Five Summers (6 page)

JO STOOD ON THE BASKETBALL COURT LOOKING OUT at the crowd of former campers assembled on the Green. According to her clipboard spreadsheet, there were almost two hundred reunion attendees, the biggest turnout in Camp Nedoba’s short history. And since so many of the former campers came from her graduating year, her dad had put Jo in charge of event planning for the entire weekend. She was both thrilled and overwhelmed. It was the best gift her father had given her since he’d set up a Frisbee golf course in their backyard for her twelfth birthday, but it was also a huge responsibility. She couldn’t screw this up.

The dry July heat was unrelenting, and playing hacky sack with Nate had just made her sweatier. She mopped her forehead with her shirt sleeve. People were getting restless.

“Testing, testing, one, two, three.” Jo tapped her megaphone, eliciting a squeal of feedback. She adjusted the volume and started in earnest. “Welcome, everybody,” she said, raising her voice to reach the back row, where Mark and Matt Slotkin were practicing handstands, “to the sixth annual Camp Nedoba reunion weekend!” There was half-hearted clapping, and someone let out a whoop. Jo put her hands on her hips.

“Come on, guys, that was weak,” she cried. “
Omki!
” Everyone laughed.
Omki
was the Abenaki word for
Wake up!
and it was a camp tradition that, every morning, the counselors would gather around the beds of hard-to-rouse campers, stomping their feet and chanting it until consciousness was achieved. If you woke up to the sound of “
Omki
,
omki
,
omki
!” it became your job to clear and scrape all the plates from your bunk’s table at breakfast.

Jo looked over at her dad, who was sitting on the office porch in his favorite Adirondack chair, watching her with pride as he munched on a bag of the homemade spicy pickle chips he force-fed to the campers at every conceivable opportunity. Mack gave Jo an enthusiastic thumbs up.

“Okay,” she continued over the chatter, “we have a lot of fun activities planned, but first I’ve gotta do a roll call to make sure everybody’s present and accounted for before we start.” A collective groan rose from the crowd. “I know, I know,” Jo said gamely. “But look at it this way—if you didn’t get to catch up in the gazebo, this is your chance to see what everyone looks like now, and who you want to buddy up with.” A few people snickered, and Jo rolled her eyes. She hadn’t meant it like that, but it didn’t surprise her that some people were incapable of hearing anything besides sexual innuendo. Jo shook it off and clicked her pen into action. There were check marks to be made.

“Mini Mack!” someone fake-coughed. Jo smiled tightly. Everyone always told her how much she was like her dad. It wasn’t an insult, but it got old after a while. She knew what the other campers called her behind her back. Apart from Maddie, Emma, and Skylar—and Nate, who always seemed to be there when she needed help carrying sports equipment or doing graham cracker inventory—none of the other campers had ever really tried to get to know her. They seemed scared she was an enemy spy, just a little adult in a teenager’s body. When they looked at her, she thought sadly, they probably didn’t even see a girl. Jo had her mom’s full lips and high cheekbones, but she had Mack’s olive skin, black hair, aquiline nose, and wide-set brown eyes. She was, at least on the surface, only her father’s daughter.

Jo’s home away from camp, at least according to the post office, was in Danbury, Connecticut. Her mother, Wendy, was a beauty sales executive who commuted into New York on the train every day to place mentions of lip glosses and age-reversing concealers in fashion magazines. The fact that her only child was a tomboy was an obvious source of disappointment. “I have a closet full of vintage Chanel,” Wendy would joke to clerks when she took Jo back-to-school shopping at the mall, “but, of course, my daughter has never met a pair of cargo shorts she didn’t like!”

Before the divorce, Mack and Wendy had been summer renters in Onan. Jo still missed the big house with the blue-painted porch stenciled with seashells all around the railing. If she stood on the dock on a clear day, she could sometimes see its weathervane peeking out from the trees across the water. Onan was the place all her good memories came from, and if it was up to Jo she would stay year-round, joining the sleepy off-season population of 2,796. As it was, she lived for the summers. It was where her
real
home was. Where her real friends were.

She was halfway through the roll call when a taxi pulled into the parking lot, interrupting the proceedings. Jo hadn’t heard anything from Maddie, and her heart leapt at the thought of her best friend finally arriving. Maybe Maddie’s plane
wasn’t
circling the airport. Maybe she was already there. Jo lost her focus as the cab door opened.

Before Maddie, Jo had never really had a best friend. Being an only child, she had gotten used to playing by herself. Her dad loved to tell people the story of the first day he dropped Jo off at preschool and watched her walk confidently to the toy bin while the other kids wailed miserably around her. By the time the other parents had extricated themselves from their children’s anxious grasps, Jo had built a Lincoln Log fort, complete with perimeter security. It wasn’t that she
couldn’t
make friends—she always got along with her classmates and even had the occasional sleepover with other girls from the peewee soccer league or, later, the Hunter High School varsity volleyball squad. But it wasn’t until she met Maddie, Skylar, and Emma that Jo started to understand what all the fuss was about. She wasn’t just drifting anymore, rounding out tables of odd-numbered people in the cafeteria. She had her own tribe, like on
Survivor
(except without all the starvation and backstabbing).

