—
Helen had a dream that she was in the swimming pool in Florida with her brother, Liam, again. She was grown, but he was holding her like a child, rocking her back and forth, and singing “The Circle Game” to lull her to sleep.
“Take your time, it won’t be long now
Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down.”
She fell asleep in his arms, and then they went underwater, where he continued to sing.
13
The new counselor for tent three—the one who had replaced Rachel—opened the front flaps of the head tent so wide that Mo knew, even in her just-awakened state, that something was wrong.
“What is it?” Mo croaked. Nell, in the bunk across from Mo’s, stirred and turned toward the wall.
“I don’t—” the counselor began. “I think—”
“What?” Mo said, though she was already pulling herself out of bed, readying herself for a crisis. Over the past eight weeks, she had come to know, almost instinctively, if someone was panicking for no good reason.
“I can’t—” The counselor shook her head, unable to say what she really needed to. “Just come to the tent now.”
Mo stood and followed, in her pajamas, across the section circle to tent three. She saw that five girls were standing outside, also in their pj’s, bleary-eyed and disoriented and shivering, even though it wasn’t very cold that morning. This tent seemed to her a glutton for tragedy. Sheera hadn’t come back to camp after her accident, but the girls in her tent talked about her often, as if she were their martyr, as if they had been friends with her the whole time. And then after Rachel left, they did the same thing—idolized her, talked about her like she had died.
Four of the girls were huddled together, but Sarah, the fifth, was standing away from the group with her arms wrapped around herself.
“Mo’s here,” Sarah said. “Mo. She’s not waking up, Mo.”
The other girls looked up at Mo as if she could make it better. Staring at the begging faces and with possibilities swirling through her own mind, she took quick stock of the girls in front of her and then came a razor-sharp thought: Helen is missing. Helen is in there.
Helen seemed like a confident, happy girl, the kind who was so fun and carefree that other, more anxious girls flocked to her. Mo had observed her spending a lot of time with Mikey Bombowski, but it seemed so innocent. The way she stood apart from him when they were together, like she was afraid to touch him, afraid of what might happen to her if she did. Mo understood the feeling well.
The girls watched Mo as she walked into the tent with what she hoped was a fearless expression on her face. She did feel a certain power come over her; it would be crass to call it an adrenaline rush, but it was something akin to being entirely out of her head and in her body. All she experienced was that she was moving—not like she was willing herself to do it, but like her body was progressing on its own, one step coming after another. Not unlike the way she felt when she had run onto the field after Sheera had fallen off the horse. She watched her feet ascend the two steps to the tent and her hand opening the flap. She briefly let the light in before letting the flap drop. Then it was dark again aside from the thin slivers of light coming in through the cracks in the canvas.
She could just make out Helen on the top bunk. Perfectly still. Mo stepped onto the wooden frame of the bottom bunk to gain some height. She put her ear to the girl’s mouth. Mo touched the girl’s forehead, half believing that all it would take for her to wake up was for Mo to place a hand on her sleeping body.
She wasn’t warm, but not cold either. As Mo’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, she was able to make out Helen’s face: eyes closed and lips turned upward in a closed-mouth smile, as if she were in the middle of a nice dream.
Mo had the dual sensation of both wanting and not wanting to do what she did next: take her own hand from where it was resting on the forehead and move it along the jawline and to the pulse. There was nothing.
Was her hand on the wrong side of the girl’s neck? Perhaps it was.
Mo traced her hand across the neck to the other side. She put her two fingers where a pulse should be. Surely she still wasn’t trying the right place. She put her fingers on her own pulse to remind herself what a healthy heartbeat felt like. Then she put them back on the girl’s neck, searching every inch of skin to find it.
She put her ear to the girl’s mouth, to see if there was some sign of breath, and then to her nose. She moved her ear to the chest, listening for a heartbeat, though of course logic would tell her later that when there’s no pulse, there’s no heartbeat either. She was jittery, on edge, because she was sure that Helen would awaken at any moment and startle Mo, and Mo would jump and say, “Jesus Christ, you scared me.” She took her two hands and pumped the girl’s chest: right in the center of her chest, between the nipples, just as she had been taught in staff training. She pumped forcefully, creating a steady rhythm, working up a sweat. She paused to open the girl’s mouth and breathe some life into it. She pumped again.
She sensed light coming into the tent while she worked.
She heard Nell’s voice. “Oh my God.”
Mo looked up. “Call an ambulance,” she managed to say.
Mo had no idea how much longer she was in there by herself, but at some point, men in navy with stethoscopes around their necks came into her line of vision.
“Someone keep that thing open,” she heard one say, and the light stayed.
“Ma’am, how long have you been here?” they were saying, and “Ma’am, please step aside,” and “Ma’am, what happened to her? What can you tell us?” So many words being thrown at her that she couldn’t begin to respond or do anything they were asking of her. Arms were pawing at her, but she just kept pumping.
“Mo, stop,” she heard. But it wasn’t until Nell took Mo’s hand and physically pulled her out of the tent, and Mo saw the men in navy carrying Helen prostrate on a stretcher and no one in the section but Nell and Jack and Fiona and the ambulance parked there and the men in navy putting the stretcher in the ambulance and Nell and Jack and Fiona climbing in and pulling Mo up with them and someone shutting the ambulance door behind them, that she understood.