The ghosts are us but not literally like in that one Nicole Kidman movie: "Camp Emeline" by Taryn Bowe

Some stories don't require much critical or theoretical intervention to interpret. That's just the way it is. They speak for themselves quite nicely and most readers are able to "get it" without needing much intermediary exposition. Sometimes, as in "His Finest Moment" by Tom Bissell, the story just before this one in the 2023 Best American Short Stories collection, that's because there's not much of a story there worth giving much thought to. There isn't any deeper layer to it, and the lack of things to say to expand upon the story is a good indication that the story isn't the kind of story you're going to treasure for a long time. Then there's a story like Taryn Bowe's "Camp Emeline," where the lack of things to say after the story is over isn't an indication that the story isn't worth thinking about long after the last words, but only that it managed to make most of what it had to say overt. Like its main character Libby clearing garbage out of the lake, you don't have to dive very deep to find what you're looking for.

I've only got a hodge-podge gallimaufry of thoughts on this story. Mostly, what occurred to me were a few minor observations about technical or formal considerations that made the story work.

The right moment to begin

Any beginning fiction-writing primer will stress the importance of starting the story at the right moment. Two key considerations for picking this moment are first to ask the question "why now?" and secondly to try to move as close to the moment of crisis for the main character(s) as possible.

"Camp Emeline" doesn't start back when Emeline is born with spinal bifida, nor when she gets sick, nor when she dies, nor when the parents are struggling to win a malpractice lawsuit against the hospital after she dies. It starts with the family trying to use the money they've won in the lawsuit to honor their daughter after they've already won. This is an interesting choice, and maybe, with this one choice came the entire success of the whole project. There's a whole different, Erin Brockovich-kind of story that could have been told. This could have been about the plucky family that took on the big charity hospital with all the celebrity endorsements and how they won and how they didn't do it for greed but instead are trying to give back with the money they won by opening a camp for other kids with disabilities. The beginning of "Camp Eveline" could have been the happy ending of another kind of story. But this story isn't so much about what happened as it is about how people cope psychologically with what happened. So it starts with happily ever after and points out that sometimes, happily ever after is the saddest moment, because it's the moment when a family that's been deferring its feelings, pending the outcome of their settlement, finally has to deal with them. 

Terror misdirected

In the 2001 movie The Others, we spend the whole movie afraid that supernatural beings are trying to kill Nicole Kidman and her two spectrally pale children, only to find out at the end that they were the dead ones the whole time. I kind of thought it was a movie that asked the question, "Has it been long enough since The Sixth Sense that we can pull this off again?" but also partly a nice misdirection. One of the scariest ideas is not that there's something to fear, but that the thing to fear is something completely different from what you should be afraid of. 

The word "ghost" appears three times in the story. The first time, it's to describe the camp the family has bought, before they've fixed it up, as a ghost town. That last time reflects the first, calling it a "ghost camp." But the second time, Libby, the first-person narrator teenage girl struggling to cope, calls her and her family "ghosts." She's gone to the wilderness to look for a sign from the dead, but they're the ghosts. This is a perfect way of describing the feeling of losing someone close to you. It is a ghost town, but not because of all the undead from yesteryear haunting the place. It's a ghost town because they've themselves are only pale shadows of their former fully living selves. 

There's another misdirected terror in the story. Libby has been directing all of her feelings about her lost sister and the wreck her parents became because of her death by engaging in sexually stupid behavior. She's been giving out hand jobs to losers at school for twenty-five bucks, and occasionally having sex with people as long as they are okay with her occasional outbursts of violence during sex. Her mother found out about the hand jobs, and now the two barely speak to each other. Perhaps partly because of this awkwardness, the parents do absolutely zero checking in on their children throughout the story as Libby and her brother Eli hang out with a twenty-four-year-old drifter who says he comes with the camp her parents bought. Libby is begging someone to take her up on her attempts to act out sexually, and she's come across precisely the profile of person you'd be worried about her coming across. So the reader does a bit of white-knuckling the book (or device, for those on Kindles), worried that she's about to find exactly the trouble she's looking for, like this is Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" 

It turns out, though, that there was nothing to fear. The drifter, who has his own people he's lost and is hurting in much the same way, turns out to be just what Libby needs. I'm not sure this is how it's likely to work out most of the time in life. I think most of the time, teenage girls probably ought to stay out of the shacks of twenty-four-year-old drifters with pasts. But the guy's got a good heart, and the two manage to help each other face their issues by a series of conversations that up their pain in very minimalist ways.  

