Every Little Thing in the World (28 page)

“Silas says we might see the northern lights tonight,” said Natalia. “Sometimes people do, in between trips, when it's colder.”

I didn't answer, just looked up at the sky as if the spectacle had already begun. “So,” Natalia said after a while. “Have you thought any more about what you're going to do?”

We stopped walking and faced each other. Of course the question itself indicated that something had changed. After the days indoors at the hospital, Natalia's skin had begun to peel a little; I could see a fresh pink layer underneath her eyes. Strange, very strange, that my secret had gone from being pregnant to not being pregnant. Strange, again, that such a huge event could take place—in my body and my heart and my mind—and still not be visible to the naked eye.

“I want you to know,” Natalia said, “that I will still take this baby. I will take care of it, and I will love it just exactly as if it were my own.”

She looked so earnest, and I wanted to love her for the offer. I wished for a cloud to float by and give us a little shade, a little darkness, to match the news I was about to deliver.

“Natalia,” I said quietly, “there's no more baby.”

She stood blinking at me for a long moment. Then she said, “The hospital?”

I nodded.

“I thought so,” she said.

I opened my mouth to say I was sorry, but thought better of
it. Because I wasn't sorry. I couldn't be. In the end I had chosen hope when hope presented itself. I had chosen me, and a life beyond that fleeting craziness two months before. I had chosen this new wisdom and resignation over months and years of uncertainty and trouble.

“I don't know if I can talk to you for a while,” Natalia said.

“I get that,” I told her. She reached out her hand and I took it. We stood there for a few minutes. And then she let go and walked away.

Soon Natalia would be home. She would face Margit as her mother for the very first time. And maybe after that, she would see that whatever I had done—whatever I had given up— it had never for a single second been her.

I saw Cody that night at dinner. I was sitting at a table by the window with Meredith. I saw him cross the dining hall and stop to talk to Mick and Natalia. Natalia pointed me out with a casual toss of her head. I hadn't realized before that she'd noticed where I was sitting.

“Hey,” Cody said, sliding in next to me, his tray piled high with sandwiches. “I heard what happened. I was worried about you.”

My heart stopped for a moment, and then I realized he meant the food poisoning. “Sydney was the only one you didn't have to be worried about,” Meredith said.

Cody sat down across the table from us. I nodded toward his food. “Hungry much?”

“Man,” he said, “I am starving. Absolutely starving.”

“Me too,” I said. I reached over and slid one of the sandwiches off his plate. We sat there, eating together. Meredith and I filled him in on the tainted tuna and our dramatic rescue. “Sydney paddled for miles,” said Meredith, “to find us help.”

“Well, it wasn't miles,” I said, though I knew it had been. “And Silas was with me.”

“Puking all the way,” Meredith said.

“It wasn't pretty,” I admitted.

Cody reached under the table and placed one warm, oar-calloused hand on my knee. I could feel his skin through my worn jeans. “You're my hero,” he said. I smiled at him. Across the room, Jane and Silas ate with the other counselors, Bucket Head wagging his tail at Silas's feet.

Hero: For the first time in my life, despite everything, I felt strangely deserving of the word. My mother had promised not to tell my father about the abortion, and I knew how proud he must be of my midnight rescue mission.

“A bunch of us are going to sleep outside tonight,” Cody said, “to see if the northern lights come out. Want to join us?” He was asking Meredith, too, but he looked pointedly at me.

“I still feel a little weak,” Meredith said. “I'm going to bed early, inside.”

I could see Mick and Natalia, clearing their trays. At another table, Sam had reunited with Charlie, and I saw Brendan saunter out the door with Roger. Our little tribe had already disbanded.

“Sure,” I told Cody. “I'd love to see the northern lights.”

*   *   *

The sun had just begun to set when I retrieved my sleeping bag from the bunkhouse. I had to grab my pack, too, and stopped by the bathroom to change pads. My stomach still cramped every few hours, and the doctor had said to be alert to body temperature changes. Every once in a while I brought my hand to my forehead, which felt cool and normal. I wondered if it would be best to just join Meredith inside, but I couldn't bear to miss the northern lights, or one last night with Cody, even though I couldn't imagine letting myself so much as kiss him.

