4. Wednesday
CHAPTER 4
WEDNESDAY
B y 11am the following Wednesday, Chef Chuck seemed to have had about enough. Maggie had stopped in to the Dining Hall for coffee on her way from the waterfront to the climbing wall and on her way from the climbing wall to the tennis courts. When she popped in on the way from the archery range to the barn, he topped up her travel mug, and said, “I think either you do not know what ‘on the way’ means, or I will need to make you a better map.” When she returned ‘on the way’ from the barn to the tennis courts and asked for another refill, he politely declined.
“No?”
“No. First, you will drink full glass of water. Nurse April is busy enough with lice outbreak in cabin 3 as it is.”
She must look as ragged as she felt. Maggie had pulled her second almost all-nighter in a row trying to match invoices and receipts from her Aunt’s towering floor stacks to the corresponding lines in the Blue Harbor ledgers. (And they were real ledgers. Like, actual hardcover books full of illegible scribbles.) She wouldn’t exactly brag that she was making quick work of it. Both nights she’d felt sure that she could see more of the rug in Aunt Peg’s office by 4am than she had been able to at sunset, but in the harsh light of day, the stacks of papers seemed to have magically replenished themselves. Worse, she had barely nudged Parton off her spot on the couch and collapsed into sleep the previous night when she had been rudely awoken to a raucous cacophony of honking. The flock of geese that had apparently already been terrorizing Oak Ridge had arrived at the Blue Harbor waterfront for its first summer dip. Fantastic. There wasn’t enough coffee in the world to perk her up today.
Although, Chef Chuck might have had a point. Maggie was getting jittery. And it was possible that she might be a little dehydrated.
“Fine,” she conceded, and took the glass of water Chef Chuck poured.
Overall, though, the first week of camp was going absolutely fine. There had been what Maggie was told was an average amount of homesickness-related stomach aches and crying jags. Twelve campers so far had failed their swim tests, but that’s what swim tests were for. There was that one incident with an enormous spider living in the rafters of Cabin 7, which she could have done without. She was beginning to suspect, however, that a significant portion of her job was responding to politely frantic emails from parents whose children hadn’t been smiling quite big enough in the candid activity photos already uploaded to Blue Harbor’s (very password protected) website asking if she could maybe arrange a phone call with said child to make sure that a sufficient amount of fun was being had. Maggie was, fortunately, an expert at the courteous but firm no.
Maggie was not an expert at dogs. But right at that very moment she was pretty sure that something was Not Right with Parton’s face. She was getting back from an after-dinner run, the demon geese having ruined her plans for a morning one, and Parton was in his usual spot on the porch. Except his usually sleek snout had ballooned to three times its normal size. As she approached, she could see that he was breathing oddly as well. Too fast and too shallow. Fuck.
She took the four steps up to the porch in two jumps, grabbed her phone from her running belt, and tapped through to call Teddy. As it rang, she knelt, wanting to calm the dog, but afraid to touch him in case it somehow made things worse — hurt him, or freaked him out, or something. She didn’t know. The call went to voicemail. Fuck.
Ok. Deep breath. Maggie stood and began to pace. She had, less than a week earlier, sat with her counselors through 16 hours of Wilderness First Aid training. It was first aid for humans, yes, but surely something had stuck in her brain that might be applicable to the situation, right?
Start with the ABC’s, the instructor had said. God bless an acronym. The ABC’s: airway, breathing, and circulation. Airway. Breathing. Circulation. The porch was only about ten feet across, and Maggie was beginning to feel a little dizzy from walking in tight circles, so she stopped pacing and sat on the top step next to Parton. It was hard to measure, but his panting seemed to be getting worse.
Ok. Airway…
Nope. This was absurd. How was she supposed to check a dog’s airway? There was a reason she’d gone to business school and not veterinary school. She tried to assess the dog clinically. It didn’t look like he was choking on something. It looked like he was having…some kind of allergic reaction?
Wait. Could dogs use epi pens? Relatedly, was there a first aid kit in the cottage?
Nurse April. She would have one. Maggie texted her an SOS and got an immediate response.
April was on the porch less than three minutes later with a large red bag bearing a white cross slung over her shoulder, blonde hair somehow still falling in perfect, undisturbed waves.
