We flew the flag at half-mast after Marina Lubov died.  We gathered in the rec hall for what we thought would be a memorial service but that turned out to be something else.  All 49 of us sat cross-legged on the floor in our blue shorts and white Camp Wigwam T-shirts, our silence broken only by occasional weeping.

My father, who owned the camp, was first up.  He spoke about the eleven-year-old Russian girl who had graced us with her presence for only five weeks.  He said we would not soon forget her clear voice as she recited the pledge of allegiance every morning.  We would not forget her dark ponytail bouncing as she took her first swats at a tennis ball or auditioned for Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.

Every girl in my bunk had tried out for Dorothy, but Lorna Jenkins, the prettiest girl in camp (if not the world), got the part.  Marina was cast as Mayor of the Munchkins and I, as a mere Munchkin.  As we sat and listened to my father, it was hard to believe that, with Marina gone, we would go on with rehearsals as before, that we would print tickets and sell candy as we did every year to our obliging parents, who made up most of the audience.  But that’s exactly what happened.  Marina’s death cast a shadow but only for a week or two.  After that, we forgot, at least most of the time.

It was yesterday’s phone message that started me thinking again about Marina.  A voice insisted I was someone I’m not.  “Diego Epstein — glad we found you!” The woman said, in the officious tone of a wedding planner.  “We have a wedding this June, in South Beach.  Please call soon — we’ll work around your schedule.”

My answering machine says:  “You’ve reached Dee Epstein; Wedding Photographer.  Please leave a message.”  The tone is pure New York, pure female, with a cheerful upbeat lilt I worked hard to perfect.  Until now I had never been mistaken for one Diego Epstein.  I looked him up on the web and saw why he was in demand.  A bride on horseback; a cathedral bathed in golden light, turning the bride and groom into icons; a couple exchanging loopy, wolfish grins as they clasp a serrated knife dripping with butter cream.  Not my style at all — not to mention that Diego is 37, male, and lives in Buenos Aires while I’m 46 and live in Brooklyn.

When I scrolled through Diego Epstein’s other photos — his non-wedding ones (the website calls them “Artistica”) — I thought of Marina.  City scenes mostly: wet shadowy pavements with windblown trash, a crowded subway car, a man at a urinal, and another man walking along railroad tracks, garbage cans lining the perimeter.

That summer, Marina and I spent many afternoons at camp photographing trash — the first assignment in our photography workshop.  I was reluctant to be paired off with her — this strange-accented girl who seemed older than the rest of us — but the experience drew us together.  Not surprisingly then, when she died, people looked to me for answers.

After my father spoke, we heard from the police chief of Monterey, Massachusetts.  Three miles from camp, Monterey had a general store to which we would willingly hike to buy chewy caramel candies called “sugar babies” and caramel lollipops, which lasted for hours, called “sugar daddies.”  Monterey had a post office, a church, a row of colonial houses, and a firehouse.  Apparently, it also had a police station, although we had never noticed one.

“Rules are there for a reason.” The police chief was tall and stern-looking, with a grey mustache and big, forbidding, hunched-over shoulders. “The girls in Bunk Six, Marina’s bunk, broke the rules.  They did it to have fun, to do something a little shocking.  Now each of those girls has to wonder: Suppose we hadn’t gone to the lake after dark?  Suppose we hadn’t gone skinny-dipping with no lifeguard around?  Would this sweet little Russian girl, whose parents fled terror to find a better life, would she still be here?”  There was absolute silence and then some muffled crying from Stephanie Petersen, who had been no friend to Marina but who had been crying intermittently ever since we realized, two nights before, that Marina was missing.  My father sat, his back rigid, arms crossed over his chest.

The rest of the meeting was about what to do when you’re sad.  “There’s an illness called depression,” the camp nurse (who happened to be my mother) told us.   Then she abandoned the podium to a member of the Monterey police force, Lieutenant Hilda Kline, the same policewoman I had spoken to for two hours the day before.

The policewoman, whom I already thought of as Hilda, and not as Lieutenant Kline, seemed to be looking directly at me when she spoke.  “The best way to handle being sad or scared,” she told us, “is to speak to an adult in charge.”  Hilda had freckles and short reddish-blonde hair and was about the age then that I am now.  She was pretty in a professional-looking way and was the first woman police officer I’d ever seen, except on TV.  As she spoke I thought about what I’d said when she interviewed me the day before.  While I answered her questions, she alternated between looking at me, and then — when I spoke about certain things — not looking at me at all.  As if by not looking at me she thought I would say more.  But I had said all I was going to say.

