Free Happily Ali After by Ali Wentworth

home, but I knew it would teach her nothing about independence, self-reliance, and all that bullshit. Or maybe I just wanted to go on a magical, winged unicorn. I called the camp director and tried to get an accurate temperature reading of her misery. I reached what sounded like a 1980s cassette-operated answering machine.
    A few hours later Uta called me back. Uta was thewife of the camp director and the office administrator. Uta had a strong Eastern European accent and a monotone way of speaking that brought to mind a Russian prison guard.
    “Hail-o, diz iz Uta. I’m ze kimp administrator.” Long pause.
    “Hi, Uta! Listen, I’ve been getting these heart-wrenching calls and I just want to make sure my daughter—”
    “Zair are no phuns allowed hair!”
    “I know, yes, she must have borrowed—”
    “Who dit she say she git ze phones from?”
    I feared naming names in case Uta was some leftover McCarthy spy still on the red hunt. And packing heat.
    “She didn’t say, listen, the point is, I’m worried. She’s been crying—”
    Uta cleared her throat loudly. “Evry gerl has homesickness. It’s nathing.”
    “Could you just give me updates?”
    Uta answered like she was reciting the weather, or my horoscope. “Yur daughter iz surrounded by luff.” And she hung up. She probably had to spit and shine her combat boots.
    It was only a two-week sleepaway camp and my daughter had just one week left, so I closed my eyes and took a huge drag from my medical inhaler. And popped another steroid.
    T he following week, the pneumonia worsened. A simple walk to the kitchen was fatiguing. Even watching a movie would deplete me for hours (particularly the ones starring Kristen Stewart). My younger daughter and our babysitter would be out all day surfing, picnicking on the beach, and basically frolicking with joy. What normal people are supposed to be doing in summertime. Not living in a cave of darkness, despair, and phlegm. When I would hear the front door slam, I would call for them and offer them hundreds of dollars to fetch me a Bagel Bite or some peanut butter on toast. How quickly they had forgotten the sickly old woman who lived down the dark hall.
    I was living off mini bottles of Gatorade and Wheat Thins. Meanwhile, my daughter had survived the second week of sleepaway camp. I hoped she would be filled with the feeling of true selfhood and fortitude, but instead it was pure animosity and mercilessness. In the months (and, I assume, years) to come, she would regale strangers with the story of how we abandoned her in Maine without money and food and left her to survive. Yes, her experience of tennis, riding, and campfire s’mores was on a par with being lost in the desert and chewing off an arm wedged between two boulders. They should make a film about her experience.
    It was very clear that I, in my enfeebled and frailstate, would not be able to pick her up on the last day of camp. The idea of driving ten hours one way was ludicrous; a simple trip to the toilet involved resting on the side of the bathtub en route. The whole ordeal took an hour. I knew my husband could retrieve her and maybe stop for ice cream and speeding tickets and have a memorable and bonding day. And he could be the sponge for all her bitching and tales of woe.
    And then the world got far grimmer outside my own miserable cocoon. On July seventeenth the Malaysian airline flight MH17 was shot down. My husband was called to the anchor desk at ABC, where he sat for hours and hours of breaking news. In between throwing questions to correspondents regarding the developing investigation into a possible missile fired by Russian rebels in the Ukraine, he would e-mail me about camp. “You’re going to have to go get her!”
    Huh? I pulled the chilled washcloth off my fiery forehead. I e-mailed him back.
    “Fever. Delirious. Can’t.”
    Surely they would have to go back to their regularly scheduled programming; Rachael Ray was mid Naked Chef stew-off.