“Stop it, Molly. You’re going to tip us over.”
I knew I should take it easy, but I liked Emma being the one caught off-balance. I jabbed the paddle deep into the water and with five jerky strokes propelled the canoe out of the boat cove toward the middle of the lake, leaving the other canoes bunched near the shore.
Emma’s fingers clenched the metal rim, her stiff arms trying to balance the wobbling boat. “I mean it. Slow down. I told you I can’t swim.”
I lifted my paddle from the water. Poking through the afternoon haze, the peak of Crooked Mountain looked like a circus clown’s head, tilting to the side as if posing a silent question to the lake.
“Okay. Let’s drift for a while.” I rested the paddle across the canoe and sat tall, like the illustration in a book I loved as a kid, about an Indian boy paddling his canoe all the way to the ocean. Naturally I was always the Indian princess, with long braids hanging down the front of my fringed buckskin shirt. Even though the fringed shirt would look pretty silly under the bright orange life jacket. Even though I knew I was too old for that sort of fantasy.
“Thank you.” Emma bowed at the waist with exaggerated politeness, her hands waving in imitation of courtly respect.
I returned the gesture, flourishing my new camp cap stitched with the logo of an origami crane. The canoe wobbled and Emma grabbed both sides. “Stop it,” she yelled. “You’re awful.”
“Be nice to me. Remember who knows how to paddle and who’s afraid of the water.” Being with Emma reminded me of my arguments with Oliver: fierce on the outside and tender inside.
She pointed at a small wooded island. “If you paddle over there, slowly, I’ll show you the blueberries.”
Five minutes later, our canoe drifted alongside the thick berry bushes overhanging the water.
“They’re so tiny. Nothing like the blueberries we get at home.” I picked a leaf out of my mouth. “Tell me about your mom.” I swirled my fingers in the water. In the days since we visited the archives, I’d been curious about Rosa. “She sounds so, I don’t know, ferocious.”
“She is, kind of. But when we walk around the city, she keeps folded-up dollar bills in her pocket for the homeless. They remind her of people in prison. The discards, she calls them.”
“Is it strange having your mom be famous?” I splashed at a water bug floating on spindly crooked legs on the surface of the lake.
“Sometimes. People come up to her in restaurants, even on the street. They recognize her and want to talk.”
“What about all those years in prison? She went away and left you alone.”
“Not on purpose. Besides, I wasn’t alone. I had my dad, and Aunt Maggie.”
“Why do you call her Aunt?” I wished I had the courage to point out that Esther was really Emma’s aunt, but I didn’t.
“Maggie was like a second mom. She watched me after school and when Dad came home, we’d eat together.”
“Didn’t you worry that Maggie and your Dad would, you know, fall in love?”
Emma looked at me funny, then giggled. “Maggie likes girls.” After a moment, she grabbed the paddle and dipped it into the water. “Let’s go back to camp.”
I showed her how to push away the water with the flat side of the paddle, then turn it to slip through the air. We zigzagged toward shore.
“How come you know so much about canoes?” Emma asked, once she got the rhythm.
“There’s a pond near our house. How come you know so little?”
“If you don’t know how to swim, you don’t choose canoeing for Free Choice, do you?”
“Why didn’t you learn to swim?”
“When I was little, I was a counselor’s brat. I spent all summer on people’s laps. Everyone thought that since I was here all those years, I must’ve learned how to swim. But I never did. Besides, I’m terrified of the water.”
“I can’t believe you grew up without a mother. What’s it like now, having her home?”
Emma peeled a long translucent curl of dead skin from her sunburned thigh. “Sometimes it’s hard. Like she wanted me to spend Saturdays doing childcare at the battered women’s shelter. I wanted to audition for a teen theater group—they write plays and produce them. When I chose acting, she didn’t say anything, but I knew she was disappointed in me.”
“She expects a lot of you, doesn’t she?” I appreciated Esther letting me decide stuff for myself. “And does she really give money to beggars? Esther would help them find a job and a place to live.”
“What’s she like? Your mom.”
“She likes vegetable gardens and painting. Every summer she volunteers with Jake at CP Camp, doing art workshops with the kids.”
Emma hooted. “CP! Your parents volunteer for the Communist Party?”
“CP means cerebral palsy.”
We looked at each other and burst into laughter, wobbling the canoe. Emma stiffened and grabbed both sides.
“But it’s not funny.” I remembered what was happening at home. “Esther’s really sick.”
“So why did you come here?”
“She wanted me to.”
We dragged the canoe halfway onto the soggy shore, turned it over, and tied it up under the low branches of a blue spruce. Straddling the canoe’s rounded belly, we dangled our bare feet in the water. Our silence hung like a low cloud over the lake.
“I guess I don’t exactly hate camp,” I said after a while. My big toe painted a figure eight in the murky shallows, sending eddies in all directions. “I hate feeling different.”
Emma slapped her foot hard on the water surface, starting ripples that collided with my toe eddies. “I know. I used to go to a private school with lots of leftie kids. Last year my dad transferred me to public school. The kids there don’t like me.” She paused. “Or maybe I don’t like them. Anyway, I don’t fit in. If I couldn’t hang out with my camp friends on weekends, I’d go crazy.”
I couldn’t imagine Emma feeling out of place anywhere.
“One time in first grade,” Emma continued, “I was invited to a birthday party for a new kid in the building. When my dad came to pick me up, I asked him if we could buy some of those little round green things because they were good. Everyone laughed at me. How was I supposed to know? We supported the Farm Workers. We boycotted grapes. We didn’t eat them.”
I couldn’t imagine my family not eating grapes because of a farm worker we didn’t even know. It seemed like such a faraway kind of reason. But there were different rules at Loon Lake. What mattered here was that Emma’s mom was a hero, and that rubbed off on Emma. “Here everyone loves you.”
“I belong here. There are other kids like me. Luisa—she’s a CIT— her mom is a political prisoner, and Jamal’s dad was the tenant rights organizer those landlords in Brooklyn murdered.”
“Well, I don’t belong and I want to go home.”
“I think I’m supposed to hate you.” Emma tossed a pebble into the water. The expanding circles spun outwards and slapped the lily pads. “Because of what your mother did to mine.”
“But our mothers’ fight has nothing to do with us.”
“Maybe not. But if I told people here about who your mother is, what she did, how do you think they’d treat you?”