When I came out of the bathroom Mick was standing outside, leaning against a pine tree. I looked around for Natalia and saw from his steady gaze that he wasn't waiting for her, but for me.

“Syd,” Mick said. I walked over to him, and he put his hand on my shoulder. “Natalia told me what happened,” he said.

It seemed funny, somehow, her name on his lips—though of course I'd heard him say it a hundred times before. But in that moment the word sounded so elegant, and he pronounced it as if nothing could be more natural. It was as if he really had been changed by his association with her. With us.

“You did the right thing, Syd,” Mick said. “She'll realize that before too long.”

“Thank you,” I said, meaning this more than I could possibly express. His hand still sat, heavily, on my shoulder. I thought with a surge of happiness that it wouldn't be like “Flowers for Algernon” at all. Mick would keep becoming his better self,
growing into his potential more and more with every day that passed.

“Mick,” I said, “do you ever think about that guy? Under the tunnel? Do you ever feel guilty about it?”

He frowned for a second, unsure what I was talking about. Then he remembered and took his hand off my shoulder. He waved it, pushing the question out of the air—dismissing it as ridiculous.

“No way,” he said. “That was like a time of war. Him or us. I did what I had to do.”

He cocked his head and smiled at me, and I nodded gravely. “Are you going to see if the northern lights come out?” I said.

“Wouldn't miss it,” Mick told me.

I took a step back, a little awkwardly. Then I raised my hand and waggled my fingers to say so long. As I turned and headed down the hill, my sleeping bag under my arm and my pack over my shoulder, Mick called out to me.

“Keep it in your pants tonight, Syd,” he yelled. “No point starting in right where you left off.”

“Shut up,” I yelled back. Leaves and mud squished under my feet, and my chest swelled with love. Still. If I never saw Mick again in my whole entire life, those last words—from both of us—would be completely perfect.

I met Cody down by the water, with a gaggle of other campers that included Meredith. Apparently she'd changed her mind about sleeping indoors, and I felt glad. Somebody who had
been so disciplined about watching the dawn deserved, more than any of us, the aurora borealis.

“Want to go for one last swim?” Cody asked.

“I can't,” I said. When he cocked his head in question, I said, “It's too cold.”

We walked away from the others to find a place to lay down our sleeping bags. It was rockier than our last spot, on a small slope. As we settled down next to each other, the sky growing darker above us, I decided to level with him.

“Cody,” I said, “I can't sleep with you tonight. I can't have sex, I mean.”

He moved a little closer and put his arm around me. “That's okay,” he said. “I figured you wouldn't want to, after last time.”

I let my head drop onto his shoulder, feeling grateful and amazingly comfortable.

“Are you a virgin?” he asked.

“No,” I said. And then, because he seemed like such a nice guy, and because from the start it had been so easy just to be with him, I told him the truth. “Two nights ago I had an abortion.”

“No way.”

The sky grew dark, then darker still. The lights in all the outbuildings had been turned off, and the stars gathered above in a thousand layers. The stars. How I would miss all those stars. Back home would feel like a more distant planet with its overhang of pollution and spattering of one star here, a moving airplane there. Here, on the lake, we hung flat out into the solar system, right in the thick of every world.

Cody still didn't speak. “It's not what you think,” I said. “I've only slept with two people in my entire life.” Even as I defended myself, I realized that at sixteen two people might be exactly two too many.

I waited for him to take his arm away, but he let it stay there, insistent and even a little protective. “So,” he said. “That night, when we were together. You were pregnant?”

I nodded. He might not have been able to see me, but he would feel the top of my head brush against his chin. “Intense,” he said. I nodded again. He squeezed me a little closer. Up above, just behind or just in front of the stars, I saw a little flash of green. It flickered, then bowed. Something inside me contracted, and I reached for Cody's hand.

“Look,” I said.

