The Week I Camped Across the Lake

The Last Night

Thursday was the last full day. Hannah texted me pictures in the afternoon, which the camp allowed on the last day so parents could see.

Sophie holding a paddle in a canoe. Sophie at the craft table with glue on her fingers.

Sophie on the swim dock in her yellow life jacket, standing next to a sign that said she had passed her deep-water swim test.

She was not smiling in the picture. She was looking straight at the camera with her chin up, which is how she smiles when she is proud.

I spent part of that afternoon at the picnic table with my pocketknife and a scrap of pine I’d found by the fire ring. I whittled out a heron.

It was not my best work. It had a long neck and one leg tucked up, and I sanded it with the strip of sandpaper I always keep in my tackle box.

At eight o’clock my phone rang. It was the camp office. I stood up so fast I knocked the chair over.

“Mr. Lindgren, it’s Kim,” she said. “Nothing’s wrong. Sophie asked if she could make a phone call before dock time, and that’s not something we normally do, but she has been very clear about it. She has been asking since lunch.”

There was a rustle, and then Sophie came on the line. She didn’t say hello. She never does.

“I have a question,” she said. “And I wrote it down so I’d get it right.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m listening.”

I heard paper unfolding.

“Tomorrow when it is pickup,” she read, slowly and carefully, “can you be the one who signs me out? Because Miss Kim says there is a sheet, and a grown-up has to sign it, and it says authorized adult. And I want it to be you.”

I had to sit down on the picnic table bench. I could not get any words out for a second.

“Matt?” she said. “Are you there? You’re supposed to say something now.”

“I’m here,” I said. “Yes. Yes, I can do that. If your mom says it’s all right.”

“I already asked her,” Sophie said. “Miss Kim let me call her first. Mom said yes and then she made a noise. I think she was crying. Is that a happy noise?”

“That’s a happy noise,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “Dock time is in twenty-eight minutes. Don’t forget the lantern.” And she hung up.

At eight thirty I switched on Ray’s lantern and held it up high. Across the water the yellow life jacket came to the end of the dock, and this time she did not just wave.

She held something up. It took me a minute to see that it was Hannah’s flashlight, and she was waving it back and forth, back and forth.

Amy texted Brent that night, and I know because she sent me a picture of it. “Last night. She asked Matt to sign her out tomorrow. She passed her deep-water test. She lasted, Brent.”

He wrote back fast that time. “I know. I’m coming.”