Adirondacks

Fiction by Grace Keir

In the morning, we saw the fog in the valley. You were already gone. You and your father and your sisters' husbands had long since packed the camping gear into the truck and filled the thermoses with coffee and driven up to the trailhead. You did all of this before the sun even thought about rising. That’s how you said it to me, the night before, when I asked if you’d wake me up to say goodbye: “Baby, we’ll be gone before the sun even thinks about rising.”

We were in bed at nine o’clock, covers pulled up to our chins. The sky was still blue behind the curtains.

The next day, we, the women, rose earlier than we had all week. Our beds were cold without you. We gathered in the kitchen and drank the coffee you’d left courteously in the pot. 

“The fog,” your eldest sister, Julie, pointed out. The rest of us nodded. I stood nervous beside her at the big window. 

You’d coached me on sisterhood the night before. I felt apprehensive about the whole thing. Unequipped.

You said, “Julie likes to give advice. She likes to tell people what to do. Talk to her about your problems.”

“Really? My problems?”

“Yeah, sure. And June, she likes girly stuff. Paint each other’s toenails or something.”

“Okay. What about your stepmother?”

Here, you looked out the window. We hadn’t yet drawn the curtains. Lightning bugs dotted the lawn. 

“Not yet qualified to say,” you told me. 

I could empathize there. Say no more.



Once the morning fog burned off, Julie and I went into town for pastries and better coffee, no offense. We stopped at a farmstand and turned peaches over in our hands. 

Julie drove with all four windows rolled down. She hung her hand out, fingers occasionally flicking at a phantom cigarette. Meanwhile, I was trying to think about my problems. 

I asked her if she thought it was normal that the only thing that ever really, truly, sounded nice to me was going to a bar alone and drinking a cold glass of beer.

She said, “Sure, I think that’s normal for someone in their early twenties.”

I said, “I’m twenty-seven.”

And she just said, “Hm.”

Then she turned on the radio.

Later, by the pool, I tried again. I was worried, I told her, that I drank too much alcohol and ate too many carbs and smoked too many cigarettes.

“Everything is okay in moderation,” she said. 

She was watching June swim laps in the pool. It was noon. We were drinking blackberry brambles. She’d made them sweet and strong, with lots of gin. 

“You know what I think,” she said. “I think June might have an eating disorder.”

See, you got it wrong. She likes talking about other people’s problems. Gossip, not advice. For instance: your stepmother was inside with a headache, a cold compress against her temple. “You girls go on without me,” she’d said as we gathered our towels and our sunblock.

“As if we’d sit around waiting for her,” Julie had murmured to me. 

So I was starting to understand her pretty quickly. 

June, on the other hand, remained a mystery. Her flowing white nightgowns and her long blonde hair in loose braids. The crystals she carried in her pockets and the way she spoke too softly to hear, with an affected lisp. You told me, on the first night, “If you see a ghost on your way to the bathroom, don’t panic. It’s probably just June.”

I studied her body as she emerged from the pool. She was very thin. The sharp ridges of her hipbones pressed against her pale skin like misplaced bird’s wings. 

“See what I mean,” Julie said. 

“Sure, I see.”

June looked out of place in the Adirondacks. She reminded me of a desert flower, her beauty suited for a harsher climate. She was even more California than me. 

“So, how do you like living in LA?” I asked her in the kitchen. 

She was slicing a peach right on the tiled countertop. Sticky juice seeped into the caulk. 

“Oh, it’s alright,” she said. “I love the light. My friend made me go to this sound bath in Joshua Tree last week. I’m not opposed to the whole spirituality thing, but that took it a little far.”

I laughed, half-distracted by the mess she was making on the counter. 

“And for what it’s worth,” she continued, “I’m considered the hippie in this family. Though it wasn’t hard for me to get that reputation. Not with this crowd.” She gestured at the empty kitchen with her paring knife. 

“I know what you mean,” I said. “Not everyone in California’s like that.”

“No, of course not,” she said, with a mouth full of peach. “But a lot of them are.”

I wanted to tell her about my California. The part in the middle that is neither coastal nor desert. Farmland. The grapevine. I supposed I couldn’t argue with her, though. Not about Los Angeles or California or the West Coast at all. I got out of there as soon as I possibly could. 

June wiped juice from her chin with the back of her hand. “Who knew these mountains could get so hot?”

I nodded. I was thinking about you. I hoped you were drinking enough water. 



