I'll Be You(61)

I rolled on the floor, fumbling my words. “I’m so sorry—it was just a few drinks…a onetime thing…I’ll go back to rehab.”

But Chuck was speaking over me, his voice pleading and needy. “I swear, Elli, I didn’t do anything. She just climbed under the blanket and…nothing happened, I swear.”

Now my sister froze, suddenly understanding—or misunderstanding—the situation. “I’m sorry, what?”

I finally maneuvered myself into a sitting position, trying to ignore the dangerous heave in my stomach, the bile lifting in my throat. “No—you don’t understand…It’s not what it sounds like.”

“You’re wearing my clothes.” She blinked, took a step backward. “Oh Jesus. Oh my God. Please tell me you didn’t.”

I had pushed myself to a full stand, but now I slid sideways against the couch. “I was just trying to help you. I want to be your surrogate. Maybe this was a stupid way to do it, but I want to do this for you and I thought”—I was crying now, sober enough to see that I had done something unfathomably stupid, something irrevocably terrible—“I thought you wouldn’t let me.”

She had gone white, her face a pale moon in the dark.

“Get out,” she whispered hoarsely. “Get out now and don’t come back.”



* * *



—

And so I did.



* * *



—

And that was the last time I spoke with my sister: 388 days ago. Not that I was counting.





18




GENFEM HAD ONCE BEEN a summer camp, probably built in the 1950s. The campus stretched out under a canopy of oaks, a sprawl of old clapboard buildings that gripped the hillside. The road on which I entered with Suzy and Ruth wound on through the trees, past an empty swimming pool, and ended at a small parking lot that held a bright red Land Rover, a gold Mercedes, and a cluster of other cars, mostly expensive and European. Just past this lot was the main building, a two-story lodge with a wraparound porch and a flagpole. An old wooden sign on a heavy post lay splintered in the weeds at the edge of the parking lot: WigWam Woods Christian Youth Camp. Someone had lodged an axe between the W and the i.

The rest of the buildings—smaller bunkhouses and bathrooms—nestled farther up the hill, half-hidden between the trees. The bunkhouses had whimsical Hansel and Gretel trim around the windows and doors, which had been painted in a bright collection of rainbow hues, as if a child had come in with a box of crayons and decided to add some color to the scene.

At the center of camp, between the main lodge and the bunk buildings, was a great lawn that had gone brown from too much sun. On the far end was an amphitheater, with benches tiered around a stage; and at the center of this was a small, altar-like platform that looked like it might have once supported a giant cross. Now it held another one of those statues of the naked female form. She was at least seven feet tall and had been constructed out of barbed wire, an arm lifted toward the sky.

Everywhere I looked, there were women in white linen. A half dozen of them sat in a circle on the great lawn, intently listening to another woman who seemed to be giving some sort of lesson. Other women scurried between the bunkhouses, carrying mops and buckets, duffel bags, stacks of books, nothing at all. A few wore red, and the one teaching was in yellow—these women, I noted, had normal hair—and I wondered if these dresses denoted status, or duration of their stay. If you looked past the drastic haircuts and the shapeless garb, these woman didn’t look particularly brainwashed. They looked…happy. A pair of middle-aged women walked past me toward the main lodge, giggling, clutching each other’s hands. Another woman sat cross-legged, reading, serene, in a patch of sun under a tree.

The overall effect, with the smiles and the Crayola paint job, was less cultish and more monkish, as if these women were novitiates in some colorful new religion.

One of the women holding hands nodded at me as she passed. “Shanti shanti, Eleanor,” she said and smiled. Or maybe it was enchantée? I felt disoriented, as if I’d found myself in a foreign land where I didn’t understand the language.

Once we were inside the gate, Ruth grabbed the groceries from me, her eyes scanning the women in the field, as if someone out there might be watching. I followed the two women up the road toward the main lodge, searching every face that passed me. None was Elli’s. Maybe she was out in the group on the lawn? But from a distance everyone looked the same, a blur of naked heads and white forms slipping between the sun-parched trees.

At the lodge, the two women scurried toward the back of the building, disappearing through a door without even bothering to say goodbye. Without them, I felt exposed. What now? It wasn’t like I could walk around asking anyone if they’d seen my sister; I was my sister.

I could smell something cooking, onions and cumin; and just as it registered that this was dinner hour, a bell began to ring. The inhabitants of the camp shifted and turned almost in unison, their attention moving toward the main lodge. The women sitting on the lawn stood, wiping dead grass from their rears, gathering books and sun hats. In a minute, they would all be upon me, and what would I do then? What if Elli was among them and the whole ruse fell apart?

I really hadn’t thought this whole thing through.

An adrenaline kick moved my feet before I’d even decided I needed to get out of sight. I walked away from the main lodge, turning up one of the smaller paths that led to the bunkhouses, my head down to avoid the attention of the women who were passing me on their way down the hill.