“Hey there. What seems to be the matter?” She spoke with the deliberate calm of someone accustomed to other people’s panic. Not that Maggie was panicked.
“I don’t know,” Maggie answered, sounding, she had to admit, rather panicked.
“What did you hurt? Did you hit your head?”
“Me? No, it’s Parton. I think he’s having an allergic reaction? I don’t know. I found him like this.”
“The dog,” April said.
“Yes, the dog!” Ok, Maggie was panicking.
April took a moment, apparently deciding that the best way out of this situation was through, and refocused her attention on the dog. Maggie stood to give her space as April knelt down to examine him. Parton’s eyes had swollen shut, and his breathing was getting ragged. “Good boy,” April soothed, laying a hand lightly on his forehead.
“I think it’s getting worse.” Maggie said, trying her best not to loom over them.
“It does look like anaphylaxis.” April looked up at her. “Allergic reaction. Bee sting, maybe? I’m not a vet.”
“The internet says that for large dogs, a human-sized epi pen is ok. If it is an allergic reaction. I Googled it. After I texted you.”
“Well, you should never look your symptoms up on the internet…” April trailed off, and looked at the dog for another few moments. Then she grimaced. “And that’s why they say there’s an exception to every rule.” She motioned for Maggie to hand her the red bag, fished out an epi pen, and, with practiced ease, flipped open the cap, slid out the injector, and stabbed it into the upper portion of Parton’s back leg. He barely acknowledged the sensation, which seemed to Maggie like a bad sign.
“I don’t know what good that’s gonna do,” April said, slipping the epi pen into a bright orange bag labeled “Sharps.” “He needs a vet.”
“I—Yes. Do you happen to know a good vet?”
“No, but hang on.” April pulled her phone out of an exterior pocket on the first aid kit and placed a call.
“Hey there, Becker…” Maggie could hear the warm tones of a greeting on the other end of the line. “Me and Ms. McArthur have ourselves a bit of an emergency over here. Do you remember the name of the 24-hour vet Miss Peggy took Parton to when—” She paused, and Maggie could hear the drone of a response. “No, it’s—Bless your excellent memory Daniel Becker. Could you text me the—no, that’s not…”
April lowered the phone from her ear. “He’ll be here in five minutes.”
Daniel Becker must have broken several traffic laws because only six minutes later he did, indeed, pull right up to the cottage in his Oak Ridge Green pickup truck, having apparently made the executive decision to bypass the actual parking lot.
He wore a lived-in Asheville Bulldogs crew neck and grey-blue shorts that hugged lean thighs dusted with dark hair. Stubble shadowed his strong jaw, a contrast to the way the rest of his skin glowed in the golden hour light.
Maggie was irrationally annoyed. How absolutely dare he show up to a crisis looking like Patagonia #sponcon when she was sweaty and disheveled and moderately panicked? He probably wasn’t being handsome to spite her, but with everything else she had to deal with, it certainly felt like a personal attack.
* * *
Daniel vaulted out of the front seat and took the porch stairs in a single stride. Parton lay on his side, face swollen, breathing too quickly. April hadn’t said what was wrong. He wasn’t visibly bleeding, but he looked awful.
“Hey, buddy.” Daniel squatted near Parton’s head and reached out to scratch him lightly behind the ears. April was standing to his left, leaning against one of the porch’s heavy white support posts. The fact that she hadn’t left when he said he was on his way meant that she didn’t think the patient was stable. A bad sign, even if the patient was, in this case, not strictly within her area of medical expertise.
Maggie had jumped up from her seat on the porch swing when he’d arrived. Strands of her copper curls were making their escape from her messy ponytail, creating a halo effect in the dying light. She was almost eerily still, but for the fingers on her left hand tapping out a pattern on her thigh. She was, Daniel thought, trying very hard to hide that she wanted to jump out of her own skin.
“What happened?”
“I found him like this,” Maggie said, sounding unexpectedly defensive, at the same time April said, “Looks like anaphylaxis. Insect bite, maybe. Bee sting.”
“He looks rough.”
“He’s better than he was. Maggie called me for an epipen. Seems like it helped.”
Daniel looked at Maggie, eyebrows raised. That had been quick thinking, and creative. “Well, look at you.”