But it was hard to learn how to be someone’s best friend—let alone three people’s—and Jo felt ill-equipped. She didn’t have a psychologist mother like Emma’s or a touchy-feely family like Skylar’s or a no-holds-barred emotional temperament like Maddie’s. It was hard for Jo to talk about her feelings or care about how she looked or gossip about boys the way her friends did. She always felt like she couldn’t quite keep up in friendship, the way other people couldn’t keep pace with her on long-distance runs. But she’d never stopped trying—at least, not until the rest of them had.

Jo was used to feeling left behind. After all, she’d said good-bye to them summer after summer, knowing she wasn’t leaving camp grounds for two long, lonely weeks until her mother picked her up on Labor Day. So when the calls, e-mails, and letters dwindled after their last year together at Nedoba (it had been hardest to see the letters stop, those thick manila envelopes with the North Carolina return address, made out to “Ms. Josephine Putnam,” or “Jolene F. Putnam, Esquire,” jokes Jo’s mom never got and in fact seemed annoyed by), the withdrawal didn’t feel good, but it also didn’t feel new. It was just the way things had always been. And at camp, at least, she still had Skylar, even if their relationship had mostly devolved into odd couple bickering without the other two to balance them out.

As she stared at the taxi, though, Jo realized she wasn’t willing to settle for the status quo any longer. Once Maddie stepped out, once they were all back together, she had to do everything in her power to keep them from ever falling apart again.

But she’d gotten herself worked up for nothing. Maddie wasn’t in the cab. Instead, a slight brunette hopped out and hurried noisily across the gravel, pulling a gigantic suitcase behind her. Jo let out a deep, shaky breath.

“Sorry I’m late!” the girl panted, waving excitedly to some people on the Green. “Did you call me yet?” Jo studied the girl’s face and frowned. She’d been able to identify almost everyone by sight, except for some of the older twentysomethings and a few guys who had grown facial hair. This person
looked
awfully familiar, but Jo couldn’t place her. “Uh, I don’t think so . . .” She looked down at her clipboard, trying to stall. The girl dropped her suitcase dramatically and opened her mouth in shock.

“
Jo Putnam
!” she cried in disbelief. “It’s
me
.
Sunny
.” Mark Slotkin did a hilarious double take, and Jo tried not to laugh.

“Sunny!” Jo said, “Of course! Sorry, the . . . sun must have been in my eyes.” In reality, she could see fine—she just hadn’t been able to see Sunny’s old nose, which had been shaved down to a ski-jump shadow of its former self. Sunny skipped over to sit with Aileen Abrams, Kerry Woodsmall, and Jess Ericsson, three other girls who were bunking in Souhegan. Mack had insisted on making the bunk assignments himself so that Jo wouldn’t play favorites, and so she was stuck with Sunny Sherman for three long nights. Jo made a mental note to drive into town later for some earplugs.

Once attendance was finished—everyone had made it on time except for Maddie, and Jo just skipped her name, lest she fall down an introspective rabbit hole again—it was time for the fun part: the itinerary. Jo had agonized over the schedule, but she was happy with what she’d come up with. Ever since she was six or seven she had “played” camp director, overseeing her dolls in a series of organizational meetings, but this was the first time she’d ever really tried to do the job.

“It’s two p.m.,” Jo announced after checking her watch. “For the next two hours or so there will be CITs in the arts and crafts cabins, the library, and the game room if you want to use them. There’s also archery on the north field with everyone’s favorite instructor, my dad.” Mack smiled as the crowd cheered. “Dinner starts at five thirty sharp,” Jo continued, “and at seven we will head to the shore for the opening night bonfire!” She waited for the clapping to die down. “Tomorrow, after breakfast, we’ll leave for Wexley Island, where we’ll hang out all day before heading back to the mainland for dinner.”

“Sexy Island, woot woot!” someone yelled, and everyone laughed. Mack stood up from his seat on the porch.

“Wexley Island was named for John Wexley, who was a farmer on this land before the previous owner founded this camp site in 1976,” he announced. “I met Farmer Wexley on multiple occasions and I can personally guarantee that there was nothing sexy about him. He had to have a leg amputated from gout.” Mack sat back down and went back to his pickles.

“Thank you for that nugget of history, Dad,” Jo said. “You should put that on the website. Anyway, Wexley Island is Friday and then Saturday is an all-day, no-holds-barred capture the flag game”— another wave of cheering cut her off—“with a huge secret prize for the winning team! Then we’ll do another bonfire, just because we can, and Sunday morning is checkout. Everybody got it?” She put down the megaphone and looked out at the hundreds of squinting faces.

