Free Six Feet Over It by Jennifer Longo Page B

had more to offer than Kai’s nausea or endless manual labor.
    I daydreamed about swimming with Emily, roasting marshmallows on unwound coat hangers around a campfire, while in real life Kai and I lugged armload after armload of worm-filled wood in the suffocating heat, day after day.
    Except Saturdays. On Saturdays we didn’t go to the forest, and we didn’t have to stack, either. On Saturdays we piled into the death-mobile to buy milk at the store and pick up the mail at the post office. The third Saturday in June marked three weeks of Wood Stack Camp, and Grandpa decided to get the mail first, then Gramma and Kai went into the store for milk and dog kibble to supplement Rene’s liver. I waited with Grandpa and Rene in the truck and he pulled from the pile of bills and catalogs a bright yellow envelope addressed with cursive black Magic Marker penmanship. Emily, at last, my heart thumped. Four letters I’d sent her, all unanswered. Did she forget me? Maybe Girl Scout camp doesn’t have mail. But here it was; here she was! Grandpa tossed the yellow envelope at me. Not Emily’s writing after all—Meredith’s perfect cursive. I tore it open, devoured the only sentence, Didn’t you know this girl?
    A folded newspaper article dated two weeks prior fluttered to my lap. Tree Kills Girl Scout.
    Emily is dead.
    Below the headline her smiling school photograph, newspaper grainy black-and-white, unruly curls held back with a clip.
    A pine tree, twenty-one inches in diameter and long dead due to drought, fell on the child as she changed into pajamas in her sleeping bag, crushing her.
    Awakened by the tree’s fall, the remaining campers climbed from their bags and scattered. Camp counselors conducted a head count, noticed the corner of a bright orange sleeping bag beneath the fallen trunk, pulled the child from the immense weight and performed CPR.
    Too late.
    She was already dead.
    The scream of the chain saw, the rush of air through pine needles, the deafening thud of tree against soil.
    In the truck I could not breathe. Gramma and Kai, hefting a gallon of low-fat and a big bag of kibble, climbed up into the cab.
    “What’s wrong with you?” Gramma asked.
    Grandpa looked up from his Fingerhut catalog. “What?”
    Gramma sighed. “Not you, dummy. Get a move on; don’t let this milk spoil.”
    The road was curvy. I was sicker by the second. Kai whispered, “You okay?” and when I nodded she let me lay my head on her shoulder for maybe a minute. I was just about to cry when she moved her head to my shoulder, murmured she had a headache, dissolved. I wiped her tears with a tissue from Gramma’s bra, folded the yellow envelope, stuffed it and the article into my pocket. At the house I tucked Kai in bed, got her two aspirin and a cool, damp washcloth, and locked myself in the bathroom to cry. It didn’t happen. Too late. Now I was just nauseous.
    I won’t survive without you. Hadn’t Emily said those words to me, begged me not to go?
    Every day, all day, cowering terrified beneath falling trees.
    I harangued an annoyed and baffled Gramma, “Is this twenty-one inches? How big is this one? If this fell on you, would it kill you? Is this twenty-one inches?” She gave me her sewing tape measure and I found a trunk that fit. Surprisingly small.
    I hid in the pantry with the phone, dialed Emily’s home number repeatedly, all hours of the day and night. It rang and rang until a recorded voice claimed disconnection, so I sent a letter, a thick envelope stuffed with ten pages covered front and back in my wobbly grief-penmanship asking her mom to call Gramma and Grandpa’s number. Wrote again and again how much I missed her. Missed Emily.
    The letter came back in a larger envelope, along with all my letters to Emily. No Forwarding Address.
    Nothing in the newspaper story beyond the details of her death and the cold final statement: No services will be held.
    I phone-grilled Wade and Meredith, who expressed a modicum of