We lay back on our sleeping bags, holding hands. Above us the sky moved and roiled. It danced and flickered, like an ocean tide from a faraway galaxy. After a while it got colder, so we crawled into our separate bags. We didn't hold hands again, but lay next to each other, staring up at that gently explosive sky.

We could have said something about how beautiful it all was, and how lucky we were to be watching it. But what words could match the spectacle up there above our heads? How could we describe it in a way that would do justice rather than make it smaller? So we kept quiet, our limbs lying against one another, touching through layers of down and Gore-Tex.

Tomorrow we would return to civilization. But right now everything—the white pine and the wildlife and the thousands
of trails forged by the Deep Water People—lay around us in a pulsing hush of ancient wilderness. The two of us, so new in comparison. We were like babies, safe somehow in the forest. We were the newest creatures on Earth, with nothing to do but move forward into the world, starting fresh.

epilogue

a time made simple

August in New Jersey. Hot, humid, muggy, and buggy. I'm living at my dad's house. Every morning he wakes me up just before dawn—which comes much too early on these long summer days. I climb from the tangle of my sleeping brothers and pull on clothes that are almost as grimy as the ones I wore on Lake Keewaytinook. Then I go downstairs and eat breakfast with my father in the dusky kitchen. No one else is awake, not Kerry or the kids, so it's just the two of us. My dad and me. We don't talk much—some mornings we don't talk at all. I'd like to say I feel closer to him, but some days the air just hangs with everything I can't say. The silence doesn't seem to bother him. He's content to leave things between us just as they've always been, and I'm learning not to want any more from him than he's capable of giving.

It's strangely companionable, the two of us eating the freshly laid eggs that he scrambles with unpasteurized butter and sprigs of basil from his garden. After breakfast he drives off in his truck. I put on a wide, floppy straw hat and pedal Kerry's one-speed cruiser three miles down the road to Campbell's farm.
My only day off is Monday. The rest of the week I spend half the day in the fields, weeding and picking ripe produce. Then in the afternoon I sit out at the roadside stand, my face streaked with farm soil and my arms sunburnt and sore. I sell summer squash and corn, fresh tomatoes and blueberries. There are no checks or credit cards; the Campbells trust me with the folded cash and jingling coins, and although I am not getting paid for my work—I'm paying for my month on the lake—I have never pocketed a single penny. It feels good to be trusted.

I pedal home in the afternoon and get there an hour earlier than Dad. I run upstairs to take a long, steaming shower before he's there to remind me of the ten-minute rule and lecture me on precious resources. Kerry doesn't tell. She's grateful to have me there watching the kids. Some afternoons she naps, sometimes she goes for long walks. She looks like she's lost a little weight.

Rebecca can stand up on her own now. She teeters to her feet and wobbles in every direction. She beams so proudly, it's like her smile is what keeps her balance. The other day she was sitting in the high chair and Kerry asked, “Where's Sydney?” Rebecca lifted up her chubby arm and pointed right at me. It was the weirdest thing, like suddenly receiving direct communication from a houseplant.

My mother saw Rebecca for the first time when she dropped me off here after my plane came in from Toronto. She even held her for a few minutes while Dad carried my pack into the laundry room. Mom said Rebecca looked just like me when I
was a baby. Dad seemed surprised, as if he'd forgotten I hadn't sprung up from the ground sixteen years ago, exactly the way I am today.

Two weeks ago we were quite a spectacle, the campers from Lake Keewaytinook, coming back to civilization. When we got off our chartered plane, everyone in the Toronto airport stared at us. We looked fresh from some major trauma, most of us in filthy clothes and all of us with deep, native tans. A few motherly-looking women actually came up and asked why we were all so dirty.

Natalia and I said good-bye to Meredith, Brendan, Sam, and Mick. We all stood together under the airport security lights, the five of them with their hospital-washed clothes and me in the T-shirt and jeans that had been worn for almost thirty days straight without seeing a drop of soap. We took turns hugging one another and writing down e-mail addresses and cell phone numbers. But I think we all knew these good-byes were the most final we'd ever known. There would never be another time like the month on the lake, the six of us together. Not even if we decided to come back next year, as Meredith was already plotting.