The Inverted Forest (26 page)

Then there was the matter of the phone call she’d promised Linda Rucker. It irked Harriet. What had seemed at the time like a kindly gesture had evolved somehow into the demands of an actual friendship. She brooded over her obligation much of the morning, and twenty minutes before lunch she roused herself and picked up the infirmary telephone and dialed the number of Linda Rucker’s sister.

The line was answered by a wheezy voice: not that of Linda
Rucker but that of Linda Rucker’s sister, who grunted heavily and shrieked out Linda’s name, “Lin-duhhhhhhh! Lin-duhhhhhhhhh!” A long, low, crooning wail. Layered inside this wail, waiting to be excavated, were decades of grievance and compacted insult. “Lin-duhhhhhhhhh!” the sister wailed one last time, and then, either bored or clumsy, she seemed to let the receiver drop from her hand and clatter down onto a table or countertop.

A steady plod, plod, plod of footsteps could be heard. The receiver was hoisted up. “Harriet?” Linda Rucker said, her voice clear and alert, lively compared to her sister’s, but lacking a genuine spark of interest. She took in a long, near-whistling draw of breath. “Well,” she sighed. “I guess you tracked me down, didn’t you?”

“I did, yes.”

“I thought you might call. One of these days.”

“How are you, Linda?”

“I’m all right, I suppose. Considering.”

“And have you . . . What have you been doing?”

“This and that,” she said. “Settling in.”

“And have you had time to look for a job?” Harriet asked. She’d not wanted to pose this question, but already it seemed they’d exhausted the safe topics.

“Oh, I’ve looked,” Linda said. “I’ve found one, too.”

Found one?
That was good news, surely. A pleasant surprise. “Well, for goodness’ sake. You’re not wasting any time, are you?” Harriet said. It was a relief, really. Linda had found a job. And she was willing to talk about it, too, solitary and reticent Linda Rucker. She said she hadn’t needed to look very hard. In fact on Sunday, as soon as she’d arrived at her sister’s house, she had unloaded her car and gone straight out to look for work. In Branson, Missouri, an Ozark tourist town, there were scores of hotels and restaurants, hundreds of service jobs. She’d been hired right away at an enormous country buffet. Kitchen work. From 3:00
P.M.
to 10:00 each evening Linda Rucker
stood at a counter chopping vegetables and cheese for the buffet’s famous mile-long food bar.

“It’s fascinating work,” Linda said dryly.

“But at least you have a start at something, don’t you?”

“A start at what, though? It’s just chopping and slicing.”

“At least you’re not lying around feeling sorry for yourself.”

No answer to this. No offering to the contrary.

“Well,” Harriet said. “You can always move on to something—”

“All right,” Linda said. “Here’s a question I don’t really want to ask. Is Christopher Waterhouse the new program director?”

“Mmmm,” Harriet said, as if this were an entirely new possibility to consider. “Well, that’s the thing. No one’s made an announcement, one way or the other.”

“Is he acting like he is?”

“Sometimes, yes. Sometimes he does.”

“Can I tell you something?” Linda asked. “I’m not proud of admitting this, Harriet. I
hate
him.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“I’d like to find a way to make him miserable.”

“Well . . . ,” Harriet said, vaguely.

“I’d like him to suffer.”

“That’s, you know . . .”

“I’m usually not like this. I’m a fair-minded person, mostly. But someone like Christopher Waterhouse, he doesn’t feel awful about the things he does. He isn’t disgusted with himself. So the only thing you could do with a person like that is tie him down and make him suffer,
physically,
I mean.”

“Well . . . ,” she said again.

“I’m not talking seriously here, Harriet. It’s not like I’m making plans. I’m just saying that if someone or something were ready to make Christopher suffer, and all I had to do was give my approval to get it started, I’d do it. I’d think it over a little while and nod and
say
go ahead.
There’s nobody else in the whole world I feel that way about.”

“All right,” Harriet said. “All right.”

“It’s god damn awful knowing what’s happening there at camp. It would’ve been better if you hadn’t called.”

“But you
asked
me to,” Harriet said, incredulous.

“Did I?” There was a small wavering in Linda’s voice that was both obliging and unconvinced. “I don’t know about that . . . if it’s true or not. But even if it is, I shouldn’t have asked. It does me no good to hear these things right now. To know about camp. So I’m making a firm rule about this, Harriet. No more, please. No more news about camp.”

“Fine, yes. No more news.”

“Thank you,” Linda Rucker said. This seemed to mark the end of their conversation, but at the last moment, she let out an indignant huff and said, “Even if things are starting to fall apart without me, I still don’t want to know. It does me no good, you understand?”

“All right. I won’t call again,” Harriet said and hung up the phone.

No time, really, to reflect on this fraught conversation. She had medications to distribute, and a dirt-smeared five-year-old boy to wash and hurry across the yard and into the mess hall for a lunch of pizza squares and salad. For James this was a happy occasion. He took his place beside Schuller Kindermann at the director’s table, and Harriet, balancing her muffin tray in one hand, roamed from table to table dispensing her potent medications. It was a task that required all of her concentration.