“Now,” she cried, starting to hop back and forth like a boxer, pumping herself up, “can I get a NE . . . DO . . . BA?!” Nate cupped his hands around his mouth and started the chant. “NE! DO! BA!” he yelled. Emma immediately joined in. Adam raised a fist in the air, half serious, half mocking. Soon everyone was chanting.

“NE! DO! BA!” they boomed. “NE! DO! BA!” Mack, whose baritone could be heard from the porch, gave his daughter a one-man standing ovation, and even Gus flashed a smile as he lugged his toolbox back to his van across the parking lot.

Jo blew her whistle triumphantly. If she could successfully rally two hundred people, a measly three would be a piece of cake.

MADDIE’S TAXI BARRELED DOWN THE HIGHWAY. THE cabbie, a sixty-ish guy with a gray ponytail and mirrored aviator sunglasses, was blaring the local rock station, and Maddie was grateful to have a wall of sound between her and any human interaction. She was in a terrible mood. First, her flight had been delayed. This wouldn’t have been a big deal if it had been delayed before she got on, when she had a T.G.I. Friday’s and a newsstand with fifteen different tabloid magazines at her disposal. But no, the plane had boarded just fine, the cabin had been closed, and then they’d circled around the runway a few times before coming to a standstill due to what the pilot called “unfavorable winds.” Maddie learned this information while sandwiched in a middle seat between two men who, if she had to guess, she would say were former college linebackers or WWF wrestlers. The plane sat on the tarmac for three hours.

Then, upon finally taking off and landing, Maddie discovered that her checked bag had opted to stay behind at Raleigh-Durham. The supremely unhelpful baggage attendant had promised that an airline representative could drive the suitcase out to Camp Nedoba as soon as it arrived on the next flight, but Maddie told them to forget it. She had a carry-on with her toothbrush and a bathing suit and an extra pair of underwear. She was sure she could borrow some clothes from Emma, who was pretty close to her size. And besides, who cared what she looked like? Who cared about her, period?
You can take the girl away from her baggage, but you can’t take the baggage away from the girl
, she thought bleakly.

“So, sweetheart,” the cabbie said, turning down the music. “What brings you all the way out here?” He had a thick Boston accent, turning “sweetheart” into “sweet-
haaat
” and “here” into “hee-
ah
.” Maddie paid a lot of attention to accents, since she was always trying to drop hers. The whole Southern belle, mint julep thing just seemed so cliché.

“I’m going to a camp reunion,” she said, making the consonants hard and the vowels soft—the opposite of how her mom and stepdad talked.

“A camp reunion?” He laughed. “I never heard of that before. Whaddya do, hang around in sleeping bags passin’ around a flask?” Maddie smirked.

“No flask,” she said. “I’m only seventeen. And I don’t like sleeping outside.”

“Most people don’t, sweetheart.” He looked at her in the rearview mirror and smiled. “I bet you’re used to nicer things, though. I been drivin’ a long time. You get good at readin’ people.”

“Oh yeah? What’s my reading?” They had ten more miles to go, and even though she didn’t really feel like talking, this was too good to pass up. Plus, Maddie decided, she liked the cabbie. He seemed kind of—to borrow her stepdad’s highest adjective of praise—boss. And he hadn’t called her “Red.” At least, not yet.

“You’re a prom-queen type,” he said. “Parents got money, nice house, friends, guys knockin’ down your door, scarin’ your old man half to death . . .” Maddie pressed her lips together and tried to keep a poker face. “But you’re quirky,” the cabbie went on. “You’re like—you ever seen that movie
The Breakfast Club
?”

“Mmmm hmmmm,” Maddie said. She could even picture the dusty, peeling VHS cover stacked with other eighties classics underneath her mother’s 13-inch TV/VCR combo in the living room. Caitlin Ryland had never bought into the hype of new technology. “Why should I replace all my tapes?” she would say when Maddie or her younger half sisters, Mae and Harley, would beg for DVDs—or better yet, wireless Internet. “This works just fine. They just want you to pay twice for the same stuff.” Except she didn’t say “stuff.” Maddie’s mother was a champion curser; to drive the point home after a particularly colorful expletive, she would often exclaim that she didn’t give a good goddamn who heard it.

“Well, you’re like that redhead,” the cabbie said. “She was a quirky prom queen.” He merged onto the highway. “How’d I do?”

“You nailed it,” Maddie said. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that she hadn’t ended up going to her junior prom because the week before she found out that her boyfriend had cheated on her with her best friend. Or that the only people beating on her door were collection agents looking for her stepdad, Eddie, who had moved down into the unfinished basement because he’d rather sleep on a mildewy futon than be in the same room with her mom, who routinely came home from her shifts at Kroger smelling like Jim Beam and Kool ultra lights.

