Briar Haven, Part I — The Demon Lives at Seven
“What’s your favorite thing about Briar Haven?” Mare asks me. She is fresh from the shower, wrapped in a towel and burrowed into the kitchen couch, watching me fold laundry.
“The way the mist rises on the lake in the morning while you’re having breakfast,” I answer. “And how every day you think it’s going to be cold, but by 10 a.m. the mist is gone and it’s hot out.”
“Do you think anyone there remembers you?” Mare asks.
Ahahaha – yeah, about that.
It is entirely possible that someone there remembers me – Briar Haven tends to keep staff for decades. So maybe I will encounter someone who knew me as that girl I was, and maybe it will hurt.
Or maybe they will just be shocked that I managed to produce the bright-eyed, well-adjusted, perfectly un-spooky girl standing beside me in her Briar Haven fleece. God knows I am.
“Not many people there will know me, Mare, it was many years ago. And that’s good. It’s your place now. You’ll always be my kid, no matter where you go. This is a chance to figure out who else you are.”
At the very beginning of the summer, Mare pulled my old trunk out of the basement, scrubbed it herself, laid it out in the sun on Clover Hill to remove the dingy smell. She brought it into the kitchen and insisted that we start packing it, three weeks before she was to go.
The sight of it – my name still visible in faded stenciling on the front – is incongruous in the warm kitchen of the Tilty-Floored Farmhouse. It occupies the periphery of my vision when I am cooking, or feeding Eden, or getting the girls loaded for a trip to the market.
I have been slowly filling it with things off the equipment list – shorts and t-shirts and good walking shoes. Camping blankets and a basket of toiletries to take to the wash house. I have remembered things that aren’t on the list – a good mattress pad, itch cream, a tarp for her bed in case it rains. We treated her to a great headlamp and I showed her how to read under the covers.
At first she was excited and fearless and every day demanded to know HOW MUCH LONGER UNTIL BRIAR HAVEN? I was the best mother in the whole darn world. My seven-year-old – SEVEN! the people marveled – wanted to go to overnight camp.
But then she started cramming the tray with little things she suddenly couldn’t stand to leave behind – the flowered diary with the tiny lock, her quill pen, Ren’s music box. Every time she looks at the trunk now, she blanches. She is starting to ask more questions, and as she watches me do laundry, I know what’s coming.
“I’m scared. I think I don’t want to go.”
The hairs along my arms stand up. I can’t settle my hands. Can’t sit, can’t stand, can’t contain myself in my own skin. I put down the little pink shorts I was folding and go to the fridge where I dig, find some onions, put them on the counter, and proceed to chop.
“Baby, if you weren’t nervous, I’d be worried that you just didn’t get it,” I say, leveling those onions with vicious focus. Chopitty-chop.
“Oh,” she nods.
Back to the fridge for a bottle of fizzy water. I take a swig, swallow bile and carbon, pick up my knife again. The trunk is there, small and dark in the corner. I want to throw it out the window, watch it shatter glass, splinter on my lawn.
This is too hard.
I have had too many children. I was crazy even to have the one, I know it, but they were so cute I kept having them without thinking about the consequences – about the fact that one day they would be seven and it wouldn’t be enough just to be there.
“Let’s play ‘what if,’” I manage. A big stupid tear falls on the cutting board, I sniffle hard and clear my throat. “What if … your bunk mate has a GIGANTIC UGLY WART ON HER NOSE … and you even think it moves when you talk to her?”
Mare laughs.
Oh-my-god-the-onion-is-done-now-what.
“Okay, first step – DON’T LOOK AT IT!” I say, moving to the fridge and peering in. “Whatever you do!
“Second step:” she chimes in with a giggle, “Say nothing. Don’t laugh. And later, in bed, laugh to myself all I want.”
“Exactly,” I say. “Okay. Another one. What if … you decide you hate it and you want to go home?”
Ah, celery! I take it to the cutting board. Chopped celery in little tiny cubes. In piles of cubes. Next to the onion.
“Do you think that will happen?”
“Oh, yes! Absolutely. It’s part of the whole experience. Everybody feels that way. The key is to have a plan. So what if? What will you do?”
“I’ll call you.”
“You know, they don’t let campers call home. It’s part of it.” (Unless you are wailing hysterically that your mother promised you could go home – that works, I hear.)
“I’ll write you a letter,” Mare said.
“Right. And if you send me a letter that says, ‘Momma, come get me,’ what do you think I’m going to do?”
“Get in the car.”
I will get in the car and I will pound the shit out of anyone who gets between me and you.
“Exactly. So if you write that letter, I think you better not send it right away. I think you better put it under your pillow. Leave it there for a day. Because, you know, wanting to go home is perfectly normal. Everyone feels that way. But it passes. So put the letter under your pillow, and remind yourself that it passes.”
On my countertop, a pile of chopped-up things. A pan. Soup. I’m making soup. It’s a hundred degrees out, let’s simmer. Why-the-fuck-not.
