I said that I understood that. How ambition was complicated. When you wanted something badly, you could become invested in the wanting. And then when that wanting didn’t result in the imagined outcome, or maybe even when it did, you were left in a situation where you had to give up the state of wanting you’d gotten so used to. Who were you, in a way, when the wanting was gone?
I was thinking out loud, I suppose. Voicing some ongoing conversation I’d been having with myself.
“You mean this camp, not being able to make it into a resort or whatever?” Stella asked.
“No, I guess I’m thinking more about how we got to this place, how we even ended up here at Alder.”
Stella had been digging her heels in the sand, creating shallow channels, moats. She stopped for a moment.
“Did you think about trying to revive it as a camp for kids?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why? Do you hate children?”
She hadn’t expected me to laugh.
“I mean—”
“I don’t hate kids.”
At twenty-two, she was closer to being a child, in years, than she was to being my age.
“No, I get it,” Stella said. “I don’t want to have kids.”
“Ever?”
“Yeah. Why? Why would you do that to yourself and to another human being?”
“It’s that bad?”
“No.” Her consideration of the subject played out across her face—slightly raised brows, skewed, pensive mouth. “But sometimes. Yeah.”
“Well, you never know, you might change your mind.”
She nodded, conceding but unbelieving. As if the concepts of reversal and ambivalence were possible but abstract. Like she could only place herself in them the way she could place herself on an imagined ice floe in Antarctica.
“Do you want to have kids?” she asked me.
There was something so straightforward about Stella’s question—as if she had no idea how loaded such a question could be. Coming from her, it was a simple inquiry, which somehow made it possible for me to answer. I sat up, wrapping my arms around my knees, facing the water and the dock, with Stella in my peripheral vision.
“We tried. I always wanted a child in a kind of abstract way, like someday it’d be nice to have a family. I never imagined it in great detail but I sort of just always saw it as happening one day, though I never had the biological urgency some women talk about. But there’s this point where everyone around you is having kids. And maybe it sounds shallow and wrong but that made me want it in this even stronger, more immediate way. Like I’d be left behind. I’d be missing out. So we started trying. And it wasn’t happening. And then I had a miscarriage. And.” And and and.
“I’m sorry.” She brought her hand to my forearm, her blue fingertips resting on my wrist.
And then I found myself apologizing. I barely knew her. I shouldn’t have been telling her all of this.
“We might keep trying,” I said, brightly, like I’d made her sad and now I needed to cheer her up. “You know, with more fertility treatments and all that. Maybe adoption. We can’t really afford more trying, though. It just seems like . . . like a lot now.”
I thought of my brother’s son, of visiting their house a couple of years earlier, without David for some reason, and my nephew was five and couldn’t sleep and he appeared, by the side of the guest room bed, carrying a pillow on which he’d arranged an assortment of stuffed animals. Two of his cherished “Lolos,” what he interchangeably called these bears with formless velour handkerchief bodies, a small plush owl, and a fox he’d considerately picked out for me. He asked if he could sleep in this bed with me and I said sure, thinking that my brother wouldn’t approve but that I couldn’t refuse him. He got under the covers and I reached over to touch his cheek and then his so-thin shoulder and, already more than half asleep, he took my arm into the fold and held it close to himself, as if it were another one of his animals. It wasn’t entirely unlike the tender way Stella had taken my hand in hers when she painted my nails, or the way her fingertips had rested on my wrist just now.
“Alice would say something like, I don’t know, she’d say we make our own families. Or like, what even is family? She’d reduce it to something that’s not worth having. A social construct that’s dangerous and divisive.”
“Why is she still in your phone?”
“I don’t know.” She smiled, shrugged. “Why haven’t you told your husband I’m here?”
In an office in the lodge, the old microphone of the PA system still sat out on a large wooden desk. When I’d gone to camp here, every night at lights-out, a counselor would sing “Taps” into it. All is well. Safely rest. God is nigh.
The one summer I worked there as a counselor, my closest friend was a girl my age named Berrie Lerner. She had wildly curly hair and gray eyes and a boyfriend back home she was going to break up with because she couldn’t stop thinking about John, one of the boys around our age who worked on the kitchen staff, whom she had been with all July. I was with Stuart, another “kitchen guy,” as they were called, and the four of us would go down to the lake some nights and go swimming or just sit in the sand, or on the low concrete retaining wall, and fool around. Stuart and I quickly came to an unspoken understanding that we liked each other, liked each other’s body, but that neither of us fascinated the other. Berrie and John fascinated us. When the four of us were together, we were spectators and Berrie and John were the show.
When it was Berrie’s turn to sing “Taps,” her voice, a steady contralto, would come through the PA system strong and clear but also soft. A voice to tuck you in and kiss your cheek. Berrie thought the last line went God is night. I could have corrected her when she came out and we sat on the steps with our flashlights, the heat of the day replaced by a coolness that required a sweatshirt. We’d be quiet for a while before we began to whisper about the girls or something that had happened that day or what we would do on our day off, how high school and our towns seemed so far away. Berrie would make a pronouncement about field hockey or blow jobs, in a you-know-how-it-is way, like a jaded forty-something divorcee, and then she would giggle or moan and—oh, shit—remember where we were and what time it was and lower her voice. God was nigh. God was night.
Stella had left me a note on a piece of blue scrap paper, slipped through the mail slot in the front door of my house and onto the small kilim rug in the front hall, sometime after David headed out in the morning. She would be back this afternoon, said the note. We could go boating, maybe? She included her cell phone number and signed it: S. Her handwriting was girlish, looping, pleased with itself, more feminine and bubbly than I would have expected. It didn’t have the ageless quality of a certain kind of cursive that used to be taught—the penmanship of Aunt Esther, script that you could read pages and pages of. Irrationally, I used to think my own handwriting would evolve, as I got older, to resemble Aunt Esther’s hand. But it remained crabbed and illegible.
I could’ve tossed the note—I had her number now—but instead I took it upstairs and buried the blue paper in my nightstand drawer. And then I waited. I went online and read an article on how to build a professional network and counted this as a productive use of my time.
I looked at old pictures of Esther and Joe. I’d come across a shoebox full of photos in the house and an album in the lodge—green imitation leather, a three-ring binder of yellowed adhesive pages covered in flimsy plastic. In the early ’70s: Some windy day. Esther in