Harmony (8 page)

It's the night of our fourth day here (which is Wednesday, I think), and I'm hanging out with Tilly, Candy, and Ryan in Town Square, which is what we call the grassy area between the guest cabins and the dining hall. It's after dinner, around seven thirty or eight, and the little kids—Charlotte and Hayden—have already gone inside to go to bed, but the rest of us are allowed to stay out until nine thirty.

This is our basic daily schedule: every day, we have a meeting after breakfast and make up a project list and job chart for the day. Then we have Morning Block (where we work on our projects), lunch, and free time, and then Afternoon Block until dinner. At night, there's more free time, or sometimes something like Moonlight Swim or a sing-along.

Ryan and Tilly are playing some game—not really a game, more like they're acting out a story—where the Simpsons go to visit the biggest statues in the world. Candy and I are both sitting on the ground, and we both have books on our laps so we can write. I'm making a map of the camp, and she's writing a letter to her dad (who it turns out isn't really Rick).

I've already done a rough pencil sketch of the different areas, and now I'm starting to fill in the names that we've come up with. The staff cabins are called Springfield, and the guest cabins are Shelbyville (those were both Ryan). For the little office building, we used Tilly's idea of Beantown. The dining hall is the Great Hall, after
Harry Potter
; Candy and I both picked that out. The beach is Rehoboth, because that's a place we've all been on vacation, and Tilly and I named the lake the Sea of Knowledge, after
The Phantom Tollbooth
.

I pick up a purple marker and start coloring in a big block-letter
H
at the top of the page, the first letter in Harmony. Candy looks over from her paper and watches.

“So what are you saying to your dad?” I ask her.

She shrugs. “I told him about baking bread and putting together the incubator for the baby chicks.” The eggs are supposed to arrive tomorrow. We're also getting a full-grown chicken, which Scott is picking up on Saturday. “He didn't really think we should come here,” she says. “So I'm just telling him some of the cool stuff we're doing.”

“Why didn't he think you should come?” I ask. Tilly's pacing around us in big lopsided circles, and when she gets close, she brushes my arm and my hand veers off course. I start widening the
H
, to cover up the stray marks.

Candy watches me draw. She's wearing a necklace, a silver chain with a
C
on it, and she's holding on to the letter, fiddling with it. “I think mainly just because he wouldn't get to see me as much,” she says. “Plus, Ryan's not his kid, so you know. He doesn't care as much whether he ever . . . gets better or whatever.” She picks up her letter and shakes it in the air, brushing off a few pieces of grass. Then she laughs. “He also thought Scott sounded kind of creepy. He said the whole thing sounded like a cult.”

I laugh, too. “Well, he
is
kind of creepy. But in a good way, mostly.”

Tilly's back near us again and joins in our conversation, even though I didn't think she'd been listening. “Why did your parents divorce?” she asks Candy.

I sort of cringe, because I know you're not supposed to ask questions like that, and also because of the weird phrasing. Tilly does that with certain words, like “marry” and “divorce” (and there are probably others, too, though I can't think of them right now): instead of saying “get married” or “get divorced,” she just uses the plain form of the verb. It's one of those things that's not grammatically wrong, but it makes it sound like English isn't her first language.

Anyway, Candy doesn't seem offended. She shrugs again. “I don't know. I was pretty little, like still a baby. If you ask my mom, she says they were just too young, but I don't really know what that means.”

“Do you like your dad better than Rick?” I ask. Now that the topic's open, I'm sort of curious, too. I mean, I've had friends who have divorced parents, but I've never really discussed it with any of them.

“Yeah, of course,” she says. “I love my dad. He's awesome.”

She goes back to her writing, and I start coloring in the
A
. Tilly wanders back over to talk to Ryan. But a few minutes later, when Candy's folding up her letter so that it will fit in the envelope, she says, “But I guess it's kind of hard to say.” It takes me a second to remember what we were talking about. “'Cause I've never really lived with my dad, you know?”

“Uh-huh,” I say, because I can't think of anything else.

