Maggie, Kent, and Callie arrive right on time to drop Duncan off at camp. I’m greeting all my kids for the week—helping them get settled and answering their parents’ questions—so I don’t get to tour the camp with my family. Other than at the prospective family open house Camp Prairie Star holds every January, Maggie hasn’t been back since her own idyllic summer session twenty-five years ago.
I’d love to follow her around and hear her recount her memories, but maybe there will be time for that after Skit Night on Friday.
My focus this week is Duncan, not that I’m planning to play favorites with the kids in my cabin. I mean that I’m looking forward to experiencing Camp Prairie Star through Duncan’s eyes.
It’s not lost on me that Duncan is the son Maggie did choose to raise. I know the situations were completely different. When Annie and I were born, Maggie was barely sixteen. She wasn’t married, or even with our birth father anymore. He wasn’t interested in being a dad at all. And there weretwoof us.
When Duncan was born, Maggie was thirty years old and in a loving marriage with a supportive partner who was excited to be a dad.
But still, if I had grown up with Maggie as my mom, I would have come to camp for the first time when I was ten, like Duncan is doing this summer. I would have grown up with Camp Prairie Star as a part of me, like Maggie did and like Duncan, and eventually Callie, will.
In my imagination, there’s a ghost Gage, an alternate-dimension Gage, who had that experience. Like the many Peter Parkers in the multiverse ofSpider-Man, I can sometimes see another version of myself in my mind—the Gage that could have been if Maggie had kept me, right alongside the Gage that I am as Ted and Dawn’s son.
And the most disturbing part is that sometimes I’m not sure if the me I actually am is the real Gage or if ghost Gage is the true version. I don’t know which Gage is better off, though it’s easy to look at any challenge in my life and imagine the grass would have been greener in my ghost kingdom.
Being here this summer, and especially being here with Duncan, who is like a shadow of who I might have been, is my effort to combine my current self with the ghost Gage that could have existed if the adults in my life had made other choices when I was born.
That night when all the families have left and it’s me, Jayden, and the seven boys who live in our cabin this week, we’re all trying to get to know each other better.
One of the boys picks up on the familiarity between me and Duncan and asks, “Do you know each other already?”
“We do,” I confirm, nodding my head, but I realize I never stopped to think about how to explain our relationship to the rest of the cabin. Adoption is not the easiest thing to explain to a bunch of kids.
“Is he your uncle or something?” another kid asks Duncan.
I’m about to step in to take the pressure off him, when he smiles.
“Gage is my brother,” Duncan says confidently. “My mom had him before she married my dad, but she couldn’t take care of him, so he went to live with another mom and dad. But he’s still my brother because distance doesn’t erase family.”
His simple explanation steals my breath, and I suddenly feel ashamed that I’ve been thinking of him in terms of my ghost self instead of in terms of being my little brother.
He’s not me. He’s not a version of me from a potential other dimension. He’s Duncan, and a pretty cool little kid. I vow to remember that this week.
I lay my hand on his shoulder. “That’s right,” I agree. “Duncan is my favorite brother, as a matter of fact.”
Duncan rolls his eyes. “I’m your only brother.”
I chuckle. He is, as far as I know anyway. No one’s kept tabs on my birth father over the years, so maybe I have more siblings out there somewhere.
The answer seems to satisfy the other boys.
“Although,” I say to Duncan with a wink, “you should have saved that information for our game of Two Truths and a Lie. Truths that sound like lies are the hardest to guess. Does everyone know how to play? I’ll go first.”
I always play Two Truths and a Lie with my campers the first night. It’s fun and easy to play and helps us all to get to know each other. I usually start, though Jayden does sometimes instead. The idea is for us to model how the game works.
“So, my name is Gage. Let’s see…” I pretend to think, even though I always use the same three statements. “I have a twin sister. My favorite baseball team is the Atlanta Braves. And I have never lived outside of Texas.”
“That kid can’t answer,” one of the boys says, pointing at Duncan.
“Fair point.” I nod. “Duncan can’t answer for me, and I can’t answer for him. Now, which of my statements was the lie?”
“I don’t think you have a twin sister,” a boy with black hair and dark brown eyes guesses.
Duncan giggles.
“Wrong,” I say. “I have a twin sister named Annie.”
“The Texas thing,” another boy shouts. “You’re a grown-up so you’ve probably lived all sorts of places.”
