Camp by Elaine Wolf

Author:Elaine Wolf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

Chapter 12

It’s Our Secret

The night of the Saginaw social, I dreamed of a white door. I stand on tiptoe and, with little-girl fingers, grab the old- fashioned glass doorknob. Locked. I push, try again. A whisper. A moan behind the door. Who’s there? I squeeze the knob. Turn harder. Still locked. Locked out. Always the same, this dream that came again and again.

I stirred in my camp bed. In the haze between sleep and awakening, the door filled my mind. I drifted back to sleep, back to a time before Charlie—a time before we had a house, when my parents and I lived in an apartment. My father’s at night school. I try not to bother my mother. She vacuums the living room while I sit in the big chair where Dad reads to me on weekends. In his absence, I trace with my index finger illustrations in The Tall Book of Fairy Tales: Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel. I tell the stories, voice hushed so my mother won’t get angry. She fluffs the cushions on the sofa. “Remember the rules, Amy. Don’t tell your father I had company today.”

The doorbell rings. “It’s our secret,” my mother warns. She sends me to my room, across from my parents’. “And if you come out before I tell you, you’ll be punished.”

I curl up with Puppy, my stuffed animal, and listen for noises. Footsteps in the hallway. Then whispering. The floor creaks by our bedrooms.

I open my book to the picture of a gingerbread house. My father’s squeaky voice plays in my head:

Nibble, nibble like a mouse. Who is nibbling at my house?

“Stupid goose!” cries the witch when Gretel refuses to poke in the oven to see if it’s hot. So the witch shows her how. Gretel pushes her all the way in, slams the oven door, and runs to save her brother.

I finish the story and squirm, the urge to pee so strong I clamp my legs. My mother will punish me if I leave my room. Yet I have to go so badly that I’ll wet my pants if I wait. And the one time I did that, she got really angry. “Big girls don’t make sissy in their clothes, Amy.”

I sneak out and hear my mother moan. Is someone hurting her? I stand by my parents’ door and listen to my mother whimper, then something that sounds like a slap. “No,” she whispers. “Oh, no. No more.”

Urine runs down my leg. I have to save my mother, chase that bad visitor away. I reach for the glass knob. But then I hear my mother cry out, “Yes. Oh yes!”

Is she hurt or is she happy? If the visitor is hurting her, I have to help. If I don’t, she’ll be mad. She’ll say I should have heard her calling. She’ll say I should know when to break the rules. And if she’s happy, she won’t be angry with me for breaking them.

I stand in a puddle of pee. My mother speaks again as I grab the doorknob.

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