“Tom stayed with her for months. Later Sarah moved closer to home, and he helped with the kids while she returned to school to study social work. Outreach to the disabled, that was her field.
“Now, as it happens, Tom Storey had supervised worship at Camp Wyndham since the 1980s, and was made camp director a decade later. The spring that Nick turned seven, Sarah suggested the camp host a two-week program for the deaf, and Tom made it happen.
“They went looking for counselors who knew how to sign, and I fit the bill. I learned sign language as a lad from my deaf Irish mother . . . which, I add, charmed quite a few of the kids, who liked to say my hands had an Irish accent. I was in the States to collect a master’s degree and was glad to get a decent-paying summer job. A man just can’t earn a living wage selling Smurfpecker in this blighted nation. I have to tell you, heroin dealers and meth slingers have made your country a wretched place to be a simple, honest drug dealer who wants to give his customers a lovingly curated experience.
“Tom hired me to teach outdoorsy stuff—what berries you could eat, what leaves not to wipe with, how to make fire without matches. I was always especially good at that last trick. On arrival we were each assigned a cute name. I was dubbed Woody John. Sarah got to be Ranger Sarah.
“We had a few days of orientation and training before the kids arrived, and I wasn’t there long before I could see being named Woody was going to be a problem. On the very first day, Sarah greeted me by saying, ‘Morning, Wood,’ with a darling look of sweet innocence on her face. The other counselors heard her and fell all over the place laughing. Pretty soon everyone was saying it. ‘Who’s got Wood?’ ‘Hey, guys, don’t be so hard on Wood.’ ‘I’ve been walking around all morning with Wood.’ You get the idea.
“Well, the night before the kids were due to show up, we were all having some beers together, and I told her maybe one day if she was lucky and played her cards right, she might wake up with Wood. That got some laughs. She said it would be more like waking up with a splinter in an awkward place, and that got more.
“I asked her how come she got to be Ranger Sarah, and she said since she was program director she was allowed to pick her own name. So I announced by ancient English law I had the right to challenge her authority with trial by combat. I told her we’d settle it on the dartboard. We’d each get one throw. If I hit closer to the center, I could rename both her and myself. And I warned her ahead of time that I would be choosing Bushmaster for me and the Camp Beaver for her. She said I was going to lose, and she’d let me know my new name after the game, and that soon enough I’d be longing for the days when I was plain old Woody.
“By now everyone was deadly serious. And by ‘deadly serious’ I mean ‘crying on the ground.’ Of course I liked my odds. When I was an undergrad I spent more time in pubs throwing darts than I did in classrooms taking notes. I stood well back and nearly hit bull’s-eye without so much as a warm-up. Suddenly everyone went completely silent. Awestruck by my powers.
“Sarah didn’t so much as blink. She pulled this little hatchet out of her belt, walked to the line, and chucked it. She didn’t just hit bull’s-eye, she split the board in half. She told me, ‘You never said I had to throw a dart.’ Well, that was how I became Tosser John. On account of how well I could toss a dart.
“And I suppose that’s where it started—the feeling like we belonged together.
“At the time camp officially got going, Allie and her mother were hardly speaking. Allie, who was all of fourteen, had been dropped by her third therapist after throwing a paperweight at his balls. She had wrecked her mother’s car after taking some boys for a spin in it. Older boys. I couldn’t tell you how much of her behavior was a result of being kidnapped by a parent when she was in third grade, but certainly her anger went well beyond the ordinary teenage stuff. She hated her mother for exerting any control over her at all, and was furious she had been forced to work as a counselor-in-training. Those first few days were ugly. Allie would wander away from the kids to do things with her cell phone. If she didn’t like what they were serving in the cafeteria, she’d walk out of camp and hitch a ride into town to meet up with friends. And so on.
“Sarah decided Allie was going to join her on an overnight backpacking trip to the Jade Well—a pool of icy water beneath an eighteen-foot cliff. Perhaps she had decided to strangle her and figured it would be easiest to hide the body out in the deep dark woods. They needed a third grown-up and drafted me. Off we went with twelve little kids on a ten-mile hike, walking in a cloud of mosquitoes. All I can say is thank God the children were deaf. Allie and Sarah cursed each other the whole way. When Allie glanced at her phone once, Sarah confiscated it. Allie would let branches snap back into her mother’s face. The kids knew something was wrong and were getting more and more rattled.
“By the time we reached the Jade Well, the two of them were screaming at each other. Everyone was sunburnt and chewed to pieces. Sarah was furious at Allie for forgetting the bug spray back at the bus, and Allie was angry at Sarah for blaming the mistake on her, and I was ready to quit. They were standing near the edge of the cliff and I just couldn’t help myself. I took them both by the arm and dropped them over the side, right in their boots. And do you know what? They both came up laughing . . . laughing and spitting water at each other.
“The two of them were after me the rest of the hike. When they served out hot dogs they passed me a nice fresh tampon in a roll. They opened the roof of my tent at two A.M. and doused me with cold water. They spritzed me with hair spray instead of suntan lotion. And you know what? It was good. The hike out was as happy as the hike in had been miserable. The kids took to protecting me from Ranger Sarah and Muskrat-in-Training Allie. Nick especially. I think Nick decided it was his special responsibility to protect me from the madwomen in his family. He was my bodyguard for the rest of the summer.
“There was one more overnight hike on the last weekend of camp. That was the night Sarah unzipped my tent. She only said one thing. ‘Did I play my cards right?’
“We had almost exactly a year together as a couple after that. She wanted to swim the Great Barrier Reef. I wish we had gone. I wish we had read books to each other. We had one weekend of sexy-times in New York City while her father looked after the kids. I wish we’d had more. I wish we’d walked more. I wish we hadn’t sat in front of the TV so much. It was nice, we cuddled, we laughed at Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers, but it didn’t make much in the way of memories. We did such ordinary, banal things. Ordered pizza and played Trivial Pursuit with her sister and her dad. Helped the kids with homework. We did dishes together more than we ever made love. What kind of life is that?”
“Real life,” Harper said.