Summer at Willow Lake (8 page)

“Mom, do you think you’ll go?”

“It would be petty to do otherwise.”

“Good for you,” Olivia said. “It’ll be fine. Listen, I have to dig out some things from the basement.” She studied her mother’s lovely, composed face. “My duffel bag and sports equipment. And I need Dad’s old footlocker,” she added. Then her heart sank. “Tell me you didn’t throw it out.”

“I never throw anything away. Ever,” her mother said.

Which explained much about Pamela. Fresh as yesterday, Olivia could remember the day her father had moved out. She could still picture the way he looked through a blur of tears, as if he was on the other side of a rain-smudged window. He’d sat down so he could look her in the eye. “I have to go, honey,” he’d told her.

“No, you don’t. But you’re going to, anyway.”

He’d refused to be dissuaded. The unspoken tension that had always existed between Olivia’s parents had finally reached the breaking point. It should have been a relief, but Olivia could never recall feeling relieved.

“I’m leaving some boxes of my stuff in the basement,” her father had told her, “including all my sports equipment and camp gear. It’s all yours now.”

Every once in a while, she’d take out his old Kioga sweatshirt and put it on, or wrap herself in the Hudson’s Bay blanket, which smelled of mothballs.

She took the service elevator, descending alone into the bowels of the old building, and let herself into the storage unit. She found her duffel right away. The stiff canvas was covered with a patchwork of badges from Kioga, marking every summer from 1987 to 1994. Most campers avidly collected the coveted patches, each of which represented a magical summer at sleepaway camp. Not Olivia. Though she had dutifully sewn on her patches in order to keep from offending her grandparents, the colorful badges held no sentimental value for her. Nana and Granddad were convinced that the camp was Shangri-la and it would hurt their feelings to say otherwise.

Olivia set aside the duffel bag and looked around the crowded but well-organized basement room, dank with disuse and old memories. There were framed photographs of Olivia and her father and leather-bound albums labeled Bellamy. Pulling out the large, heavy footlocker her father had left behind for Olivia all those years ago, she opened the lid and was hit with a musty smell she could immediately put a name to: camp. It was an unforgettable combination of mildew, wood smoke and outdoors, an essence that resisted laundering and airing out.

Rifling through the locker, she helped herself to a lantern and a book on wilderness survival, and grabbed a vintage Kioga hooded sweatshirt with the words Camp Counselor stenciled on the back. In the Bellamy family, it wasn’t enough to be a camper. As each individual came of age, working as a counselor was a rite of passage. Olivia’s father, all her aunts and uncles had spent college summers there, leading camp activities by day and partying at night with the rest of the staff. Olivia and the next generation of cousins had done the same, right up until the camp had closed nine years ago. It was a summer that had begun with great promise but ended in disaster. She was surprised by how vividly she recalled the sounds and smells, the quality of the light and the stillness of the lake, the dizzying joy and nauseating disappointment she’d experienced that summer. I’m crazy for going back there, she thought.

She stuffed a few key items of memorabilia into the duffel bags—the striped Hudson’s Bay blanket, the sweatshirt, an old tennis racquet that needed to be restrung. There were wooden pins with campers’ names burnt in, canoe paddles that had been painted with surprising skill, the shafts autographed by other campers. Songbooks, friendship bracelets, dipped candles and birch-bark craft projects—it was a treasure trove.

The key to staging a property was in the details—the more authentic, the better. Things like this would bring the camp back to life, and she was counting on her aunts and uncles to contribute to the collection. In the bottom of the footlocker, she found a tennis cup, tarnished and battered. It had a pedestal, a domed lid and double handles. The piece would look handsome in the glass trophy case in the dining hall of the camp, assuming the display case was still there.

When she picked up the tennis cup, something rolled around inside it. She pried off the lid, and an object fell out. A button? A cuff link. It, too, was wrought of tarnished silver, with a fish design—maybe a zodiac sign? She looked around for its mate, but there was only the one. She put the cuff link in her pocket and rubbed the trophy, trying to make out the engraving: Counselors Classic. First Place. Philip Bellamy. 1977. Apparently her father had won the cup at the annual staff games while working as a counselor at Camp Kioga that year. He would have been twenty-one, getting ready to go off for his senior year at college.