But afterward she was tired, a blanketing, unshakable tiredness that only a weekend of bed rest could cure. All morning she’d sipped Coca-Cola to remedy her fatigue. Just after lunch she did something she hadn’t done in years: begged a cigarette and then stepped out the
back door of the kitchen and smoked it among the stacks of milk crates and collapsed boxes. What a strange, woozy buzz it created in her head. Her breathing slowed. Her heartbeat raced. All the particulars of the kitchen’s scrubby backyard seemed magnified by a degree or two. But her tiredness did not lift.

A few hours later, while sorting dinner medications in the infirmary yard, she put a hand to her forehead and fell asleep, probably for no more than ten minutes. She woke with her arms stretched across the enormous muffin tray. In the wells of the tray lolled dozens of bright capsules and tablets. Lithium, phenobarbital, Nembutal. Kneeling beside her on the bench, as if he’d materialized out of nothing, was James, calm and alert, his chin propped in his hands while he chewed, patiently, on something tiny and dark.

Raisins it turned out. But in those first moments of waking, she’d been given a terrible start.

The day wasn’t conquered yet. There were duties—some of them usual, some unusual—for Harriet to perform. Nursing duties. She was a nurse, after all. (In her most hectic moments this sometimes struck her as the oddest of facts.
I am a nurse? How strange. How could this have happened to me?
) There were stacks of file charts into which she added her notations and initials. She changed urine-stained bedsheets. To anything that looked remotely like an insect bite or ivy rash she applied calamine lotion. The usual and the unusual. She rewrapped the Ace bandage on Mrs. Gilder’s swollen ankle and then a few minutes later used a pair of hemostats to remove three pearl-white pajama buttons that Ms. Pauline Kopine had squirreled away in her right nostril. What a peculiar occupation, nursing, the way it veered back and forth between the honorable and the ridiculous.

But they were in the homestretch now, she reminded herself. And who knew? She might just have the necessary stamina to make it the
rest of this day and another. But nothing more than that. Nothing left over.

At dinner she dealt out her medications and then sat for two plates of Maureen Boyd’s benign but compulsively edible five-layer lasagna. She drank coffee and blinked away her weariness, and when she looked around, she noticed that many of the counselors were doing the same: gulping down long sips of coffee and then heaving their shoulders and stretching open their eyes as if to wake themselves from a dream. At the end of the meal Christopher Waterhouse bounded up to the long mess hall serving counter and raised his hand for quiet. He looked to be in a jubilant mood. He had an announcement to make. In thirty minutes everyone was to meet in the open meadow for the evening’s activity: the Kindermann Forest Camp Carnival. “There will be
thrilling games,
” he said in an unpracticed barker’s voice.
“Extravagant prizes. Spectacular feats of competition.”

It was a camp tradition that the evening activity be hawked like miracle-cure medicine. The counselors grinned knowingly. It seemed they’d come to enjoy these exaggerations, the teasing discrepancy between what the Kindermann Forest Camp Carnival was promised to be and the homely reality of how it would turn out.

Thirty minutes later, when Harriet arrived with James at the meadow, she and the counselors found seven milk crates containing the barest ingredients of carnival games: spoons and a carton of eggs; strips of cloth for a three-legged race; a clutch of water balloons. From this, apparently, they were meant to construct an evening of entertainment. No one could, of course. The state hospital campers were, by this late juncture of the day, tired, moody, easily distracted. The counselors lacked both the energy and the necessary will. They rolled their eyes and checked their watches and prayed for it to end. But they seemed to agree: you couldn’t blame Christopher Waterhouse. He’d had too many responsibilities dumped in his lap; his daytime
obligations as a lifeguard, and now the fresh demands of being the undeclared program director.

This was the attitude Harriet found so baffling: the tremendous leeway afforded to Christopher Waterhouse. Maybe Linda Rucker had some notion of it. In her phone call she’d pleaded not to know the ways camp had deteriorated. What could Harriet reasonably tell her anyway?
Kindermann Forest, without you, is shabby and disorganized. The evening activities are a tiresome joke. The blame for this seems to be Christopher Waterhouse’s. By the way, no one misses you. No one seems to mind.

For the rest of the evening the campers were set loose to sift through the crates of carnival games and roam the meadow as they pleased. As evening activities went, this one was shapeless and lazy. No games, thrilling or otherwise, were played. No feats of competition, either. The campers were free to scatter debris across the meadow or, in a few cases, to form chatty little cliques that looked, from a distance, as cheery and ordinary as any summer-party gathering. Others stood rooted in the grass, flailing their limbs about, rocking to and fro and turning their heads sharply to consider the darkening bowl of the sky or the overhead whir of insects. Rarely did a camper try to push beyond the grass boundaries and into the woods; they were more compliant now, or more exhausted, than they’d been the first day of camp.

A half hour before twilight Christopher Waterhouse came bouncing across the meadow in the camp van. Until that moment he’d barely been present at the carnival, though he’d been seen nearby, hurrying along the gravel paths or hefting boxes in and out of the mess hall; a young man with pressing duties and the authority to wander wherever he chose.