For lunch, we ate bread and peaches and deli meat straight from the baggie, standing over the counter, without plates. We could devolve into girlish savages without you around. Yesterday’s lunch was Niçoise salad on a ceramic platter, chilled rosé, grapes. 

Your stepmother refused food. She said she had a migraine, and she made us close all the curtains before we went back outside. 

“When did migraine become the word for hangover?” Julie whispered as we left the dark cavern of the house for the bright afternoon.

“Like you haven’t used that one before,” June said. She winked at me, and for some reason I winked back.

Until today, we’d been a big group. Loud. The television and the radio always on, some constant splashing or backyard sport, card games, charades. Without you, I mean all of you, a snowy, feminine silence had fallen over the summer house. 

“What do you think they’re doing right now?” June asked. 

She was floating in the shaded deep of the pool. Julie and I waded in the shallow, sun-soaked end, tanning our arms. 

“Hiking,” Julie answered. 

“Don’t you think they should’ve invited us? I mean, I wouldn’t go, but it would’ve been nice to be invited,” June said. “I hike all the time in LA.”

Julie glanced at me. “June, I don’t think this is quite the same.”

You and your father love a challenge. Being that you are the youngest and the only boy, I understand why you’ve bonded over this. Danger, mud, wilderness. June and Julie watching from afar, clutching the hems of their dresses. Now, their husbands want to impress your father, and probably also you, so they join in. Hunting, snowboarding, renting ATVs. 

And this hike: “The hardest in the Adirondacks.” Your father put it in dismissive air quotes. He’s hiked the Rockies, the Tour du Mont Blanc. He’s camped at the bottom of the Grand Canyon with horses.

“I think you girls would do just fine,” he said at dinner last night.

June and Julie had shaken their heads, pushed their plates away.

“Remember when he tried to make us all go camping that one time,” June said. “With Mom? What a disaster.”

I looked over at Julie. Her face was flat, inscrutable. You rarely spoke about your mother. I was holding my breath. I thought maybe we could bond over this, while you guys bonded over rocks or whatever. I mean, my mother didn’t kill herself, but she did leave me. 

“Yeah,” Julie said. “That was probably her last straw. The nail in the coffin.”

“Not funny,” June said. She was a scowling head above the rippling water. 

I wondered about my mother’s last straw. Maybe it was, literally, straw. We lived among sawdust and hay bales. As I understand it, my mother was a glamorous woman. My father picked her up in Hollywood. She was a party girl, a glittering prize left to tarnish in the San Joaquin Valley. Maybe that’s what drove her crazy.

“I’m gonna go see what Cruella is doing,” Julie said, climbing out of the pool. She let the screen door slam. 

At first, their nickname for your stepmother seemed crude and childish to me. They were grown women, married women, after all. But by the second day, it was mundane and by the third, second nature. I felt little sisterly. I wanted to align myself with them.

“I’m sure I could do that hike, you know,” June said. “I’m just choosing not to.”

“Totally,” I said. 

Now I was thinking about your mother. You know you’ve never even shown me a picture of her? I wondered if she looked more like Julie or June.

“But I do think it’s nice to get some time apart,” June continued, swimming towards me. “The girls, the boys. They need to go out into the woods and get lost in order to feel something.”

“What do you mean?”

June reached the shallow end and stood up, squinting. “Like, they don’t experience any real threats. But they have all these emotions – fear, anxiety, rage. And they’re, like, accumulating. They need a channel, before it gets toxic, becomes tumorous. They need to create their own pain.” She gathered her hair at the base of her neck and sighed.

I thought of you: the way you cried over reality television and hid behind my arm during Scream. Maybe you and your father went out into the woods to mourn her, away from the narrowed eyes and measured silences of your sisters.

“Women, on the other hand,” June went on, “have it all laid out for them each day. A buffet platter!” She threw her head back and laughed. “Take your pick!”

“Sure,” I said. “Pain buffet.”

June pointed a pale finger at me. “Bingo. Pain buffet.”

She leaned back into the water and began to float on her back, eyes closed in what appeared to be a state of sudden bliss.

Maybe June had a point. Maybe she had it all wrong. But I didn’t feel like arguing with her. I was starting to think she was high. She probably brought some of that California weed with her on the airplane. No one would suspect June of a thing. TSA would take one look at her and say, Go right ahead, miss.

“Guys.”

Julie stood on the deck. Her face was stark white. Impressive, considering the sunburn she’d been sporting minutes earlier. 

