Grace considered this a moment, wondering if Karin had appeared especially nervous at the send-off. If she had, had Grace failed to notice? Had she let her daughter go off on this adventure, what was supposed to be a kind of coming-of-age ritual, without her whole and undivided attention? After all, this was a particularly strange undertaking for Karin—spending the night in a forest that had, for all intents and purposes, belonged to her father.
She glanced over at Martijn to see if he had somehow picked up on Karin’s emotional frequencies, but she doubted it. He was a good-enough stepdad but not really empathic in those kinds of ways. Still, she was pleased he had volunteered to go along on the trip as a parental supervisor. It wasn’t his kid who was heading off into the forest, and his own children had done their droppings elsewhere. But it showed initiative that he’d taken the time to go along. She read it as an attempt to show that he cared about bonding with Karin. She liked that. Maybe, eventually, their families would blend.
“Thanks for your concern, but I don’t have any doubt she’ll be fine,” Grace said to the Scout leader, and then wondered if she had sounded overly officious. But she couldn’t tell her that she doubted Karin had even an ounce of nervousness. “I mean, I’m sure you’re right,” she added. “She’ll love it.”
Would she love it? Karin wasn’t exactly a novice camper, since she’d had a lot of outdoor adventures with her father. The idea of the dropping was that she’d be out there with her peers, kids as uncertain and wobbly about the world and themselves as she was, and they’d have to rely on one another to find their way to the finish. Grace liked that aspect of this Dutch rite of passage; it was so unlike the American culture in which she’d grown up. The Americans talked a lot about self-reliance, but the Dutch put it into practice at an early age, by basically leaving their children alone and letting them figure things out.
Of course, the parents and the Scouts would never be far away. They would be there at the front end and at the back end. And if something went awry, they’d never be out of shouting distance.
The Scout Clubhouse was just outside Ede proper, in a low-lying white brick building built a half-century ago that looked like a vintage schoolhouse. It was surrounded by tall, thin birches, resembling high fence posts, that made it all seem very orderly. There was some playground equipment and a small pebbly beach that bordered a sizable lake, now deserted because the season was over.
Karin had lurched out of their car as soon as they pulled into the parking lot, running over to the other kids, her fellow Scouts, obviously pleased to escape the vehicle, where there had been a low hum of tension between Grace and Martijn throughout the ride down. They’d had a fight earlier that day. Grace, watching her go, had felt the guilt of not resolving the fight before getting into the car, and making her daughter stew in it. She and Martijn still had to learn how to let go and move on, not to carry around an argument after it was basically over. This was part of the challenge of trying to build a new marriage, to blend two wholly different families, while she also felt the tug of losing her daughter to the world.
That loss was happening now—not little by little, as it had when she was a small child waddling off with uncertain giggles into the freedom of the untethered world, but in leaps and bounds as Karin found greater satisfaction in places outside the home than she did in the loving arms of her mother. Grace had tried to prepare herself mentally for this transition, since like all parents she knew it was the way with adolescents, but somehow all that internalized mental coaching didn’t make it hurt any less. Could it be that her stress about that loss was actually making her testy with Martijn? Was that it? And nothing to do with him at all?
Karin’s group was not the only group at the Scout Clubhouse. There were a few other droppings scheduled to begin this evening, in different parks in the region. None of the kids were supposed to know where they were headed—they had all been told it could be in one of the three nature reserves, the Hoge Veluwe National Park or the adjacent Veluwezoom National Park or the Utrechtse Heuvelrug, to the west of Ede. But Karin had specifically requested the Hoge Veluwe, because of her history with her father there, much to Grace’s chagrin. What made a twelve-year-old kid think they had to go off and face their personal demons in the dark like that? Grace would never really know. But she did respect it, and was just a little bit proud of Karin.
Martijn ambled up to her and put a hand on her shoulder, startling her out of her thoughts. She turned to him and looked at his dour face, his unsmiling look, and his still so beautiful pale green eyes. The expression they held was not entirely devoid of love, but one might have to get out a miner’s pickaxe and headlamp to find it. She noticed now how deep the wrinkles near his temples had become, how the grooves of his crow’s feet appeared like rivulets descending from the furrows of his brow. Had she done this to him? Made his eyes this sad and his skin so ashen?
“Grace, my Grace,” was all he said in the low, bass voice he used when he wanted to sound like a soulful radio announcer. It felt good to hear some sweetness and levity in his tone again, to be reminded of his softer