She found an old photograph stuck down inside the cup. The edges of the picture were curled, the colors fading, but the image made her catch her breath. She saw her father as she had never seen him before, holding the sparkling new trophy aloft. He appeared to be laughing with joy, his head thrown back and his arm around a girl. No, a young woman.

Olivia wiped the dusty photograph on her sleeve and angled it toward the light. On the back, the photo bore the date—August 1977—and nothing else. She studied the woman more closely. Long dark hair, cut in feathery layers, spilled loosely over the shoulders of her camp shirt. The abundant waves of hair framed an attractive face and a smile that might be tinged with a hint of mystery. With her full lips, high cheekbones and dark, almond-shaped eyes, the stranger was an exotic beauty whose looks contrasted with the ordinary shorts and shirt she wore.

There was something in the way the man and woman in the photograph seemed bonded together that sent a chill of curiosity through Olivia. A certain familiarity—no, intimacy—was evident in their posture. Or maybe she was reading too much into it.

Olivia knew she could ask her father who the stranger was. She was quite sure he’d remember a woman who could make him laugh the way he was laughing in the photograph. But she didn’t want to upset him, asking about an old girlfriend. There was probably a very good reason she was a stranger.

Something about the old photograph bothered Olivia. She studied it a moment longer. Looked at the date again. August 1977. That was it. By August 1977, her father was engaged to her mother, and they married later that year, at Christmastime.

So what was he doing with the woman in the photograph?

CAMP KIOGA CODE OF CONDUCT

Display of overly affectionate attention between males and females is discouraged. This applies to campers, counselors and staff members alike.

Four

August 1977

“P
hilip, what are you doing?” asked Mariska Majesky, stepping into the bungalow.

He stopped pacing and turned, his heart lifting at the sight of her in a beautiful chiffon cocktail dress and platform shoes, her dark, wavy hair swept up off suntanned shoulders.

“Rehearsing,” he confessed, his chest filled with joy and dread, the intense emotions waging an undeclared war.

She tilted her head to one side in that adorable way she had of conveying curiosity. “Rehearsing what?”

“I’m practicing what I’m going to say to Pamela when she gets back from Europe,” he explained. “Trying to figure out how to end our engagement.” Since his fiancée had gone overseas, there had been only a few brief, unsatisfactory phone conversations, a hasty flurry of postcards and aerograms. The Italian telephone system was famously unreliable, and destroying her dreams over a crackling transatlantic wire or in a letter didn’t cut it.

Next week, she would return and then he’d tell her in person. It was going to turn him into the heel of the century.

The only thing worse was spending the rest of his life with someone who didn’t own his heart the way Mariska did.

Now Mariska grew serious, her full mouth forming a sad smile. Philip hugged her. She smelled fantastic, a heady mixture of flowers and fruit, and she fit just right in his arms, as though heaven itself had made her for him, exactly like the song said. Her nearness made him forget his worries about Pamela.

“I picked these up at the one-hour-photo place today.” Mariska took an envelope out of her purse. “There’s a shot of us. I ordered double prints, so you can keep a copy.” Flipping through the snapshots of the day’s sporting events at the camp, she pulled out one of her and Philip, laughing in triumph as he held a bright silver trophy cup aloft.

His heart constricted. He looked so damn happy. In that moment, he had been happy. Taking the tennis trophy down from the luggage rack, he put the snapshot inside it and replaced the lid. “Thank you,” he said.

She crossed the room and kissed him. “We should go. It’s the last dance of the summer, and you know how I love dancing.”

Each summer, the season ended with a series of rituals. Yesterday, the campers had all gone home. Today was the staff’s farewell, a dinner dance that would end at midnight. By this time tomorrow, nearly everyone else would be gone, the college-age counselors all heading back to school.

“Let’s go,” she urged him, pulling back and taking his hand. “I don’t want to muss my hair.” She eyed him with a mischievous gleam in her eye. “Not yet, anyway.”

