered now in a layer of dark gray. Well, it was here. Feeling a strange inner quailing, she stepped back from the window. Grabbing her flashlight, she headed outside, surprised that the door was already unlocked. The now cooler air feathered against her skin, causing a shiver. She wanted to look inside other cabins and assure herself that everyone was in bed, but if she flashed her light she might scare whoever was there.
Instead, she felt her way through the dark and fog around her cabin. She stopped when she was closest to the lake, hearing scraping, heavy breathing—and maybe crying? She hesitated, realizing she’d heard a piercing shriek, and that’s what had wakened her. Should she turn on her flashlight? Would it even penetrate through this gray curtain? New noises sounded. Was that someone dragging one of the canoes over the scattered stones by the lake?
A few minutes later she heard footsteps and saw a quick burst of illumination from someone’s flashlight. It was several people, trying to stealthily make their way toward the cabins. Emma shrank back, her fingers feeling the rough cedar shakes of her cabin’s wall. She worked her way noiselessly back toward the doorway and sneaked inside ahead of them. She saw a few more quick stabs of light as the group came forward. One of them was crying. A girl.
Wendy.
She was being helped along by Brooke and Rona.
Emma quickly climbed into her bed and stayed stock-still as she heard the faint squeak of cabin doors opening and closing. She shut her eyes. Their collective breathing was stuttered and Rona shushed them. A beam of light swung her way and seemed to pause before passing over her. Had they seen her when she was outside? Or had the fog made her invisible?
When all was quiet Emma opened her eyes again, gazing into the dark. What had they been up to? She decided she would talk to them the next day about it, maybe cut one of them—Wendy, the weakest link—from the herd and find out.
But she never had the chance. The next morning the fog made it hard to see anything and Joy, who’d returned sometime in the night and was apparently affected by the tales of the “sentient” fog as well, kept everyone inside. It took several days for the weather to clear and when it did it also became clear that Ryan wasn’t around. Emma caught up with Wendy, who admitted the three of them had been out, but the fog had swept in so suddenly it had scared them. They’d been down by the lake, sharing a joint, and had just run for cover. She swore they hadn’t seen Ryan at all.
But then when Ryan didn’t appear that day, the three friends had to admit to Joy that they’d been out at the lake, but they hadn’t seen him. Joy reported him missing to the sheriff’s department. The search extended to Haven Commune, but there was still no sign of him. He was just gone.
In the days following, Emma noticed something else. The three “hot chicks” were pretty cool to one another. Though they pretended to still be friends and were totally concerned about Ryan, the Laurelton High girls’ friendship had hit a wall. They seemed to have stopped talking amongst themselves. Was it something to do with Ryan? Somehow Emma didn’t think so. She thought back to what she knew of them and considered she might have an inkling of what caused the rift, but kept it to herself. Rona, sensing Emma’s interest, demanded, “What do you know?” but Emma, as ever, simply ignored her. She just wanted to go home. All summer she’d distanced herself some from the camp shenanigans, and now she was completely over them.
* * *
The last days of camp Emma kept her eye on the three “friends.” The consensus about Ryan was he’d just left. Joy apparently knew that this was within Ryan’s MO from his overbearing parents and she was more pissed than worried that he’d used her camp as a jumping-off point. The guys seemed to consider Ryan some kind of hero that he’d bailed. If they noticed Rona, Brooke, and Wendy’s estrangement, they didn’t care. Summer was over. They’d either scored with them or hadn’t. From Emma’s point of view, that’s all the guys had cared about anyway. The last night they tried to get everyone around the campfire again, but no one was interested.
In the middle of that night Emma heard a loud noise. A shout. Her eyes flew open. Outside the window flashlights bobbed white in the darkness, an uncoordinated light show. Deep male voices reached her ears.
She climbed out of her sleeping bag and ran outside, but stopped short. Joy was standing by one of the lodge posts, a black jacket thrown over her sweats and T-shirt—Emma’s sleeping garb as well. When Joy didn’t see her, Emma stayed in the shadows and just listened.
Marlon, the camp handyman, broke from the group of flash-lighted seekers and told Joy in his gravelly voice that Ryan had been found. His body was floating on top of the lake.
But that wasn’t all. A girl from Haven Commune was dead as well. She’d been found lying on the slab at Suicide Ledge, her arms crossed over her breast, ashes strewn over her body.
So, there were ashes, Emma thought, grasping onto a random thought as she inwardly reeled from Ryan’s death.
“They were lovers,” Marlon rasped. “He killed her and killed himself.”
“Oh, my Lord . . . my Lord,” whispered Joy.
Emma pulled her shoulders in.
Suicide Ledge had claimed another.
The next day, Joy closed the camp and it stayed that way for nearly twenty years.
Chapter 2
Now...
Emma looked straight ahead at Miss Kacey, her therapist. She understood what Miss Kacey was saying, but she wanted to clap her hands over her ears because Miss Kacey said the same thing over and over again and it was nothing Emma wanted to hear.
“We’ve talked about this, Emma,” Miss Kacey was saying patiently. She was always patient. “Your injury has made it difficult for you to really consider all the possibilities, even hidden dangers, that being a surrogate for your sister might entail. Pregnancy comes with a lot of responsibility.”
“I’m responsible,” said Emma.
“Yes, you are. Very responsible. But you know you don’t have the same problem-solving skills that you did before the accident.”
“It wasn’t an accident.”
“No, it wasn’t,” the therapist agreed, momentarily at a loss to continue.
Emma couldn’t quite remember the attack during her senior year of high school that had left a jack-o’-lantern-shaped scar on her back and had caused her head to hit the fireplace mantel, causing permanent damage. But she could remember being scared. She squinched her shoulders together at the memory even now, though it had happened a long, long time ago. Lots of years. Decades, she’d heard Jamie say. Decades were lots of years.