The Last Thing She Ever Did
Gregg Olsen
TWENTY YEARS AGO
Beetles never stop. They gnaw silently and relentlessly.
Guilt is like that too.
Less than two hours from Bend, Oregon, Diamond Lake is a spectacular sapphire blue with a tawny shoreline ringed by ponderosa pines. The pines there struggled to survive against the scourge of a plague of unseen beetles that insidiously burrowed through the bark and into the cambium, a tree’s growth layer where the rings in the trunk are formed. For years the attack by the tiny army went unnoticed, picking away, weakening a once-mighty stand of timber until the trees began to slump into deadfall.
A slow, quiet death.
Unseen.
Until it was all too late.
For Liz Camden, too late happened when she was only nine.
Shards of memory returned every time she passed the sign indicating the turnoff to the lake. Liz was always a passenger when this occurred, because she never, ever drove that route on her own. It was a pact she made with herself, a way out of remembering all of it and preventing the splintery, jagged pieces from stabbing at her. Whenever they did, despite her best efforts to forget, the memories assembled themselves into a cracked mirror.
And it all returned . . .
Liz’s mother, Bonnie Camden, and neighbor Miranda Miller planned a day trip to shop in Portland, three hours from Bend. Liz’s father, Brian, was away on business, though due home that night.
Miranda’s husband, Dan, a doctor with a thriving practice in town, had been looking for an excuse to take out his new boat while the women were “off spending all of our hard-earned money on diamonds and furs.” It was a joke, of course. Dan was always one to exaggerate Miranda’s spendthrift ways and trumpet his own frugality. Except for that boat.
He’d wanted one for years. He’d sit on the deck overlooking the Deschutes River and roll his eyes at the tubers who passed by. He wanted a boat with an outboard motor. Why float when you could command the water with an engine’s roar?
“For fishing,” Liz remembered Dan telling Miranda when the Camdens were over to celebrate the end of the summer.
“You can fish from the shore like everyone else,” Miranda said.
She could always deliver a deadpan line. She had a knack for it. Or she could make her point with a simple gesture, a roll of the shoulder, and what they all knew and loved as “the Miranda look.” A dart at her target, then away, with a slight smile across her face. Never mean. Always effective.
“I want a boat.”
“I want a new refrigerator.”
“Oh really?” he said.
“That’s what I just said.”
Liz remembered how three days later a delivery came from Hansen’s Appliances. The day after that, Dan pulled up in front of the Millers’ house with a boat trailer and the apple of his eye. It wasn’t new. But the sixteen-foot Bayliner Capri was the most beautiful thing Dan had laid eyes on.
“God, I love this boat. I might even sleep in it,” he told Miranda as the neighbors gathered to ogle his purchase.
Miranda rolled her shoulder, flung her dart—“Well, I hope it’s comfy, because there’s no ‘might’ about it, buster”—then slipped away with her wry smile.
She wasn’t mad at her husband. Not ever. That’s just the way they played. Liz always liked the Millers’ banter. Her parents were mostly silent. A quiet and somewhat sweet stalemate. When the chance came to hang out over at the Millers’, she always looked forward to it. She knew it would be fun.
The trip to the lake was executed like an army reconnaissance mission, which wasn’t surprising. In his life before returning to Bend to start a medical practice, Dan had served in Vietnam. He never talked about that experience, at least as far as Liz knew, but his crew cut and the jangle of the dog tags he still wore telegraphed his history without words. Dan was a lean man with sinewy arms, who was softened by his ready smile and pretend irritation with all the things Miranda threw his way.
As the big day approached, Dan gathered the kids who were not away at church camp—Liz and the Millers’ son Seth, both nine, and Liz’s older brother Jim, eleven—to talk about the finer points of trout fishing and water safety. Dan could be long-winded, and most everything he said seemed pure overkill. But that was the way he was.
The blast of heat that week had toasted the high desert. When thunderclouds rolled in the night before the big trip, everyone felt the relief that comes with the promise of rain. The TV weatherman, a glad-hander with an endless procession of bow ties, indicated a storm would move quickly through the area.
And, for once, he was right.
The tempest passed through Bend early Friday morning, slickening the roadways, filling the Deschutes, and pounding the eardrums of those unable to sleep through the cracks of thunder.
That morning Bonnie and Miranda went out ahead of Dan and the kids. “I need to get to Portland early if I’m going to empty Dan’s bank account,” Miranda said as they drove off.
Years later Liz could still see her mother and Seth’s mom as they had appeared when they left in the Millers’ Cadillac. They had dressed up for the occasion. Her mom seldom did that. But that day Bonnie Camden looked like a movie star. Indeed, both women did. They wore new summer dresses. Bonnie had made hers from a Butterick pattern she’d found at a fabric store in the town of Sisters. It was a solid sky blue with white piping. Miranda had ordered hers from an expensive catalog from a store in New York. It was white linen that she accessorized with a pale green leather belt. Liz wanted to touch the linen, but she didn’t dare. She wondered when she’d be old enough to wear makeup and put on a gold necklace and shoes that clattered when she walked on the stone entryway of her grandparents’ house.
Of all Liz’s scattered recollections from that day, the one of Mrs. Miller and her mother was unique in that it was the only one Liz didn’t mind revisiting.
The white Ford station wagon reeked of a sweet, spicy scent when Liz and Jimmy got inside to join Seth and his dad. Cloying. Heavy. By the end of the day, the scent had imprinted itself on Liz’s brain in the way that the odor of the first alcohol that gets a new drinker really, really drunk can later turn their stomach at the slightest whiff. Yet, sitting there, she couldn’t determine exactly what it was. Spice like her dad’s Teaberry gum? A sachet in her grandma’s drawer?
Dan stopped at McDonald’s on the way out of town and ran inside while his son and the Camden kids waited. Liz would later remember thinking it was an auspicious beginning to the trip. An Egg McMuffin was a treat. Her mom never let her children eat fast food.
“She says it isn’t good for you,” Liz recalled saying to Dan when he handed her a McMuffin wrapped in oily paper.