“What did Marina look like?” Lieutenant Hilda Kline asked first, which surprised me because I was sure she had seen pictures.  My dad took pictures of all the girls at their various activities, which he would turn into an album and home movie for parents.  The lake and waterfront were featured, too.  “The most beautiful lake in all of New England,” my father always said, “and the prettiest girls’ camp by far.”

“She looked grown up for her age,”  I said, politely, to Lieutenant Kline.

“Tall?”  she asked.

“My height,” I said, nodding.  I didn’t add that, while Marina and I were the same height, I was all sharp angles, gangly, olive-skinned (like my father), and undeveloped.  Marina, on the other hand, was a mass of contradictions: slim but solid, black hair but with very pale skin, lanky from the hips down but with noticeable, well-shaped breasts.  By adult standards, Marina had a lovely body.  But we weren’t adult.  We were eleven.

“What did Marina like to do?” Hilda asked me.  “What was her favorite sport?”  This was not such an easy question.  Both of us were bad at team sports. “Swimming,” I said.   The two of us were on our way to becoming junior lifesavers that summer.  My heart started to race because, of course, that was how she died — most likely from a cramp, they said, when she was too far from the dock to get help.  Something like that could happen to anyone.  “Her least favorite was relays, followed by kickball.”  I thought for a while.  “Actually, I don’t think she liked sports as much as ‘quiet activities’.”

“Arts and crafts?”

“Could be,” I said slowly.  “I think she liked photography.”  We were the only two girls from Bunk Six who signed up for photography as our “hobby” — something that made me slightly sick to my stomach at the end of the first week of camp.  I didn’t want to be associated with the new girl.  But as the camp director’s daughter, I had to be nice to her.  My reluctance to be paired off with Marina had less to do with who she was than with the fact that the rest of us had been together for three summers already.  I had struggled to get accepted into the circle of girls that were now in my “Bluebird” bunk, having made it through “Wrens” “Robins” and “Sparrows”.  Next year we would be “Owls” — wise and old compared to everyone else.

When my father touted the camp to prospective parents, he talked about the lake and then about the other features that made the camp special, according to him: the low counselor-camper ratio; the five acres of woods that adjoined the camp, which gave the impression that you were miles from civilization; and, above all, the camp spirit.  “We have girls who start at eight and continue until twelve, and each year they become more attached to each other and to the ideals of integrity, cooperation, and independence that Camp Wigwam fosters.”  At thirteen, he explained, the girls graduate to a co-ed camp a few miles away, which was closer to Great Barrington, as well as Tanglewood and Jacob’s Pillow.  But nothing else had the setting or spirit of Camp Wigwam.  It left its imprint on girls forever.

“Was there anything about camp that bothered her?” Hilda asked me.  This was one of the times when she didn’t look at me.  What could I say?  “Nothing” seemed the only possible response.

At night the Bluebirds — all six of us except Marina, who would listen impassively — competed for the dirtiest song or story.  We sang about men in search of prostitutes who “walked down Canal Street” and who, once they got “it” in, couldn’t get “it” out.  We recited limericks about ministers “from Birmingham” (pronounced “Birm — ingum”), who, unlike the benign and understanding ministers we were urged to confide in, “fucked little girls while confirming ’em”.  We told stories about masked men who said things like “your mother loved it” and about delicatessens where strange objects — mislaid penises — turned up in pickle jars.  In our imaginations, we were whores; violated English schoolgirls; daughters of corrupt and lascivious mothers, who sold us into white slavery; and castrating pickle-mongers, in search of especially juicy specimens to foist on unsuspecting customers.

We got ourselves fired up, not just with jokes but with memorized lines from various books from our parents’ or older brothers’ collections — my favorite was “he was a piston gone wild” from a book I found in the night table in my parents’ bedroom.   And on Saturday nights (when our counselor mysteriously disappeared after 9 pm), we progressed to what we called “running the gauntlet”.   One of us walked up and down the row of beds naked, while the other girls commented in lewd or admiring tones.  Why our counselor wasn’t there, I can no longer recall.  Was there something called a “development meeting” that she had to attend every Saturday night or is that simply what she told us?  Had she gone to meet her boyfriend from the camp across the lake?

Into this nighttime debauchery came Marina: Russian, precocious, physically developed, ugly/beautiful Marina, who looked nothing like a blonde cheerleader, or even like Lorna Jenkins: our ideals of beauty.

How could I possibly tell Lieutenant Hilda Kline about running the gauntlet?  Or about the Saturday night, one week before her death, when we made Marina do it?

