The Inverted Forest (28 page)

Then he’d be on his way to the Ellsinore Dairy Queen with Evie Hicks.

Harriet let the window curtain swing shut. For several long minutes she did nothing but stand there dumbly while, from the back of her mind, the Garden Ladies insisted,
Oh, for goodness’ sake, Harriet. For goodness’ sake.

Behind Harriet a bed frame creaked. A muted cough. A plaintive voice called out, “Here it comes. Ack ack ack.”

There were patients in the infirmary to care for, a simple fact, but, under the circumstances, it had the force of a long-sought discovery.
Patients. Yes, of course
.
Two of them.
Stretched out on a tousled bunk, her head nested in a mound of borrowed pillows, was Miss Mary Ann Hornicker, the freckled, diabetic, and silent woman whom Harriet had met the first day of camp and who, over the last eleven days, for reasons complicated or simple, had come to adore Harriet. Miss Hornicker was propped up on one elbow studying her nurse as if Harriet might at any moment bestow on her the sweetest of blessings. Across
the aisle lay Mrs. Nancy Klotter, who came to the infirmary once a day, sometimes more, with an invented condition. Could a person be both retarded and hypochondriac? Absolutely. There were other campers who could be counted in both categories, but Mrs. Klotter was, perhaps, the most committed to her imaginary ailments. “It’s coming back again,” she said now, sitting cross-legged on her bunk, a hand raised to ward off the return of her dry, unconvincing cough. “Ack, ack, ack,” she gasped. “Ack, ack, ack.”

Here at least was an opportunity for Harriet to lose herself in a few minor duties: a cup of tap water to soothe Mrs. Klotter’s invented cough, a kind word for Miss Hornicker, a quick check of James (tucked perfectly in his bed but still awake), the night-lights in the bathroom and infirmary turned on, the overhead fluorescent lights dimmed, her muffin tray set out on her work desk and ready to be filled. And then what?

Then she opened the infirmary door and stepped onto the wood stairs. It was irrefutably nighttime now, the woods thickly dark, the air cooler and less muggy. A fractional moon glowed from behind the crowns of the tallest trees. From the vantage of the infirmary step, she could see the camp van lurching across the meadow. Its uneven headlights threw out a muddled brightness. Eventually it reached the roadway, the engine revving, gravel popping from beneath its tires, as it wheeled past the infirmary and made a sharp turn onto a narrow drive. Moments later it had disappeared behind the back corner of the mess hall.

A small cluster of people waited just inside the screened perimeter of the mess hall porch. The porch light had been turned on and, by benefit of its orange glow, Harriet could recognize each member of the group: the ragged and frightening Mulcrone sisters; their counselor, Veronica Yordy; and, atop a nearby mess hall dining table, half-sitting, half-sprawled, Evie Hicks.

It was easy enough to guess what was happening here: they were
waiting for Christopher Waterhouse, waiting for the camp van to be unloaded and then driven around to the porch so that Evie could be loaded into the passenger seat for her ride to Ellsinore. They looked a little impatient, a little wilted, from the slow lapse of minutes. At least the Mulcrone sisters and Veronica Yordy did. (Veronica rocked on her heels and clapped her hands listlessly together. She was anxious, no doubt, to get Evie installed in the van and the Mulcrone sisters escorted to their cabin, washed and in their beds.) But Evie Hicks was a different case. She was slumped down studying the scratched surface of the mess hall table. You could mistake her slack posture and dawdling movements for teenage indolence, but Evie was the opposite of lazy. Her enthusiasms were myopic and absolute. Harriet had treated the girl for chapped lips and heat rash and given her medication three times a day. This much was clear: Evie was engrossed in whatever existed a few inches before her eyes. And she was altogether immune to the passage of time. One place, one time of day, was as good as any other to Evie. Of course it was a fool’s game to try to guess what any of the state hospital campers might be thinking or feeling. But looking across the infirmary yard to the lit mess hall porch and Evie’s light-haloed figure, Harriet was certain of one thing: the girl had no idea that she was waiting, much less what she was waiting for.

