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  “Are those all weeds?” asks Ryan, pointing to the plants. I sigh, but quietly, so he won’t hear me. But I mean, duh. Even if you’re a city kid (which, by the way, so am I) or someone who’s never planted anything before, do you really think that weeds would be spread out in perfectly spaced intervals? Or, for that matter, that they’d be marked with signs?

  “Nope,” says Scott, and I have to give him credit, he doesn’t sound like he thinks Ryan’s an idiot for asking, or even nervous like he’s afraid Ryan’s going to pull up all his good plants. I’m kind of comparing Scott to my parents, in the way they deal with Tilly when she says things like this. They’re pretty good at not sounding like she’s an idiot, but the nervous part is usually there, especially with my mom.

  “These are actual vegetables,” Scott says. “Or at least, they’re going to be. See, you guys just got here, but I’ve been here for a month already. And actually, I started working on this even earlier than that. I came up in March, right after the snow melted, and I laid out a bunch of newspapers and mulch to get rid of the grass. Then when I came back up last month, I was able to get started pretty quickly on planting.”

  “That makes sense,” I say. I’m showing off maybe, but I want Scott to know that I’m not a total idiot about this stuff. “Because if you want any of them to be ready to pick over the summer, you have to get the seeds down early.”

  “Exactly,” he says. “Sounds like you know a little bit about growing plants.”

  So I start telling him about the school garden at my old school in DC, and we’re having this whole conversation, while Ryan just kind of meanders around the edges of the plots with his head down. Then all of a sudden, he comes back over to us and interrupts me right in the middle of a sentence. “Webster’s dictionary,” he says, “describes a wedding as ‘the process of removing weeds from one’s garden.’” And then he wanders away again.

  I raise my eyebrows and try to throw Scott a look like that was odd, but Scott’s grinning like it was a great joke and totally fit the context of the discussion.

  “Hey, Ryan,” he calls out. “Get back here.”

  It takes him a minute, but Ryan eventually weaves his way back to us.

  “Simpsons quote, I’m guessing?” asks Scott.

  Ryan looks up like huh?, like he’s already forgotten the whole thing and he’s on to something else entirely. “She’s always so deep in her own head,” my mom says about Tilly.

  “Wedding and weeding,” prompts Scott. Still not annoyed, not bothered that our conversation got interrupted or that we still haven’t started whatever this irrigation project is. Just interested in what’s going on in Ryan’s mind.

  Ryan smiles. “Yeah. Isn’t that hilarious? It’s when Homer’s teaching a class about how to have a successful marriage.”

  Scott turns to me. “Ryan is a walking Simpsons encyclopedia,” he says. “It’s pretty impressive. Now listen up, both of you. In that shed . . .” He points at a little white building with a slanted roof on the far side of the garden. “I’ve got a whole bunch of plastic milk cartons that need to have holes poked in them. Any idea why they need to have holes poked in them?”

  I start to say something, but Scott holds up a finger to stop me. He smiles at me the same way he did in the dining hall this morning: like he knows I know the answer. He wants to hear what Ryan says.

  “Ryan?” he says. “Any idea why we’d be poking holes in milk cartons? For a reason that has something to do with our garden?”

  I can see in Ryan’s face that it’s hard for him to drag himself back from wherever he is in his mind. But then there’s a moment when I think he plays back Scott’s question in his mind, and everything clicks into place.

  “To water the plants,” he says. “So the water will drip in there a little at a time.” Which is even more than I’d figured out, actually. I knew we’d put water in the jugs, but I hadn’t really thought about why.

  “High five,” says Scott, and he holds a hand up to each of us. “And here’s how we’re going to make this fun. While we work, Iris is going to tell us things about her life in DC—little stories, random facts—and Ryan is going to see if he can come up with a Simpsons quote that fits the situation. Got it?”