“I don’t think it was camp that bothered Marina,” I told Hilda.  “Maybe other things.”

“What other things?”

But I clammed up.  “I don’t know.  I really don’t.”

“Do you want a Coke?” Hilda asked me.  Cokes were almost unheard of at camp — reserved, like sugar babies and sugar daddies, for our treks to the Monterey General Store.  We drank water during the day, orange and apple juice at breakfast, and at lunch and dinner we had “bug juice”: weak Kool-Aid.

“Yeah,” I said.  “A Coke would be great.”   I wondered how she could possibly get me a Coke, since we were meeting in the camp office, a small room to the right of the entry in the house overlooking the lake where my parents stayed during the summer. My parents didn’t allow soda at home in Garden City, and as far as I knew they certainly didn’t keep any in the house at camp, where I’d spent my summers until I was old enough to attend as a camper, as the youngest Wren.

In the basement beneath us was the dark room where Marina and I and the two Owls in photography class had developed our first photographs: black-and-white images of garbage cans.   It was my father’s idea.   “There is beauty in everything,” he said mildly.  “Even garbage.  I want each of you to find it.”

Only Marina didn’t smirk.  She listened thoughtfully, her face rapt and serious.  Then she suggested in her soft accented English that the two of us work as a team to find the best garbage.  Unskilled in the art of polite refusal, I nodded.  Together, that week, we aimed our Brownie cameras at discarded trays of food, the crumpled napkins and sodden crusts.  We traded clean-up duties with Lorna and Stephanie so we could zoom in on bathroom wastebaskets, with their furry mass of band-aids, cotton balls, and who-knows-what.  We squatted to capture the afternoon light dappling the aluminum garbage cans behind the mess hall.

These days when I’m asked to give the “candid” treatment to a wedding photo shoot — no posed pictures, please, just the couple’s love shining forth from every shot — I remember my father’s words:  there is beauty in everything.  Sometimes, as everyone knows but won’t admit, brides are not beautiful; sometimes the groom is candidly nuzzling his ex-girlfriend or the bride’s best friend; sometimes an uncle sits with the six-year-old flower girl on his lap, her ballerina skirt camouflaging his hand resting too comfortably on her soft thigh.  Sometimes there’s a turd — human or otherwise — in the gazebo that even the white wicker bench and flowered trellises cannot mask.  That’s when I stop shooting.  When I’m asked to go “candid” I can’t do it.

“Candid” is when I really have to lie.

When Hilda got up to look for a Coke, she left behind a manila folder.  I lifted the cover and looked inside.  An unusual number of photos of Marina (at least twenty) were on top of the pile: playing tennis, trying out for the play, paddling a canoe, emerging from the lake, even fencing.  More photos than I could recall my father taking of any one camper, even me.  Marina was highly photogenic; if I hadn’t known she was eleven, I might have said sixteen.  When I heard Hilda coming back, I closed the folder and looked up.

The girls of Bunk Six didn’t actually make Marina run the gauntlet.  She volunteered.  “Whose turn?” Stephanie Petersen asked, in her Lanz nightgown with the smocking around the collar, brushing her hair till it shone.  It was the fifth week of camp and chilly for August.  The answer was obvious: everyone in our bunk had done it except Marina and me.

“I’ll go,” Marina said.  It happened so fast.  She stripped off her pajamas, which were pale blue with tiny yellow flowers — a present from her grandmother, she told me, whom she lived with.  She slowly walked down the aisle between the cots, her eyes unfocused, staring at nothing.  “Nipples too dark,” called out Stephanie.  Someone else said: “She looks like a goddamned statue.”  For a full minute no one else spoke.  I like to think we were awed into silence by the beauty of her body and that she realized it, too.  But then Francine, who was flat as a board, said, “No one will believe it.  Even the Owls told me they think she has tennis balls under her T-shirt.  Wait till I tell them.”

There was an unspoken rule that we didn’t speak to anyone about our Saturday night activities.  Saturday night in Bunk Six was a kind of hothouse, a secret garden where anything was okay, a dreamy, steamy world cut off from everything outside the bunk.   The rest of the time we were innocent young girls, trying out for parts in The Wizard of Oz, practicing our backhands, developing our first pictures in photography class.

