“I said, I wouldn’t mind working here, if you needed the help.”
“You seem to tolerate needles, which means you’d be level-headed in an emergency,” Elaine noted. “And you seem to love animals. Those are the only job requirements. Oh, but don’t get too attached. Especially to Bart. He’s the runt of a big litter, and he may not make it.”
“Detached is my middle name,” said Cam, which was true in most cases, but she knew she’d already fallen deeply and seriously in love with Bart. Come on. Soft. Puppy. Belly. He was irresistible.
“Great! I have to do the mail route right now. If I’m five minutes late, Mr. Griffith has a panic attack. He never gets anything but the circular from the supermarket, but he really looks forward to it. Can you watch Bart for me?”
“You deliver mail, too?”
“Ayuh. Many hats, remember. Anyway, I’ll be surprised if our friend here makes it through the night. If he’s not improving tomorrow, I might ease his pain.”
“Ease his pain, what do you mean, ease his pain?”
“Put him down, Campbell. He’s really suffering.”
“He’ll make it,” said Cam. “He and I have a little pact.” Which wasn’t exactly true, but she was going to make one with him right now.
Before Elaine left, Cam retrieved her biker bag from the front hall, grabbed the envelope, and handed it to her. “Will you mail this for me?” she asked. Her breath caught for a second as she handed the last remaining evidence of her friendship with Lily to Elaine. But she forced herself to suck in some more air and blow it out in a steady stream.
This is what it felt like to have a broken heart. It felt less like a cracking down the middle and more like she had swallowed it whole and it sat bruised and bleeding in the pit of her stomach.
Cam returned to the examination room and picked up the puppy, who was wrapped in baby blankets and lying on a doggie bed, motionless except for his belabored, snuffly inhales and exhales.
She sat down on the cold tiles of the exam room floor and let Bart rest on her lap, stroking the place where his snout and forehead came together. She and her mom had spent countless nights like this, reclining on the bathroom tiles, which cooled Cam’s fever as she waited to throw up again.
Her mom would stroke her forehead, and after vomiting for the seventeenth or eighteenth time—dry heaving drops of bile into the toilet—Cam would say, “I want to die, Mommy. Just let me die.”
And her mom would say, “I’ll make you a deal, Campbell Maria. You do not die, and tomorrow, we will have a special day.”
“Tell me what we’re going to do tomorrow when this is over,” Cam would whisper.
Then her mom would make a list itemizing the world’s best day. It was always different and always vivid, something Cam could imagine and look forward to.
“Tomorrow we will fly in a hot air balloon over the Everglades,” she would say.
“Oh, that’s a good one,” Cam would sigh.
“No, we really will. We’re going to get into the basket of a rainbow-colored balloon with a park ranger–slash–balloon aviator. And you will feel superior badgering him with questions he can’t answer about Everglades conservation while he floats us out over the surface of the water and tries to point out the pretty flowers.”
“Excellent.”
“And then we’ll have lunch and bubble tea.”
“Don’t say lunch,” Cam would say before heaving again over the toilet.
“Oh, I’m sorry, baby,” Cam’s mom would say and then place a cold washcloth on Cam’s forehead and the back of her neck. “So after that, on our perfect day, we’ll go to one movie and then sneak into a second show to get a freebie double feature. And then we’ll come home and sleep dreamlessly all the way through the night.”
“Now you’re exaggerating.” Cam hadn’t slept through the night since the cancer had started.
World’s Best Day actually materialized a lot in the beginning. Cam’s mom would scramble, rearranging her schedule so she could take Cam on a hot air balloon ride or whatever it was she had described the night before. But as Cam got sicker and her episodes more frequent, Cam had to let her mother off the hook. She couldn’t keep taking off of work for World’s Best Day.
“Okay, pup,” Cam said, adjusting the puppy and removing some of his blankets. He was getting a little too warm. “You just need something to look forward to. Are you listening? Tomorrow is going to be the world’s best day, so you have to hang on because you won’t want to miss it.”
