Last Time I Lied

This is how it begins.

You wake to sunlight whispering through the trees just outside the window. It’s a faint light, weak and gray at the edges. Dawn still shedding the skin of night. Yet it’s bright enough to make you roll over and face the wall, the mattress creaking beneath you. Within that roll is a moment of disorientation, a split second when you don’t know where you are. It happens sometimes after a deep, dreamless slumber. A temporary amnesia. You see the fine grains of the pine-plank wall, smell the traces of campfire smoke in your hair, and know exactly where you are.

Camp Nightingale.

You close your eyes and try to drop back into sleep, doing your best to ignore the nature noise rising from outside. It’s a jarring, discordant sound — creatures of the night clashing with those of the day. You catch the drumroll of insects, the chirp of birds, a solitary loon letting out one last ghostly call that skates across the lake.

The racket of the outdoors temporarily masks the silence inside. But then a woodpecker’s rat-a-tat-tat subsides into echo, and in that brief lull, you realize how quiet it is. How the only sound you’re aware of is the steady rise and fall of your own sleep-heavy breathing.

Your eyes dart open again as you strain to hear something else — anything else — coming from inside the cabin.

There’s nothing.

The woodpecker starts up again, and its rapid jackhammering tugs you away from the wall to face the rest of the cabin. It’s a small space. Just enough room for two sets of bunk beds, a night table topped by a lantern, and four hickory trunks near the door for storage. Certainly tiny enough for you to be able to tell when it’s empty, which it is.

You fling your gaze to the bunks across from you. The top one is neatly made, the sheets pulled taut. The bottom is the opposite — a tangle of blankets, something lumpy buried beneath them.

You check your watch in the early half-light. It’s a few minutes past 5:00 a.m. Almost an hour until reveille. The revelation brings an undercurrent of panic that hums just under your skin, itchy and irritating.

Emergency scenarios trot though your brain. A sudden illness. A frantic call from home. You even try to tell yourself it’s possible the girls had to leave so quickly they couldn’t be bothered to wake you. Or maybe they tried but you couldn’t be roused. Or maybe they did and you can’t remember.

You kneel before the hickory trunks by the door, each one carved with names of campers past, and fling open all of them but yours. The inside of each satin-lined box is stuffed to the brim with clothes and magazines and simple camp crafts. Two of them hold cell phones, turned off, unused for days.

Only one of them took her phone.

You have no idea what that could mean.

The first — and only — logical place you think they can be is the latrine, a cedar-walled rectangle just beyond the cabins, planted right at the threshold of the forest. Maybe one of them had to go the bathroom and the others went with her. It’s happened before. You’ve taken part in similar treks. Huddled together, scurrying along a path lit by a single, shared flashlight.

Yet the perfectly made bed suggests a planned absence. An extended one. Or, worse, that no one had even slept in it the night before.

Still, you open the cabin door and take a nervous step outside. It’s a gray, chilly morning, one that makes you hug yourself for warmth as you head to the latrine. Inside, you check every stall and shower. They’re all empty. The shower walls are dry. So are the sinks.

Back outside, you pause halfway between the latrine and the cabins, your head cocked, straining to hear signs of the girls hidden among all the buzzing and chirping and water gently lapping the lakeshore fifty yards away.

There’s nothing.

The camp itself is completely silent.

A sense of isolation drops onto your shoulders, and for a moment you wonder if the whole camp has cleared out, leaving only you behind. More horrible scenarios fill your thoughts. Cabins emptying in a frenzied, worried rush. You sleeping right through it.

You head back to the cabins, circling them quietly, listening for signs of life. There are twenty cabins in all, laid out in a tidy grid covering a patch of cleared forest. You wind your way around them, fully aware of how ridiculous you look. Dressed in nothing more than a tank top and a pair of boxer shorts, dead pine needles and pathway mulch sticking to your bare feet.

Each cabin is named after a tree. Yours is Dogwood. Next door is Maple. You check the names of each, trying to pick one the girls might have wandered into it. You picture an impromptu sleepover. You begin to squint into windows and crack open, unlocked doors, scanning the double-decker rows of sleeping girls for signs of additional campers. In one of the cabins — Blue Spruce — you startle a girl awake. She sits up in her bottom bunk, a gasp caught in her throat.

“Sorry,” you whisper before closing the door. “Sorry, sorry.”

You make your way to the other side of the camp, which normally bustles with activity from sunrise until twilight. Right now, though, sunrise is still just a promise, nothing but faint pinkness inching above the horizon. The only activity involves you marching toward the sturdy mess hall. In an hour or so, the scents of coffee and burnt bacon should be wafting from the building. At the moment, there’s no smell of food, no noise.

You try the door. It’s locked.

When you press your face to a window, all you see is a darkened dining room, chairs still stacked atop long rows of tables.

It’s the same at the arts and crafts building next door.

Locked.

Dark.