“I’m not incompetent,” she snapped. “Let’s get him in the truck.”
Daniel had planned to just lift with his knees and haul Parton into the backseat as gently as possible, but Maggie seemed to have problem-solved this, too. She reached back for a quilted blanket he hadn’t noticed folded neatly on the swing. When she bent to spread it out behind the dog, she left it doubled over in a long rectangle like a makeshift stretcher.
Maggie crouched and grabbed a corner of the blanket, and then shot Daniel a speaking look, as if daring him to make her ask for help. He didn’t. Together, they silently maneuvered the fabric under Parton’s body and stretchered all one hundred pounds of him into the truck’s back seat.
They drove the half hour on Highway 26 in further silence. After the first five minutes, Maggie switched on the radio, which Daniel had tuned to Kiss Country. He thought she’d change the station, or at least comment on it, but she just leaned back in her seat and watched the trees blur by in the growing darkness. She was preternaturally still again, but for her fingers tapping a soundless pattern on the arm rest. Every time the song changed, she twisted around to check on Parton, like she was rationing the number of times she was allowed to look.
The emergency vet was, as Daniel remembered, much like the human ER: long on wait time and short on tempers. The good news was that Maggie’s epipen brainstorm had probably saved Parton’s life. The bad news was that, because Parton was doing better, the vet tech triaging patients in the waiting room put him near the bottom of her list and told them to settle in for an extended stay.
Maggie had stopped her tap-tap-tapping when the tech said Parton would be fine, but she looked momentarily stricken when they were warned about the wait.
“Do you have somewhere you need to be?” Daniel asked. He could stick around if she had work she needed to get done.
“I’m fine, Becker.”
How this woman managed to make everything he said to her sound like an insult was a mystery. Drew would probably tell him that that was a Her Problem, and Drew would probably be right. But it felt like a Him Problem. He liked to be liked. Sue him.
Maggie slumped back into the hard plastic chair and stared down the middle distance like it had dared to make small talk.
Now that the acute emergency was over, Daniel had time to fully take her in. Out of the corner of his eye, obviously.
She’d clearly been out for a run when she’d found Parton. She was still wearing black nylon shorts, a waist pack, and a t-shirt from a 2017 10k in London that said Chase the Moon in peeling cursive letters. They had the A/C blasting in the waiting room, and Daniel could see goosebumps running up her arms. She hadn’t seemed to notice him watching her, so he crept his gaze up to her face. Her flush had receded in the hour or so since he’d arrived at Blue Harbor, leaving the freckles dancing across her nose and cheek bones in sharper relief. She was naturally pale, but her skin looked almost translucent, and her lips seemed drained of color. He would have attributed the effect to the chill and the fluorescent lighting, if it weren’t for the smudges under her eyes that hadn’t been nearly as dark the first time they’d met.
“You look exhausted.”
“Thanks,” she said without so much as glancing his way.
Ok, in her defense, that one he could have phrased better.
“No, I just meant…how’s it going?”
She looked at him, eyebrows raised, but otherwise didn’t respond.
Daniel didn’t actually have to interact much with the Blue Harbor director. His friendship with Miss Peggy had been convenient but not necessary. The summer was more or less already planned. They could coordinate details as needed by email. Unfortunately, he was beginning to take Maggie McArthur, Fancy Business Consultant’s knee-jerk dislike of him as a sort of challenge. Because the more Maggie seemed determined not to, the more he wanted her to like him. He should probably talk to someone about that.
They sat in a less-than-comfortable silence for several minutes. Or, rather, they sat silently. The waiting room echoed with the rattle of the air conditioner and a never-ending symphony of barks and meows and the occasional non-sequitur from a parrot in the corner.
At some point, Daniel noticed Maggie shiver.
“Cold?”
“I’m great.”
Daniel had had about enough of great. Without another word, he got up and walked out through the swish of the automatic doors.
* * *
Good. Maggie was freezing and hungry and just about hollowed out by the panic that had receded when the vet tech said that Parton would be alright. The dog was now snoring quietly on the blanket at her feet, and she was focusing what remained of her energy reserves on trying to keep it together and stay awake. If Daniel Becker wanted to go take a drive, that was fine by her. The removal of his annoyingly persistent kindness and increasingly comfortable-looking shoulder from her immediate vicinity would make her task much easier. And she was pretty sure he’d be back. He wouldn’t leave Parton stranded, at least.
