Every Little Thing in the World (26 page)

“Is that okay?” I asked Jane, pointing to the severely dented and misshapen side of the tuna fish can.

She turned it over, shrugged, and said, “What's the worst that could happen?” Everybody sat around watching Jane squat over the can, mixing the tuna and mustard together. She refused to use a bowl and seemed to be losing quite a bit of fish as she mashed it into the tin with a fork. The smell assaulted me so hard I practically doubled over. It went through my nose and attacked my entire body, a nausea so brutal and complete I could feel it in my elbows and toes.

“You don't look so good,” said Jane, looking up.

“I feel sick,” I whispered.

“You haven't eaten anything all day,” said Jane. “Here.” She held out the can, and I shook my head violently.

“Is there anything else you want?” she asked, sounding annoyed and maybe even a little accused.

I had the usual vision: a glass of lemonade, so cold that a film of condensation melted under my fingertips as I closed my hand around it. Ice clinking, and a sprig of fresh mint. Both my parents grew mint in the summer. Funny to think so randomly of a small thing—besides me—that they kept in common.

The only thing in the whole world I could possibly stand to put in my body was that glass of minty lemonade. Anything else, I knew, would make me sicker than I already felt. “I'm going to go lie down in the tent,” I said to Jane.

I knelt in front of the flap, my fingers shaking as I pulled down the zipper, and crawled into the tent on my hands and knees. Tonight Natalia had decided to return to her private tent with Mick. Brendan, Sam, and Meredith had already laid out their sleeping bags in the other one. The material felt smooth and cool under my palms. I used the last piece of energy I had to pull my sleeping bag out of its stuff sack. Then I collapsed on top of it, dead to everything.

Hours later I awoke to darkness—both inside my mind and outside, in the world. I had been sleeping so deeply, so dreamlessly, that my body still felt paralyzed. It took several seconds
to remember where and even who I was. Somewhere in the near distance I could hear a strange retching sound. At first I thought it might have been me; my stomach felt brutalized and scarred by hunger. I curved my hand across my belly, which finally seemed to be swollen with hopeful cramps. I heard myself moan, a soft, painful sound, and realized that the other sound had come from outside the tent.

“Are you getting sick too?” Meredith whispered. I pushed myself up on one elbow and looked at her.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Did you sleep through it?” she asked. “We've all been puking the last hour or so. First me, then Brendan and Sam. I think Natalia and Mick are out there too.”

She put her hand over her mouth, then bolted out of her sleeping bag. She ripped down the tent zipper and scrambled outside, abandoning our careful system and letting in a million mosquitoes. A new tone of retching joined the other, closer and more pained.

I crawled out of the tent and walked into the bushes. I squatted to pee, leaning forward to examine my underwear. No blood. The pain in my belly must be hunger, I decided, and nothing more.

I walked over to the food box, sealed tight against bears and Bucket Head. It opened with an airtight
whoosh
, and I dug through the cans. I couldn't imagine waiting long enough to find a can opener to pry one of them open. On the other side of the fire, I could see Mick and Natalia's tent—the flap open,
the light from her solar lamp shining meekly. I walked over and crawled inside.

Disciplined hoarder that she was, Natalia still had two chocolate bars from Jack's in the front pocket of her pack. They were both misshapen, having melted and hardened many times over the hot days and chilly nights. I ripped one open and shoved a piece into my mouth. As soon as one square began melting on my tongue, I shoved another one in. When I was finished, I sat there for a minute, mosquitoes and black flies buzzing around my head. I breathed heavily while my stomach gurgled, as if the mini feast had been a marathon run.

I put the other chocolate bar in the pocket of my coat and climbed out of the tent. I didn't feel guilty about stealing it. If Natalia wanted the responsibility of making me have a baby, she could also have the responsibility of feeding me. I looked around the campsite, trying to locate her, and realized that all three tents were open, flaps rattling in the breeze, letting in every bug on the lake. I could see Meredith, crouched on all fours next to our tent, her braids hanging toward the ground. Looking at her silhouette, arched in the dark, I noticed for the first time that she'd lost a lot of weight over the past few weeks.

