MAGGIE
That night in her room, she tacks up photos of the Osmonds and Davy Jones on the blank bulletin board and across the dresser spreads out a lace runner her grandmother made for her.
She goes to the window that overlooks the back of the resort, and she sees post lamps lighting the property.
She can’t make out too much, but the whole place looks orderly and well appointed.
In the woods a small distance from the crew building, she makes out the shape of a smaller structure with lights on.
She sees someone moving inside. The person walks by the window twice and then seems to settle somewhere.
The small structure almost reminds her of the concession stand at Chip’s baseball games.
But as her eyes adjust to the darkness, she can see it’s a camper.
The person stops and bends down, and looks like they pick up a baby and pat its back.
She reads the poem over and over again, staring at Emily’s dashes and spaces. Something catches her eye then in the corner, and she startles, but sees it’s a dark brown moth fluttering around the room. It slows and lands on her lampshade, flapping its wings and staying in place so peacefully.
It flies around some more, near her pile of clothes on the chair, and lands on her uniform shirt.
She can’t explain it, but she feels glad it’s in the room with her.
Two creatures who want quiet, who are attracted to light and life.
“I’m nobody, who are you?” she says to the moth, and it moves to her water glass and seems to study the liquid inside.
She decides to introduce herself to the girls down the hall. Christy and Mary Jo are nineteen and roommates, and they’ve both been here a few months, but Nancy is in her early twenties and has her own apartment a few miles away and is just hanging out after her shift.
“This is a real job for her,” Mary Jo says, and laughs when Nancy swats her with a Carpenters record sleeve. She holds her hand up. “I mean, she has like a real life. She even goes grocery shopping.”
Nancy, who has beautiful long, dark hair, laughs.
She wears a silk blouse and a pencil skirt, and her heels are kicked off to the side.
“I hate grocery shopping.” She picks up a bottle of nail polish from the desk and examines it.
“I came up to visit before going back to my boring real life.” She glances at Maggie.
“Where are you from again?” She picks up a pack of Virginia Slims and takes a cigarette out, frowns, and slides it back in the pack.
“Easton.”
“Oh, I’m from Bethlehem,” Christy says, “and Mary Jo’s from Wind Gap.
” Christy’s blond hair is almost white. She has glowing cheeks and Maybelline lips.
She takes the pack of cigarettes from Nancy and gestures toward Maggie.
Maggie never smoked before, only once when she and her friend Sally bought a pack on the boardwalk in Ocean City on a family vacation.
They each tried one, and the taste made Maggie want to vomit.
Maggie takes the cigarette in her hand and stays still as Christy lights it.
Christy winks at her. “Has anyone told you to make sure the front door is locked and you don’t let anyone in?
” She points her thumb in Mary Jo’s direction.
“We’re not letting this one go anywhere near the door.
Two weeks ago she let some guys from a different resort into the building. They were looking for fresh meat.”
Mary Jo raises her hand and laughs. “Me! I’m fresh meat.”
“Not funny,” Christy says and throws her headband at her. “You’ll set us back fifty years.”
“Not if I’ve decided it’s what I want, too.”
Nancy leans back, and her hair moves like she’s in a Breck commercial.
“Oh, by the way,” Maggie says. “Who’s in that camper out back?”
Christy rolls her eyes. “The problem child.”
“Our favorite angry bartender,” Mary Jo says. “We call him the ghost because he’s always, like, lurking on the edge of things.” She does the creepy motion with her hands. “Woooooooo.”
“Elliot?” But she thought she saw him pick up a baby. Did she imagine that? Why on earth would he have a kid in there? She thinks of his green Camaro and can’t fathom him driving a baby in it. Maybe she was seeing things, filling in blanks. She doesn’t mention it to the girls.
“Oh stop, he’s not so bad.” Nancy stands and steps into her shoes.
“Nancy’s more polite than I am. He’s the resident cad,” Christy says to Maggie. “If he tries to talk to you, pretend he’s a real ghost and you aren’t looking for a haunting.”