An engine groaned. From behind the mess hall came a widening spray of headlights. Then the camp van rumbled around the corner of the building, bouncing along the driveway and stopping—a bit too hastily, it seemed to Harriet—at the mess hall porch. The driver’s door swung open.
“All aboard,”
Christopher Waterhouse called out.

The eagerness of these two words,
All aboard,
the inflated cheerfulness, made Harriet suddenly miserable. Without quite meaning to, she stepped back into the infirmary and closed the door. She looked around. A different world entirely here: the air chilled to seventy-five degrees and wrung of its dampness, the smell of Pine-Sol cleaner, the waxy glow of the bathroom night-light. From her shadowed bunk
Mary Ann Hornicker peered up wordlessly and adoringly at her favorite nurse. Mrs. Klotter resumed her cough. “Ack, ack, ack.”

Harriet put her forehead against the closed infirmary door and squeezed shut her eyes.

A great shuddering wave of misgiving and dread washed over her. And resentment, too, at Christopher Waterhouse and Schuller Kindermann and Linda Rucker. Especially Linda Rucker, who, more than anyone, would expect that Harriet step forward and do something. But on what basis? On Linda’s intuition, her
inkling
that Christopher Waterhouse harbored a perverse interest in Evie Hicks? On this basis Harriet was supposed to march across the roadway to the mess hall porch and make a persuasive case to Veronica Yordy. (If so, it had better be a brief and utterly convincing account, because among the advocates at camp for Christopher Waterhouse, Veronica and her best friend, Marcy Bittman, were surely the chummiest and most loyal.) Maureen Boyd might have been persuaded to join Harriet’s cause, but she and the kitchen girls had gone home for the night. So what did this leave Harriet? The weakest and most ridiculous option of all: she could race to the director’s cottage and make a frantic and useless appeal to her employer, the stubborn and foolish Schuller Kindermann.

Everyone to whom she might make an appeal was white. And somehow—though it wasn’t charitable or exactly logical to think this way—their whiteness, their alikeness, and the safety of their large community made them easily fooled.

Fools. Incompetents. Knuckleheads.
They’d put her in an impossible situation. Surely she’d earned the right to curse them in the ugliest possible terms, to shout in her mind,
Dumb Fucking Crackers. Idiots. Retards
. Cruel words. Desperate words. She hoped they might be enough to shock her into action.

In the end what got her going was so much milder.
Oh, for goodness’ sake, Harriet. For goodness’ sake,
the Garden Ladies called to her, and she lifted her head from the door and opened her eyes. She was
waiting, as she always did, for something small and knowable to present itself in the middle of an emergency. Her hand found the doorknob. Smooth. Round. Cool to the touch. A doorknob. She turned the knob and in an instant was out the door and hurrying across the yard.

A vehicle was advancing down the road, bouncing along on its carriage in a way that seemed purposeful and jolly. She broke into a run and soon reached the gravelly edge of the roadway. The headlights, waxy and off-kilter, kept coming—fifty yards, twenty yards, then nearer. She stepped into the center of the road and put out her hand. In the glare it was hard to tell if the van was decreasing or maintaining its speed.

She held her ground, and eventually the driver slowed to accommodate her.

From behind the steering wheel, Christopher Waterhouse nodded to her and raised his eyebrows expectantly. His window was rolled down, his forearm balanced neatly on the window frame. The effort he’d made loading and unloading the van had left his T-shirt collar and underarms mooned in sweat, and the hair along his temples swept back damply against the side of his face. He was hunched forward in the driver’s seat, the same stiff bearing of his shoulders and neck that he adopted in the high perch of his lifeguard chair.

“Nurse Harriet,” he said, a term of address that had caught on with the Kindermann Forest staff. Not
Harriet,
but
Nurse Harriet.
Maybe the counselors considered it a mark of respect. Whenever they used it, they seemed to wait a moment afterward, as Christopher Waterhouse did now, for Harriet to blush in appreciation.