  And the thing is, I know this is one of those things where grown-ups think they can fool kids into getting along or doing chores by making it into a game—but it actually does sound fun. And once we get going, it becomes a kind of friendly contest; I try to come up with stories that will stump Ryan, and every single time, he manages to find a Simpsons quote to match. And it’s not like I’ve never watched The Simpsons. Sometimes I throw him an easy one, or surprise him by coming up with a quote of my own. By the time we’re done with the milk cartons, we’ve gotten into songs. Like I tell them about this really cute white fake-fur vest that my grandma bought me, and Ryan sings “See My Vest.” As we’re putting everything back in the shed, I talk about my favorite Mexican restaurant, and how I really liked their gazpacho, and I say along with him, “It’s tomato soup, served ice cold!” And the two of us walk back along the path with Scott, singing, “You don’t win friends with salad,” and doing our own goofy little conga line all the way to the cabins.

  chapter 11

  Tilly

  Date and Location Unknown

  There’s a sculpture that stands in an imaginary square, a memorial to those whose lives were changed by the events of July 14, 2012. This is where the Hammond Living History Society holds its meetings.

  The society was formed in 2017, with the goal of uniting several different existing groups of Hammond history reenactors; the society aims to provide a common network for interested hobbyists, regardless of their level of commitment to authenticity of historical detail.

  Every year, the society sponsors the Hammond Days festival in Laconia, New Hampshire, on a plot of privately owned land about a mile from the former site of Scott Bean’s Camp Harmony. Concession stands sell items from a list of family member favorites published by the American Hammond Association: cucumber spears served with a cup of ranch dressing; Dora the Explorer Popsicles in any color except green; slices of chicken cordon bleu from the recipe in The Joy of Cooking, which Alexandra made on request for birthdays and other special occasions. Popcorn sprinkled with garlic salt. Fresh plums. Chocolate chip cookies baked from rolls of refrigerated dough.

  While more serious reenactors give meticulous consideration to each element of their attire (taking care, for example, to know which patterns of Hanna Andersson pajamas Tilly and Iris wore in the winter of 2007 and which patterns the company did not introduce until 2008), plenty of festival attendees take a more casual approach. Most visitors make an effort to reproduce the general style of the family’s clothes within a given period, without worrying too much about whether Tilly wore the fuchsia-and-teal-striped long johns that Christmas, or the lavender-and-ocean-blue ones.

  The climax of the weekend-long festival is a show entitled “The Other Hammonds,” presented at the bonfire on Saturday night. One by one, festivalgoers stand up, against the backdrop of night hush and fire crackle, and present a story of how things might have gone a different way for the family. How one different decision or divergent circumstance might have changed everything. Picking apart the seams of the story and finding a new way to stitch it back together.

  chapter 12

  Iris

  June 6, 2012: New Hampshire

  It’s the night of our fourth day here (which is Wednesday, I think), and I’m hanging out with Tilly, Candy, and Ryan in Town Square, which is what we call the grassy area between the guest cabins and the dining hall. It’s after dinner, around seven thirty or eight, and the little kids—Charlotte and Hayden—have already gone inside to go to bed, but the rest of us are allowed to stay out until nine thirty.

  This is our basic daily schedule: every day, we have a meeting after breakfast and make up a projec
t list and job chart for the day. Then we have Morning Block (where we work on our projects), lunch, and free time, and then Afternoon Block until dinner. At night, there’s more free time, or sometimes something like Moonlight Swim or a sing-along.

  Ryan and Tilly are playing some game—not really a game, more like they’re acting out a story—where the Simpsons go to visit the biggest statues in the world. Candy and I are both sitting on the ground, and we both have books on our laps so we can write. I’m making a map of the camp, and she’s writing a letter to her dad (who it turns out isn’t really Rick).

  I’ve already done a rough pencil sketch of the different areas, and now I’m starting to fill in the names that we’ve come up with. The staff cabins are called Springfield, and the guest cabins are Shelbyville (those were both Ryan). For the little office building, we used Tilly’s idea of Beantown. The dining hall is the Great Hall, after Harry Potter; Candy and I both picked that out. The beach is Rehoboth, because that’s a place we’ve all been on vacation, and Tilly and I named the lake the Sea of Knowledge, after The Phantom Tollbooth.

