“Petyr, it’s me, Wade,” I said, overcome with gratitude. “Please. I need to talk to Grace.”
“Grace asked me not to accept any calls from you, Wade,” Petyr said in that quiet, soothing voice of his. “I have to go now. I’m hanging up. I’m sorry.”
The line cut off.
“Are you all right?” said Haymont.
I looked up at him standing by the counter with his tie slung over his shoulder. I was about to yell at him to call Petyr for me, but something about the way he was looking at me caused me to stop. His eyes were fearful and he was shying away, almost cringing. I stepped forward to hand him the phone and he actually flinched. It reminded me of how frightened I’d been of that boy, the one who’d appeared in my kitchen long ago, so ravenous. I thought of how I’d recoiled as the dimpled black meat of his arms came toward me.
“How about we relax, Wade, all right?” said Haymont. “Please.”
I put the phone down and drove home.
Eventually, as the weeks passed with no word from her, I came to understand that I would never see Grace again. This knowledge left me feeling both empty and strangely calm. The days grew quiet and dry. The August heat finally broke, causing leaves to crack and fall to the ground in brown particles. I decided to build a new hunting stand. I placed it farther up the trunk than the old one, up in the highest branches. I went scavenging with Sonny until late in the day, until it was nearly dark and our shadows stretched deep into the woods.
One morning, I woke to the sounds of going home. I realized, as I climbed from bed, that this was the day all the children were leaving for the winter. I fixed myself a coffee and headed out onto the porch to watch the buses take them away.
The day was very bright. I had to put on Grace’s old sunglasses to be able to look at the camp without my eyes hurting. So many of the children were slim this year. There was hardly a fat one among them. I watched as they scurried around, hugging each other good-bye and exchanging numbers and addresses, loading their bags and duffels onto the buses. I went up to my stand to get a better view.
As I made my way up the rungs, though, I became aware of a creaking above me. I glanced up at the stand and saw that someone was already up there.
I froze halfway up the tree. Grace. She’d come back.
A breeze washed over me. I began climbing again, my hands almost trembling. What would I say to her when I reached the stand? Part of me wanted to hug her. Another part wanted to hurl her to her death. When I neared the top of the trunk, though, I saw that the person in my stand wasn’t Grace at all.
I pulled myself up onto the platform.
“You can see the whole camp from up here,” said Patty. She was sitting cross-legged at the platform’s edge. Her hair was finally loose. It hung down her back in a shimmering black fan. She was much smaller than she had been at the start of the summer, but she was by no means thin.
“You’re going to miss your bus,” I said.
She glanced over her shoulder and studied me a moment. “I pictured you different,” she said. She spoke with a slight, lovely accent. “I thought you’d be older. Scarier.”
“You should go. You’re going to be left behind.”
But she didn’t move, just sat and stared at the camp, where the buses were already loading up. I sat down beside her. How strange she looked, part fat, part thin, like someone caught between two versions of herself. Her legs were almost slender, but there were crushed black veins in her ankles. Her neck was thin but her face was puffy and shiny with sweat.
Down at the camp, the buses began shuddering to life.
I noticed a chunk of something resembling a moon rock in Patty’s lap. “What’s that?” I said.
She glanced at the rock, turning it over in her hands. “It’s salt. Rock salt.”
She brought the rock to her mouth and bit off a piece. She sucked and chewed it. “See?” she said, and handed me the rock.
I took it and bit off a hunk. Immediately my tongue began to burn. Chewing it, I felt as though my teeth were cracking and shattering against its surface. My mouth filled with liquid.
Patty smiled at me. “Stings!” she said. Her eyes were bloodred from tearing. Drool leaked from her mouth.
Wiping her chin, she inched closer to me, and together we sat and watched the buses pull out of the lot. Counselors stood in the grass, waving good-bye.
I wished that Grace was there, that she was sitting beside me in my stand, watching the children leave for home. I could almost see her next to me instead of Patty, sitting at the platform’s edge in her jeans and T-shirt, her hair pulled back from her spoiled face. I could practically feel her there, pressing against me. Her head was on my shoulder now, her hair soft against my neck. I smiled, staring out at the sloping woods through her old sunglasses. Because everything was all right. She was back with me. The sky was the bluest of blues, and the land was rich with gold.
Part One: The Two Ferns
THE RULE FOR GUARDING THE DUMPSTER WAS SIMPLE: NO ONE, under any circumstances, takes anything out.
So imagine my chagrin when I woke to the sounds of someone rummaging around inside the dumpster’s hull. I wiped a porthole in my fogged-up windshield and saw that it was before dawn: the sky dark, the mist still clinging to the palm trees. I fished around until I found my spear gun and got out of the car.
“Time to quit that,” I said, and banged on the dumpster’s side, sprinkling rust everywhere.
The noise from inside stopped.
“Out,” I said.
A man peeked over the lip. He was older than I’d expected for a thief; he looked to be in his seventies, skinny and bent, with unkempt hair and a dirty white beard.
“What seems to be the problem?” he said.
“Scat. Now.”
“All right. Fine. Goddamn.” The old man swung his leg over the top of the dumpster and lowered himself to the ground with surprising agility. He wore no shirt, just a pair of cutoff jeans shorts with long, fraying threads hanging off the ends. Spatters of pink spots dotted his chest and shoulders from years of too much sun. In his hand was a duck with part of its beak blown off.
“That goes back in,” I said, and gestured to the duck, an old, wooden hunting decoy.
“Oh, come on, son,” he said, tucking the duck beneath his arm. “No one’s going to miss this thing.”
“I’ll miss it,” I said. “My boss will miss it.”
He shot a quick glance at the hedges beyond the lot. I could almost feel him doing the math, calculating his chances of getting away if he made a break for it. I tightened my grip on the spear gun and made sure he saw. The gun was a 24 © Blue Reef Special. My boss, Orlando, had let me borrow it from the pawnshop for the night, to guard the dumpster. The Blue Reef was a long and mean-looking gun with a razor-sharp harpoon sticking out from the barrel. Professional fishermen used it to bring down large deep-sea fish—marlin and jackfish. Fish much faster and tougher than the old man standing by the dumpster.
He adjusted the duck beneath his arm. “Just hear me out. My son, he gave this to me for my birthday a few years back. It was a gift from my boy. It means something to me.”
“See these?” I said. “See those?” I gestured at the flyers taped up everywhere—on the chain across the entrance to the parking lot, on the window of the pawnshop, on the front of the black, barge-like dumpster itself. The fliers explained that to remove anything from the dumpster was strictly illegal, as the dumpster was the