“See?” He grinned. “Drive long enough you get to know people just by lookin’ at ’em.” Maddie wondered how her life would be different if she were a dime-store psychic and was able to see into people’s souls. She wondered, for instance, if she ever would have taken up with Charlie Sloan in the first place.

Maddie texted Jo as the cab turned into the Camp Nedoba parking lot. She pressed her face up against the window and took in the hand-painted welcome sign (she’d recognize Skylar’s spiral O’s anywhere), the sprawling Green and rolling hills, the wooden buildings weather-beaten by the New England winters to a dull gray, except in spots Mack had recently patched or replaced, which shone bright and butter-yellow, like when you carved away the bark of a twig. She rolled down the window to take in the smell of the pines and the earthy dirt pathways leading from camp center to the bunks on either side of the woods.

“Quaint place,” the cabbie said as she handed him a handful of cash. “Get some sun, buck up. Take a load off.”

“I’ll try,” Maddie said.

“Call me if you need a ride back to the airport,” he said, handing her a card. “Ask for me—the name’s Dave. Or just tell ’em you want the guy with the gut and the ponytail.”

“Dave,” Maddie said, suddenly studying his face with interest. She couldn’t see his eyes, but his features looked all wrong—Italian, probably. Plus, he was about a decade too old. But she had to ask. “You ever live down South?” She tried to sound casual.

“Can’t say that I have, sweetheart. Too hot down there. And I can’t watch the Sox.” He gave her a wink and drove off. Maddie hung her head and kicked at the gravel with the mottled gray toe of her dirty white Ked. She couldn’t picture her real dad driving a cab, anyway. Or listening to Led Zeppelin. He’d been a math major. And according to her mom, he liked Miles Davis. All she knew was that he’d moved to New Hampshire sometime after she was born. She didn’t have an address or even a city. She had a needle buried in a haystack that felt about the size of Mount Everest.

Maddie looked around for a familiar face. Now that she was there, now that she could finally take a breath, she realized she had no idea what she was going to do when she saw her friends, especially Jo. She hadn’t told them about the breakup. She hadn’t told them about a lot of things, for instance that her mom was a mess and her dad was AWOL. Not minor details, even in the grand scheme of things. And while she could fake a northern accent for a half hour car trip, she wasn’t sure she could fake a better life anymore, not even for a three-day weekend. Just then, she saw Mack come out of his office with a stack of folding chairs and she was able to breathe. He was exactly who she needed to see.

“Knock, knock,” she said, tapping on the porch railing. He looked up and took off his sunglasses, and Maddie could see the fresh tangles of lines that sprouted from the corners of his eyes when he smiled, like tributaries from a river.

“Oh my gosh,” he said, shaking his head. “I barely recognized you. You look so grown up!” Mack had an expression that Maddie imagined must be what a dad looked like when he saw his daughter all dressed up for the school dance. She blushed.

“The prodigal child returns,” she said, dropping into an awkward curtsy.

“You’re not prodigal,” Mack said, leaning down to give her a kiss on the cheek. “You’re a prodigy.” Maddie shifted her weight uncomfortably. She didn’t know if she could fairly be considered a prodigy at anything. Except maybe for lying.

“Did you find Jo and the girls?” Mack asked, scanning the Green. “They’ve been jumping out of their skin waiting for you to get here.”

“No, not yet,” Maddie said. “Before I do, I need to give you something.” She took a crumpled envelope out of her purse and handed it to him without making eye contact.

“What’s this?” He turned it over in his big, calloused hands.

“It’s not the whole airfare but it’s as much as I have right now,” she said quickly. “I’ll have the rest by September, and I can mail it. I would have had it all, but my mom—”

“Honey,” Mack said, interrupting her. “You know I won’t take this.” He handed the envelope back to her, and when she crossed her arms stubbornly, he tucked it into her purse.

“But I owe you,” she said, her chin starting to quiver. She had never paid for camp, not a single cent. It was the only way her parents agreed to let her go. She burned with shame when she thought of the letter she had written to Mack when she was nine, after she’d found the Camp Nedoba website while secretly Googling her birth dad on the free library computers.
Dear Mr. Putnam
, she had written,
I am very interested in your summer camp but I only have $57 but I hope we can work out a deal.

“No, you don’t,” he said firmly. “You belong here, and how you got here doesn’t matter. It never has.” He patted her shoulder. “Some people will tell you it’s the journey that counts, but as far as I’m concerned, in this situation, it’s the destination. So, I think you’d better go find your friends. Don’t you?”

She nodded, blinking back tears, and started for the door.

“Hey!” Mack called, and she turned around. “Why don’t you tell them the truth this summer? It’s never too late.”

Maddie grimaced.

“I’ll think about it,” she said.