  I pick up a purple marker and start coloring in a big block-letter H at the top of the page, the first letter in Harmony. Candy looks over from her paper and watches.

  “So what are you saying to your dad?” I ask her.

  She shrugs. “I told him about baking bread and putting together the incubator for the baby chicks.” The eggs are supposed to arrive tomorrow. We’re also getting a full-grown chicken, which Scott is picking up on Saturday. “He didn’t really think we should come here,” she says. “So I’m just telling him some of the cool stuff we’re doing.”

  “Why didn’t he think you should come?” I ask. Tilly’s pacing around us in big lopsided circles, and when she gets close, she brushes my arm and my hand veers off course. I start widening the H, to cover up the stray marks.

  Candy watches me draw. She’s wearing a necklace, a silver chain with a C on it, and she’s holding on to the letter, fiddling with it. “I think mainly just because he wouldn’t get to see me as much,” she says. “Plus, Ryan’s not his kid, so you know. He doesn’t care as much whether he ever . . . gets better or whatever.” She picks up her letter and shakes it in the air, brushing off a few pieces of grass. Then she laughs. “He also thought Scott sounded kind of creepy. He said the whole thing sounded like a cult.”

  I laugh, too. “Well, he is kind of creepy. But in a good way, mostly.”

  Tilly’s back near us again and joins in our conversation, even though I didn’t think she’d been listening. “Why did your parents divorce?” she asks Candy.

  I sort of cringe, because I know you’re not supposed to ask questions like that, and also because of the weird phrasing. Tilly does that with certain words, like “marry” and “divorce” (and there are probably others, too, though I can’t think of them right now): instead of saying “get married” or “get divorced,” she just uses the plain form of the verb. It’s one of those things that’s not grammatically wrong, but it makes it sound like English isn’t her first language.

  Anyway, Candy doesn’t seem offended. She shrugs again. “I don’t know. I was pretty little, like still a baby. If you ask my mom, she says they were just too young, but I don’t really know what that means.”

  “Do you like your dad better than Rick?” I ask. Now that the topic’s open, I’m sort of curious, too. I mean, I’ve had friends who have divorced parents, but I’ve never really discussed it with any of them.

  “Yeah, of course,” she says. “I love my dad. He’s awesome.”

  She goes back to her writing, and I start coloring in the A. Tilly wanders back over to talk to Ryan. But a few minutes later, when Candy’s folding up her letter so that it will fit in the envelope, she says, “But I guess it’s kind of hard to say.” It takes me a second to remember what we were talking about. “’Cause I’ve never really lived with my dad, you know?”

  “Uh-huh,” I say, because I can’t think of anything else.

  She takes off her glasses and cleans them off on her T-shirt. For a minute, her dark hair falls forward so that I can’t really see her face. “I mean I did,” she says, “but I was too young to remember it. And my mom’s been with Rick since I was like two, so he’s the one who’s always been around.” She runs her fingers along the crease in the folded page, making it firm and crisp. “Sometimes when I’m pissed off at Rick or my mom or Ryan, I think about how cool it would be to go live with my dad instead, but I can’t really imagine it. He lives in this little apartment, and I always have to sleep on a pullout couch when I’m there. And I’d have to go to a new school and everything. So.”

  She stops talking. I guess that’s the end of what she was going to say. She puts her letter down on the grass and picks up the envelope, resting it against the book on her lap. “Hey, can I borrow your markers?” she says. “I want to decorate this before I mail it.”

  “Sure.”

  We sit there for a while, coloring silently. Ryan and Tilly are both talking at the same time, and neither one of them seems to be paying much attention to the other, but somehow it’s working for them.

  “So Mr. Burns is raising money for the Burns Monument,” says Tilly, “because he doesn’t want to pay for it himself, even though he could . . .”