She takes off her glasses and cleans them off on her T-shirt. For a minute, her dark hair falls forward so that I can't really see her face. “I mean I did,” she says, “but I was too young to remember it. And my mom's been with Rick since I was like two, so he's the one who's always been around.” She runs her fingers along the crease in the folded page, making it firm and crisp. “Sometimes when I'm pissed off at Rick or my mom or Ryan, I think about how cool it
would be to go live with my dad instead, but I can't really imagine it. He lives in this little apartment, and I always have to sleep on a pullout couch when I'm there. And I'd have to go to a new school and everything. So.”

She stops talking. I guess that's the end of what she was going to say. She puts her letter down on the grass and picks up the envelope, resting it against the book on her lap. “Hey, can I borrow your markers?” she says. “I want to decorate this before I mail it.”

“Sure.”

We sit there for a while, coloring silently. Ryan and Tilly are both talking at the same time, and neither one of them seems to be paying much attention to the other, but somehow it's working for them.

“So Mr. Burns is raising money for the Burns Monument,” says Tilly, “because he doesn't want to pay for it himself, even though he could . . .”

“Yeah, and he starts taking money out of everyone's paycheck,” says Ryan, “but Homer doesn't mind because they start giving the employees free beer. Did you ever see the one . . .”

“. . . he's like, ‘No! If the tallest statue in the world is 420 feet tall, then this one has to be 421 feet tall!' But he forgets to add a base to the bottom . . .”

“‘Dental plan! Lisa needs braces! Dental plan!'”

“What are they even talking about?” I say, looking up. I notice a mosquito on my arm and accidentally draw a purple line on my skin as I swat it away.

Candy laughs and says, “Nice.” She reaches over with her marker like she's going to draw something else on my arm, but I push her away.

“That looks really pretty,” I say. Candy's covered the envelope with a design of flowers and curlicues, except for a space in the front where she's drawn a black box around her dad's name and address. I read, “Michael McNeil. So is your last name Gough or McNeil?”

“McNeil,” she says. She lowers her voice. “Which is fine with me. Don't tell Ryan, but I was dying the other day when Tilly called him Ryan Gowg.”

“R.I.P. Candy,” I say, grinning. “Candy Gowg.”

Candy grabs my arm and tries to write on it again, but I jump up, dumping the book and the paper off my lap, and start running away. As Candy chases me across the lawn, I run past Tilly, who's saying, “. . . pure gold, and he'll have his arm raised up like the Statue of Liberty, but holding a nuclear atom,” and loop around Ryan who's saying, “Twenty dollars can buy many peanuts!” I lead Candy in a big circle around the dining hall, laughing and screaming whenever she gets too close. And when I pass by Ryan and Tilly again, the two of them are cracking each other up, even though I'm not even sure they're having the same conversation.

 • • • 

The next morning, my dad and I are on breakfast crew with Tom and Hayden. I like Tom; he kind of reminds me of my third grade teacher, Mr. Pagano. Well, not exactly, because Mr. Pagano was a short white guy, and Tom is a tall black guy, but they're both Philadelphia Eagles fans, and they both have a similar sense of humor when joking around with kids.

Scott made a Costco run last night, so we've got lots of good food to eat. My dad's making French toast, and Tom is taking the pits out of cherries with this thing that looks like a hole punch, and it all looks really yummy.

I'm setting out plates and silverware. Hayden's sitting on the floor, lining up spoons on the linoleum. My dad and Tom are chatting about nothing in particular, and I'm hearing about half of it as I move back and forth between the kitchen area and the dining area.

“. . . suits our needs,” Tom is saying. “It's not like I was expecting a five-star hotel.”

“Yeah, no,” Dad says. “Could've been a lot worse.”

I carry a pile of napkins out to the serving table. We use cloth napkins here, for the environment. I tried to get my mom to do that once when I was in like kindergarten and we were learning about ecology or whatever. I remember that she got that stressed-out look she always had, and she said we could try it, but that it would mean a lot of extra laundry. My mom hates laundry, maybe because she's not very good at it; back at home, we always had to go down to the basement to look for clean clothes in the morning, because there was always a mountain of things she hadn't gotten around to folding yet. Here, though, there's a laundry room with a couple of big industrial-sized washers and dryers, like they have in hotels and Laundromats, and one person is assigned to laundry duty every couple of days.

