This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Published by Catapult
First Catapult printing: 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Deborah Shapiro
All rights reserved
“As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat,” copyright © 1974 by John Ashbery; from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.
ISBN: 978-1-948226-30-1
Jacket design by Nicole Caputo
Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956398
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The summer demands and takes away too much,
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.
JOHN ASHBERY,
“As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat”
CONTENTS
Summer, green and still and slightly grainy. The way it is in foreign films from the 1970s and ’80s. A lulling, enveloping heat. I had things to do, I swear, written on lists, but those things seemed to get done only if they coincided with the slow, inevitable rhythm of the days. From the couch in the room with the bay window, I would watch those movies, watch young French women who never wore bras move around in philosophically provocative situations, and then I would get up and go outside, go down to the lake, or watch another movie. The days passed into each other without much distinction, dulling all anxiety but heightening a sensitivity. Like walking out of a dark theater into a bright afternoon, one world exchanged for another. Being stunned and not minding it, wanting to hold to an in-between.
I’d started to think of this place as a falling-down estate owned by a family that had shut it up, fled during a war, leaving us as caretakers. We’d done what we could, David and I, but the playing fields remained overgrown, the tennis, volleyball, and basketball courts all cracked and wild with weeds. The little cove by the lake was filmed with algae. The boathouse, the dining hall, the rec hall, the whitewashed bunks—they were still standing though in need of repair. Most of the bunks here, the original ones, were built in a clearing, in a horseshoe shape around a flagpole. But as the camp had grown, two structures were added at the edge of the woods. It was darker and cooler over there, even on a day in July, the sun bright and blazing before noon, an equatorial light.
I couldn’t have said what I was doing over in that part of the property. Taking a different way, maybe, down to the water. Those cabins had always had a secretive quality because they were set apart from the rest of the camp. And when I had been a young camper here, almost thirty years ago, these cabins were where the older girls, in all their mysterious glamour, stayed. If I was alone, I would walk hurriedly by. If there were two or three of us, we would linger, bravely, as if on a dare, waiting to be taken into their world.
The girls were gone now, of course, but something of them remained, some sort of pull, a lasting, palpable atmosphere. A presence. When I heard a sound—a dull thud that repeated, followed by a scraping—I stopped walking and kept listening. The noise was familiar somehow. I made my way around the side of the cabin where the ground rose a little and I could look inside through a screen.
I was sure I hadn’t left the shutters open on any of the cabin windows, though now they were propped up with a couple of two-by-fours. And I couldn’t remember if the clothesline between these two cabins, that I ducked under, had always been there. But the damp clothes on it—a T-shirt, a black no-wire bra, three pairs of underwear—those were definitely new.
A thud, again. The scraping. And through the screen, a young woman sitting on the dark wood floor, her back toward me. Shit, I heard her say—but it didn’t appear to be in response to my presence. She stood, moving into the light, holding her right hand in her left, staring at her palm. Long white neck, straight black sweep of hair across her forehead, lanky, a person of lines and edges. I saw then what she’d been doing: playing jacks.
I ran my nails down the screen, gently, a noise that caught her attention. She turned, making me out through the window. No smile, but her face was soft, unalarmed. It made me think she knew me, that she’d seen me before, wandering around, and perhaps had put together some idea of who I was. Which meant she would have been living on our property for a while.
She stepped closer, right up to the screen, looking down at me.
“I have a splinter,” she said. “From the floor.”
“I