“Natalia?” I called. The sound barely traveled, a near whimper in the darkness. When all I heard for reply was a low, miserable moan, I felt gripped by the most eerie kind of fear. I walked toward the sound, up to the tree line, where Natalia sat, rocking back and forth and holding on to her stomach. Mick
lay a few feet away, splayed out on his back. I crouched next to Natalia and lightly touched her shoulder.

“Natalia,” I said, “what's happening?”

She opened her mouth, I thought to answer me, but she leaned forward and threw up. I stroked her head and saw Sam lying not far from Mick. It was awful, like some kind of psycho killer had crept into the camp and attacked everyone but me.

From the fire pit, Jane came walking toward me, doubled over, clutching her stomach.

“Sydney,” she panted. “You have to go with Silas. Everybody's sick. Really sick. The tuna. You didn't eat the tuna. You have to go for help.”

I ran down to the lake to meet Silas, thinking maybe he'd been spared too. But I found him puking into the water. Bucket Head stood next to him, worriedly wagging his tail. The dog looked fine—either he hadn't eaten any tuna or his doggy stomach worked better than ours.

“Jesus,” I said to Silas. “Where are we supposed to get help?”

“We're only a couple days from base camp,” he said. His voice sounded croaky and alien. “There should be other camps not far from here. Or a house with a phone, or a boat that can take us to the hospital.”

“But look at you,” I said. “How the hell are you supposed to row?”

He was barely in better shape than the rest of them, but there was no way I'd go by myself. I took the stern while Silas climbed into the bow and picked up his oar like it weighed a
thousand pounds. He had become so skinny that I could see his collarbone sticking out above his thick fisherman's sweater. The smell of unwashed lanolin—soaked with these weeks of campfire smoke—managed to drown out the vomit. Bucket Head tried to jump into the canoe with us but I pushed him out, not wanting the extra weight. As we pulled away, the dog splashed into the water, paddling after us madly. I couldn't worry about him, could only trust him to give up and return to shore with a resigned doggy sigh. The only thing I could do was lift my arms and row.

And row, and row. We rowed in the dark for what seemed like hours, Silas's oar practically useless in the water, the waning moon doing the best it could to light our way. I rowed faster than I had in three weeks, with more purpose and concentration than I'd ever known. It seemed like every fifteen minutes or so, Silas would lean over the bow and puke. I would row harder.

It all felt so unreal. The urgency of the puking friends we'd left behind, the deep sleep from which I'd awoken, the promise I'd made to Natalia. I couldn't imagine anything that came next; I felt like Silas and I would just be out on this lake, rowing forever in the darkness. It seemed impossible that we would find any sign of civilization advanced enough to come to our rescue. It seemed impossible that my friends—the young and healthy athletes—could be in any kind of real danger. It seemed most impossible of all that I'd agreed to become a mother.

I'm sixteen years old
, I thought, as I spiked my oar into the
pure, cold water.
I'm sixteen years old.
The great horned owls hooted like omens. The loons trilled, alternately sounding like fates laughing or babies crying. I could do nothing to stop either sound.

Finally we came to a sign on the water:
LAKE KEEWAYTINOOK ADVENTURE TRIPS
. A motorboat floated beside a small pier. I rowed ashore and pulled the canoe, with Silas nodding off in the bow, onto the sand. No matter how skinny he'd become, he was still a full-grown man, and I don't know where I got the strength to haul both him and that canoe. As the muscles in my back crackled and snapped, I thought I could also hear the adrenaline, bubbling up beneath them.

Walking between the trees on what I hoped was a path, I wished I'd thought to bring along Natalia's lantern. Complete darkness settled around me. After a few steps my eyes adjusted enough to see a small wood cabin. The door was closed, and I couldn't see any sign of life but a pair of dirty socks drying on the porch rail and a fire pit that smelled as if it had been drenched with lake water within the last few hours. I walked up the steps and knocked. No answer. I tried the doorknob and found it unlocked, so I eased the door open, thinking that if nobody was home I could use the phone. I wondered if 911 worked in Canada. I wondered if I would be able to give rescuers the vaguest idea of our campsite's location.