Maggie thinks of Elliot sitting next to her at breakfast with Rhonda.
She thinks of his expression at the Wooden Duck when Rhonda talked about Chip and loss.
What happened to him in the war? What did he see, and why is he in the camper away from the rest of them?
She remembers a feature on the news about war trauma and forgets where she is for a second.
Nancy looks at her now. “Don’t forget to smoke it,” she says, and stares at Maggie’s cigarette with the long ember.
Maggie holds it out to her absently, and Nancy laughs as she takes it from her.
“Sheesh, everyone wants me to smoke.” She holds it up to her lips and inhales and sighs as she blows out.
“Your expression a second ago,” Nancy says. “You remind me of someone.”
Maybe you knew my brother, Maggie wants to say, but she feels self-conscious in front of Christy and Mary Jo. She looks at Nancy’s bright green eyes and makes a mental note to ask when they’re alone. “Just a familiar face,” she says and waves good night.
She is up before the sun and heads outside, feeling like she’s more okay here this morning, in the middle of all these mountains and trees, the light starting to materialize in the pink sky.
Something calls to her. Something makes her feel settled, as though she’s getting a hint of what Chip was looking for.
She wears shorts and a sweatshirt, and there is a slight breeze that prickles her legs.
She thinks she will go for a jog. Her last two months of high school, she had gotten in the habit of getting up and running three or four miles most mornings.
“All that running,” her mom would say and kiss her on the head.
She remembers their gym teacher and Chip’s baseball coach, Mr. Grakowski, who framed Chip’s uniform shirt on the gym wall, used to say, “Runners are running from something.”
“Then why do we have to do the mile and these stupid sprints?” Stew Arbor, the class clown, said.
Mr. Grakowski shook his head, his whistle around his neck, his shelf of a belly tight under his polyester shirt. “Because you gotta find out what you’re running from,” he said, and mimed hitting Stew on the head with his clipboard.
Is that what this is about? Was she running from something? If anything, running brought more to her mind: Chip at Red Maple, Chip’s last days in that light-filled hospital room, his drowsy eyes watching her mouth read The Velveteen Rabbit.
Haven’t you heard this enough?
He made that noise that indicated his mouth was dry, and absently, she held his Styrofoam cup with the straw up to his lips.
“How is he?” her mom said, standing in the doorway. Sometimes their mother would just stand in the doorway, as though she couldn’t take another step into the room. She crossed her arms, and her face was blank.
“He’s still here,” Maggie said, and as her mother flinched she realized that was a terrible thing to say.
She jogs in place now and does some overhead stretches. She hears a bird that sounds like a wren and takes off.
There is so much green here, the fog hovering around the mountains like in a storybook land, or Scotland or Ireland.
She runs toward the barn, and she sees a woman, probably a guest, jogging on the trail there.
Off in the distance, she sees the camper she saw from her window, and it’s quiet and dark.
Why doesn’t Elliot live in the crew building with the others?
And did she really see him pick up a baby?
She thinks she hears a horse in the barn, and she looks at the dew on the geraniums. Her hair bounces as she runs.
She feels stiff in the beginning, but then her joints become fluid like wax melting, and she breathes in the perfect air.
She tries to ignore the question that keeps pressing her.
What now? What now? What now? She swats away the memories of the day when he took that final gasping breath, when everything awful was shown to her, like the note at the end of one of her mystery books she used to read in middle school.
Oh, that last day. She remembers stepping outside the hospital, her father’s hand on her shoulder, her mother’s head slumped forward.
Maggie had forgotten what day it was, what time it was, and when they went outside, it was early evening.
The sunset was beautiful, and Maggie didn’t know how it could still be beautiful after what the three of them had just seen.
She carried a pile of thinking-of-you and get-well cards people had sent Chip.
She carried a plant with a small balloon on a stick stuck inside.
She carried The Velveteen Rabbit because she knew, if she did nothing else that day, she would put it back on his shelf so it would be safe.
Cars drove by, and there were pumpkins and gourds and beautiful mums in front of shops.
