I Am Margaret Moore Read online

  I look to my girls. Rose and Flor have slipped around the corner but Nisreen lingers.

  I am afraid, the way I was last summer. We are here again and still I am afraid.

  Come on, Rose calls, out under the sky. Let’s go.

  Nisreen says, soft and for me: As Marshall girls we’ll live and die. Forevermore we are Deck Five.

  I follow her out into the light.

  The fear moves close behind me.

  THE MANIFEST

  THERE WAS ONCE A Marshall girl who lowered the flags with a storm rushing in from the west. Lightning came and shocked her all afire, and she fell charred and dead, and we do not know her name, and she is immortal: a statue with one hand outstretched beside the Legion Building.

  There was once a Marshall boy who caught a fever. They sent him to the infirmary and told him to rest, to sweat out the sick in the room at the end of the hall. Night fell like a curtain and when the nurse came back he was stiff and dead, and we do not know his name, and he is immortal and hovering still in the corner of that room.

  There was once a Marshall boy who flew far from the fold. The whole camp watched as he came up over the woods, but the plane was too hungry and there above the trees it took its last breath and crashed shrieking down onto the road. And we do not know his name, and he is immortal and made of new rules and new pavement where they filled the scar he left.

  There was once a Marshall girl who coaxed her horse to jump too high. They fell in a flash of black and tan and red. The horse stumbled up, and charged round and round, and she lay still in the dust, and we do not know her name. And she is immortal and they say in the stables every June, to the Butterflies on their first day, Sometimes it is wise to be afraid.

  THE REVEILLE

  WE WAKE TO CANNON-FIRE.

  Reveille is oh-six-hundred hours: the cannon shouting on the shore and the metal bell clanging. A second classman runs up and down the hall, ringing and ringing and yelling, Wake up, Deck Five!

  Nisreen is awake and staring out the window at the glass-flat lake, one arm propped behind her head. The wall behind her is bare. Rose hangs a Marshall flag over her bed, whiter than the paint. Flor hangs the flag of Venezuela. Yellow for riches, blue for the sea, she told us our first summer, in our hot mosquito-bite cabin on the other side of the road. The flag hung behind the bunk she shared with Nisreen, bright in the cabin’s shade. Red for spilled blood.

  I sit up. The night’s chill still holds the air. In the hall doors open and girls scuffle past, racing for the showers before the water turns ice-cold.

  “Margaret,” says Nisreen, without looking; with her gaze on the distant shore. “I missed you.”

  And the door flies open and cracks against her wardrobe. “Get up, lazy girl!” shouts Flor, and she is wrapped in a towel with her hair soaking wet, and she yanks back the wool blanket and the sheet, and she grabs Nisreen and pulls her out. They fall against the wardrobe and Flor kicks the door shut with one swift heel. Far off down the hall the counselor shouts, No slamming doors.

  They kiss. Deep and true and wild, like I am not here at all, and Nisreen’s nightgown is tangled, and Flor’s hair drips water all over the tile. They come up breathless and bright. Nisreen’s eyes steal to me. Flor laughs and says, “What? Were you telling Mar all our secrets?”

  And she flips her hair at me and the water is cold and wonderful.

  Breakfast roll-call is oh-six-thirty. Dress C’s: our boat shorts and blue oxfords, our deck scarves, our saddle-shoes and crew socks and gold nametags. The girl who rang reveille has the bell again, darting through the hall as our doors slam shut, shouting, One minute ’til lineup!

  We run for the stairs. One after the next our right hands reach up. One after the next we slap the gold M on the wall; we clatter downstairs; we fall into line for roll-call; we march to the mess.

  When the boys march in I will not look for him.

  We are early, and the sunlight warms the air and sifts through the leaves. High up in the tree next to our lines, there is a snarling angry buzz.

  The naval companies call attention, one after another, cacophonous, beyond their barracks.

  I will not look for him.

  Naval One bursts into view at a quick showy clip. They halt at the steps to the mess, just in front of us.

  I will not look for him.

