She had a feeling this was her last free night.
The campground was enormous and surprisingly full. Gemma estimated there were at least four dozen tour bus–size RVs and even more smaller camper vans, plus tents peaked like angular mushrooms across the sparse grass. It was a beautiful night, and outside there was a feeling of celebration. Old couples sat side by side on lawn chairs dragged out onto the cracked asphalt, drinking wine from paper cups. Children ran between the tents, and a group of twentysomethings with long dreads and bare feet were cooking on a portable camper stove. Fireflies flared sporadically in the darkness, and people shouted to one another and shared beers and stories of where they were going and where they’d come from.
Pete left in search of food from the gas station, and Caelum moved off in the direction of the pay-per-use stalls, walking slightly ahead of Lyra. Gemma suspected he wanted to be left alone, but she followed them at a safe distance, half-believing that they might once again simply melt into the darkness. But after Lyra took money for the showers she knew she could no longer delay the inevitable. It was time to call home.
She’d missed thirty-seven calls from her parents. When she pulled up her texts, she saw they progressed from furious to frenzied to desperate.
Please, her father had written. Wherever you are, please call us. He must have come back early from his business trip. That meant things had really gone nuclear.
She dialed her dad’s cell phone number and he picked up on the first ring.
“Gem?” He sounded frantic, so unlike himself that her resolution faltered. “Gem, is that you? Are you there?”
“I’m here, Dad.” She had to hold her phone away from her ear when Kristina started shouting in the background. Is that her? Where is she? Is she okay? Let me talk to her. . . . “Look, I’m fine. I’m not hurt.”
“Where are you? Jesus Christ, we’ve been so worried—”
“Geoff, let me talk to her.” Kristina’s voice, slurry from crying and maybe from pills, was audible again in the background.
“Hang on, Gem, I’m putting you on speakerphone. Your mother wants to hear your voice.” Fumbling, and the echo of her parents’ voices overlapping. Gemma hated speakerphone, which always made her feel as if she was speaking into a tin can. “Gemma, are you still there? Can you hear us?”
“I can hear you,” she said. “There’s no need to shout.” She watched a mom bouncing a sleepy toddler in her arms, passing back and forth in front of the RV, the kid’s dark hair curling on her shoulder. She felt a momentary grief so strong it was like falling.
“Where are you?” Kristina sounded like she was crying again. “We’ve been so worried. We called April and she said you’d left. Your father jumped on the first plane out of London he could find. She was so upset—”
“April was upset?” Gemma asked quickly.
“What do you think? She told us you had a fight and she’d asked you to leave. She felt awful about it. She’s been worried sick. We’ve all been worried sick.”
“I’m fine,” Gemma said. “I’m with my friend Pete. We’ll be home tomorrow.”
“I want you home tonight,” Gemma’s father said, sounding more like himself. Now that he knew his daughter wasn’t dead in a ditch, he’d apparently decided to resort to playing bad cop. “Where are you? I’m coming to get you.”
It was time. She took a breath. “I went down to see Haven.”
There was a long moment of silence. Gemma watched the fireflies flare and then go dark.
“You . . . what?” Gemma’s dad could barely get the words out.
“I went to Haven.” She closed her eyes and thought of the statue of the man kneeling in the dust, that old childhood memory unearthed, the DNA of another child coiled inside of her. “I went to see where I was made.”
“Where you . . .” Geoff’s voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. “What—what are you talking about?”
“There’s no point in denying it. I know everything.” She was suddenly and completely exhausted. She felt so old—older, even, than her parents. “I know about what you were trying to do at Haven. I know you left Fine and Ives because they wanted to invest. I know the military stepped in and the mission changed.” Gemma’s mom whimpered. This part would be the hardest. “I know about Emma, too,” she said.
Her parents were quiet for so long she checked the phone to see whether the connection had been lost. Finally she heard a kind of gasping and knew that they were still there. She imagined the lies they’d told over the years as a physical force, something with hands, something that had reached out now to choke them.
“Gemma.” Her father was crying. Her father had never cried, not once in her life. She was shocked and also, in a sick way, glad. The mask was falling off. The cracks were showing. Let him cry, the way she had. “We can explain. Please. You need to come home.”
“Please come home, baby.” Kristina sounded like her voice was being squeezed through a pipe, high and agonized, and Gemma felt terrible again. Even now, she hated for her mother to be sad. But Gemma knew she had to be strong.
“Not until you agree to help me,” she said. In the distance she saw Pete returning from the direction of the gas station with a paper bag tucked under his arm. As he passed beneath the streetlamp and back into the RV park, a man smoking a cigarette nearby turned to look at him, and Gemma had a tingling sense of unease. But the man turned away again and was soon lost to Gemma’s view. “You have to help my friends, too.”