But Francine’s words exposed Marina outside the five of us.  Now all eyes were upon her; and all found her beyond the pale.  It was too much.  Marina, who was always so distinctively, even eerily, composed, flung herself on her cot at the end of the row.  Her shoulders shook and for a moment I thought she was laughing, but no.  And it didn’t end there.  In a moment, she had wrapped herself in her ratty green camp blanket and, barefoot, fled the bunk, the screen door banging behind her.  She escaped us, escaped herself and the image of herself that Francine presented — a spectacle in a Camp Wigwam T-shirt, ridiculed behind her back.  It was the “behind her back” part that, when I thought of it, surely was the worst.  In seconds I wrapped my own blanket around me — I (unlike Marina) with my pajamas on, pink ones with feet, which were very popular — and ran out of the bunk, after Marina.  I had to.  I was the daughter of the camp director.

I found her sitting on a swing by the lake.  She sat without moving, looking across the lake at a dark shape on the other side, the rock that we both had to swim to for our swim test the week before, a rock known as Manatee Point because of its big, round, awkward shape.  Manatees — the ugliest mammals known to man.  She had stopped crying and just sat there.  “Marina?” I said.  It was dark and I didn’t want to frighten her.  The camp was quiet.  There were lights on across the lake and in my parents’ house, at the top of the hill, at the border of the woods where we had our campfires and cookouts.   That was where the dark room was, too, where, under my father’s tutelage, we developed our pictures.

When Marina turned to look at me, her face was streaked with tears.

“That blanket must be itchy,” I said.

She shrugged. “I didn’t think I’d mind so much,” she said.  “I thought I could do it.  I thought I could do it better than you.  That’s why I volunteered.  But when Francine said that about the Owls, I couldn’t breathe.  I thought I was going to die.”

I didn’t know what to say.  My silence seemed to calm her down.

“Have you ever felt that way?” she asked me.  “Like you wanted to die?”

I shook my head.  I didn’t know.  What would that feel like?

“I never have,” she said.  “Never until now.  Not even when my mother and father thought we would be killed — when the police pounded on our door.  They found out my parents were trying to get me and my grandmother and my uncle out of Russia.  So my parents hid us in a closet in the pantry.  They told the police that my uncle and I were at my grandmother’s house, in the Ukraine.  It was summer vacation.  We stayed in the closet for twelve hours and — promise you’ll never tell anyone this . . ”

“I promise,” I said quickly, my heart beating fast.

“My uncle — he’s my uncle but he’s only five years older than me — he was smashed up against me.   He felt my breasts, first just by accident . . .”

“Oh,” I said, the word escaping me.  I was trying not to say anything; I didn’t want Marina to stop speaking, to stop telling me.

“When I didn’t push him away, he did it harder, deliberately.  Not hard so it hurt, but so I knew it was deliberate and not an accident.  I didn’t stop him because I liked it.  Now, he’s here in the U.S., living in Flatbush with my grandmother and me.   He doesn’t bother me much anymore — he has a real girlfriend.  But I remember what he did.”

Then she smiled.  “He taught me a word.  Pizdah!”

She leaned over and whispered to me what it meant.

I didn’t say anything for a long time.  What could I say?  Marina’s experience made our dirty jokes and sexy quotations and running the gauntlet seem stupid and juvenile.   She had lived it, whereas I had done nothing but look at some books — books hidden in the basement near the dark room, books in my father’s bedside drawer at home with titles so lurid I didn’t dare open them.  There was one I didn’t like to think about called “Daddy’s Little Girl.”  I wasn’t little.  I was tall and angular, with oversized feet and gangly limbs.  I was bookish and awkward and in my pink-footed pajamas far more ridiculous than Marina could ever be.  At that moment, I felt we were both doomed.  Doomed to what? I didn’t know.  But doomed nonetheless.

“What’s his name?” I asked.  “Your uncle.”

“Ilya” she said.

“Like Ilya Kuryakin,” I thought but didn’t say the name, not wanting to appear foolish. “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” was one of my favorite TV shows.  A spy drama on TV, I thought, that was the pinnacle of the excitement in my life, while Marina was living out a real drama, complete with secret police pounding down the door.  How could I have thought our stupid charade would affect her?  But it had.  She had run from the bunk, crying.

“At least he’s sixteen,” I reasoned.  “Your uncle.  He could almost be a boyfriend.  What does he look like?”

“He’s not that bad,” she said, hugging the blanket around her.  “You’re right,” she said.  “He was like a boyfriend.”  At that moment, I thought I’d never have a boyfriend — or breasts.  I envied Marina her uncle, and she knew it.

Hilda drank her Coke straight from the can, so I did the same, but the bubbles made me choke a little and a little soda dribbled down my chin.

“Sorry,” I said, embarrassed.