“Who's there?” a voice said, as I fumbled around for a light switch. My eyes settled on a bedroom doorway, where a man stood, his hairy belly bloated over boxer shorts, his crazy gray
hair pointing toward the ceiling in sleepy disarray. As an overhead light flickered on, I saw the double barrel of a shotgun, aimed straight at me.

I raised my hands in the air. “It's me, Sydney,” I said lamely. The man lowered the weapon, peering into the darkness with instant sympathy. Under the bare lightbulb, standing on crooked floorboards, my face must have been a study in need, fear, and helplessness. I could see the man recognize me for exactly what I was: a very young girl in trouble.

“You need help,” he said, and I broke down and wept at the kindness in his voice.

His name was Mr. Dickerson, and he drove Silas and me back to our campsite in his motorboat. He radioed a neighbor from down the lake, Mrs. Potter, and she followed behind us. Silas lay collapsed on the floor of the boat, so when we reached camp I jumped down and started to round up our fallen troops. The campsite looked and smelled like a massacre had taken place—our campfire still smoking, the smell of vomit hanging heavily in the air, everyone lying on the ground, moaning.

“How many are there?” Mr. Dickerson called to me.

“Six,” I said. We roused them one by one. Natalia got weakly to her feet and draped herself across my shoulders. It amazed me that such a slim girl—all bones and skin and muscle—could feel so heavy on my back. We limped together toward Mrs. Potter's boat. Mrs. Potter stood in the bow, shining a spotlight down on us. Then she leaned over to offer us a hand up.

“You want me to help you puke?” she said, the concern on her face as clear as her snaggled teeth. “I got long fingers.” She held one up to illustrate.

“No, thank you,” Natalia and I said—a chorus of singsong politeness that tripped over the still waters of the lake, where we would not row again any time soon.

The lights of the hospital in Keewaytinook Falls shone very bright after our weeks on the water. By the time we reached its sterile halls, I was too exhausted to announce myself as the only one who didn't need treatment. The nurses shuffled me with the rest of them into one big recovery room. Silas, Jane, Mick, Sam, Natalia, Meredith, and Brendan lay across their cots, moaning and puking into triangular tin trays. I sat up on the end of mine while a flurry of nurses and PAs attended to the others. A blond doctor who looked younger than Margit inspected us one by one. She wore a girlish ponytail and burgundy scrubs.

“So,” she said, when she got to me. “You're feeling better than the rest?” She shone a light into one eye, and then the other.

“I'm fine,” I said. “I didn't eat any tuna.”

“Oh.” She snapped the light off and put it in the breast pocket of her scrubs. “Smart girl,” she said. “Your friends here are all going to have their stomachs pumped.”

“It looked like that was pretty much taken care of back at the campsite,” I said.

She smiled wearily. “Well, we're going in for the rest of it. Then they'll have to be on intravenous fluids. I'd say they have a
good two days here, at least. Is there somewhere you can stay?”

The doctor placed a flat, cool hand on my forehead, and something in my stomach lurched at a memory from this motherly touch: the days of someone taking care of me. She had pale brown eyes with long lashes, like a deer. She looked like one of my best friends grown up and responsible. I wanted to ask if I could stay with her.

“I guess the camp we're from, Camp Bell,” I said. “Somebody from there could come and take me to the base camp.”

“Okay,” she said. “Give the nurse that number and we'll take care of it.”

“I don't know the number. I don't even know if they have a phone.”

She smiled at me. “We'll take care of it,” she said, and started to turn away.

I understood, in that moment, that I had choices. I could choose to watch her walk out that door. I could choose to let her forget, within minutes, that she'd ever seen me. I could follow my usual MO and do nothing. I could let the rest of my life roll out in directions I'd never wanted to travel, not for a single minute.

Or else I could summon the same strength I'd used to row for help. I could reach out and grab the hem of her top as she turned away with a swish of that girlish ponytail. What surged up in me at that moment—as my hand reached out for her—felt more like survival than choice. It felt like gulping down a glass of water when you're dying of dehydration.

“Yes?” she said, looking back at me. “What is it?”