Where or When (23 page)

“No one is saved, and no one is totally lost,” he tells his assembled family.

 

 

 

 

The sun had set not a half hour before, and in the west there was still an orange dust at the horizon. The air was dry, the evening lit up already with the summer constellations. He walked her down with the others to the water's edge, where tonight there would be a bonfire, a small celebration for the Fourth. In his hand he carried sparklers. He gave one to her, lit it for her with the matches he had in his shirt pocket. The golden sprinkles from the sparklers illuminated their faces. In front of them, and behind them, there was laughter and chatter, as the others walked singly or in pairs, some with sparklers of their own. It was exciting, this walk in the darkness down to the lake, the path known but not certain, the event producing in the air a sense of freedom, an element of risk.

The counselors had made the pyre already, were hovering importantly nearby. The children took their places in a semicircle around the wood and the straw, facing the lake. It was the last night of camp and friendships had formed, delineated in the shapes that drew closer to each other. She sat beside him on the ground, their knees raised, their arms touching from the shoulder to the elbow, and for a time it was all that she could absorb—the length and dizziness of that touch, a thin delicate line along her skin. Until he moved his arm and put it around her, finding with his fingers first the capped sleeve of her blouse, then the skin beneath it. Neither spoke or dared to look at the other.

The straw was lit, bursting noisily into flames, crackling toward the sky, letting loose a shower of sparks that arced upward and died before they could fall on hair and bare skin. Someone, a figure lit by the fire, led the group in songs, summer camp songs and songs for the Fourth. The boy sang beside her, his voice nearly a man's, but she could not sing. She felt the pressure of his arm along her back, the imprint of his fingers on her skin. The fire obscured the cross, obliterated the lake.

When the singing was over, the counselors produced long sticks and marshmallows. The boy hesitated, moved his arm away from her, stood up. She watched him walk toward the counselors, take a stick and a marshmallow, poke it toward the fire, which had settled some. She watched his back, his body just a silhouette. He spoke to another boy.

He returned, sat facing her. He removed the gooey marshmallow, charred on the outside, and held it out to her. She exclaimed, started to speak, so that when he thrust it toward her, it caught on her lips and teeth, smearing her mouth. In the confusion, laughing at the mess, she licked the marshmallow from his fingers as he tried to push it in. She caught one finger between her teeth, released it. Embarrassed, she laughed again and said that he was mean.

He licked the stickiness from his own fingers. When they were clean, he put his hand into his pocket and withdrew an object. She couldn't see in the darkness what the object was. He held it for a moment, then seized her arm at the wrist. He put the object into her palm, closing his hand for a moment over hers. She fingered the object, rolled it in her palm. She felt the links of a chain, the sharp edges of metal charms.

“It's a bracelet,” she said, holding it in a fist. Her breath was tight and shallow.

“I wanted something to give you,” he said beside her.

When she looked at him, she could see only that half of his face that was lit by the orange of the fire, a light that made shadows in his eyes and with his cheekbones.

He took her hand, and she thought that he might remove the bracelet from her fist and put it on her, but instead he made her stand up. He led her up the path, away from the others; the chatter and the laughter around the bonfire faded as they walked. Above them, trees rustled in the night breeze. In the distance, up the hill, she could see the glow of the lights in the main house, the lights from the dining room, some individual lights in bedrooms where they had been left on.

When they were halfway up the path, the boy stepped off the worn track and into the woods. She was not sure exactly what he meant to do, but strangely, she was not afraid. She followed closely behind him, sometimes touching his shirt, as he led the way, held branches for her, pointed out to her where there was a rock or a log. She wondered briefly how they would find the path again, then dismissed her worry. All she could think was that within hours her parents would come to the camp to fetch her and drive her north to Springfield, and that she might never see this boy again.

An owl hooted, startling them both. She laughed nervously, reached out for him. He stopped, turned to face her. She could barely see his eyes in the moonlight, the strong moonlight that had been on the path obscured now by the overhead trees. She sensed rather than saw him, felt his presence near, his own shallow breathing, the heat from his chest and arms. “The stars are amazing tonight,” he said, looking up at the sky. “Can you read the constellations?”

“The Big Dipper,” she said. “And sometimes the Little Dipper. But that's all.”

“Mmmm. Me too.” He took a step closer, so that his face was just over hers.

He tilted his head slightly, bent to kiss her. Instinctively she raised her chin. He caught her at the side of the mouth, held his lips there. The kiss was dry and feathery, so tentative she was not certain they were actually touching, though she could feel his breath on her cheek. He put his hands on her arms; she lifted her hands so they touched his back. She had never kissed a boy before, had never even held hands with a boy until she met him. Each touch was new and exhilarating, but she knew that he would not hurt her.

