This was the narrative Amy was telling herself, though she knew she wasn’t going back for the phone for John’s professional well-being. She knew she was going back to check the thing that she never checked.
Amy opened the driver’s-side door and looked at the display panel on the phone. It read, “Molly: One New Message.” It was not the first time she’d seen this name pop up on John’s phone. He thought Amy was so clueless that he didn’t need to take any precautions to remain discreet. Or perhaps he simply didn’t care.
But this time, she did not turn the phone over and pretend she hadn’t seen the notification. This time, she opened the phone and read the message.
“Are you staying in Connecticut tonight?” it read.
Amy’s heart pounded as her fingers rested on the keypad. Then she moved them along the keys, the answer coming to her quickly, thoughtlessly.
“Yes,” she responded, though this was a lie. They would drive back to Larchmont when the day was over. “Don’t wait up.”
She hit SEND. She held the phone open, watching it, waiting for a response. It came fast.
“:( Tomorrow night?”
Again, she did not hesitate. “Yes,” she typed. “I’ll say I have to work late.” Sent.
“Okay :)” Molly responded.
Amy closed the phone fast and threw it across the car like it was too hot to hold. She had things to bring Helen, a day to spend with her daughter. She hoped Fiona would at least stop by and say hi. She carried the shopping bags up the hill.
And as she approached the section, she could see Fiona was already there, wearing her navy camp staff polo. John was standing at the entrance to Helen’s tent, and the girls were standing close to each other, and—could Amy believe it?—they were laughing.
Fiona looked over and noticed her mother. “Mom!” She waved. Amy felt that uninhibited smile come on.
She placed the bags on the ground and approached the girls.
“Hi, sweetheart,” she said to Fiona. “You look marvelous.”
“I’ve missed you, Mom,” Fiona said. She had not said that once during her first year of being away at college.
“I’ve missed you too,” Amy said. She put an arm around each of her girls’ shoulders and kissed each of their foreheads and held them close to her breast.
Since she was a teen, she had been afraid of what had, long ago, become true: that she could, at any moment, lose her luster. That for John, she could so easily become old news.
8
There was something rebellious in Nell that Mo did not have an iota of in herself. Nell did not do things because she was supposed to; she just did what she wanted. She decided very quickly whom she liked and whom she didn’t and never pretended otherwise. She did not buy into the scene at the staff lodge where, every night after lights-out, the counselors made out with one another and in front of one another on the seedy couches, drank cans of cheap beer, and filled the basement with clouds of smoke. Sometimes Mo went to be social, but often Nell convinced her to do things as just the two of them, like walk down to the lake with bottles of beer.
One evening, with their bottles of Heineken—which they’d bought on their day off and hidden in the back of one of the kitchen’s industrial fridges—they sat with their denim shorts in the sand and their feet in the temperate, murky water. On their third beers—more than they usually drank—Nell began to talk about her life at home. They were about four weeks into camp, though as Nell began to talk about her conservative parents, about the oppressive boarding school she had attended, Mo realized how little they had told each other about their outside lives. What they had bonded over was their Englishness, their newness to the camp, their love of horses, and, perhaps most profoundly, the feeling Mo had that both of them didn’t really belong there. They were different somehow, not just because they were foreign or new—because plenty of the counselors were foreign or new—but because they both, for reasons Mo couldn’t quite explain, couldn’t assimilate into the Camp Marigold universe.
Nell was explaining how her parents had tried to put her on an antidepressant a couple of months earlier.
“It was all a secret, of course,” she said in her posh accent, and took a swig of her beer. “They’re too upper-crust for anything like that to get out.”
“What was wrong?”
“I was ‘unstable’ after graduating school,” she said, using her fingers to make quotation marks in the air. “And my A levels weren’t good enough to get into any uni they liked.”
“So you’re not going to uni?” Mo asked.
“I am,” Nell said. “Just not to one they think is good enough.”
Nell looked like a classic beauty—long red hair, porcelain skin, thin but curvy—but didn’t act like one. She was disdainful of other pretty girls, as if she didn’t know she was one of them, and of men too, like they all had some agenda she wasn’t buying into. She had a dirty mouth, and Mo, who was in charge of the section of thirteen-year-old girls, often had to remind Nell, the head horseback-riding counselor, to watch herself in front of the campers. Mo wasn’t actually sure what had appealed to Nell about working with kids to begin with or if she had just come to the camp to get away from a life back home.
“What does that mean, ‘unstable’?” Mo asked.
“I cried a lot. Even when I felt fine, I couldn’t stop,” Nell said. “And then after crying all day, I would go out, drink too much”—she lifted her bottle—“and go home with someone. Then same thing all over again the next day. You know.”
Mo nodded, though she didn’t know.
“So this was my solution.” She swept a hand toward the lake and toward the camp behind them. “I never took the medications. Threw them in the trash.”
“And what do you think? Did it work?” Mo asked, already half-knowing the answer.
“Camp? I don’t know. I’d hardly say it’s won me over.”
—
The next morning, Mo left her bunk sometime before dawn and went down to the stables. She had to move slowly in the darkness down the sloping hill from girls’ camp. She cut across the athletic fields, thick with unkempt dandelions and slick with midsummer dew, to the red-roofed barn.
She normally did not ride in the early mornings, as she didn’t like to deprive Micah of any sleep before his full days with rowdy kids. But she had stirred in her bunk all night, the anxiety of the approaching day resting heavily on her, and this was, and always had been, the only way to alleviate such anxieties. Today, she had a certain impression to make: that her girls were happy and well fed, active but staying out of trouble. She had to meet parents and be much more gregarious than was her nature.