Unlike "The Others," "Camp Emeline" doesn't make every shot a carefully contrived chiaroscuro. It throws light and dark around loosely, and uses both large and small tableaux. 

An interesting stylistic quirk

The opening lines paint a scene, in this case the natural scene of the camp around the lake. After two sentences, though, while still in the same paragraph, it changes to a quick summary of the past leading up to the beginning of the plot that begins "When the settlement money came in..." This "When the settlement money" could have been the opening lines on their own. I'd have probably written it that way, because I kind of have a thing about not liking to open with scene descriptions, but scene description is a tried-and-true story opening. That opening paragraph feels like it has two starts jammed into one rather long paragraph. And while much of the story mostly moves along quickly, some of the individual paragraphs break the typical logic of the paragraph, jamming more than one main idea in before providing an indentation to indicate a change. The third paragraph does this much like the first, beginning with the father going in to Meredith to buy flashlights and batteries, then digressing into how the parents have been off their game since Emeline died, then talking about Libby's risky behavior and the rift it's caused with her mom, then moving back to another description of the camp again, ending with the first reference to it as a ghost town. These aren't on every page, but they do show up now and again. The logic of these paragraphs is more associative than linear, which mirrors the way the story is more about feelings about what happened than what happened.  

So does Emeline give them a sign or not?

The quest for a sign from the dead sister/daughter Emeline continues throughout the story. Libby sees her mother swimming in the lake and wonders if she's also looking for a sign. 

There are three mentions of ghosts in the story, and also three mentions of loons. The three times loons are mentioned are actually not far off from the three mentions of ghosts.

I probably only said this line to myself 8,000 times while reading this story. 

Ghost/loon combo one: "Without campers, the camp was a ghost town. I could hear loons wailing. 'I'm here,' they seemed to say. 'But where are you?'" 

Ghost/loon combo two: Libby and the drifter are out on the water in a canoe at night, and when Libby could "hear the loons wailing, (she) knew (she and the drifter) were moving toward the center where they'd built a nest." Not long after this, the drifter asks Libby if everything is okay with her parents. "Probably not," she answers. "It's like we're all ghosts." 

Ghost/loon combo three: On her last night with the drifter just before the camp opens, they are in the shack listening to the rain. "One of the loons wailed. I waited for another to call back. That's why they cried like that, I'd read, to find a mate, or sometimes, if their calls were short and clipped, to locate family, to check if they were out there still, alive. Before the end of their night together, Libby thinks that she feels "stronger than before (she'd) come here, to this ghost camp, to his little shed." 

Loons, if you've ever heard them, sound a little ghost-like. It's tempting to think that Emeline is speaking through them. But the loons are actually symbols of the survivors, who are the real ghosts, still looking for their lost loved ones. There is no sign from the dead. The only sign that they were ever there is the mournful wailing of those still alive, which marks both the dead's former presence as well as their current absence. 

At the end, Emeline's former presence and current absence is replaced by Libby mourning over the newer absence of the drifter. Meanwhile, there is a new presence, that of the just-arrived campers, that feels to her like a menace. Maybe it's because the new campers, which were like a new puppy to get over the lost dog to her parents, have arrived to her before she's ready.

If this were a typical Hollywood movie, the presence of the wise, older-but-still-somehow-not-a-sexual-predator drifter would have healed Libby enough to allow her to honor her sister by passing on her love for Emeline to the campers. The final scene would be Libby doling out the love in the parking lot to the new children, perhaps looking wistfully off as she sees the drifter walking down the road in the distance. Instead, our final scene is Libby cowering in the Drifter's shack, praying for any kind of illness that will give her an excuse to not meet these kids. She isn't yet done looking for her lost loved ones, and she's not willing to replace them. 

When the drifter first brought up his lost ones to Libby in the canoe, he was sick for a few days after. It's possible this sickness was the poison of losing his loved ones leaving him at last. So while we don't see Libby totally healed, I don't think we should completely ignore her self-evaluation that the drifter's presence has made her stronger than she'd been. Her sickness--or wish for it--is a sign she's ready for the next stage in healing.