This time, your window peek reveals a semicircle of easels bearing the half-painted canvases of yesterday’s lesson. You had been working on a still life. A vase of wild flowers beside a bowl of oranges. Now you can’t shake the feeling the lesson will never be completed, the flowers always half-painted, the bowls forever missing their fruit.

You back away from the building, rotating slowly, contemplating your next move. To your right is the gravel drive that leads out of camp, through the woods, to the main road. You head in the opposite direction, right into the center of camp, where a mammoth, log-frame building sits at the end of a circular drive.

The Lodge.

The place where you least expect to find the girls.

It’s an unwieldy hybrid of a building. More mansion than cabin. A constant reminder to campers of their own, meager lodgings. Right now, it’s silent. Also dark. The ever-brightening sunrise behind it casts the front of the building in shadow, and you can barely make out its beveled windows, its fieldstone foundation, its red door.

Part of you wants to run to that door and pound on it until Franny answers. She needs to know that three girls are gone. She’s the camp director, after all. The girls are her responsibility.

You resist because there’s a possibility you could be wrong. That you overlooked some important place where the girls might have stashed themselves, as if this were all a game of hide-and-seek. Then there’s the fact that you’re reluctant to tell Franny until you absolutely must.

You’ve already disappointed her once. You don’t want to do it again.

You’re about to return to deserted Dogwood when something behind the Lodge catches your eye. A strip of orange light just beyond its sloped back lawn.

Lake Midnight, reflecting sky.

Please be there, you think. Please be safe. Please let me find you.

The girls aren’t there, of course. There’s no rational reason they would be. It feels like a bad dream. The kind you dread the most when you close your eyes at night. Only this nightmare has come true.

Maybe that’s why you don’t stop walking once you reach the lake’s edge. You keep going, into the lake itself, slick rocks beneath your feet. Soon the water is up to your ankles. When you start to shiver, you can’t tell if it’s from the coldness of the lake or the sense of fear that’s gripped you since you first checked your watch.

You rotate in the water, examining your surroundings. Behind you is the Lodge, the side facing the lake brightened by the sunrise, its windows glowing pink. The lakeshore stretches away from you on both sides, a seemingly endless line of rocky coast and leaning trees. You cast your gaze outward, to the great expanse of lake. The water is mirror-smooth, its surface reflecting the slowly emerging clouds and a smattering of fading stars. It’s also deep, even in the middle of a drought that’s lowered the waterline, leaving a footlong strip of sun-dried pebbles along the shore.

The brightening sky allows you to see the opposite shore, although it’s just a dark streak faintly visible in the mist. All of it — the camp, the lake, the surrounding forest — is private property, owned by Franny’s family, passed down through generations.

So much water. So much land.

So many places to disappear.

The girls could be anywhere. That’s what you realize as you stand in the water, shivering harder. They’re out there. Somewhere. And it could take days to find them. Or weeks. There’s a chance they’ll never be found.

The idea is too terrible to think about, even though it’s the only thing you can think about. You imagine them stumbling through the thick woods, unmoored and directionless, wondering if the moss on the trees really does point north. You think of them hungry and scared and shivering. You picture them under the water, sinking into the muck, trying in vain to grasp their way to the surface.

You think of all these things and begin to scream.

PART ONE

TWO TRUTHS

One

I paint the girls in the same order.

Vivian first.

Then Natalie.

Allison is last, even though she was first to leave the cabin and therefore technically the first to disappear.

My paintings are typically large. Massive, really. As big as a barn door, Randall likes to say. Yet the girls are always small. Inconsequential marks on a canvas that’s alarmingly wide.

Their arrival heralds the second stage of a painting, after I’ve laid down a background of earth and sky in hues with appropriately dark names. Spider black. Shadow gray. Blood red.

And midnight blue, of course. In my paintings, there’s always a bit of midnight.

Then come the girls, sometimes clustered together, sometimes scattered to far-flung corners of the canvas. I put them in white dresses that flare at the hems, as if they’re running from something. They’re usually turned so all that can be seen of them is their hair trailing behind them as they flee. On the rare occasions when I do paint a glimpse of their faces, it’s only the slimmest of profiles, nothing more than a single curved brushstroke.

I create the woods last, using a putty knife to slather paint onto the canvas in wide, unwieldy strokes. This process can take days, even weeks, me slightly dizzy from fumes as I glob on more paint, layer upon layer, keeping it thick.

I’ve heard Randall boast to potential buyers that my surfaces are like Van Gogh’s, with paint cresting as high as an inch off the canvas. I prefer to think I paint like nature, where true smoothness is a myth, especially in the woods. The chipped ridges of tree bark. The speckle of moss on rock. Several autumns’ worth of leaves coating the ground. That’s the nature I try to capture with my scrapes and bumps and whorls of paint.

So I add more and more, each wall-size canvas slowly succumbing to the forest of my imagination. Thick. Forbidding. Crowded with danger. The trees loom, dark and menacing. Vines don’t creep so much as coil, their loops tightening into choke holds. Underbrush covers the forest floor. Leaves blot out the sky.