  There is a white-hot silence in the sunlight, like time has hitched to a halt. It comes again: the buzzing, louder and furious. And all at once something falls from the tree and lands with a thud on the mulch. It storms and wrestles. It is two big summer bugs fighting each other, I think: spinning and digging at the mulch, and buzzing fierce and desperate. In the second row a third classman turns her head to look, and Rose calls, “Eyes front.”

  My eyes are front, not looking as the buzzing whines higher. My eyes are front, where the Naval One UC salutes. His eyes are on the reg com, and then he does a sharp left face and his eyes are on his boys.

  For one instant between, his eyes are on Deck Five.

  He has found me.

  THE BOY

  I LOVED A BOY once, before all this. I loved him so strong and so true I can feel it still, like a knife to my stomach. So that every night when I closed my eyes his name was the last word still tracing its bright-lit path across the bleeding dark of sleep, and every morning it was the first thing to sift through with the sunlight.

  His name was—

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  THE FALLEN

  AFTER BREAKFAST I WALK out to the tree where we stood to wait for the boys. Beneath it there is a shiny thing that lies on its back. It is almost dead or dead already, one leg twitching.

  It isn’t two winged things, the way I thought. It is one: a fat cicada, black and wet, with half its body poking through a clouded shell. It tried and failed to molt from its old skin. And it buzzed and strained and fell to earth.

  I pluck a single buttercup from along the stone ledge, missed when the groundskeepers sheared the grass short. I kneel on the path and place the flower there beside the cicada.

  I stand watch until its twitching leg goes still.

  THE DAYS

  THE SUMMER FINDS ITS rhythm.

  We wake at reveille.

  We line up outside Neverland for roll-call at oh-six-thirty.

  We march to the mess for breakfast. We go to morning classes. We line up for roll-call at eleven hundred hours. We march to the mess for dinner. We go to afternoon classes. We practice and match in the afternoon: sailing and wherries out on the lake; tennis and track; basketball in the stifling-hot gym with our shouts echoing high. We line up for roll-call at seventeen hundred hours. We march to the mess for supper. Tuesdays and Thursdays, we drill on the field and feel it spring in the hollow corner, and we line up for Retreat with our flag held high. After, the band plays, and we crowd into the tunnel with them while the rest of camp is stuck outside. They are much too loud, and out-of-tune, and inside the stone arch the sound breaks our bones. And it is perfect, and we jump and shout, and then at the very end they play the Navy hymn and we find each other and sing, Deck Five the proud, Deck Five the bold.

  That first Retreat I look across at Nisreen and she is crying. She brushes the tears away but still I see.

  Our first weekend we don’t get permit, but we have three golden hours of freedom in the afternoon. We steal away to the pier and unfold under the sun. Flor and Nisreen practice semaphores: Flor swings two red-and-yellow flags, and Nisreen crouches on the pier scribbling the letters down. When they practice with a scribe they will run messages from Rose’s book: complicated and misspelled, so they can’t shortcut by guessing. But today Flor sends without looking away. Every time she triple-clacks the flags together to end the message, Nisreen smiles secret at what the letters spell.

  Rose and I lie in a long crew-boat. The boat is the same as the wherries we take out in rowing class, but four times as big: enough room for eight girls rowing in pairs, and the smallest third classman shouting out the stroke. Rose has her boat shorts rolled up and her socks folded neat next to her saddle-shoes. She has found a boy: a boy from Aviation, short and silly last summer but this summer standing tall; the boy who will do the flyby tonight at Parade. She has chattered about him all day but she will never speak to him. She will gaze from far away until he marches off-step or comes second in a sailing race. And then she will forget him and find a new boy; a better boy.

  She has chattered about him but now she has gone quiet, reading an old paperback with the front cover curled in.

  I ask her what she is reading and she uncurls the cover as she turns the page: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Back home Rose is a theater girl, trimming curtains instead of sails. She marks the pages the same way she marks her Victory Race notebook: swift and sure. She is left-handed but she writes with her right, so the ink won’t smudge.

