He parked his car in front of the camp office. Mo opened her door but Jack remained still.
“Micah’s lived a good life,” Jack said. “He’s our oldest horse here. Did you know that? Twenty-eight years old.”
“Yeah. I did.”
“Mo,” he said, turning to look at her, “we’ll be putting him down tonight, after the campers are asleep. It will be easy and painless.”
“It’s not because he’s old, though,” Mo heard herself saying. “I woke him up too early yesterday morning. You saw. It was a long day, and he was tired.”
“I know you’re upset, Mo,” he said. “We all are.” He put his hand on her knee. “You can come down to the stables while we do it if that’ll make you feel better. Maybe it will give you a sense of closure,” he said. “I know how you loved him.”
She pushed his hand away. “Don’t touch me.” Before he could respond, she got out and slammed the car door.
When she got back to the Hemlock section, she found the girls running around getting ready for breakfast and Rachel standing on top of the picnic table in the center, shrieking out warnings. “Five minutes to flag raising!”
Mo approached Rachel. “You can get down,” Mo said. “I can take over.”
Rachel looked startled. “I didn’t realize you were back. Is she okay?”
Mo nodded.
“What about Micah? Is he hurt?”
Mo hesitated. “Really, I can take it from here,” she said, stepping onto the bench of the picnic table.
But Rachel shook her head. “What’s going on?”
Mo was not equipped to deal with as much catastrophe as she had had to that day. She took a deep breath and said in what she hoped was a calm but empathetic tone, “They’re going to put him down tonight.”
A gasp came out of Rachel, and then she put a hand over her mouth, as if doing so would hide her reaction. “Oh,” she said, composing herself.
“I’m so sorry,” Mo said, putting a hand awkwardly on Rachel’s forearm. She hadn’t known that the horse had meant anything to Rachel.
Rachel looked down at Mo’s hand.
“Why don’t you get some rest?” Rachel said. “You must be exhausted.”
It was true; she’d hardly slept in the brightly lit waiting room.
Rachel turned away from Mo and called out to the girls again: “Five minutes till flag raising!”
Mo descended from the picnic table, then walked into the head tent. Nell was just rousing herself from her bed; she was a late sleeper.
“How is she?” Nell asked, and stood.
“She’s going to be okay,” Mo said. “I don’t know if her father will let her come back, though.” She decided not to tell Nell about Micah just yet.
“That’s really sad,” Nell said. “You look so tired.”
“I am.”
“Go to sleep,” she said. “I’ll take care of the girls.”
Mo nodded and climbed into her own bunk, across from Nell’s. But just as Nell had been getting up, Mo had realized that Nell did not look the same to her. Nell could not look the same, not after Sheera’s fall. Not after Micah had been sentenced to death and Mo had seen Rachel’s reaction to it. Not after they had talked on the phone the night before and Mo had imagined Nell’s mouth near the phone’s receiver. Mo’s thoughts felt thick with exhaustion, but she understood thoroughly, instinctively, that everything had changed.
“Nell,” Mo said from her bunk, and Nell walked toward her.
Mo did not say “Come here,” because she already sensed that Nell knew to do so. She knelt down to Mo’s eye level. Mo had always assumed that she would be the one pursued and not the other way around. She could tell, by the way that Nell’s face looked so open and pure, like a blank canvas ready to be painted over, that Nell too was surprised to be the pursued, not the pursuer. When Mo pulled Nell’s chin toward her face, Nell exhaled, as if a sense of relief came from the submission itself.
9
Nell and Mo heard the gunshot because they were listening for it. They were lying in Mo’s bunk together in the tent they shared, side by side. Their fingers were intertwined. When the shot rang out—it easily could have been a car backfiring or fireworks to any unsuspecting ears—Mo jumped.
Nell and Mo had no beers of their own left, so when they were finished crying, they went down to the staff lodge.
They didn’t go to the staff lodge often because they didn’t like any of the other counselors. There were the Americans, the Brits, the Australians, and a handful of more exotic foreigners, whom the Anglophones were drawn to like mosquitoes to sweet blood. Marco from Portugal, who taught mountain biking, was short but tan and compact, and Philippa S. and Philippa J. sat with him at picnic tables on the athletic fields when they should have been watching campers and taught him “blow job” and “rim job” and other jobs they wanted to perform on him. Chloé, from France, ate everything, in moderation, and still looked thin in a bikini, and Devon and Alex and Blake chased after her, asking, “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?” though Finn from the Netherlands, who was apparently a basketball star in Ukraine, was already fucking her in the oar house every night.
Nell sat down on one of the couches with a can of beer. Devon, a lifeguard, sat next to her and offered her a joint.
Nell took a hit and blew smoke toward the ceiling.
“I’m sorry about your horse,” he said. He had a shaved head and a thick Manchester accent.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Fucking brutal, watching,” Devon said. “Wonder if the kids heard it.” Nell was the lead horseback-riding counselor, and Jack had asked her to be there to bring the horse out into the open field. She had refused. So a few of the men, including Devon, had done it instead.
Earlier that night, they’d also learned that Sheera’s father had decided not to let her return to camp.
Micah’s age had been his death sentence. Any horse could have done the same thing in reaction to such a loud clap of thunder, but twenty-eight was senior enough to make senility plausible, and a good camp just couldn’t keep around a senior horse that had given one of its campers a concussion. And, though no one would ever say it aloud, the fact that Sheera was one of the camp’s few black kids—well, that hadn’t helped his case either.
Nell took a deep swig of her beer.
“Tell me something, Red.” Devon leaned back, appraising her, the joint burning between his fingers. “When you started riding, you ever have that thing happen to you that you hear about?”
“?‘Thing happen’?”
“Ya know, like”—he moved closer; his breath was coated with weed and whiskey—“you ever bleed some? Down there?”
Nell took the joint again. “I think that’s an urban myth.”
“I don’t believe you, Red.” He yelled across the room: “Philippa! Come here for a sec.”
The Philippa with bleached hair and a fringe tottered over.
“You rode horses as a girl, yeah?”
“Yeah, why?” Philippa sat down on one of his knees, then reached across to take the joint from Nell. He placed a hand on Philippa’s back, just above her ass.