Then Cam described the myriad sights and especially smells of a puppy’s perfect day. A walk through wet grass, lunch at the back door of the butcher shop, some backscratching against a tree, a game of fetch, a nap in the sun, chewing on a slipper, some tug-of-war, and a ride in the car with your head out the window.
It seemed to work a little. Bart seemed to be resting more comfortably when Elaine got home around four, with her ponytail stuck through the back of her postal cap. But Elaine said he was still very unstable. Cam made her promise that she wouldn’t do anything rash, at least without calling Cam first.
“It’s not rash, Campbell. It’s medicine.”
“Just please don’t do it,” Cam begged, and as she drove home with Tweety, she didn’t pray, exactly. She wouldn’t call it praying. But she sent energy to Bart. She used the visualization techniques that Lily taught her to imagine a future that contained a healthy, muscular, full-grown Bart. While she was at it, she visualized a healthy Cam and then, quite by accident, a healthy Asher lying shirtless in the sun.
FIFTEEN
BEFORE GOING BACK TO THE HOUSE, CAMPBELL PARKED CUMULUS WITH Tweety inside and took a walk past downtown Promise’s happy brick storefronts streaming with wind socks and balloons. She bought a coffee at the café and then stole three lobster magnets, a bag of moose-shaped pasta, maple syrup, and a pair of stripy hand-knit slipper-socks from the gift shop.
The thrill of stealing distracted her from Bart and the memory of the Alec Debacle, but she felt this new thing—guilt?—over stealing, not from “the Man” or “the Mouse” but from some little old lady who probably spent her evenings knitting slipper-socks in front of The Price Is Right.
Cam had never stolen from Main Street before. Except for the fake one in Disney, they didn’t have Main Streets in Florida, and the experience of it—the quaint, mom-and-pop, entrepreneurial, from-days-gone-by, up-by-your-bootstraps industriousness of it—was giving her a conscience. It was harder to steal when you could imagine from whom you were stealing.
It wasn’t that hard, though, because she was just about to slip an irresistible lobster claw–shaped oven mitt into her biker bag, when she heard someone yell, “Samoa!” from out on the sidewalk.
“That’s not exactly PC,” said Cam as Sunny walked in with her catalog boyfriend in tow.
“It’s a post-PC world now, Samoa. We’re not pointing out your difference; we’re celebrating it.”
“Hmmm,” said Cam, trying to figure out whether that made any sense at all.
“We’re going down to the flamingos. Want to come?” Sunny grabbed Cam’s hand and spun underneath her arm. “They’ll make you feel at home.”
“Is there some kind of traveling bird-circus in town?”
“No, they just arrived by themselves. A whole flock,” said Royal.
“Hundreds of them,” said Sunny. “They’re feeding down at the pond behind the elementary school.” She pulled Cam out the door, swirling and skipping down Main Street, still barefoot and dirty and wearing Friday night’s dress.
Cam let Sunny drive since she was bold enough to ask and she knew where to go. Royal sat in the backseat with Tweety, and Cam gripped the door handle on the passenger side. She was not used to surrendering control of Cumulus.
They drove along the coast toward the lighthouse. To their right, the pounding surf reminded Cam that they were at the end of the Earth, an eerie feeling for someone raised in the middle of a swamp. The horizon was frightening
. It was no wonder the pre-Columbians thought they would fall off of it.
“Grab the wheel for me?” Sunny said as she wriggled out of her fleece-lined sweatshirt.
Gladly, thought Cam.
“Have you seen those yet?” Sunny asked, driving with her knees as she put her hair in a ponytail. Cam tried to keep one eye on the road as she glanced quickly to where Sunny was pointing: a grassy hill, embedded with large, gray, lichen-covered rocks. Three or four black-and-white cows stood grazing on purple flowers.
“Are those dandelions?” Cam asked.
“Uh-huh. They grow purple here for some reason. Even when they turn to fluff. We have a festival in spring when all the little kids in town get together to make a wish in the town square and blow fistfuls of dandelion fluff into the air at once.”
They were quiet for a while. Sunny now had two hands on the wheel, so Cam let herself look around. Almost every home seemed to be selling something in its front yard. Antique shutters, weathervanes, sleds, chairs, bear sculptures carved from the burls of trees with a chainsaw, washers and dryers. She even saw one sign that read, FOR SALE: USED HOT TUBS.
