Marta hugged him. Unlike Sal and Enzo, he was about her own height—she didn’t have to stand on tiptoe to reach his shoulders—but there was something comforting and familiar about the awkwardness of his young man’s embrace, the yeasty smell of perspiration on his neck, and she squeezed him fiercely. If she needed proof that God was looking out for her on this trip, it was this boy. Only now did she fully grasp the importance of a buddy—how much of your well-being you were handing over to that person.
Her heart finally slowing its insane rhythm, Marta pulled back. Wes would feel even more dragged down by her now, she thought. Oppressed by her need. But he grabbed both of her hands, smiling a little, and gave them a cheerful little shake. “You and me,” he said, as if he’d read the tenor of her thoughts. “We’re a team. It’s going to be great. OK?”
Marta nodded weakly.
“No, seriously. It is. OK?”
“OK,” Marta agreed.
“Then let’s go check out this weird restaurant.”
They started inside, cutting a path through the prying looks of their fellow travelers, but Marta felt better already. Stronger. She vowed to herself then that her allegiance would be to Wes, not to David, and she wouldn’t do anything to betray him. She’d protect Wes with as much ferocity as she’d protect her own sons.
Six
Two a.m., according to the glow-in-the-dark dial on his watch, and Wes didn’t feel the least bit sleepy. Even Marta, who had spent the first two hours after lights-out rolling over to her side, then her stomach, then her other side, with the steady regularity of a rotisserie chicken, was now breathing deeply beside him, inflatable pillow tucked between her right ear and her bent right arm, left arm curled up close and tight to her chest, as if she were cold. Wes pulled her blanket up over her shoulder. The tent, to him, was cozy, even a little stuffy, and his mattress, which Andy had cautioned against overinflating, was so thin that he could feel every bump in the ground unless he lay flat on his back and perfectly still. It was like trying to sleep floating in a swimming pool.
Across the campsite there were sighs, coughs. Sniffling—maybe allergies, maybe soft crying. He dozed a while, then jolted awake to a low-pitched gasp and a sudden blaze of light a dozen paces outside his tent. He waited, tense, Stamp clutched in his right hand.
“Oh,” said a man’s voice. There were a few hitching breaths. “Oh. Sorry.”
It was that Jesse Haggard—he knew it. Of all the blowhard, cowardly assholes he could have drawn as company for a trip like this.
Marta groaned and rolled 180 degrees this time, so that she was facing Wes. “A bite?” she asked hoarsely.
“False alarm,” said Wes.
She propped herself up on one palm and smooshed her face with the other. “This is the longest night of my life,” she said. “I thought I was too old for long nights.”
“Seems like you caught a few Zs,” Wes said.
“A few.” She leaned over stiffly, snagged the loop on her water bottle, and unhooked the cap. “I was having a nightmare about my husband.”
She hadn’t said much about her husband, and Wes hadn’t asked, had just assumed he was someone dull, a lawyer or a corporate executive, and that Marta had taken the trip as an extreme response to empty nester’s syndrome. “What was it about?” he asked.
“I’m already starting to forget it.” She took a gulp and lay back down. “I’d gotten bit again. I remember that much. And he was trying to use the Stamp on me, but he kept missing the spot and burning me other places.”
“That’s horrible,” Wes said.
“In the dream it was painless. It was just the idea of it. Knowing I was running out of time, and what would happen when it did.” She shivered and clutched the blanket to her neck. “What about you? You sleep?”
“Not really,” he said. He ducked his chin down, surreptitiously, he hoped, and sniffed his armpit. He was starting to smell himself already, and it made him anxious. Back home, he showered twice a day, once when he rose, once just before bed. He had, in preparation for the excursion, tried during Boot Camp to skip his evening shower, but he found himself cheating, rationalizing to himself the harmlessness of a fast five-minute scrub the way an alcoholic might argue that beer isn’t the same thing as liquor. So now he was here, with no practice living unwashed, and the novelty of the situation hadn’t jolted him out of his neuroses, as he had assumed it would. Worse, he was starting to feel the press of his bladder. He moved the muscles down his groin, assessing, and yes, there it was—that first faint cramp of fullness. He shifted his hips. Contracted the muscles in his groin again. The prickle. He would never be able to sleep, needing to urinate. Or knowing that he might soon need to urinate.
If he were sharing the tent with another man, he’d just relieve himself into an empty bottle. But next to Marta? Good lord, no way.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” he said, understanding the absurdity of his word choices but not willing to say “take a piss” or “take a leak” in front of this woman who could be his mother (if his mother were nicer and warmer and generally more motherlike). “Is that OK? I won’t be long.”
“Of course,” she said, switching on the lantern. Its bulb glowed cool and blue against the tent’s white walls, and they both squinted.
“You’ll want to run the vac as soon as I’m outside.”
“I know,” she said. Her voice had thinned slightly with impatience, but she put her hand on the remote to let him know she was ready.
“Okay,” he said, and she hit the Open button. He wriggled out as quickly as he could, and when his second foot hit the ground behind him, the flap drew shut with a snap and the vacuum motor whirred softly. The air outside was chilly and clean; he exhaled a white cloud. Seven tents formed a circle on smooth, even ground, ground that had been worn to mostly dirt by the traffic of multiple excursion groups. The last embers of their evening fire, which Andy and Tia had built in a rock-lined depression that was sooty from previous use, were long dead, still faintly redolent of the greasy soy dogs the campers had roasted on sticks (these also from a well-used, fire-hardened stash stored in a utility shed just downhill and out of immediate sight). There had been throughout the evening an air of forced cheer, everyone in the group trying too hard to demonstrate their enjoyment, to prove to one another, and themselves, that the risk and the expense were worth it. Look at that sky! people kept saying. You don’t see stars like that in the zone! And, Smell that mountain air! Berto and Anastasia, a married couple, both lawyers of some stripe, in their late thirties—fitness nuts (Wes realized that calling someone a health nut, even in his own head, was a bit hypocritical), lean bodies knobbed with long muscles—had started singing an old children’s camp song as the group worked on pitching their tents, and it caught sluggishly on with a few of the others, Jesse Haggard pausing (while his girlfriend worked on, Wes noticed) to play his ukulele and over-sing the lyrics.
I’m a mean old man in a little old shack
With a mean little dog and a duck—Quack! Quack!
And a pig and a horse and a cow—Moo! Moo!