Leftovers (8 page)

Take away his despicable Polaroid camera, and I had a dad who helped with homework, showed up at all my school concerts, and patiently taught me how to separate eggs, use his fancy food processor and melt chocolate in the double boiler. He took me to petting zoos, museums and parks on weekends. He encouraged me to name my dog after my favorite dessert.

Dad knew how to make Mom laugh, how to make her agree to some outlandish kitchen purchase, how to make her day with flowers,
even
how to get her nose out of the latest best-seller for a night out. In a town where divorced or battling parents were the norm, I never had to deal with screaming or slamming doors or weeklong parental silences.

Like Sullivan, my father made a big deal of my left-handedness. He read up about right-brain dominance and told me that left-handed people were supposed to be super creative. He signed me up for music lessons: piano, then violin, then clarinet. I sucked at all of them. Same with painting classes and the pottery workshop. Ditto for ballet and jazz dance. Even my efforts at a summer creative-writing camp were to great literature what nails are to the blackboard—or so the instructor said.

But I aced cooking. And while my father can take the credit for teaching me the basics, it was me who, that summer between sixth and seventh grade, went a bit crazy with it. I experimented with everything from the spices in Dad's old family chili recipe to the consistency of the hot fudge he poured over his hand-churned ice cream.

Don't misunderstand me. It's not that I like cooking so much. I just like being good at something. Recipes came— still come—naturally to me, in much the same way that I think piano concertos must come to Jake Malone, the autistic boy who lives down the street from Mom and me in Riverwood. So I rolled with it.

“Earth to Sarah...”

Sullivan reaches over my shoulder and grabs a slice of red pepper. He bites into it, chews thoughtfully and swallows. “How do you like it here?” he asks me.

I bet Sullivan asks himself that same question a few times a day, especially since he's been grounded. More than once I've overheard him humming the theme song to
Gilligan's Island
.

I set my knife down beside the sink. “Well, Sullivan, I'd say that most days the whole Camp Dog Gone Fun experience rates somewhere between a Disney World vacation and going to the dentist.”

Sullivan pops another slice of pepper into his mouth. As I watch him chew, he reaches out and tucks a strand of
my hair—an escapee from my only-when-I-cook ponytail— behind my left ear. He takes the rare opportunity to study my face. “More puzzle work tonight, right?” he asks.

I want to turn away. I can feel my face burning, the skin on my cheeks crawling. But Sullivan's blue-eyed gaze has my head in a vise grip.

If he's going to kiss me again, I wish he'd just do it. Maybe I even want him to.

Victoria makes Sullivan eat a lot of veggies, so his breath is always fresh, like a salad. And I like the way his skinny hands rested so firmly on my shoulders during that quick first kiss in the boathouse, like he knew that if he didn't keep me grounded, I'd fly out of there like a startled seagull. Truth is, I felt safe in the darkness with him.

But I can't stand having Sullivan stare at me like this under the hot kitchen lights.

Because I'm sure that the truth, the ugly truth, is written in bold letters somewhere on my face.

So I step back and grab a serving spoon off the counter. Wielding it like a sword, I back Sullivan out the kitchen door.

Sullivan checks his watch. “Later, ‘Gator,” he calls over his shoulder as he bounds out the screen door and takes a flying leap from the top of the porch stairs to the ground. It's his job today to round up the seven old dogs with hypothyroidism, the four old dogs with diabetes and the five young dogs with epilepsy for their twice-daily trek into Dr. Fred's office for their medications.

I reach up to switch the range fan on HIGH.

Sometimes, in the evenings, after the dogs are all bedded down in the barn and Brant's left for home, Dr. Fred lights a bonfire down on the small strip of sandy gravel on the south shore that he calls the beach and invites the rest of us to join him. Sometimes he gives us geography and history lectures to fill the time. Sometimes he does chemistry experiments or imparts wilderness survival tips. Mostly he tells stories; gruesome Chinese fairy tales and synopses of old Hollywood horror movies are his favorites. It seems that Dr. Happy-All-the-Time has an edge after all. I like it.

Sometimes Nicholas brings down his guitar. When she found out he played a little, Victoria paid to have it couriered from his grandmother's house.

“Keeping your hands busy with constructive things is never bad, Nicholas,” she told him the morning she brought it over to the island from town.

Brant the sicko piped up. “I know how to keep
my
hands busy.” He made a jerk-off motion behind her back.

Anyway, back to Nicky, pudgy fingers and all. He's not a bad guitar player. No Carlos Santana, but not terrible either.

But then there's Johanna, shrieking out old Celine Dion ballads. Johanna is convinced—
hello, delusional
—that she'll be a huge star someday. On the bright side, Johanna's singing keeps the biting insects away. And the dogs love it; they howl in the barn like crazed backup singers.

When all else fails, Taylor is always eager to offer up some of her tortured poetry for critique.

Me? I put together ingredients for S'mores. Good enough.

Tonight Dr. Fred begins his campfire session with a lecture on the history of the Thousand Islands region.