I paint until there’s not a bare patch left on the canvas and the girls have been consumed by the forest, buried among the trees and vines and leaves, rendered invisible. Only then do I know a painting is finished, using the tip of a brush handle to swirl my name into the lower right-hand corner.

Emma Davis.

That same name, in that same borderline-illegible script, now graces a wall of the gallery, greeting visitors as they pass through the hulking sliding doors of this former warehouse in the Meatpacking District. Every other wall is filled with paintings. My paintings. Twenty-seven of them.

My first gallery show.

Randall has gone all out for the opening party, turning the place into a sort of urban forest. There are rust-colored walls and birch trees cut from a forest in New Jersey arranged in tasteful clumps. Ethereal house music throbs discreetly in the background. The lighting suggests October even though it’s a week until St. Patrick’s Day and outside the streets are piled with dirty slush.

The gallery is packed, though. I’ll give Randall that. Collectors, critics, and lookyloos elbow for space in front of the canvases, champagne glasses in hand, reaching every so often for the mushroom-and-goat-cheese croquettes that float by. Already I’ve been introduced to dozens of people whose names I’ve instantly forgotten. People of importance. Important enough for Randall to whisper who they are in my ear as I shake their hands.

“From the Times,” he says of a woman dressed head to toe in shades of purple. Of a man in an impeccably tailored suit and bright red sneakers, he simply whispers, “Christie’s.”

“Very impressive work,” Mr. Christie’s says, giving me a crooked smile. “They’re so bold.”

There’s surprise in his voice, as if women are somehow incapable of boldness. Or maybe his surprise stems from the fact that, in person, I’m anything but bold. Compared with other outsize personalities in the art world, I’m positively demure. No all-purple ensemble or flashy footwear for me. Tonight’s little black dress and black pumps with a kitten heel are as fancy as I get. Most days I dress in the same combination of khakis and paint-specked T-shirts. My only jewelry is the silver charm bracelet always wrapped around my left wrist. Hanging from it are three charms — tiny birds made of brushed pewter.

I once told Randall I dress so plainly because I want my paintings to stand out and not the other way around. In truth, boldness in one’s personality and appearance seems futile to me.

Vivian was bold in every way.

It didn’t keep her from disappearing.

During these meet and greets, I smile as wide as instructed, accept compliments, coyly defer the inevitable questions about what I plan to do next.

Once Randall has exhausted his supply of strangers to introduce, I hang back from the crowd, willing myself not to check each painting for the telltale red sticker signaling it’s been sold. Instead, I nurse a glass of champagne in a corner, the branch of a recently deforested birch tapping against my shoulder as I look around the room for people I actually know. There are many, which makes me grateful, even though it’s strange seeing them together in the same place. High school friends mingling with coworkers from the ad agency, fellow painters standing next to relatives who took the train in from Connecticut.

All of them, save for a single cousin, are men.

That’s not entirely an accident.

I perk up once Marc arrives fashionably late, sporting a proud grin as he surveys the scene. Although he claims to loathe the art world, Marc fits in perfectly. Bearded with adorably mussed hair. A plaid sport coat thrown over his worn Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Red sneakers that make Mr. Christie’s do a disappointed double take. Passing through the crowd, Marc snags a glass of champagne and one of the croquettes, which he pops into his mouth and chews thoughtfully.

“The cheese saves it,” he informs me. “But those watery mushrooms are a major infraction.”

“I haven’t tried one yet,” I say. “Too nervous.”

Marc puts a hand on my shoulder, steadying me. Just like he used to do when we lived together during art school. Every person, especially artists, needs a calming influence. For me, that person is Marc Stewart. My voice of reason. My best friend. My probable husband if not for the fact that we both like men.

I’m drawn to the romantically unattainable. Again, not a coincidence.

“You’re allowed to enjoy this, you know,” he says.

“I know.”

“And you can be proud of yourself. There’s no need to feel guilty. Artists are supposed to be inspired by life experiences. That’s what creativity is all about.”

Marc’s talking about the girls, of course, buried inside every painting. Other than me, only he knows about their existence. The only thing I haven’t told him is why, fifteen years later, I continue to make them vanish over and over.

That’s one thing he’s better off not knowing.

I never intended to paint this way. In art school, I was drawn to simplicity in both color and form. Andy Warhol’s soup cans. Jasper Johns’s flags. Piet Mondrian’s bold squares and rigid black lines. Then came an assignment to paint a portrait of someone I knew who had died.

I chose the girls.

I painted Vivian first because she burned brightest in my memory. That blond hair right out of a shampoo ad. Those incongruously dark eyes that looked black in the right light. The pert nose sprayed with freckles brought out by the sun. I put her in a white dress with an elaborate Victorian collar fanning around her swanlike neck and gave her the same enigmatic smile she displayed on her way out of the cabin.

You’re too young for this, Em.