Color her surprised when he walked in a few minutes later carrying a Nalgene bottle, a beach towel, and a dark green Oak Ridge hoodie.
He resumed his seat and held the sweatshirt out to her. “Zipper’s broken, but it’s better than nothing.”
“I’m fine.” She almost had to grit her teeth to keep from crying. Damn him.
“I know.”
“I’m not taking your sweatshirt.”
“Because you’re fine.” He had the gall to quirk up the left side of his mouth in half a smile.
“Yes.”
“Ok.” Daniel reached across her and set the hoodie down on the plastic side table. His arm brushed her shoulder as he pulled it back, setting off another full body shiver. Daniel raised his brows but said nothing. He only wrapped the towel around himself like a shawl and settled back into the chair to wait.
Well. Now Maggie felt ridiculous. She’d been deftly outmaneuvered. And she was still cold…and hungry…and tired…
She awoke to the sensation of fingers tapping on her forearm and a husky voice repeating her name close to her ear. Odd. Maggie preferred to have her mornings to herself and so, as a rule, always slept alone. Still groggy, she grumbled, and nuzzled her face into the towel.
The towel.
She jolted up, nearly breaking Becker’s nose in the process because they were at the emergency vet, and she appeared to have, horrifyingly, dozed off on his shoulder. His sweatshirt slid off the side of her chair onto the linoleum floor as she sat up because of course at some point he’d thrown it over her like a blanket. God she was a disaster.
And there was the vet tech peering curiously at them over her clipboard.
By the time the vet gave them the all clear, it was closing in on 2 a.m. They’d given Parton an antihistamine and a prescription for a canine epipen and sent him home with orders to take it easy. Maggie had, apparently, pulled exactly the right remedy out of thin air and probably saved the dog’s life, which, unfortunately, bolstered her sense of control over the situation not at all.
Dinner being a distant memory, she didn’t argue when Becker suggested a detour to the 24-hour McDonald’s out by the airport before they headed back to Blue Harbor. The restaurant itself was an island of flickering fluorescent lighting in the middle of a dark parking lot next to an abandoned Shell station. When they drove up, Becker deemed it “overall too murdery” to go in and insisted that they use the drive-through, park, and eat in the truck. Maggie insisted on paying.
After the background buzz of the E.R., the quiet of the parking lot made the cabin of Becker’s truck feel almost claustrophobic. With the engine, and, therefore, the radio, off, the only sounds were Parton’s low, even breathing coming from the back seat and the occasional slurp of Becker’s milkshake. The whole world had been reduced to the deserted islands of light cast by the parking lot’s lamps. Maggie dipped a fry into her soft serve and then crunched down as loudly as she could just to break the silence.
On her follow-up lick of the cone, she caught Becker looking at her oddly out of the corner of his eye. His face was mostly in shadow, and she couldn’t quite read his expression.
“What?” she demanded, her voice sounding hoarse and louder than she’d meant it to. She cleared her throat.
“What?” Becker asked innocently, or with feigned innocence, she still couldn’t tell.
Maggie dipped another fry into the cone and tried to beat the volume of her last crunch. Becker slurped at his milkshake in a way that felt like a response.
“How well do you know the Davies family?”
Becker glanced at her, then slurped again. “About as well as I want to.”
Well, that was cryptic. “Do you think they’d be interested in taking over Blue Harbor? Consolidating it with Oak Ridge?”
“No.” His answer came so quickly she was almost startled.
“You don’t want to take a minute to think about it?” Maggie took a leisurely lick of soft serve.
“No. They hate that they have all this money committed to Oak Ridge. But they’ve cornered themselves into doing this one good thing. It’s been around too long. I think the money is legally tied up. And the PR if it closed would be terrible. But they aren’t going to expand.” He took another sip, more quietly this time. “If that’s what you were hoping for, you’ll have to think of something else.”
Maggie hummed noncommittally. If he was right, her plan to get in, get the books in order, and get out had just gotten a little more complicated.
