Camp

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When I was fourteen, not quite four years ago, I’d lie awake at night and pray my mother would die.

If I had known her secret, I might not have hated her. But my parents didn’t tell me about the ghost that slipped into the hospital the day I was born. It crept across my umbilical cord, linking me to my mother’s past. Then it wedged right between us. My father said doctors couldn’t explain the purple blotches on my chest. But now I’m sure of this: That phantom punched me hard. And though the black-and-blues faded before I could crawl, the ghost kept pushing my mother from me, flexing its muscles, bulking up. So by the time my parents sent me to sleepaway camp, that ghost was larger than I was. I just hadn’t seen it yet.

Dad sprang the news about camp on us in the fall when I was in ninth grade. “I heard from my brother today,” he announced at dinner as my mother carried a plate of lamb chops to the kitchen table. The smell of meat thickened the air. “Ed closed the deal on that girls camp he’s been looking at.”

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