“I like my hot tub straight from the factory,” mumbled Cam.
“What?” Royal asked.
“Nothing.”
They turned back toward the coast. Cam let herself be mesmerized by the spots of sun glittering off of the waves, when Sunny said, “Look at these bozos!”
Alec with a c was hitchhiking along Route 1, looking very European in his gray skinny jeans and oversize black turtleneck sweater. His black greasy hair swung loosely across his forehead. Cam couldn’t help getting excited, in spite of how bad he must have smelled in that sweater in this heat.
Man, that biological imperative is strong, thought Cam. She should not have been excited to see him; she was supposed to have had nameless-faceless-lose-my-virginity-before-I-die sex. Not fluttery-jittery-I-can’t-wait-to-see-him-again sex. And she really should not have been dejected when she saw the beautiful, porcelain-skinned redhead, who must have been the voice from the other night, jump out from behind him and wave the car down. Cam’s whole body felt heavy, as if there were mercury flowing through her veins. She felt like a polluted tuna.
Before Cam could say anything, Sunny pulled over. She rolled down the window and asked, “Going to the flamingos?”
Alec climbed into the backseat, and Royal handed Tweety’s cage to Cam.
“It’s very dangerous to pick up hitchhikers,” Cam mumbled under her breath.
“Hi, Autumn and Alec,” Sunny said. “Do you know Campbell?” Cam’s heart kicked at her chest. She wiped her palms on her shorts and tried to look Alec bravely in the eye.
“No,” said Alec flatly. He looked out the window, leaning his head against it, letting his knees splay wide apart. Autumn, another catalog kid, stuck a limp hand out to Cam and giggled, “Enchantée,” before sinking down next to him and whispering something rudely into his ear.
Detached, thought Cam. Detachment. I am detached, she chanted to herself. She tried this mantra on the entire drive to the flamingos, but the lump in her throat kept growing and eventually gave way, allowing one tear to slip from the corner of her eye. She never thought she’d feel like this, but she was beginning to miss home.
The five of them unfolded their limbs, climbed out of Cumulus, and took big steps through the ragweed in the field behind the school. Autumn put a daisy in her hair and Royal chewed on a piece of hay. They could be in a music video right now, thought Cam. They were so obnoxiously young and beautiful, and—aside from her own petty concerns about having just lost her virginity to the asshole who stood right next to her making out with his girlfriend—they were carefree.
She tried to stay a few steps behind the couples, acknowledging her fifth-wheel status, but Sunny ran back, linked arms with her, and kept her with the group. “Wait till you see this, Samoa,” she said.
And what she saw when they got to the top of the rise actually made her forget Alec for a second.
It was like flamingo lava—liquid pink—flowing toward them down the hill in the shape of a huge, bright, orangey-pink cornucopia. The whole thing seemed like one enormous amoebic organism blanketing the gentle hillside. Like some giant inside the Earth had blown a huge, bubble-gum bubble that popped all over the swampy mud. As they walked closer, they began to hear the distinct calls of individual birds and see the thousands of reedy legs and knobby knees that made up the inner workings of the flock.
“Isn’t pink the most peaceful color in the universe?” asked Sunny as they looked out on the enormous cloud of pink feathers. The five of them sat on the top tier of an old wooden fence and watched as the birds sifted through the silt for the blue-green algae and shrimp that were their only food.
Cam was glad the question did not require an answer. Pink. Pink was the color of chicken pox, pimples, bloodshot eyes, Pepto-Bismol, a syringe full of bone marrow, her eyedropper of liquid morphine, Alec’s tongue. A lot of horrible things were pink. And the flamingos, while fabulously, fiery pink, were not peaceful at all. They constantly pecked and nagged at each other like the senior citizens of their Florida homeland.
Cam sat in between the two couples on the fence. Alec was to her right. He gave her a sly glance and then purposefully let his little finger graze hers before pulling it away and pretending to ignore her again at the sound of Autumn’s giggle. Cam hated him.