  “Yeah, and he starts taking money out of everyone’s paycheck,” says Ryan, “but Homer doesn’t mind because they start giving the employees free beer. Did you ever see the one . . .”

  “. . . he’s like, ‘No! If the tallest statue in the world is 420 feet tall, then this one has to be 421 feet tall!’ But he forgets to add a base to the bottom . . .”

  “‘Dental plan! Lisa needs braces! Dental plan!’”

  “What are they even talking about?” I say, looking up. I notice a mosquito on my arm and accidentally draw a purple line on my skin as I swat it away.

  Candy laughs and says, “Nice.” She reaches over with her marker like she’s going to draw something else on my arm, but I push her away.

  “That looks really pretty,” I say. Candy’s covered the envelope with a design of flowers and curlicues, except for a space in the front where she’s drawn a black box around her dad’s name and address. I read, “Michael McNeil. So is your last name Gough or McNeil?”

  “McNeil,” she says. She lowers her voice. “Which is fine with me. Don’t tell Ryan, but I was dying the other day when Tilly called him Ryan Gowg.”

  “R.I.P. Candy,” I say, grinning. “Candy Gowg.”

  Candy grabs my arm and tries to write on it again, but I jump up, dumping the book and the paper off my lap, and start running away. As Candy chases me across the lawn, I run past Tilly, who’s saying, “. . . pure gold, and he’ll have his arm raised up like the Statue of Liberty, but holding a nuclear atom,” and loop around Ryan who’s saying, “Twenty dollars can buy many peanuts!” I lead Candy in a big circle around the dining hall, laughing and screaming whenever she gets too close. And when I pass by Ryan and Tilly again, the two of them are cracking each other up, even though I’m not even sure they’re having the same conversation.

  • • •

  The next morning, my dad and I are on breakfast crew with Tom and Hayden. I like Tom; he kind of reminds me of my third grade teacher, Mr. Pagano. Well, not exactly, because Mr. Pagano was a short white guy, and Tom is a tall black guy, but they’re both Philadelphia Eagles fans, and they both have a similar sense of humor when joking around with kids.

  Scott made a Costco run last night, so we’ve got lots of good food to eat. My dad’s making French toast, and Tom is taking the pits out of cherries with this thing that looks like a hole punch, and it all looks really yummy.

  I’m setting out plates and silverware. Hayden’s sitting on the floor, lining up spoons on the linoleum. My dad and Tom are chatting about nothing in particular, and I’m hearing about half of it as I move back and forth betwe
en the kitchen area and the dining area.

  “. . . suits our needs,” Tom is saying. “It’s not like I was expecting a five-star hotel.”

  “Yeah, no,” Dad says. “Could’ve been a lot worse.”

  I carry a pile of napkins out to the serving table. We use cloth napkins here, for the environment. I tried to get my mom to do that once when I was in like kindergarten and we were learning about ecology or whatever. I remember that she got that stressed-out look she always had, and she said we could try it, but that it would mean a lot of extra laundry. My mom hates laundry, maybe because she’s not very good at it; back at home, we always had to go down to the basement to look for clean clothes in the morning, because there was always a mountain of things she hadn’t gotten around to folding yet. Here, though, there’s a laundry room with a couple of big industrial-sized washers and dryers, like they have in hotels and Laundromats, and one person is assigned to laundry duty every couple of days.

  I fold the napkins into squares and make a neat pile next to the forks. The napkins are all sorts of different patterns. Ryan and Candy’s mom, Diane, has a sewing machine, and she made them out of whatever fabric she had around: clothes, pillowcases, dish towels. Tilly wouldn’t use any of them until Diane assured her that none of them were made with Ryan’s old underwear.

  Back in the kitchen, my dad and Tom are laughing about something I didn’t hear. Tom is saying, “. . . crazy? My brother was like, ‘Black people do not go off the grid. Off the grid is a white people thing.’”