“Tell me about skinny-dipping,” Hilda said.

I was relieved.  Skinny-dipping, of course, was completely different from running the gauntlet.  That I could talk about.  It was, as far as I knew, one of those camp traditions (like “French-ing” the counselors’ beds) that was publicly forbidden, but privately allowed.  The lake was clean and the water silky smooth, so that the feel of it on bare skin was like a cloud.  We’d done it every summer since I’d started as a Wren.  Different bunks did it at different times, generally with the counselors right there.  Occasionally the counselors even participated.   I told all this to Hilda.

Then she said, “So this was known to everyone?  Your parents knew, also?”

I downed the last of my Coke, choking a little.  It hadn’t crossed my mind that there was anything bad about skinny dipping.  Should my father, the camp director, and my mother, the camp nurse, have put a stop to it?  “I don’t know,” I said.

The one similarity between running the gauntlet and skinny-dipping was that they were both Saturday night activities.  On Saturday nights, my parents sometimes went into Great Barrington for a movie or to Tanglewood for a concert.  Sometimes, but not always.

“It’s fun,” I said.  “We do it every summer.  Nothing bad ever happened before.”  Because it was dark, because we all did it together, slipping out of our terry cloth bathrobes into the shining silvery lake, because we jumped in so quickly, some of us wrapping our arms around our knees and “cannonballing” in — there was no shame associated with skinny-dipping.  Running the gauntlet brought out our differences; when we skinny-dipped we were all the same.

“There was lightning,” I said.  “The night Marina drowned.”

“Are you sure?” Lieutenant Hilda Kline leaned back in her swivel chair.  She clicked her ballpoint pen.  There had been flashes of light.  This much I knew.  But there were things that happened that night, words that were spoken, that I would never share.  Not with Hilda or with anyone.

The night of the skinny-dipping was only a week after Marina had run the gauntlet.  I was uncomfortably aware, since our talk on the swings, that increasingly she viewed me as her best friend.  Now, at the edge of the lake, she dropped her robe without fear or shame and held out her hand.  “Let’s jump in together,” she said.  There were six of us in Bunk Six, and suddenly it seemed as if the pairings had been determined.  I was not to be paired with Lorna, or even Janie; in fact, the two of them were now declared “best friends.”  That left Stephanie and Francine.  I had no choice, really.

“Yeah,” Stephanie called, from where she was already in the water, her brilliant red hair pinned up so it wouldn’t get too wet.  “You better get in, Marina, before someone takes your picture.”

“Yeah, like Mr. Epstein,” said Francine.  The four girls in the water were laughing and sputtering.  I felt my face burn.  I was still in my robe.

“No wonder he has his own dark room!” Marina said suddenly, laughing too.  “Now, I see everything!”  Her Russian accent made her exclamation especially funny.  “Give me your hand,” she pleaded.  “Come on!”

“Who do you think I am?” I said, slipping off my robe and laying it on the grassy dock.  “Your Uncle Ilya?”

“Who’s Uncle Ilya?” called out Lorna, who was treading water nearby, her blonde hair in wet undulating curls, her dimples showing.

There was a loud splash as Marina jumped in.  Any answer I might have given — and there was none — was drowned out in the tumult.  A moment later, as I slipped silently into the water, I watched Marina’s strong arms, her beautiful strong legs, propel her away from us.  Away from me.  Toward Manatee Point.

I didn’t tell any of this to Lieutenant Hilda Kline.  I thought about the photographs in the folder. The house seemed terribly silent.

“When I said before that Marina was bothered by life,” I told Hilda, “I was thinking about what happened with her uncle.”

“Her uncle?”

I waited, listening to the sound of my own breathing.  Marina was dead, I thought sadly.  There was nothing to be done.  I imagined how terrible my parents felt that this had happened under their watch.  Then the tears begin to roll down my cheeks.  “He molested her,” I said.  “She never got over it.  Her uncle molested her.  That’s why I think she drowned.”

Later, much later, I thought about the night we went skinny dipping.  Where were my parents that night?  Had they gone into Great Barrington or was that the week before? I thought about the lightning that perhaps wasn’t really lightning.

Then I thought about the final words I had exchanged with Marina and how she jumped in and began to swim, fearlessly, recklessly, towards Manatee Point.

I tried to conjure the sounds of the lake that night — the girls calling to one another, the splashing as each of us jumped in, the waves lapping at the buoys along the dock. The memory comes in flashes and then recedes, the sounds are there and not there, loud and then nothing.

I’ve tried to persuade myself that Marina didn’t hear me.