And yet she desperately needed him to want her. She finally understood the Adolescent Postcoital Syndrome: Couple has sex. Girl gets uncharacteristically clingy. Boy feels suffocated. Boy pushes girl away for good. Cam wanted to be cooler than that. She did not want to succumb to the clinginess. The desperation. It was just that even though she had given it to him, she felt like Alec had stolen something from her, and she didn’t want him to get away with it.
She jumped down and took a walk along the perimeter of the birds.
Some of the happy citizenry of Promise had meandered over to the school to calmly take a look at them, too, but no one was photographing the flamingos or making a big “to-do,” as Cam’s grandmother would say. A Little League game continued, uninterrupted, on the baseball diamond in the far corner of the field. Instead of flocking toward the flamingos, the kids who were playing on the school’s playground ran screaming to the ice cream truck that had pulled up in the school parking lot. No one had even notified the media, which was a little surprising to Cam.
Not that she thought this was a miracle. Far from it. The real miracle was how an entire bird could grow to this size and resplendence from eating mostly microscopic organisms. That was a miracle. The fact that they flew here was a migration. The birds were simply in search of volcanic mud.
Cam watched the birds for another minute, beginning to tire of their honking and nagging and pecking, when two birds moved to the right to reveal a tall mound of mud topped by a chubby bird the size and shape of an oven stuffer-roaster. It was covered lightly with fuzzy gray fluff the color of dryer lint. A baby flamingo! It was so ugly, it was cute.
“Hi, Buddy,” Cam said. She turned to point him out to the happy couples.
Unfortunately, though, they had started up a game. They would kiss whenever two flamingos came face-to-face, their curved pink necks creating each half of a flamingo-necked heart. It was cute, really. But it was also Cam’s cue to leave.
SIXTEEN
CAM CAME HOME EXHAUSTED, READY TO HOLE UP IN HER ROOM AND watch a movie. But she couldn’t get past the front porch.
“Where have you been? I was about to call the police!” Alicia said. She and Perry sat on Adirondack chairs, sipping pink lemonade, as Asher painted the rungs of the porch’s railing a glossy black.
Asher was starting to make a little more sense to Cam. He was a lone wolf at the top of the food chain. And when you’re at the top of the food chain, you don’t want your prey to lay itself down in front of you like that Barbie doll on the bench that Cam had seen through her telescope. You crave somethin
g more complicated. You want to engage in the hunt. Something surreptitious, covert, clandestine. And yet something safe. Something that would guarantee your ultimate bachelorhood and the solitude of your lair. He must be involved with an older woman, thought Cam. But after today, she felt too tired to care.
“I can’t win. You force me to get out of here and now I’m in trouble for not coming home? Excuse me, I need to put Tweety inside. He’s had a very long day.” She tried to push past them all, feeling Asher’s eyes on her, but her mom stopped her.
“Campbell, you’re covered in dog hair.”
“I got a job at the vet.”
“That’s great. Really. But please go wash off in the outside shower.”
“Now?”
“Cam,” her mom said, and then Perry started sneezing on cue. Even Asher started wiping his eyes on the back of his sleeve. “I’m allergic to dogs, too,” he admitted.
“Oh, God.” Cam yielded. She handed Tweety’s cage to her mom and said, “He’s morbidly obese, by the way. You need to stop feeding him the papaya.”
“Go!” her mother said, throwing her a beach towel from the porch.
The shower assailed her with its sharp, freezing drops. Only hardy, robust New Englanders would think of installing an outdoor shower. Didn’t her family realize that she had zero body fat? She shivered as she soaped up with a cracked and drying bar of Irish Spring, probably decades old. She was trying to ignore the spiderwebs in the corners of the shower when she heard the sudden scratchy sound of her towel scraping against the top of the wooden stall. Cam knew what was coming next, but before she could react, Perry plucked each of her articles of clothing off of the shower stall.
Cam peeked over the stall while Perry proceeded to fling the clothes piece by piece from the cliff to the beach below. Cam stood naked in the shower except for her Chuck Taylors. She wasn’t about to take those off.