People walked their dogs, the world still moved, and Chip was no longer a part of it.
She shook her head, feeling as though at any moment the ground would open up and swallow them all because there was no way they could do this thing, this carrying on without an essential member of their family.
But they found their car in the parking garage, and the three of them headed home.
She chases away the awful expressions on her parents’ faces, how broken and beyond repair they still look. They are only in their forties with so many years ahead of them, knock wood.
She thinks of the way Mr. Millman at the market never asked if she was okay, even when he heard her sniffling in the stockroom.
She thinks of the way Tommy would pretend to comfort her, but then slide his hands into the back of her jeans and start kissing her neck, when all she wanted him to do was hold her, listen to her, tell her she’d learn to live with this.
The woman running ahead of her has disappeared now, and it’s mostly just fog.
It feels good. It feels wonderful. To be alone, to be moving, to have this unlimited path to follow.
When her parents got married in the 1950s, they went to a Pocono resort for their honeymoon, and her mom still has a candle they made in the china cabinet.
Maggie remembers her father saying they went out in a canoe, and Maggie thought they were the coolest people she knew, the worldliest. The place they stayed, Birch Haven, was destroyed in a flood in the 1960s, but her mom said it was the perfect place to begin.
Maggie tries to push her parents and memories away. She will get better here. She will get better the way Chip tried to. God. She swallows the lump in her throat. She feels like she is beginning, too. Like she has married a new life and this is her honeymoon.
She is about to turn around when she notices the big tree to her right and a man next to it.
She is out of breath and stops, puts her hands on her knees and tries not to make a sound.
She realizes it’s Elliot. He’s grunting, doing squats, and then she sees him scale the tree, like a bear, wiggling out to a wide branch, and holding himself there, his feet hanging for a few minutes, just his form in the fog.
A part of her feels like she should run and stand under him, like firefighters in the old cartoons waiting below a burning building with a big life net.
As if he needs that. As if anyone besides her needs catching.
After her run, her legs are sore. It’s a little past seven, and she doesn’t start her shift until nine.
She remembers employees are allowed to use the indoor pool in the mornings before it opens to guests as long as they understand that no lifeguard is on duty, so she hurries back to her room to change into her swimsuit.
She worries she got it wrong and doesn’t want to get in trouble, but figures she’s here to be different from the careful girl she’s always been.
She walks to the pool, hoping there are towels.
The air is humid and thick with chlorine, and the chaise longues are all lined up against the stone wall with brass light fixtures overhead.
The water looks clean and inviting, and someone suddenly breaks the surface. “Morning,” Elliot says, flicking his hair and cocking his head to drain his ear.
How did he get there so quickly?
“I like to take a quick dip after my morning workout,” he says.
“I had the same idea.” She glances down at him. She looks at the big clock on the wall, at the stacks of perfectly folded striped towels. “Can I ask you something?”
“Ask away.”
“You live out in that camper?” She almost adds something about the baby, but thinks it will sound insane. There is no baby here with him now.
“Yup.” He cracks his back like he seems to love to do. “I don’t play well with others.”
She grips the bottom of her sweatshirt. “I felt bad I asked you about Vietnam.”
He shrugs. “I imagine there’s stuff you don’t like to talk about.”
“Try me.” She pulls off her clothes and feels a little self-conscious in her faded bathing suit.
“Okay, I will,” he says as she’s about to jump in. “Wait!”
“What?”
“Make sure you touch the drain.”
“The drain?”
“I always do; it’s good luck. Follow me.” His wet face looks wholesome for a second. A child at the town pool. She wonders what horrors he saw in the war. She can’t imagine how awful it would be to sacrifice years of your life to something so thankless.
“To luck,” she says, and dives in. Her eyes burn, but she keeps them open, and follows his form, his long legs kicking, his arms raking the water.
He reaches the drain, and he puts his hand on it.
He turns his face to her, and she puts her hand on the drain too, her fingers touching his for a brief second.
He blows bubbles out of his mouth. Their eyes lock, and she wonders if he can see she’s smiling.