I can't believe that the big heap of granite rubble they call Camp Dog Gone Fun is actually a remnant mountain peak—one of more than a thousand remnant peaks poking out of the St. Lawrence River. Join all the peaks together and they make up an ancient mountain chain that was scoured, molded and eventually flooded by several glacial advances and melts.

I stare into the bonfire's flames, unsettled by the knowledge that the Thousand Islands were once interconnected. Does it mean that each individual—even me—might actually be part of a bigger “we”? That maybe humanity is just a different type of mountain chain?

Some people might feel all warm and fuzzy about that possibility. Me? I feel crowded.

Sullivan isn't around tonight. Grounded or not, it's Thursday, which means he's back in Riverwood, having his legislated weekly visit with his dad. During the school year, when Sullivan lives with his father, he visits Victoria and Dr. Fred every Saturday. Sounds like a complicated pain-in-the-ass arrangement to me, but Sullivan says it's the only life he's known since he was three years old. He doesn't even remember his parents ever living together. He says both of them blame their divorce on Rusty, an Irish setter they owned when Sullivan was a baby. Rusty developed a seizure disorder. During a particularly rough patch, Victoria started spending more time with Dr. Fred than with Sullivan's dad.

Oops, as Johanna would say.

After the divorce, Mr. Vickerson got custody of Sullivan. Victoria got custody of Rusty. Dr. Fred doesn't seem the type to break up a marriage. Then again, no one would have guessed that my father was a perv either. Who would have thought he'd have had the time, between operating a successful restaurant, taking part in local fundraisers, running six miles a day and being seen around town playing the role of good husband and father?

Moral of
this
story: Adults can't be trusted. Maybe
no one
can be trusted. Maybe you can't even trust yourself.

Nice world.

I'm not sorry that Sullivan is away for the night. I need a break. We've been spending every spare dog-free,
food-free moment in Dr. Fred's storage shed under a hot bare bulb, working that German shepherd jigsaw puzzle on top of a three-legged ping-pong table propped up with milk crates. The puzzle is big, the pieces are small, the lighting is harsh and Sullivan keeps kissing me, so it's taken hours and hours of no-longer-free time for Sullivan and me to get the jigsaw just one-quarter done. And with over three weeks still to go before the concert, my biggest worry is keeping the shed door barricaded 24/7. It takes no imagination to picture Judy storming the place, tipping over the table and destroying our hard work.

I know I could/should be in the shed alone now, working on the puzzle, going at it great guns without the distraction of Sullivan's fast-flowing river of conversation and unexpected kisses. But like I said, I need a break. And while no one at the campfire would necessarily miss
me
, they would miss the S'mores.

Across the campfire, Victoria spears a marshmallow with a bent coat hanger and holds it over the low flames. I wonder what she thinks, or if she even knows (I hope not), about Sullivan's bizarro lust for me. I don't think there is any official camp “no messing around” rule, but Victoria is pretty protective of Sullivan, always reminding him to put on suntan lotion and eat his greens and zip up his windbreaker on rainy days. I doubt that making out with the “volunteer” help is part of the life plan Victoria has mapped out for Sullivan. She probably thinks he should be kissing teen environmental activists and class representatives. Not...me. Especially not me.

“Storm's coming,” Victoria says, waving her flaming marshmallow at the sky.

It's true. The moon disappeared a while ago behind increasingly thick clouds. The headlamps and party lanterns winking from the cabin cruisers out on the river are scattering for shore, a sure sign of troubled weather on the way.

Within minutes the cool evening breeze morphs into a stiff wind. Low, persistent rumbles compete with the crackle of the fire and the smashing of rogue waves on the beach.

At the first flash of lightning and drops of rain, Dr. Fred calls it a night. He douses the fire with a big bucket of river water, and then, without preamble, he strides quickly through the trees and across the field, motioning for everyone else to tag along to the barn. “Storm phobia means canine pandemonium,” he remarks.

Joke's on him. Most of the old dogs are curled into themselves on top of blankets or stretched out on their sides on the cool tiles, fast asleep after a day of serious exercise and socializing, oblivious to the electricity in the air and the rain pounding the roof. A few of the younger, inexperienced pups whine and circle around Dr. Fred, looking for no more than head pats and some of the dog treats they know he keeps stuffed in his pants pockets.

Only Judy is a mess, howling and whimpering and quaking with every flash of lightning.

BOOM! The rafters shake. There's another flash. Judy sees me and charges, jumping into my arms like a 130-pound toy poodle. We collapse in a heap.

I push her bulk aside long enough to struggle to my feet. “Come on, Judy,” I say, yawning and gesturing for her to follow me, though it isn't necessary; she's got her head stuffed under my armpit like a furry black basketball. We head for the barn door.

“Sarah?” Dr. Fred calls.

“Judy can sleep on the floor in my cabin,” I call over my shoulder before making a mad dash through the storm to the cabin cluster. It's so late, I'm so tired, and the storm, while not especially fierce, seems to be stalled over the island. If I stay with Judy here in the barn until the weather clears and the big sucky dog is asleep, I'll never get any rest.