Chapter 4: Alise
June 1993 - Blounts Creek, North Carolina
The dream was pure anticipation with no story to go with it, as if the feeling itself were so new that Alise’s dreaming imagination could supply no explanation. It gathered and built and finally reached a culminating certainty that woke her abruptly: It’s here!
Without opening her eyes, she took stock, listening intently for what had woken her. A camper out of bed? Some mischief or distress? Somehow, she had not foreseen how often, as a camp counselor, she would be roused from a sound sleep to deal with barfed-in beds.
This time, blessedly, all was quiet, or at least as quiet as a cabin full of sleeping third graders ever got—all heavy breathing and unconscious snores.
She turned over, seeking a cooler section of pillow and mattress from a bed already stripped of all but its bottom sheet against the sweltering, eastern North Carolina summer heat. As much as she sweated at night, the bed could have had the decency to feel cool with dampness, but it never did.
She felt very odd. Not odd in a bad way—always a concern, given the barfed-in beds—but odd enough to have woken up, despite how very tired she was after six weeks of long, hot days full of keyed-up kids, and short, hot nights full of interruptions. She buzzed inside, not with anxiety but with a keen excitement. She could not for the life of her think why. The day ahead held nothing unusual—just canoeing and tie-dying and burger day at the dining hall, which was definitely nothing to get worked up about.
And Alise wasn’t the type to get worked up, even about huge, exciting things, like her first real job at the camp she had loved since she was a kid, or her first semester in college that would begin in just over a month. Sometimes she worried that feeling so little might indicate something wrong with her. She had read that depression could be like this—not a pit of pain and misery but a flat sea of nothingness that no storm could excite.
But if depression was her natural state, she was currently experiencing the opposite. Once, a small visiting cousin—Alise was an only child—had woken her up at 4 a.m. on Christmas morning, bouncing on the bed and squealing because Santa Claus had come and all the stockings were filled. Alise had been both baffled and amused. She had never in her life been excited enough about Santa—or anything else—to wake up at 4 a.m. But she was precisely that excited, now. And it really was a Christmas-y kind of feeling, right down to the certainty that something wonderful was waiting for her to get out of bed and come claim it.
She’d been a camper here for so many years that the impulse to wake a buddy if she needed to leave the cabin at night was deeply ingrained. She still felt a little lifting sense of freedom every time she realized that, as a counselor, she was allowed to go to the bathroom—or anywhere else—all by herself. She slipped on her shower flip-flops and let herself out of the cabin, dragging down on the screen door to quell the squeak that was never oiled since it warned, usefully, of campers escaping in the middle of the night.
The cabins had no windows but screens, with canvas flaps to tie down when it rained, so the incessant katydids of summer were no louder outside than in. A welcome breath came off the river, though. She turned her face toward it, and perhaps the hint of coolness led her to the dock. Or maybe instinct: The Pamlico River was over a mile wide here, close enough to the sea that its level rose and fell with the tides, and its water ran fresh and salty by turns. The river had drawn her back to this camp, year after year, because the sweet-salt tide was the closest taste of the sea she could manage on her own. Alise had often heard the story of her unexpected birth on an Ocracoke Island beach, as her parents were attempting to get in one last vacation before her arrival. Her parents dated Alise’s affinity with the ocean from that beginning, and yet—bafflingly, infuriatingly to Alise—remained content to live in Asheville, many hours’ drive inland. They rented a house at Holden Beach for a week every summer (not Ocracoke, which was almost half again as far when you counted the ferry ride). For Alise, that week was always cruelly short, and camp was a much-needed supplement.
Her parents would have said that going to the beach was the one thing Alise did get worked up about, but worked up was not how she felt about it. Being by the sea was simply a relief from the faint but persistent sense of wrongness that she felt everywhere else. The ocean was the only place in the world where she felt completely herself.
The force that drew her toward the river now was stronger than breeze or habit. The summoning felt like certainty, like fate, like destiny. It felt as right as anything ever had.
She didn’t need a flashlight. The moon, worn away on one side like a water-smoothed stone, hung bright overhead, and she could have made her way along all the paths of this tiny camp with her eyes shut, as often as she’d walked them. No one else stirred. All the cabins stayed dark and quiet.
The moon lit a bright path on the water. She noticed that first, before she took in the expanse of dock, its weathered boards featureless except for a mounded shadow rising at the edge, as if poised to slip over the side.
Her first thought, accompanied by a surge of delight, was that she was finally seeing the seal. North Carolina in summer was no reasonable place for a seal, especially this far inland, and yet, for several years now, sightings had been reported. The seals—though according to camp tradition it was the same one every time—always seemed to miss Alise by a few days, a week, two at the most. She’d been here various weeks of the summer, and yet, whether she came the first week of June or the last week of July, the seal always came later than she did. Each near miss increased her determination to see it, and she took each failure personally. Her obsession had become a running joke at camp, so much so that her camp name—self-chosen names all the counselors went by instead of their real names—was Seal. She could not miss the seal this summer because she was here the entire time. Leprechaun claimed to have seen it two weeks ago, but Alise was determined not to believe her. Camp names tended to have some logic behind them: Leprechaun, in addition to having flaming red curls and an Irish grandmother, was a known practical joker.
Alise held her breath and peered hard at the mound on the dock. It didn’t look quite right for a seal. It was too flat, and not big enough. Everyone who’d seen the seal said it was huge. Someone had taken a photo, clear enough to identify a Western Atlantic gray seal—a bull. The camp administration had not encouraged that photo, parents being understandably squeamish about a wild animal that large around their children. But copies had circulated and Alise had kept one. The lump on the dock was definitely not that seal.
Her real disappointment somehow didn’t affect the excitement drawing on her. Reasonable caution would have prevented her from going onto the dock without a better idea of what was there. It was almost certainly an animal, and if too small to be the seal, it might be a largish dog, lying down. Alise was incapable of reasonable caution. She experienced something closely akin to a magnetic force, which propelled her across the dock to kneel beside the mound. She reached for it with both hands.
The soft fur was sleek and short and very dense. It was not an animal but the hide of one, and this didn’t worry her either. No bad smell indicated carrion, a carcass. It smelled faintly of mineral and musk, like the scent of the river. She gathered the entire thing in her arms, hugging it close and stroking it and burying her face. She was eighteen and had never wanted a boyfriend, let alone a lover, but her sheer physical hunger for this pelt felt like lust as she’d imagined it. In another moment she had spread it on the dock and begun purely wallowing against it. Unable to get enough of her skin in contact, she shed the T-shirt and nylon soccer shorts she slept in, and, after the briefest of hesitations, even her underwear. Now she was naked, nearly swimming in this fur, rolling and writhing against it until she encountered a place where it parted. She wriggled inside. The smooth interior felt even more miraculous against her than the fur had. Every fiber of her body grew taut with longing. Some force gathered, gathered inside her, and she drew the skin over her head.
On every surface of her body she caught, kindled, went molten and began to flow. She became a slow and silent explosion, combusting in pure ecstasy, expanding to fill every crevice of the hide. Time stopped. She had no sense of how long she soared on glorious sensation before there was a final knitting up—a sense of closing, finishing—that left her lying on the dock alert, at peace, and filled with wordless wonder.
The water stretched before her, a luminous invitation. She wriggled and bounced on her belly across the boards of the dock. At the end, she didn’t hesitate, but launched herself. She plunged through the surface, head first. With an easy swoop she swung above the river bottom. Then she soared through a buoying darkness that wasn’t dark to her, all her senses reaching to tell her, This way to the sea.
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