The People We Keep(56)
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It could be the dumbest thing, but I don’t think Tom Bilford will care. I don’t even know if he lives in that cabin once the campground is closed. I don’t think he’ll call the cops if he catches us, and at least I’m not a car thief anymore. I am not wanted by the police or my father.
“Worst they’ll do is make us leave,” Carly says. “Probably.”
And I decide not to worry because I want to do it.
We park in a turnout before the entrance and hoof it in. If we get caught, Carly’s rusty Pacer plays the part of a breakdown well enough to be our alibi. We plan our excuses in whispers as we walk, like someone might be lurking in the dark, waiting to overhear us. It was cold. We couldn’t find a phone booth. We needed the fire.
The moon shines so brightly off the water that we can see where we’re going. Not a single car drives by. There’s no light in the park ranger cabin, and there’s no truck out front either. The lake is ours. The night is ours. If there are raccoons in the dark, they won’t want a battle. There are two of us. We are full of ourselves, ferocious.
The rhythm of our feet on the pavement—Carly’s foot, my foot, Carly’s other one, then mine—is just a little off from a song I can’t quite gather in my head. I work to stay on beat. Carly notices that I’m noticing and holds her pace steady too. By the time we turn into the campground, we’re stomping something complicated. Carly shout-sings “Cecilia!” in her funny gravelly voice. I can’t believe she’s even heard Simon & Garfunkel, but she knows all the words and we sing it together, keeping time with our feet, laughing when we flub a step. I sing around her crackling, off-key melody, and we sound alright.
We march past my old campsite, moving in further, away from the sightline of the main road and away from Tom Bilford’s cabin, in case he comes back. We find a spot by the water, collect left-behind firewood from the sites around it.
“This is really where you stayed?” Carly asks, stacking wood strategically.
“Yeah.” I pick at bark on a neatly split log as I wait to hand it to her. “But I wasn’t like camping. I just slept in my car.”
Carly seems to know how to make a fire and I realize that I could have done this out at the motorhome. I could have dug a pit and drug out some old metal truck bumpers from the trash heap down the road to corral the embers. It wasn’t something I needed my dad to do. I didn’t have to ask permission. No one was there to tell me no. I read somewhere once about animals caged too long staying put even when someone opens the door. I spent so much time in that motorhome before I realized I could go, and while I was there, I never saw the ways I could make it better.
“Shit,” Carly says, and I think it’s about the fire, but then she says, “It’s been way too cold to sleep in a car.”
I hand her another log to stack. If Matty were banished to the woods, I bet his first act would be to make a fire pit. To burn things for light and warmth and just to play with flames.
“If I’d known,” Carly says, “I would have— I mean”—she laughs—“Rosemary probably wouldn’t have let you stay, but I could have… I would have found a place for you.”
“It’s okay,” I tell her, and my eyes are stinging, which is stupid. We can’t go back in time so I can stay with one of Carly’s weird friends. And anyway, when Carly needed a place to stay, it was with me and Adam. So maybe the only thing that’s true is her feelings, but that’s still something. “It all just happened the way it happened.”
I can feel the lake. I can taste it in the air. The way the water laps at the gravel shore makes sense, like it’s part of me. “I feel like this is where I started,” I tell Carly. “Like maybe nothing counted before I got here.”
“I feel that way about Ithaca too,” she says. She pulls her lighter from her jacket. Dumps her pack of cigarettes into her hand. She keeps one out to smoke, stuffs the rest in her pocket. After she lights up, she sets the cardboard carton on fire, tossing it under the tower she’s made with our logs.
“You got any paper?” she asks, blowing smoke as she talks. “The leaves are all damp.”
I offer her a handful of pocket lint and gum wrappers. “Is it enough?”
“I can make it work,” she says, and even though everything around us shines in the moonlight, covered in condensation, I believe that she can.
She balls the lint and throws it under the log tower, where it will catch when the flames start to travel. She’s strategic with the gum wrappers, using one after another to keep a flame focused at one small spot.
“Ha ha!” she says, with the first crackle of wood, grinning, like she knew all along it would work. She’s different here. Her makeup doesn’t shape her face in these shadows. In the moonlight, she’s young and strong, and nothing strange. She watches her tower.
“Ha ha!” she says again, when the flames break the surface of another log.
Once the fire is safely raging, we throw damp twigs at it to hear the pop and sizzle. When it gets too warm, we hang our jackets over a tree branch instead of moving further away.
“What was your mom like?” Carly asks.
I think about that wedding dress woman and the tickle of her copper hair on my cheek. “I don’t remember enough,” I say, because memories of my mom don’t always come when I call them. “But she was really pretty and people liked her, and she hated waiting for me.”