Susan Wiggs - Summer at Willow Lake

When she picked up the tennis cup, something rolled around inside it. She pried off the lid, and an object fell out. A button? A cuff link. It, too, was wrought of tarnished silver, with a fish design—maybe a zodiac sign? She looked around for its mate, but there was only the one. She put the cuff link in her pocket and rubbed the trophy, trying to make out the engraving: Counselors Classic. First Place. Philip Bellamy. 1977. Apparently her father had won the cup at the annual staff games while working as a counselor at Camp Kioga that year. He would have been twenty-one, getting ready to go off for his senior year at college.

She found an old photograph stuck down inside the cup. The edges of the picture were curled, the colors fading, but the image made her catch her breath. She saw her father as she had never seen him before, holding the sparkling new trophy aloft. He appeared to be laughing with joy, his head thrown back and his arm around a girl. No, a young woman.

Olivia wiped the dusty photograph on her sleeve and angled it toward the light. On the back, the photo bore the date—August 1977—and nothing else. She studied the woman more closely. Long dark hair, cut in feathery layers, spilled loosely over the shoulders of her camp shirt. The abundant waves of hair framed an attractive face and a smile that might be tinged with a hint of mystery. With her full lips, high cheekbones and dark, almond-shaped eyes, the stranger was an exotic beauty whose looks contrasted with the ordinary shorts and shirt she wore.

There was something in the way the man and woman in the photograph seemed bonded together that sent a chill of curiosity through Olivia. A certain familiarity—no, intimacy—was evident in their posture. Or maybe she was reading too much into it.

Olivia knew she could ask her father who the stranger was. She was quite sure he’d remember a woman who could make him laugh the way he was laughing in the photograph. But she didn’t want to upset him, asking about an old girlfriend. There was probably a very good reason she was a stranger.

Something about the old photograph bothered Olivia. She studied it a moment longer. Looked at the date again. August 1977. That was it. By August 1977, her father was engaged to her mother, and they married later that year, at Christmastime.

So what was he doing with the woman in the photograph?

CAMP KIOGA CODE OF CONDUCT

Display of overly affectionate attention between males and females is discouraged. This applies to campers, counselors and staff members alike.

August 1977

“Philip, what are you doing?” asked Mariska Majesky, stepping into the bungalow.

He stopped pacing and turned, his heart lifting at the sight of her in a beautiful chiffon cocktail dress and platform shoes, her dark, wavy hair swept up off suntanned shoulders.

“Rehearsing,” he confessed, his chest filled with joy and dread, the intense emotions waging an undeclared war.

She tilted her head to one side in that adorable way she had of conveying curiosity. “Rehearsing what?”

“I’m practicing what I’m going to say to Pamela when she gets back from Europe,” he explained. “Trying to figure out how to end our engagement.” Since his fiancée had gone overseas, there had been only a few brief, unsatisfactory phone conversations, a hasty flurry of postcards and aerograms. The Italian telephone system was famously unreliable, and destroying her dreams over a crackling transatlantic wire or in a letter didn’t cut it.

Next week, she would return and then he’d tell her in person. It was going to turn him into the heel of the century.

The only thing worse was spending the rest of his life with someone who didn’t own his heart the way Mariska did.

Now Mariska grew serious, her full mouth forming a sad smile. Philip hugged her. She smelled fantastic, a heady mixture of flowers and fruit, and she fit just right in his arms, as though heaven itself had made her for him, exactly like the song said. Her nearness made him forget his worries about Pamela.

“I picked these up at the one-hour-photo place today.” Mariska took an envelope out of her purse. “There’s a shot of us. I ordered double prints, so you can keep a copy.” Flipping through the snapshots of the day’s sporting events at the camp, she pulled out one of her and Philip, laughing in triumph as he held a bright silver trophy cup aloft.

His heart constricted. He looked so damn happy. In that moment, he had been happy. Taking the tennis trophy down from the luggage rack, he put the snapshot inside it and replaced the lid. “Thank you,” he said.

She crossed the room and kissed him. “We should go. It’s the last dance of the summer, and you know how I love dancing.” Each summer, the season ended with a series of rituals. Yesterday, the campers had all gone home. Today was the staff’s farewell, a dinner dance that would end at midnight. By this time tomorrow, nearly everyone else would be gone, the college-age counselors all heading back to school.

“Let’s go,” she urged him, pulling back and taking his hand. “I don’t want to muss my hair.” She eyed him with a mischievous gleam in her eye. “Not yet, anyway.”

Even that oblique promise was enough to send him into overdrive. As they left the bungalow, he buttoned his sports coat and hoped his physical reaction to her nearness wasn’t too obvious. As he had since the beginning of summer, he cast a furtive glance around the area to make sure they hadn’t been spotted. Kioga had strict rules about fraternizing among counselors and other workers, and just because his parents owned the place didn’t mean he was exempt.

Mariska wasn’t a counselor, but she was supposed to be off-limits, too. She and her mother, Helen, supplied the baked goods to the camp. From the age of fourteen, Mariska had driven the white panel van up the mountain every morning at dawn, bringing bread, pastries, muffins and cookies to the dining hall. The local police looked the other way when the delivery truck lumbered past. Mariska’s mother, a Polish immigrant, had never learned to drive. Her father was on swing shift at the glassworks down in Kingston. They were a working-class family and the authorities were sympathetic to their plight. They weren’t about to ticket an underage girl for helping out with the family business.

As Philip and Mariska strolled through the forest at twilight, he couldn’t resist slipping his arm around her. She tucked herself against his shoulder. “Careful,” she said softly, “someone might see.”

“I hate all this sneaking around.” A sick guilt flurried in his gut. It was definitely not cool, falling in love with another girl while your fiancée was overseas. He couldn’t help himself, though. He had been helpless to resist Mariska, even though he wasn’t free to be with her. She was so understanding, complicit in the secrecy, but he suspected she was as eager as he was to stop hiding it. The moment Pamela returned, he’d end it with her and then he could finally show the world what was in his heart.

“You’re looking at me funny,” Mariska said. “What’s that look?”

“I’m trying to figure out the exact moment I fell in love with you.”

“That’s easy. It was that night back in June after Founders’ Day.”

He couldn’t help smiling at the memory, even though she was wrong. “That was the first time we had sex. I fell in love with you way before that.”

They reached the end of the gravel path and, out of habit, separated, keeping their distance. In the pavilion across the field, the farewell dance was already in full swing. A disco ball spun slowly from the center, its facets creating a strobelike effect on the crowded dance floor. People seemed more frenetic than usual, at least they did to Philip. But perhaps that was his imagination.