Pausing on the steps of the cabin, she watched the little flames attached to bark boats blink through the leaves of the trees, moving like a Milky Way into deeper darkness, away from the lights of the camp. Inside, she hunched over and took off her clothes, the shy way, as if all the girls were already there, pulled her flannel nightgown over her head. It was embarrassing because all the other girls slept in oversized T-shirts.
She shimmied down into her sleeping bag and tried not to be afraid. The day had been a long one, moving, as they did every day, from canoeing to archery, from swimming to modern dance. She'd felt nauseous and thought every minute of calling her mother. During arts and crafts she started to cry and ran down to the latrine before anybody noticed.
She pressed the skin low on her stomach and remembered she'd forgotten to pee. It was the fruit punch at dinner. and the can of Diet Coke she'd gotten from the machine afterward. The girls moved up the paths and Sandy knew there was no time to dress again and go to the latrine, so she jumped up and ran outside, walked barefoot along the edge of the cabin until she found the spot of shadowed moss, pulled up her nightgown, and squatted, leaning back so the urine wouldn't bank in the arches of her feet.
Way back in the woods she heard a breeze blow back the leaves and rattle the branches, and as she finished and stood, someone gripped her arm and jerked her toward the woods. She thought it was Robin, who'd been waiting all day, narrow-eyed and mean, to get her alone and beat the shit out of her, but the figure was thick in the chest; maybe it was the stable boy or one of the guys that worked in the kitchen, maybe they'd noticed how sad she was and decided to save her life.
Blackberry briars caught on her nightgown, pulled until the cloth strained and snagged; her bare feet hit sharp rocks and broken sticks and strange thorny plants. He yanked her so fast it seemed like her legs would fly up and she'd float diagonally in back of him. She felt rain on her face and started to cry. He turned his head, his features better defined now in the opening of trees, in the sublunary light. His face was round with a long white beard and yellow teeth. Sandy recognized him as the lonely troll in fairy tales. Her head got swimmy and her knees dissolved and he scooped her up and carried her deeper into the forest.
Sagging burlap grazed the tip of her nose; the coarse threads tickled and she squinched her features and sneezed, soaked her flannel bit with saliva. Not that it wasn't already wet, her tongue rimming around its velvety nuance, until she knew its sinews as well as the geography of her own teeth. The mysterious smell of lust and loneliness seeped through the hotel mattress into the musty box spring. The powerful scent shrunk her tiny as a figurine left under a doll house bed. He wouldn't need the van now; he could carry her in a velvet flute case, or in his pocket, like a Barbie doll, her tiny toes brushing his leather belt, her head resting against a copper penny warmed by his groin.
Like a searchlight turning figure eights over the highway, she beamed her need out, so the numb drivers in their cars would flash to a girl in a diaper tied diagonally under a motel bed. But even if it worked, they'd just shake their heads, dismiss the image as a half-remembered scene from a bad B movie, assume their mind had lost its way with fatigue and was wandering places it shouldn't.
Her stomach quivered. He hadn't fed her for several days, just a couple swallowfuls of warm Coke. Maybe he'd bring her back some food; anything would do, a package of chowder crackers or an old candy bar. She wanted french fries, the thin kind, sweet and delicate. Saliva gathered between her gums and cheek.
At the beginning of summer, before camp, she layout in her bathing suit in the backyard, reading and daydreaming, mostly about the boy she'd gone into the closet with during a game of Seven Minutes in Heaven. She'd expected a pretend kiss, but once the door closed he pressed into her with such longing she thought she'd faint. In the hottest hour of the afternoon, the bedding flowers wilted and the sun electrified her dream of a bare-chested boy in white satin basketball shorts lying among her stuffed animals, the pink rabbit with the bow tie, the downy yellow duck. She'd heard her glass of Coke tip over, opened her eyes to a deer's thick tongue licking spilled soda out of the grass, antlers covered with fine white hairs and its eyes dark as corn syrup. A dog barked and the deer jerked its head up, stood perfectly still, then ran back into the woods, its white tail moving as expressively as a face. She'd gone into the house and got lettuce from the refrigerator, spread it out on a gray stump just inside the tree line. The deer came back that day and nearly every other, slowly beginning to rely on the fetid produce. Even now it probably lingered during the day in the woods between her backyard and the highway and at night stepped right up to the sliding glass doors.
That wasn't the only strange omen. A few days before camp, she'd gotten bored, put a few stale hamburger buns in a zip-lock bag, and walked along the highway guardrail to the park. Mosquitoes hovered like static electricity and the air was so thick with humidity it was hard to breathe. A woman with blonde hair was reading a romance novel and smoking at one of the picnic tables. Her chubby baby lay nearby on a blanket spread out on the grass, wearing only a diaper, its hair wet with sweat. Sandy asked her how old the baby was and the woman said two without even lifting her eyes from the page. Its head was too big, its eyes dull and unfocused. There was something wrong with the baby; it was sick or retarded. She'd walked quickly around the small man-made lake, the dirt path dusted with downy feathers, toward the wooden dock. Opening her bag, she took out the bottom half of a bun and threw it into the water. Mallards swam over to her, but before they got near a huge black carp surfaced, took the bread in its mucusy mouth, and swam backward until she could no longer see its shape in the muddy water.
Shadowed legs of chairs, the heating panel, the haywire shag carpet might as well be seaweed, rusty cans, and silt-covered stuff found on the bottom of the lake. She pointed her toes, pretending to wind across the room, belly grazing the carpet, her movements as easy and unhampered as air.
Back and forth she flipped her wrists until the pins and needles came and then the warm rush of blood. She listened, cars on the highway, a distant TV, and the sweet smell emanating from a spot near the nightstand where someone once tipped over a can of beer. She released her bladder and let pee soak the paper crotch of her diaper. It was hot at first and sort of comforting, but then it turned cool. She shivered, felt goose bumps raise up on the backs of her arms.
Listening to the motel door shut, to one link rattling against the next as he secured the chain, she flattened her cheek on the carpet, watched his disembodied shoes move, as if enchanted, around the edge of the bed. He clicked on the TV, the screen lit up the bedspread fringe. He walked to the nightstand between the two double beds where the push-button phone and the ugly glass lamp sat silent and the gold Gideon's Bible lay unopened in the drawer below. His toes wilted up like a piece of burnt paper and the frame rocked as he leaned his weight onto the bed, lifted the spread, and poked his head underneath. She saw the white beard strands at the corner of his lips and the whites of his eyes magnified behind the thick lenses of his glasses. He untied the cord around her wrists, swung down to her ankles, then patted her leg to signal she should shimmy out. Sitting up between the two beds she pulled down the gag; it hung around her neck like a wet bandanna.
He threw a T-shirt into her lap and she put it on, sat up on the bed; a brown paper bag stood next to the phone.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Open it.”