“If the Sullivans put Blue Harbor on the market, it won’t be Blue Harbor anymore. The buyers would turn it into a resort, or build timeshares, or subdivide the property into private lots and sell it off.” He sounded like he was describing the end times.
“Maybe. And if that’s what the market supports, maybe they should.”
Becker looked like he might argue, but, instead, he pulled the lid off of his paper cup and tipped his head back to pour the dregs of the milkshake down his throat. Maggie bit into the side of the cone and chewed deliberately. “Maybe it already isn’t Blue Harbor anymore without Aunt Peg.”
Daniel froze, head tipped back, then he straightened and turned his whole chest toward her. “Aunt Peg ?”
“Peggy Sullivan. The late owner and director of Camp Blue Harbor. My aunt.”
Daniel stared, as if searching out a resemblance in the lines of her face that were illuminated by the harsh fluorescents.
“How did you think I ended up here?” Maggie asked.
“You’re a consultant. I Googled you.”
“Why would anyone send a management consultant to be a camp director?”
“I don’t know. No one really knows what consultants do.”
He had her there.
Still, she felt compelled to point out her qualifications, modest though they were. “I was a Blue Harbor kid for eight summers.”
“But your name is Maggie McArthur ,” he continued, apparently not compelled by her relevant experience.
Maggie took another bite of her cone. “Aunt Peg was my mother’s sister.” It was really throwing Becker for a loop that he’d been even a little bit wrong about her. She wanted to take a moment to enjoy having the upper hand. “I was named after her, actually.”
“How?” He asked, like he thought she was trying to get one over on him.
“Margaret. She was Margaret Sullivan. Peggy is a nickname.”
“For Margaret ?”
“It’s Irish,” Maggie said confidently, hoping that he wouldn’t demand a full explanation of the journey from Margaret to Peggy. “I can’t believe you thought Blue Harbor had somehow hired a consultant from a big three consulting firm on a five-day turnaround. I flew in from Europe .”
“Yes, yes, you’re very fancy,” he grumbled.
“Thank you for noticing.” Maggie popped the rest of the cone in her mouth.
Becker turned the key in the ignition and the radio once again filled the silence.
Twenty minutes later, Becker dropped Maggie and Parton off back at Blue Harbor. He drove all the way up to the cottage again, which was definitely not good for the grass, but it was 3 a.m., and Maggie couldn’t seem to make herself care. He hopped down from the cab like maybe he was planning to open her door for her, but she wasn’t about to sit there and wait to find out. By the time he’d made it around to the passenger side, she was already out and pushing the seat forward to free Parton, who immediately jumped down and made a beeline for the porch.
She really wished Becker had stayed in the truck. Now they were stuck in a sort of awkward hover. Were they supposed to shake hands? In a corporate setting, she was always safe with a nice, firm handshake, but under the current circumstances it felt uncomfortably formal.
She opted for a “So, uh, thanks.” It was almost impossible to go wrong with a simple “thanks,” as long as you weren’t in the middle of a tense negotiation.
“Yeah,” Becker said, a little absently. He was watching the dog make tight circles in front of the cottage door. When Parton finally found the exact right spot and flopped down, Becker turned back and met Maggie’s eyes. “I’m sorry. About your aunt.” He said softly. “She was…a great woman. And a good one. A really good one.” He paused like maybe he was searching for better words. “May her memory be for a blessing.”
Maggie wasn’t sure how to respond. She hadn’t heard that expression before. It was…a beautiful sentiment, actually.
Inconveniently, she was terrible with sentiment.
“Uh, yeah,” she said, eloquently. “Thanks.”
From the porch, Parton grumbled loudly, breaking the awkward silence that had begun to stretch between them.
“Sounds like it’s time for bed,” Becker said, with a tired smile. He shut the passenger side door still hanging open beside them and made his way back to the driver’s seat. Maggie dragged herself up the porch stairs to let Parton into the cottage. She didn’t hear the truck’s engine rev until she’d gotten the door open, and Parton had slipped inside. Glancing over her shoulder, Maggie could just see past the glare of Becker’s headlights when he raised a hand as a goodbye. She nodded and turned to follow Parton inside. He was already curled up on the couch, head snuggled onto a throw pillow, dozing as if he’d been there all evening.