“Hey,” she said. “I’m glad I was able to catch you before you left.”

To judge from his open and encouraging expression, he seemed glad, too.

“Because I need to ask about something,” she said. But this wasn’t right. She shouldn’t have said
ask.
It wasn’t as if she was seeking permission. “I need to let you know about something,” she amended herself.

“All right,” he said, patiently. “Sure, go ahead.”

“See, I’ve been trying to track Evie Hicks down all evening. Didn’t see her at the camp carnival. And I couldn’t find her at her cabin. Then I remembered. She’s supposed to be going with you. To the Dairy Queen in Ellsinore.”

“That’s right,” he said. He turned in his seat so that he could glance back at his passenger, Evie Hicks, who sat belted into the first of three benches. She wasn’t able to collapse into her usual slack posture. The seat belts, one snugly across her stomach, the other diagonally between her full breasts, held her tight against the seat. Her head was tipped back, her mouth partly open, as if she were awaiting the services of a dentist.

“But she can’t go,” Harriet explained.

He wrinkled his brow in consideration of what she’d said. As meditations went, this one was thorough and good-natured. After a while he tipped his head forward, perhaps in agreement.

And who knew? Maybe this was all it took: a clear and polite request. Until now she’d never had what could reasonably be called a conversation with Christopher Waterhouse, though she’d said hello and thanked him each afternoon for the privilege of allowing James sole use of the swimming pool. If she was to judge Christopher on the basis of these interactions, then it was only fair to say that he’d been cheerful and accommodating. And on one occasion he’d been something more than that. On the second day of camp, when a female camper had snatched James up from his mess hall bench and held him to her hard chest with a terrible spastic energy, Christopher had jumped to his feet and pried the boy loose. On that occasion he’d been more than merely helpful. He’d been alert and brave.

“Hmmm,” he said. “Why is that? Why can’t she go with me?”

“Because she has a treatment I need to give her. Right away.”

“A treatment for what?”

“A problem that ladies get sometimes. A kind of infection.”

His comely and suntanned face blossomed with understanding. “Ohhhh,” he said.

“She’ll be feeling better in a day or two.”

“Good,” he said. He grinned and seemed to wait for a reciprocating smile from Harriet. “So I guess you’ll have to give her the treatment when we get back from Ellsinore.”

It made no sense. There was an odd little gap in logic between what she’d thought she made clear to him and his incongruent answer. Perhaps, at the bottom of it all, Christopher Waterhouse wasn’t very bright. “No, no,” she said. “It’ll have to work the other way. You’ll have to go to Ellsinore alone and bring the ice cream back for Evie.”

Again she was struck by how calm and measured his reactions were.
Bring the ice cream back to Evie?
He seemed to think this an original and complicated notion. He needed to sit in his van awhile and ponder it. But after a few pensive moments he squinted his eyes and shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. I’m going to have to say no to your idea, Nurse Harriet.”

She couldn’t quite help herself: she let out a startled
humpf
of disbelief. “What?” Harriet said. “What do you mean?”

“I’m saying I thought over your suggestion and I’m saying no.” He placed his hand on the column shift lever and in one quick motion set the van into drive.

“Christopher,” she said sternly. “What do you think you’re doing?”

He shrugged. “I’m going to Ellsinore,” he said.

And apparently he was. The tires of the van began crunching forward on the gravel, a very slow and gradual turning. It was no trouble at all for Harriet to plod along beside the van.
“Christopher?”
she insisted. She could see into the van’s interior: the sallow dash lights
and scuffed door paneling. Evie Hicks, reined tight to the seat, let her head loll to one side so that her gaze flitted dreamily along the windows of the van and settled briefly on Harriet.

“Stop the van,” Harriet demanded. “Stop the van, Christopher.” And when it was clear that he would not, she shouted, “I will examine this girl very carefully when she gets back!”

He stepped on the accelerator. The van, which had been rolling along as sluggishly as an old wagon, found its grip on the roadway and bounded forward beyond her reach.