And Then I Found You (4 page)

It had been an afternoon of unruffled peace, just fourteen-year-old Katie and her
mom on the pier, eating their melting ice cream cones and watching the Hilton Head
boats coming in and out of the marina. They’d shopped the small trinket stores, and
Katie’s mom bought her a brand-new shark tooth necklace, which dangled off Katie’s
slim neck. She fiddled with the point of the tooth, pressing it into the skin of her
thumb as she watched the boats move in and out of the slips as easily as fish.

“I want to be like one of those,” Katie said to her mom.

“One of what?”

“Those boats. I mean, not really a boat, but something like a boat.”

Her mom had laughed, fully, sticky with ice cream. “Something like a boat?”

“You know, like all free and wild and not stuck anywhere at all.”

“Katie, dear, don’t say
like;
that’s a bad habit. And yes, we all want that when we’re fourteen,” her mom said,
quietly. A sad tone arrived; Katie knew all her mom’s tones the way a pianist knew
all the keys.

“I’ll want it forever,” Katie said.

Her mom’s ice cream cone melted down her forearm unnoticed or touched. “I hope you
do. I hope that whatever it is you want that you don’t give it up just because someone
else asks you to do so. Anything you want, Katie, anything, don’t let someone else
talk you out of it.”

“I want another shark tooth necklace,” Katie said, grinning.

Her Mom had smiled, but with only the bottom part of her face. “Nice try.” She put
her hand on Katie’s leg. “You think you love that boy, don’t you?”

“He’s not a boy. He’s Jack. And I don’t think I do, I know I do.”

“You’re fourteen.”

“You didn’t love anyone when you were fourteen?” Katie licked the edge of the cone,
scooping the last of the ice cream into her mouth..

“No, I loved my Raggedy Ann doll. That’s about it at fourteen.” She handed the remainder
of her cone to Katie.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Well, Jack is the most amazing boy in the world.”

“You’ll let him talk you out of your dreams. That’s what love does sometimes—talks
you out of your dreams.”

“Not me,” Katie said. “Jack would talk me
into
my dreams.”

*   *   *

It should have been simple. Katie wanted to take the Winsome Wilderness job to make
a difference in the world, to help those who were helpless, to reach out to a child
who didn’t have what she’d been given. But somehow it turned complicated, like a mathematical
equation Katie could never solve.

Jack begged her not to go, saying “Why do you want to be so far away from me? There
are social work jobs all over Birmingham; you don’t have to be across the country
to help kids.” Her dad told her she was crazy, saying “You’re too far away. The money
isn’t even good.” And then there was the panicked plea from her mom, “If anything
happened to you, I’d never know and you’d be stuck in the middle of nowhere.” Katie
did her best to soothe their worries and promised to be home soon.

The job entailed camping out with thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls, helping them
learn the ways of the wilderness while keeping them in line until their therapists
showed up to counsel them two days a week. Katie and the other guides were to impart
stories and lessons to the girls, but the main goal was to allow nature to do the
work.

On the nights she wasn’t camping, Katie shared a two-bedroom apartment in Timber,
Arizona, with five other girls and a mass of bunk beds, knowing that rarely would
any of them be there at the same time. It was the perfect way to have a home base
and also save money. Perfect, that is, except for the rare times when all of them
had off the same week. Field guides, they were called. After one week of intense training
and an assurance of her love for nature’s unreliable behavior, Katie went off into
the wilderness. No cell phones. No TV. No cars. No cable. Only nature. And Katie fell
in love—with the wilderness, with the girls, with the work.

The pain humans inflicted one on another, even in love, had done damage to these girls
in ways Katie had never known. She watched as they arrived angry and hurt, slowly
opening to nature’s erratic and tender wildness. They learned self-reliance by crafting
necessary items. They took what they’d been given in the wilderness and created something
out of it: a spoon, an arrow, a pouch of leather, and, most importantly, a fire. Then
they took what they’d been given inside—all the wonderfulness inside—and created a
new life. The creative spirit reigned in the wilderness, and each girl who graduated
took a piece of Katie’s heart with her.

