Black Ribbon

they fall out? Or—”
    “Or,” I said, “were they pushed?”
     

 
    AFTER EVA SPITTELER’S DEATH, my sense of time became a luckless accordion squeezed and stretched by the protesting hands of some phantom child whose parents believed he had talent and who was determined to prove otherwise. The same grubby little fists that stretched minutes into empty hours would suddenly slam together, wrenching discordant seconds out of lengthy intervals.
    I assume that the grooming session, my therapy hour, lasted the usual length: fifty minutes. By lunchtime I longed for the resumption of regularly scheduled activities, which, by Maxine’s decree, had been canceled for the morning “out of respect for Eva” and would resume in the afternoon—here I again quote—“because Eva would have wanted it that way.” Hypocrisy? Not exactly. Respect for Eva hadn’t taken a posthumous upward zoom; what drew genuine awe was death itself. As for Eva’s presumed wishes, it seemed to me that if she’d been in a position to survey the situation, her primary concern would have been her own demise; all else would have felt trivial.
    When lunchtime finally arrived, the dining room presented a depressing scene. The walls and ceilings that had previously absorbed sound now sent it bouncing and jingling throughout the room so that everyone seemed to be either whispering or screaming. When Ginny bustled past me, her face grim, I pondered the husbands and, for the first time, took the matter seriously. Cam, who’d been Ginny’s almost inseparable companion throughout camp, was nowhere in sight. My old friends weren’t there, my new friends seemed like strangers, and the real strangers felt like people I didn’t want to know. Banded together in what sounded like law-school study groups, people with tense shoulders and low voices mumbled about contracts, refunds, and waivers of liability. An independent student, I’d already consulted the camp contract, most of which consisted of waivers and releases so all-encompassing that in signing the document, we’d practically granted Maxine complete impunity to go around bludgeoning campers and dogs or to toss all of us in the middle of the lake. Absent from the formal contract was any mention of Maxine’s obligations. Having spent long hours grinding away at the University of American Motion Pictures and Television School of Legal Studies, I concluded that the combination of campers’ canceled checks and the written promises Maxine had made in the brochure and elsewhere probably added up to a contract. So if people packed up and departed, were they entitled to partial refunds? At a guess, no. If camp ended early? A moot point. No matter what, Maxine wouldn’t send people home, because canceling camp this year would, in effect, mean permanently abandoning the enterprise. If this year’s campers had paid mightily for a few days of camp followed by a fiasco and an early dismissal, who’d sign up for next year? Another moot point, perhaps. Alive, Eva had seemed like an especially crabby rotten apple. Equally rotten, however, was Maxine’s ability to run the camp. In saying so, Eva had been dead accurate.
    But the legalities were no concern of mine. I had no reason to sue Maxine; and having paid nothing, I clearly couldn’t ask for a refund. Furthermore, even if every other camper decided to go home, Bonnie might expect me to demonstrate loyalty to her old friend Maxine by sticking around for the entire week. And at the end? When I finally got back to Cambridge, I’d have to sit down and write about the nightmarish days alone with Maxine as if camp really had been dog heaven with no bad dreams. If everyone else really left? Actually, I had a plan. Broke and disheartened, in no condition to care for a dog, Maxine would go away, leaving me in charge of her peaceful and charming young mastiff, Cash, whom a miraculously transformed Rowdy would immediately accept as a valued member of our little pack; and with the lodge, cabins, and lake to ourselves, the dogs and I would have such a great time that I’d only have to inject a few fictional human campers to make my article the literal truth.
    Fantasy, yes. Reality: Yesterday morning, I’d sat at a table in this same dining room to watch swift dogs course after lures.
    If I sat at the same table today, I’d have a view across the field toward the parking lot, where an ominous-looking blue van had joined the cruiser. So, instead of filling