“It’s Cruella,” she said. 

Inside, your stepmother – Cruella, Helene, etc. – was unresponsive on the couch. The coffee table was littered with magazines, playing cards, orange peels, empty bottles of beer and tanning oil. There, atop a waterlogged New Yorker, was an empty prescription bottle. 

June studied the label. “Well, it’s Xanax,” she said. “And it’s empty.”

She gave it a noiseless shake for dramatic effect.

“Maybe there was only one left,” I offered.

The late afternoon sun cast a warm light through the big window above the sink. The only one without a curtain. We smelled like chlorine and sunblock, hovering around in our dripping bikinis like a bunch of little girls. 

Julie knelt down beside Cruella and pressed her fingers to her wrist. She poked her in the ribs. “Helene,” she snapped. “Helene.”

“Move,” June said. “I’ve got experience.”

Julie scowled. “What experience? Burning Man?”  

But she did step aside, giving June space to bend over Cruella’s body. 

“She’s breathing,” June said. “I think.”

June straightened up and we all stood blinking like idiots. I could hear the blood coursing through my ears.

I tried to imagine what you would do. You’ve never been a silent bystander. You’d probably be halfway to the nearest hospital by now, Cruella coming to in the backseat, yelling at you to slow down. Remember when you pulled that guy out of the train tracks in Queens? I’ve watched you carry countless strollers up the subway stairs. 

“She needs to throw up,” I said. 

“Yes,” June agreed. 

Together, we dragged Cruella’s limp body to the bathroom. We knew, then, that she wasn’t dead, because she was murmuring and whining, wiggling against us. 

“Someone needs to stick their fingers down her throat,” I said. 

June was holding Cruella over the toilet. She blinked at me and then looked down at Cruella’s wan, slackened face. 

“Well?” Julie stood in the doorway, arms crossed. 

“I’ll do it,” June said. She pried open Cruella’s reluctant mouth and stuck her hand inside. 

There were a few long, quiet seconds while June was rummaging around in the dark, wet cavern of your stepmother’s throat, and I was holding back her hair, and Julie was biting her nail above us, where I felt, really, that we were sisters. Your advice from the other night had proven irrelevant. No painted toenails or heart-to-hearts. I felt, as Cruella dry heaved beneath us and June cracked a sick little smile, that this was sisterhood. You wouldn’t get it. You were off in the woods trying to understand brotherhood. 

Cruella threw up eventually, lots, and then got angry with us for overreacting. 

“You could have died,” Julie said. We were standing in a row at her bedside, as though paying our respects at a wake. Cruella was mummy-wrapped in quilts, her dark eyes blinking out at us from her shroud.

“Oh, please,” Cruella said, though her voice was thin, uncertain. “Don’t be so dramatic.” 

“You know,” June said, “we don’t have to tell our dad.” 

I was in awe. I mean, they were basically blackmailing her! They’d saved her life, and now they were wielding it over her head like a weapon. 

You know what it was like for me: growing up alone in that dusty, endless farmland. My only allegiance was to the grapes, the horses. If I didn’t have them to keep me in line – to teach me about trust and favors and forgiveness – I’d probably be insane.



Later, we returned to the deck, still in our bikinis. The air had cooled. Mosquitos danced along the smooth surface of the pool. As darkness fell, we figured you were roasting hot dogs over a campfire, drinking beer, making dirty jokes. Julie made us gin and tonics, stirring the limes around with a knife. We’d hardly eaten all day, but no one mentioned dinner. 

I grabbed your pack of American Spirits from our room. I was missing the smell of you, your voice. The bed was still unmade. Your book and your glass of water waited for you on the nightstand. Before returning to the deck, I took a moment to lie down in the place where your body had been, to feel the sleepy imprint you’d left on the old, sagging mattress. 

Julie and June both accepted cigarettes from your pack. We were quiet at first, sipping our drinks and smoking. We were all a little shaken. 

“Do you think she did it on purpose?” June asked eventually. 

You hadn’t told me much about your stepmother. Just that she was much younger than your father, with no children of her own, and that she had a tendency to be dramatic, cause a scene. Got too drunk on Christmas Eve and fell over during mass. Cried every time she held a baby. That sort of stuff. 

Julie rattled her ice around. When she spoke, she sounded weary. “I hope not.”

“Imagine,” June said. “Dad driving two women to suicide.”

It was a joke, but nobody laughed.

“An accident,” I said. “Right?”