  The waves lull and lap. The semaphores clack. I close my eyes and the whole world is warm and orange.

  Rose murmurs lines: “‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’” There is the scratch of pen on paper. There is a slow and languid pause. Girls shriek on the shore.

  Poetry is a strange holy mystery to me: beautiful and secret. But Rose unlocks it the same way she unlocks equations and the shifting angles of the wind. With Rose everything is a number. She tells us she will work for NASA someday, writing long strings of numbers that send astronauts into infinity.

  I will write words instead, I think.

  The pen scratches again. Flor shouts and Nisreen laughs.

  “‘Let us go in together, And still your fingers on your lips, I pray,’” says Rose, and Flor’s footsteps clatter on the pier. “‘The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite, That ever I was born to set it right!’”

  The boat rocks and I open my eyes. Flor and Nisreen have climbed aboard. Flor sits cross-legged; Nisreen stands next to her, towering tall with one hand shading her eyes.

  “It’s the yacht club regatta,” she says.

  We sit up and look out over the bow. Halfway across the lake a dozen scows hover in their starting line.

  “Is your father racing?” Flor asks.

  Rose nods, tucking her pen into her book. From out on the lake the starting horn blares. The sails pull tight and the boats push east.

  “We’ll have permit next week. We could go to Summers Rest,” says Rose. “I’ll race, and you can watch from the dock.”

  “Your house is too far to tell the boats apart,” says Flor.

  On permit weekends we line up for our slips and we spirit away into town or the cottages dotting the whole long shore of Lake Nanweshmot. Last summer and the summer before, we four never went the three-mile trek to Rose’s lakehouse. We went to mine instead: a tunneled deep-green mile to a driveway that curves through the trees. The house kneels humble on limestone blocks, nested in ivy. There is the garage door, set into the stone, where my father stores the C-scow. There is the ramp down into the water. There is the sunporch, caged in glass and greenhouse-hot with every sunset. There are the letters painted on the plank that hangs below it: SHADY BLUFF.

  Last summer and the summer before, we sat baking on the sunporch, drinking sweet-sour lemonade and painting calamine lotion on our poison ivy spots. We ran down the ramp, our feet pale with the ghosts of our crew socks. We plunged into the water and swam out and out until it deepened from warm to cold. We wandered sunstreaked through the house, lakewater footprints bleeding into the wood floor. We were right and whole.

  “It will be different this summer,” says Rose, for me.

  We are thinking of it: of last summer and the summer before. And I am thinking of the summer I was four years old, on the pier, and I stepped backward and fell flailing down into the clear green water. And my mother scoops me up and out, and I am about to cry and then I see her laughing and I am laughing too instead. The memory is fragile and blurred like I am seeing it all through that second I plunged in and looked up and the leaves were watercolors against the sky. My mother says, in the watercolor-blur, Margaret! Little summer-girl. Never grow up, promise me? Promise you’ll be my little summer-girl always.

  “Last summer—” says Nisreen.

  “Don’t,” says Flor, but she takes Nisreen’s hand when she says it. She never cries, not even our very first Butterfly summer when her uncle left her at the steps to our cabin. She is standing with a suitcase in each hand, and she is twenty-five hundred miles from home, and at home everything is uncertain. She is here to spend summer safe; to practice her English that is already perfect; to sharpen her discipline that could already cut stone. She is brave and calculating. She will stare at the girls who whimper and beg to go home. But her heart belongs to us, and to Nisreen, and she leaves it here in Neverland when the summer ends and picks it up again when we are back.

  “I know,” Nisreen says. She is gazing at the far-off branches that veil Shady Bluff. “But I don’t.”

  “We know they tried to send Mar home,” Flor says. The air-horn blasts once: the first scow has rounded the starting buoy. The second lap is on. “She ran out into the storm, and we chased after her, and they locked us up and sent us home—”

  “We don’t know anything,” says Rose. “We don’t know why.”