I fold the napkins into squares and make a neat pile next to the forks. The napkins are all sorts of different patterns. Ryan and Candy's mom, Diane, has a sewing machine, and she made them out of whatever fabric she had around: clothes, pillowcases, dish towels. Tilly wouldn't use any of them until Diane assured her that none of them were made with Ryan's old underwear.

Back in the kitchen, my dad and Tom are laughing about something I didn't hear. Tom is saying, “. . . crazy? My brother was like, ‘Black people do not go off the grid. Off the grid is a white people thing.'”

“What's off the grid?” I say.

My dad says, “It's . . .” and then he stops like he's not really sure how to explain it. “I'll tell you later. It's just . . . it's kind of like what we're doing here, but not really.”

“It's like what we're doing, but crazy,” says Tom.

“Come on, Daddy, tell me.”

“Seriously, honey, it is so boring and complicated that it's really not worth going into right now. Finish the setup, okay?”

I let it go. Tilly wouldn't let it go, if she were here; she'd get more and more upset, and then she'd start making up reasons why he
didn't want to tell her about it. Like it's something inappropriate, maybe about sex, or else maybe
he
doesn't know what it is. But I've been around long enough to know that I should take Dad at his word on this one. If he says it's complicated and boring, it's probably complicated and boring.

I open up the giant dishwasher and take out a handful of clean silverware. As I walk out of the room, I hear Tom picking up the conversation again with my dad. “Of course, there are people in my family who'll tell you that autism is a white people thing, too . . .”

I take the silverware over to the serving table and start sorting it into these baskets we use at mealtimes. I don't entirely get what autism is, because it seems like whatever's wrong with Hayden can't possibly be the same thing as whatever's wrong with Tilly. But I know that's what people say Tilly has. The weird thing is, I don't know if
Tilly
knows that. I don't think I've ever heard her say the word, but you can never tell what she hears and what she doesn't hear.

I do a quick count—first forks, then knives, then spoons—and make sure there are a few extra of each, in case someone drops one or something. Behind me, the screen door opens from outside and Scott comes in. “Good morning, Iris,” he says.

“Hey, Scott.” I neaten the utensil baskets so that they're in a straight line, then turn around and smile at him.

“Are you responsible for any of the great things I'm smelling?” he asks. He knows I like to cook; we were talking about it yesterday while we were setting up the chick incubator.

“No, but you're going to love it. My dad is the French toast master.”

“Awesome. I can't wait.”

I gather up the extra silverware and head back to the kitchen, with Scott behind me. Dad's flipping a slice of bread in the pan; next to him, he's got a platter with a pretty big pile of finished pieces. He looks up when we come in.

“Hey, Scott,” he says. “You got my keys for me?” It was our car that Scott took to Costco last night. Kind of funny to think of him driving it when none of us were there. Even stranger: the fact that I haven't been in a car in almost a week.

“That's exactly what I'm here to talk about,” says Scott. “I'm actually going to hold on to them, if that's okay with you. I'll take yours, too, Tom, if you've got 'em with you.”

“Why, what's up?” asks Dad.

“I figured we could keep them all in the office. Just good to have them all in one place, you know?”

My dad keeps his eyes on the stove, but his expression changes a little. He doesn't look mad, but his eyebrows go up, and he looks . . . skeptical, maybe. Or annoyed.

“This isn't just because you want to make sure we can't leave the camp, is it?” he asks.

When Scott doesn't answer or laugh or anything, I look up. Everybody's doing the same things they were a minute ago: my dad's still making French toast, and Tom is wiping up cherry juice from the counter, looking like he's really absorbed in it. Scott's leaning against the doorway, his eyes on my dad. He's not mad, I don't think. He looks unhappy, but not too surprised.