~ ~ ~
THEY ARRIVED in the late afternoon, after a stretch of silence punctuated only by the occasional sound of the turn signal or a sigh from Edward. The fireflies wouldn’t appear for another few days, and much of the campground radiated absence, stretches of empty sites, wooden tables free of human clutter, squat and blackened grills.
They circled the campsites carefully, commenting on the dramatic slant of number sixty-four, pausing to investigate the well-shaded opportunity afforded by seventy-two. Edward, who had not camped once in his life, kept proximity to a bathroom a priority, and narrowed his eyes as they traveled farther from the friendly wooden stalls of the showers. Claudia, though weary, held her initial vision of perfection close, and quickly found flaws in each of the most promising sites.
They had nearly completed the double-loop, an infinity shape paved in concrete, when they saw it. Claudia braked, and Paulie exclaimed. Each opened their door carefully and moved slowly closer, evaluating the patch of dark land that would be theirs for the next eight evenings. The heart of it was situated in a slight valley, and they had to hike down in small steps, Claudia holding up Paulie’s hips while Edward struggled with the chafing confines of the cutoffs. Two trees stood on the north and south borders of number eighty, their trunks covered in a mantle of kudzu vines, an impenetrable green. The branches of each strained towards the other in the sky, not quite meeting, admitting an avenue for the sun to flood the rust-colored picnic table. Farther back leaned two smaller trees, echoes of the first, spaced as though destined to receive the blue-and-white hammock that Claudia had impulsively purchased at a roadside store. But this tug of serendipity did not bear comment: at the rear of the site cantered a confident stream, which took its rhythm from the modest but fierce waterfall where it began, and the sight of the fresh rush was immediately soul mending.
“Fuck,” said Edward.
“Fuck is right, Eddy,” said Paulie, reaching for his hand. They strode towards the water together, leaving Claudia where she had plunked, cross-legged, in the dirt, finally excused from obligation. At first they stood in the center, where the deepest water played above their knees, and looked around with a kind of guilt, as if waiting to be caught. Paulie was the first to sit, disappearing briefly beneath the surface to dunk his curls, then Edward, whose balding pink crown shone wet and bright in a patch of sun. From Claudia’s vantage, it was difficult to imagine that the two heads peeking out of the water, lolling wildly, maintained ties with any bodies.
Eventually she rose, retrieved white towels from the trunk of the car and carefully set them on the table to warm. She began unpacking the supplies they’d brought, stackable rubber dishes and nectarines bundled in starchy linens and a heavy, ovular cooler of water that thudded when shifted. When Paulie and Edward approached, twenty minutes later, shaking the moisture off with the subtlety of feral dogs, she wrapped each of them in the stiff new cotton, and then they ate, surveying the landscape and discussing the very best position for sleep.
~ ~ ~
AFTER DRIVING twenty miles south to the nearest town, the last place his phone had picked up reception, Thomas cruised the main drag of square wooden buildings, seeking a parking place where he might gather the confidence to make the call.
In the lot of an abandoned drive-in diner, he got out and sat at one of the metal tables, the type covered in waffled plastic and bolted to the earth. The figure of a giant wooden boy biting into a hamburger cast a horrific shadow over the lot; when the hot wind blew, it quivered at its tenuous point of attachment atop the boarded-up kiosk.
Thomas looked at the phone and willed enthusiasm. Though it had been less than a month, he found he could no longer envision Adeleine’s shape. He saw the nape of her neck and the arch of her back, as from behind her in the afternoon, and remembered her hand as it held a fork, her hair as it grabbed light, but he could not force the fragments into concert. He considered the possibility that he no longer produced the hectic energy that he had transferred so effectively into loving her. His brain fed him images of cartoon firemen, holding out a trampoline, looking up at a curling orange window, dancing into different positions, bracing to catch something impossibly large.
Thomas prepared for, even anticipated, the number of rings — it generally took Adeleine at least four to tear herself away from the fabric of her thoughts and answer — but then she was on the phone almost instantly.
“It’s me,” he said.
He could tell, solely by the way she paused before she spoke, and then by the dull theater of her questions—Where are you? How are you? — that their language, one that had taken so long to grow, was lost. Until he began to ask her the same, he didn’t consider the alternative: that their dynamic had not been relinquished, but plundered, thieved of the little optimism that had made it possible.
“Her son was here again.”
“Did he put up some new eviction notices? Adeleine, I can’t really believe it, but Edith’s daughter is giving me—”
“He knew I wouldn’t leave the house, and he took advantage of that.”
It was here that Thomas faltered, and did not pose the inquiries that he surely would have, had he somehow divined the cramped shape of her posture, seen the ragged chew of her fingernails. Across the country, Adeleine sat on the floor with her body coiled as tightly as she could manage, her knees pressed up against her chin, her arms around her shins, the telephone held against her cheek by her left shoulder. Edith, on the couch behind, occasionally placed a hand on the top of her blond-red head and sighed.
“What happened?” he said. “Are you all right? Did he try to inspect your apartment?”
When she brushed away his questions and assumed a hardened, mostly monosyllabic conversational position, he found he didn’t have the focus to chip at it, find his way inside.
“Adeleine. I’m going to ask you — I need you to agree to something. It’s not what I expected. Jenny won’t come. She’s going to sign over the property, but we have to bring Edith here. I don’t know how to ask any other way — you need to walk out of there, and you need to bring her with you. Time doesn’t give us any alternatives.”
“Talk to Edith,” Adeleine said. The voice he heard was scrubbed of her, as though she were hours into reading a manual aloud. “Tell her you found her daughter. Tell her Jenny still exists.”
“Well—” The phone was already in transit.
“Good day?” lilted Edith.
“Edith,” he said. “It’s Thomas.”
“…”
“From upstairs?”
“Mm,” she said, without much commitment. “We could certainly use your help around here, then!”
“Edith. Your daughter. Jenny? I’m here with Jenny.”
“You are?” said Edith. A grin moved across her face, touching all parts of it. “How are her grades? Jenny,” she continued, “is such a storyteller. I always say, you could hand her a tissue and an orange and she’d give you back a whole world built around them.”