After three months of summer work, Katie decided to stay on with her job. She’d always
thought of work as something to fill time and make money, a nuisance that preoccupied
her from greater things. She soon discovered that this work filled her up, changed
her as she grew into either new Katie or the real Katie; she wasn’t sure which and
frankly didn’t care either. Katie had always needed a goal, an end point, something
to work toward with greedy need. But this job—and it was so much more than a job—took
her to a place both inside and outside herself she never knew existed. Helping wounded
young girls to heal instilled in her a generous feeling, one that extended past her
own demands and desires. Meg had been right—working with these girls was a miracle.
Although she missed Jack, most thoughts of self were buried under the work she was
doing.

Needing to see Jack and also explain why she was staying longer at her job, Katie
gathered her savings and bought a plane ticket to Birmingham. When she arrived at
the off-campus apartment that Jack shared with two other law school students, a party
was in full swing. A real college party with a sweaty keg floating in a trash can
and girls sitting on countertops and floors.

The room smelled like sweat and old beer. Katie wound her way through the apartment
until she found Jack in his bedroom, standing in front of his closet, talking to his
roommate about who would pay for the keg this time around.

“Baby, you’re here!” he said, when he saw her standing in his doorway. He moved towards
her and in two steps lifted her off the floor.

“I’m interrupting a party, I think.”

“You don’t interrupt anything of mine,” Jack kissed her, an unassailable kiss that
made her weak and indecisive about anything and everything.

“You two are ridiculous,” the roommate said and laughed, slamming the door behind
him as he left them alone.

“So,” Jack said, “Tell me that you’re here to say you are never returning to that
faraway place where I can’t even get you on the phone. Please say that.”

She couldn’t.

“I committed to this year.” Katie cringed as she said the words. “You’re so busy with
school, and I love what I’m doing. I thought one more year and then you’d be almost
done and we would … settle in a little bit.”

He sat on the edge of his single bed, unmade and rumpled. “A year is a long time.
A really long time. You’ll miss so much.”

“But then I’ll have everything else forever.” She had practiced this steady proclamation
on the plane.

Jack didn’t answer.

“I have to do this. For the first time in my life, I’m making a difference in someone
beside myself. There’s this girl, Sara—her dad died last year. She was the angriest
person you’d ever met, and she graduated last week with a new heart. You can’t imagine
the beauty out there. The mountains turning to desert to mountain again. The—”

Jack held up his hand. “I know. I know. I read it all in your letters. The feathers
you collect. The things you’ve learned to make. You sound happier than you’ve ever
been.”

“Not ever been, but happy, yes. Making a difference, yes. If I stayed here, I’d be
passing the time waiting for you to graduate. So this seems a much better way to wait.
Right?”

“You see this as a way to wait? Wait for what?”

“You, of course.”

“I would never leave you for a year,” he said.

“I’m not leaving you. I’m taking a job. There’s a huge difference.”

“It doesn’t feel like there’s any difference. What about us?”

“Us?” She kissed him. “There is always us. You’re going to be buried underneath a
stack of books taller than me. If I don’t do this, if I don’t try this now, I know
I will regret it for the rest of my life.”

“We made it through four years at separate colleges, now it’s time to be together.”

“I’m begging you to understand.” She took both his hands and squeezed them. She tried
to explain that if she didn’t do this one thing she would never again do what she
wanted, that if she could let someone—even Jack—talk her out of doing this, that she
would never again follow through on anything important in her life. Never. “It’s one
year. That’s all.” She wiggled onto his lap and kissed his neck. “Love is enough.
It always is.”

“Sadly, sometimes it’s not enough.”

“You are so pragmatic. My lawyer, Jack Adams.”

“Please don’t go.”

“I have to. That’s the thing, Jack. I absolutely have to. But I believe in us. I do.”

At that four girls burst into the bedroom, calling Jack’s name. They stopped short
when they saw Katie. “Sorry,” one tall brunette said as she shut the door.