They nodded in unison. They had the exact same nose. I was sitting on the deck, while they sat above me in chairs. This must be what it’s like, I thought, to have big sisters. I’d take the floor. I’d be the baby.

“God,” Julie said, “I missed smoking.” She tilted her head back and exhaled. “We’re trying, you know.” She patted her flat, tan belly.

“Really?” I said. “That’s exciting.” 

June didn’t react. She probably already knew. She was lying out on the lounger, her eyes half-closed, her mouth a flat line. I’d almost forgotten that they came with husbands, that they had lives outside of this cabin. Of course, I had not forgotten about you. The day had just been so long. 

“Yeah,” Julie said. “Sometimes I think it sounds nice. Other times, I think I’d fuck that kid up for real. Look at us. Look at Cruella. What gives anyone the right?”

We laughed, then. The world around us had gone bruise blue. We were reduced to three glowing tips. We thought the darkest part of the trip had passed. We thought we could exhale everything heavy.

The mountain air grew chilly. My bathing suit wasn’t yet dry, though we hadn’t been swimming in hours. I found myself damp and shivering.

I remembered something then. About my mother. She used to take nightly baths in the winter. A luxury in that water-starved place. Baths were selfish, extravagant. My father didn’t approve. But she’d get cold, you see. The wind was relentless, and at night, it’d drop down into the forties. I know that’s nothing to you and your New England winters. But we didn’t have heat. Didn’t need it most of the year. 

In the dry cold of that drafty farmhouse, her baths created a sort of sauna. When she stepped out of the tub, steam came rippling off her skin. I can still see her standing like that before the sink, brushing her wet hair. It looked like she was evaporating. 

“Is anyone else freezing?” June said from the darkness above me.

“Yes,” I said. My voice was hoarse.

I thought maybe we’d all go inside and cuddle together beneath a blanket. I thought that could be nice.

Instead, we retreated to our separate rooms and crawled into our half-empty beds. I think we were all imagining your return tomorrow afternoon. How we’d tell you, whispering across our pillows, about what happened with Cruella. How you’d tell us about the hike: the thrill, the mess, the summit.



The next day, I woke up early, hungover and eager.

I cleaned up our mess: the crumbs and the peach pits, the empty bottle of gin. I collected our glasses and cigarette butts, washed the dishes in the sink. Pulled open the curtains, stretched my arms above my head. 

When you weren’t home by noon, we got a little impatient. June had made a big lunch: prosciutto sandwiches on nice bread, a salad with grapefruit and fennel, iced tea.

We were wearing dresses over our swimsuits. We didn’t want to get the day started without you. The pool was empty and flat. We picked at the salad with our fingers. 

At two we started drinking, lying out in the sun. 

“None for you, young lady,” Julie joked to Cruella, who sat scowling in the shade with a bottle of mineral water. 

June taught me how to dive. I started by crouching on the lip of the pool, letting myself tip forward headfirst, like an egg. Then, she let me graduate to standing on my feet, knees bent, toes curled over the edge. 

“Again,” June would say when my head popped up, and Cruella would clap from her spot in the shade. 

I dove until June was satisfied with my form. 

“Let me see you do it now,” I said. I stretched out on the warm concrete. 
 
June dove perfectly. Her body was a thin, pointed line. When she entered the water, she barely made a splash.

“Show-off,” Julie said, but even she was smiling. 

Panting and sun-tired, we went inside to get more beers and realized it was nearly five. June ran to the front door and threw it open, half-expecting your truck to be there, to see all of you muddy and apologetic and grinning. But the driveway was empty. 

“Should we call?” I asked. 

“They said they wouldn’t have service,” June said.

“They’re probably on the road,” Julie said. “Maybe there’s traffic.”

We found ourselves, yet again, blinking around in our wet bikinis, entirely unprepared for disaster. It kept taking us by surprise. The sun was shining, the valley peaceful and green. We didn’t buy it anymore. 

Our calls went straight to voicemail. June collapsed to the ground, muttering to herself and shaking her head.

“Relax,” Julie said. “It’s only the Adirondacks.”

But even her voice wavered. She wouldn’t look me in the eye. We stood in the driveway, bare feet on gravel, as night fell. With each circle of headlights on the road below, our breaths caught, held, deflated.

Grace Keir

Grace Keir is a writer from New York based in Columbia, SC. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Fiction at the University of South Carolina, where she also serves as Fiction Editor for Cola Literary Review. Her work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Sage Magazine, and elsewhere.