I find the plastic container filled with thick strips of white-fleshed sea bass brought home from a colleague after a spectacular weekend catch. I slice fish into chunks, feel for bones, slip stray scales away with my thumbs.
“Come outside with me,” I say, carrying the tray out to the grill. I cook out there in the summer, because to cook in the kitchen would be unbearably hot.
Mare follows me, her long lean body wrapped in the towel, the edge of which she is chewing. I sauté the chopped-up things and then add the lobster stock from last weekend’s shells.
“I’m half excited, half terrified,” she says.
“Best things in life are like that,” I answer. “Do you have any idea how utterly undone I was the night before I had you?”
She laughs, my daughter in the smoke and the summer woods and the coming twilight.
The first time I stepped out on to this deck, adjoining the old screened porch with its view of the forest, I thought, “Wow. This feels just like being at Briar Haven.”
My love of land and trees and earth was born in those long terrible weeks, in finding the goodness of what was around me, even as the darkness inside me deepened.
“I would not send you to Briar Haven if I did not absolutely believe you will love it there,” I tell her. “I think it will be a very special, very beautiful week for you. You’ll miss us, but it will be all right.”
***
Two nights later. A shrill electrical wail breaks through the silent bedroom, the thickness of sleep, the clatter of the window air conditioner.
Mare, I think, with a starburst of panic from my core out to my fingers and toes. A squint at blue digital clock numbers: 4:02 a.m.
“Hello, is she okay?” I say into the cordless receiver. She is not at camp yet, I struggle to remind myself. She is at a sleepover at Ryan’s.
“She’s fine,” Ryan says. “She’s having a hard night.”
“Okay, I’m on my way.”
Mary has been going on sleepovers for several years now and has never once called home.
I fumble for pants, keys, shoes.
A terrible hour. Is it yesterday or tomorrow?
Driving in the darkness, the familiar forms fade into each other and even the gentlest of roads feels menacing.
In later years my mother said she had not brought me home because a child psychologist told her it would be devastating to my self-esteem to be allowed to quit. I don’t believe that story, but here in the twilight where I want to tell Mare it is all too much, camp is a huge mistake, she shouldn’t go — I wonder what it would do to her; to quit, to have me quit on her behalf, before she even starts.
What would it do to her to get there and discover she has made a terrible mistake and the world is just not as beautiful and she is not as strong as she thought?
How did I ever allow this to get so far?
There is no repression in the pre-dawn, particularly when you are alone. Each sleeping house seems safer and cozier than any I could ever make for my children. Those people are asleep because they have not done this to their daughters – because they are not destined to be destructive parents.
And then my headlights are lighting the long driveway to Ryan’s house, where two figures are sitting on the porch. I park and cross the lawn toward them, gathering an inventory of the socially-appropriate vocabulary I will need to collect my daughter without revealing that what I really want to do is scale the pretty blue siding, scamper to the roof, and howl at the moon.
A blast of cold water flings into my face.
Automatic sprinklers. Of course.
So I arrive at Ryan’s doorstep in my pj’s in that horrible predawn, water dripping from my chin and eyebrows.
Mary is quiet and dry-eyed, her sleeping bag and pillow in her lap. I am surprised there are no tears.
“You’re totally going to want to duck on the way out,” I say.
“She’s been talking a lot about camp,” Ryan says to me.
“Thanks.”
Mary stands to go, and her calm intrigues me.
I tell her to get under the sleeping bag with me. She does and we run through the sprinklers together and when we get to the car we are laughing.
She piles in, I shut her door and then lean my back against it. I look at the moon and make a checklist.
Really, sometimes, it’s just that simple.
Sprinklers and checklists.
1) Don’t tell her she doesn’t have to go. Let her introduce that idea if she wants to, but don’t you do it.
2) She doesn’t have to go. You’re in charge, here, not some bullshit made-up psychiatrist from the 1980’s. If it’s not right for Mare, you pull her, no regrets, no apologies.
3) Remember that she is not you – you don’t know what she is actually feeling. Let her talk first.
4) Remember that she might be saying she feels a certain way to see what your reaction is. Don’t give validity to irrationality – respect all of her reactions but set the example and don’t fuel mindless panic.
“I was trying to sleep,” she says, as I back the car down the driveway. “And then my foot itched. And I think my nervousness about camp is what itched it, you know?”
“What a great way to describe it,” I smile. “I’m sure that’s exactly what happened.”
“I’m nervous about camp,” she repeats.
“It’s just a feeling,” I say. We ride in silence. I wait for her to say more, but she doesn’t.
The Tilty-Floored Farmhouse is deliciously still when I open the front door. Mare dumps her stuff next to the trunk and goes up to the tiny bedroom she shares with her sisters. I see her peer into Eden’s crib, pat her back, then fall into her bed, asleep instantly.
I find my way to my own bed, pull up the afghan, and cry, drifting off just as sunlight is filling the corners of the room.
Briar Haven — A Sunfish on Lake Riley