He found her mouth, the whole of it, and drew her in to him with his hands at the back of her waist, so that she lost her balance, was leaning against him for support. He swayed with her weight, then together they knelt. He lost his own balance then and carried her onto the soft mulch of the forest floor. Lying that way, as if on a bed, they became aware simultaneously of what it was they were doing. He pulled his face away to look at her in the dim light, to see if there was alarm there, if he had transgressed. She returned his gaze, but she could not speak. He kissed her once more not so tentatively this time, and she felt something of his urgency, her own awkwardness. He kissed her for a long time, and there was again the fluttering in her abdomen. His hand moved along her rib cage. She thought that possibly she should move his hand away; it was what she had been taught. He touched her breast, enclosed it with his palm. The touch caught her breath; the fluttering sensation spread out from her abdomen and along her thighs like the spill of a warm liquid. He looked down at her breast, to where her nipple was hard against the cotton of her blouse. She could hear his breathing, faster now, like her own, a rhythm against her face and in her ear. He kissed the side of her face. She unfastened the top button of her blouse, then the next. He pushed aside the cotton fabric, exposing her breast to the night. He touched the skin with his fingers, delicately and gently, as if caressing something fine and fragile—a spun-glass ornament, or the face of a newborn. He kissed her again on her mouth. She could feel him shift his body, move a leg over hers. He raised his face up, looked again at her eyes. He looked at her breast, lowered his mouth, touched the skin of her breast with his lips. She felt him press against her. Her leg was between his; his between hers. The fluttering deep inside her became a pressure, an exquisite urgency. He put his mouth on her nipple, opened his mouth, and sucked her. She moaned faintly with this pleasure, whispered his name. She felt the urgency burst inside her, spread through her and along her legs. She felt the boy shudder against her, a tight helpless shuddering, her nipple still caught in his mouth. He said her name sharply, pressed his forehead hard against her breastbone.

In her fist, she still held the bracelet.

They lay on the dirt and mulch without moving for a long time, long enough for the moon to shift slightly overhead and shine down upon them through a gap in the leaves. The white fabric of her blouse was blue in the moonlight, and she could see clearly now the length of the boy, from the top of his head, where it rested on her chest, to his feet. As they lay there they could hear the voices of the others, moving up the path to the house, young silvery voices laughing in the darkness not fifty feet from them. She thought then that they ought to try to make their way back, so that they would have the voices to guide them, but she did not want to disturb the boy. When after a time he looked up at her, she saw that his eyes were wet, that he had been crying.

“It's all right, Cal,” she said.

He covered her breast with her blouse, buttoned it for her. He lifted himself up, knelt beside her in the piney mulch. He saw her clenched fist. He opened her fingers, took the bracelet, fastened it on her wrist. She sat up, slid the bracelet along her arm.

“What we did . . .,” he said.

She touched the bracelet. “I'm all right, Cal,” she said. “It's all right.”

“I've never . . .”

“I know.”

“Do you understand . . . ?”

She looked down at the bracelet, dangling from her thin wrist. “I'm not sure, but I think so,” she said.

“I'm not sorry,” he said.

“No. I know,” she said. “How could we be?”

He helped her to her feet. Together they brushed bits of bark and leaves from her back, her shorts. They would be in trouble when they returned, required to say where they had been, but that seemed unimportant, meaningless.

“We'll just say we went for a walk, lost track of the time,” he said. “They won't like it, but we'd probably both better have the same story.”

She nodded. He walked in front of her, held branches for her till he had found the way back to the path. They held hands as they climbed the hill, their footsteps reluctant and slow. At the main door of the house, the door that would admit them to the bright light of the hall, to the stern queries of their counselors, to their separate wings and separate beds, they paused. He kissed her quickly on the cheek, lest anyone was watching them.

“I won't be able to say goodbye to you,” she said.

 

 

 

 

T
HE RAIN
has stopped. The night is still. A hush envelops the house, both inside and out, and except for the occasional whine of the refrigerator or the rumble and whomp of the furnace, all is quiet. He holds in his hand a glass of warm champagne, which he poured from the dregs of a bottle on the kitchen counter. Harriet and his children are in bed. He has no clear idea what time it is; he took his watch off to scour the pots, cannot remember where he put it. He thinks it must be after two o'clock. His parents returned from midnight mass nearly an hour ago with Hadley, asleep on her feet as she stumbled to her room. Harriet has already filled the stockings, cleaned up the bits of crumpled wrapping from the adults' presents, set out the children's gifts under the tree. For Christmas Charles gave his wife an astonishingly tiny video camera that the salesman promised would not only be easy to use but also take brilliant movies of his children, an enterprise that now fills Charles with sadness and remorse. Harriet gave Charles two season tickets to the Red Sox, games he already knows he will never attend. In another life (
what
other life? he asks himself—
this
is his life) he'd have loved the tickets, would have taken Hadley and Jack; the tickets would have framed his summer, would have given him something to look forward to, a way to punctuate the long, hot weeks. But now he feels only a vague sense of loss, as of having misplaced one's childhood.

(He thinks, oddly, of the O. Henry story about the couple who buy each other presents they can no longer use, because of what they've sacrificed to afford the gifts. Might he have used the camera to take movies of the kids at the Red Sox games? Without the games, or any similar outings, will Harriet want to take movies at all?)