  They wait now, and I feel their eyes on me. I could say to them, There was a boy. But when I think of giving up his name, there is the fear that holds me by the neck: a fear that fades to gray and then to black beneath the storm.

  It is my fault, I think. It is all my fault.

  Nisreen still stares at the shore. “They sent us home when all we did was ask.” She looks to me and looks away and says, “When we said there was a boy.”

  “They sent us home for no damn reason, you mean,” says Rose.

  Flor squints into the glare and gleam and says, “They had a reason. They kept it from us.”

  That is it: the place where all four of us stand in the dark, afraid of the answers and starving for them.

  “We should find out the truth,” says Nisreen. And if Flor is iron over a beating-soft heart, Nisreen is her perfect opposite. Tall but thin like a foal; a girl who lets the tears slip past her bristling lashes and catch the sunset at Retreat. She feels and feels. She gets sick every summer and spends nights in the infirmary with a rash eating at her ankles or white sores spotting her throat. But there is something in her that does not flinch: not from pain, not from love, not from truth. She will bend but never break. She will walk first into the dark.

  The air-horn blasts twice: the second lap is done. Time has slipped by without us seeing.

  “They owe us the truth,” says Flor.

  I think of that word, owe, and its round mournful sound. Last summer, we did not say goodbye. Last summer ends with a bright bolt of lightning, and rain on the road, and loss and rage, and truth and lies. I am afraid and I do not want to leave.

  It is summer again. The sky is alight and the air holds us close and the crew-boat is real. I feel it with all ten fingers: the warm wood, rough and smooth at once, and bleached by sun, and stained with sweat and lakewater.

  We are whole again and together, but I have kept myself from them.

  I want to fix the pieces that are broken. Like sewing cuts with thick black thread; lashing splints to broken bones, the way we learned in our survival class. But that first-aid is only temporary. To heal we will have to go and pull out the thorns stuck deep in our flesh.

  I want to go back. The four of us, to Shady Bluff. I want it so much that I cannot find the words to say it. And I reach to nudge Rose’s hand.

  “Look at that! Would you look—” she cries out, and she is on her feet, and across the lake the wind has shifted all at once and knocked the first-place boat down, and the second boat sails past it swift and sure. It crosses the starting buoy and the air-horn sounds the victory.

  Rose whirls to us, and the breeze throws her hair around her face. And she sees my hand reaching for where she sat, and she sees the question in my eyes, and she says, “Let’s go back to Shady Bluff.”

  THE SILENCE

  ON SATURDAY NIGHTS WE call home. Lining up in the hall, waiting for the phone. It is our only chance to talk to our parents and we have four minutes each. We forget the important things. We say, No, I’m not tired over stretching yawns.

  We sit in line behind two third classmen who spent all the first week pestering, please, just two minutes, with the counselor shaking her head and telling them to write a letter, and the girls shrieking, A LETTER?!, like they will die of it.

  “It’s … how do we even know what’s happened out there?” one of them says, second in line. “There could be a bomb big enough to wipe out New York City, and we wouldn’t even know!”

  “Yes,” says Flor with her voice as flat as the wall. “And isn’t it wonderful.”

  They are brand-new girls, the two in front of us. Girls from America—Not America, Flor would say, the United States, where you are too safe to know you are safe. Out across the world there are elections that will change everything; there are wars we have never heard of; there are girls who will learn in their four minutes that they will never go home. They will hear news like Flor heard one Lower Camp summer, the counselor calling her in.

  “We really are in Neverland,” says the other girl ahead of us.

  “Shush,” says Rose, who is UC even in her pajamas. “Think about what you’re going to tell your parents.”

  She is away from the world, too. Her brother is a lieutenant in the Navy, on a ship on some far ocean, and late in the summer when we sit in the chapel and hear the long list of names ringing out in the Gold Star Ceremony there will be two Winstons there. Her brother is not in danger: that is what her father says. She worries still when she thinks no one is looking.

  We wait in the line. We spend our four minutes and we hang up and hand the phone to the next girl.