“Well,” Katie stood and looked down at him. “I guess you aren’t going to be too lonely
while I’m gone.”

“Don’t turn this around,” he said. “I’m not doing anything wrong. At all.”

“I’m not either,” Katie said.

“If I’m not doing anything wrong and you’re not doing anything wrong, why the hell
does everything feel so wrong?” Jack asked, squinting at Katie as if a bright light
shone into his eyes.

“I don’t know,” she said in a whisper. “I really don’t know. But I can’t fight about
it, and I can’t leave with us angry.”

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

*   *   *

The camping and wilderness routine returned to Katie as if her visit to Jack had been
a quick dream. She opened her eyes in the dead of night, her head lying on a bunched-up
sweatshirt. As usual, the first thing she looked for in the night sky was the moon,
but it was a new moon, not invisible exactly, but translucent. The arching bell of
dark sky reached to touch the edges of the earth, holding its innumerable stars. A
young girl next to Katie whispered. “There are a million more stars here than where
I live in New York.”

Katie smiled into the dark, once again explaining. “There are always the same amount
of stars, but here you can see them. Just like you’ll soon be able to see all the
beautiful things in you that were there all along. It takes the wilderness to open
your eyes.”

“Whatever,” the girl said in the hoarse and angry whisper they all seemed to arrive
with.

That night Katie missed Jack with a deep ache. It was a feeling that snuck up on her
in the quietest moments. How was it possible to both love where she was and yet miss
where she wasn’t?

She’d seen the sun set and rise on the same seemingly endless terrain. She’d eaten
food she’d never heard of and slept less than she knew a human body could sleep and
still function. She collected feathers, which she often found exactly when she was
thinking about something that needed an answer. She knew her days by the phases of
the moon. The shooting stars—twenty or thirty a night—were her lullaby and passageway
to sleep. What was once foreign was now familiar.

Many times Katie felt that her family was frozen in time, but much happened that year.
After an early graduation from University of South Carolina, Tara had eloped with
her boyfriend, Kyle; now she wrote witty columns about marriage for the local paper.
Molly was in her sophomore year in high school and her letters were full of exclamation
points and drama. Her parents were living a second dating life, their first cut short
by marriage.

No one in the family—not one—agreed with Katie’s job choice. They believed she was
running away from life when she told them over and over that she was actually not
running anywhere, but maybe, just maybe, was learning a new life while touching the
lives of others.

Jack wrote letters and she wrote back, long letters about everything she saw and felt
in this strange terrain. In every correspondence, she told him,
I wish you could see what I see.
She missed him, his voice, his touch, and yet the longing for him couldn’t stand
against the need to stay at her job. With every girl’s life that changed, a new young
girl was beginning to see her way through a cloud of chaos, and Katie couldn’t leave
her alone in that misery.

What Katie wasn’t able to explain, the phenomenon that lacked words, was how passing
time in the desert was different than actual-time at home. Scientifically, of course
this time alteration wasn’t true, but in the paradox that was nature’s way, it was
vivid and unerring. Ten days strung together were only two days. While at home a month
passed, in the desert it was a week or less. She didn’t feel she’d been gone too long
and they—her family and Jack—felt she’d been gone forever. A lifetime perhaps.

Jack’s written words filled those empty missing-him spaces until they’d be together.
The delay, Katie thought, was where the love grew larger in longing.

The first year had passed and each time she was pressed to come home to Jack, she
gave it a time limit,
Just one more month,
Katie would write.
There is this new girl, Steph, and she is making so much progress. Her dad almost
destroyed her, but she’s coming out of her shell. She has a month left … then … then
I’ll come home.

And then,
They need me two more months because they lost their best field guide. I promise,
just two more
—Even inside these explanations and excuses, Katie only felt as if their love was
waiting, never as if it were leaving. Until the week Jack’s letter ended with,
We should both be free to date others by now.
But Katie didn’t take it literally, only as a hint that they could, but of course
wouldn’t.