Even that oblique promise was enough to send him into overdrive. As they left the bungalow, he buttoned his sports coat and hoped his physical reaction to her nearness wasn’t too obvious. As he had since the beginning of summer, he cast a furtive glance around the area to make sure they hadn’t been spotted. Kioga had strict rules about fraternizing among counselors and other workers, and just because his parents owned the place didn’t mean he was exempt.

Mariska wasn’t a counselor, but she was supposed to be off-limits, too. She and her mother, Helen, supplied the baked goods to the camp. From the age of fourteen, Mariska had driven the white panel van up the mountain every morning at dawn, bringing bread, pastries, muffins and cookies to the dining hall. The local police looked the other way when the delivery truck lumbered past. Mariska’s mother, a Polish immigrant, had never learned to drive. Her father was on swing shift at the glassworks down in Kingston. They were a working-class family and the authorities were sympathetic to their plight. They weren’t about to ticket an underage girl for helping out with the family business.

As Philip and Mariska strolled through the forest at twilight, he couldn’t resist slipping his arm around her. She tucked herself against his shoulder. “Careful,” she said softly, “someone might see.”

“I hate all this sneaking around.” A sick guilt flurried in his gut. It was definitely not cool, falling in love with another girl while your fiancée was overseas. He couldn’t help himself, though. He had been helpless to resist Mariska, even though he wasn’t free to be with her. She was so understanding, complicit in the secrecy, but he suspected she was as eager as he was to stop hiding it. The moment Pamela returned, he’d end it with her and then he could finally show the world what was in his heart.

“You’re looking at me funny,” Mariska said. “What’s that look?”

“I’m trying to figure out the exact moment I fell in love with you.”

“That’s easy. It was that night back in June after Founders’ Day.”

He couldn’t help smiling at the memory, even though she was wrong. “That was the first time we had sex. I fell in love with you way before that.”

They reached the end of the gravel path and, out of habit, separated, keeping their distance. In the pavilion across the field, the farewell dance was already in full swing. A disco ball spun slowly from the center, its facets creating a strobelike effect on the crowded dance floor. People seemed more frenetic than usual, at least they did to Philip. But perhaps that was his imagination.

Outside the pavilion, he stopped walking.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“Dance with me. Right here, right now.”

“These shoes aren’t doing so well in the grass,” she protested.

“Then take them off. I want to dance with you in private where no one can see, so I can hold you exactly the way I want.” Once they made an appearance at the pavilion, they would have to go their separate ways, pretending they were just friends. For now, he wanted to dance with her like a lover.

With a silky laugh, she kicked off her shoes and slipped into his arms. The house band was playing a passable rendition of “Stairway to Heaven,” and they danced in the dark, where no one could see them. She felt wonderful in his arms, and his heart soared at the thought that, very soon, the whole world would know she was his.

Pulling her close and swaying to the music, he bent and whispered in her ear, “It didn’t happen all at once. Me, falling in love with you. I think it started four years ago, when you first started delivering stuff to the dining hall.” He could still picture her, sun browned and serious, a hardworking girl who couldn’t quite hide her envy of the privileged city kids whose parents could afford to send them to summer camp. She had moved him then, a beautiful girl wanting something she couldn’t have. And she moved him now, a beautiful woman whose dreams were finally within reach.

“Each summer when I came here,” he said, “I was more and more into you.”

“You never did anything about it until this summer,” she pointed out, a note of gentle chiding in her voice.

“I didn’t think you wanted me to.”

“Oh, I did. I wanted you to sweep me off my feet.”

He laughed and did exactly that, scooping her up with one arm under her knees, the other behind her shoulders. “Like this?”

She made a sound of surprise and clung to his neck. “Exactly.”

He kissed her then, slowly and hungrily, and wished he had acted on his feelings long before this summer. What an idiot he’d been, thinking those feelings weren’t real, expecting each summer that the attraction would be gone. Maybe he’d spent a little too much time with his father’s parents, the redoubtable Grandmother and Grandfather Bellamy, who claimed it was impossible to love someone from a different class. They were fond of reminding Philip that he was a young man of sophistication, with a first-class education and the brightest of prospects for his future. A girl like Mariska, who attended a small-town high school, who worked at her family’s bakery and part-time at the local jewelry store, would be considered an unfortunate mismatch for him.