The Girls of No Return (17 page)

Amanda raised her eyebrows. “I see.”

I placed one hand on my stomach and one hand on my head. I knew I must look like a preschooler or a clown —
Now pat your head and rub your stomach!
— but I couldn't think of what else to do. “Really,” I said. “I think I'm going to be sick. May I go to the restroom?” I was using my most courteous voice. I was almost unrecognizable. I stepped around the chair and nodded my head toward the door.

Amanda sighed. “Sure,” she said. “Take all the time you need.” As I walked out, I heard her say, “Now, Shandra, what about you?”

I couldn't walk away fast enough.

And the funny thing is, I thought I'd gotten away with it. I hid out in the cabin for the rest of Circle Share, scratching my initials into the side of my bunk with a pen cap. I lay on my bunk during Waterfront, pretending to be asleep. I even sat with my cabin at dinner without being asked about my “illness,” though Boone did pull me aside as we walked into the Mess Hall and whispered, “No one leaves Circle Share, you idiot.” I hoped perhaps that no one besides her had noticed that I left so abruptly. Or that no one cared.

I was so wrong.

Margaret caught up to me as I was walking with Boone and Jules out of the Mess Hall. She was wearing her train conductor overalls again, and had tossed a knit cap over her spiky hair. “Lida,” she said. “A minute, please?”

“Sure.” I shrugged, and turned to follow her. I looked back in time to see Boone smirk at Jules and mouth something indiscernible.

Margaret and I headed through the trees toward the beach. The sun had just set, and Bob had the blue-black, forbidding darkness that it always got that time of night. It had never rained, but once the sun went down, a familiar chill had descended over the school. We walked out onto the dock, and looked across the water.

“Let's talk,” Margaret said, and paused. “I hear you were sick during Circle Share.”

I was quiet. The dock rocked under our feet in time with my own breath.

“I get the feeling that you think talking is an elective at Alice Marshall.” She spoke softly, so that I had to strain to hear her. “Lida, it's not. You'll come away with nothing if you don't open up and share. You've been here for almost two months. It's time to start participating.” She looked at me and sighed. “Whether you admit it or not, your past actions have affected others. Including yourself.” She said it like it was something I owned and had neglected, set aside on a windowsill and forgotten about.
Your Self
. “You still need to repair those relationships.”

“How?” I asked. I wanted to explain to Margaret that my Thing was a relentless series of events that I couldn't change and would never escape. How could I repair relationships when I didn't have any relationships to begin with?

Margaret pulled her knit cap down farther over her ears. “These Things don't happen
to
you, Lida. You
choose
them. Or if you don't choose them, you at least choose how you react to them. Once you accept that you are responsible for your happiness, you'll begin to work on the things that could make you happy. Family. Friends. Yourself.”

She said
yourself
again in that way of hers. Only Margaret could do this. Only Margaret could sound like Yoda and yet also like a rock star.

I swallowed. If I looked carefully, I thought I could just see the peaked roof of Ben's lookout.

“Lida,” Margaret began again, but I interrupted her.

“I can't,” I said.

“Can't what?”

“Can't talk about my Thing.” I was breathing quickly now, and my face felt hot.

Margaret looked at me steadily. “You can,” she said.

“No, I can't.”

She didn't take her eyes off me. “You are no different from any girl here,” she said. “Your problems are no greater and no less important than anyone else's. The only difference that I can see, Lida, is that you're unwilling to do the work of healing.” She spoke matter-of-factly, unsympathetically. The Margaret I knew was gone, replaced by someone who sounded just like Bev, just like every guidance counselor and therapist I had been dragged to see in the past year.

“Healing?” My voice was loud and sharp in comparison. “What healing?” I took a deep breath and continued. “Am I supposed to tell everyone what happened? If I just say it, will it be like — windshield wiper, it's erased?” I waved my arm mechanically in front of my face, half laughing, half shouting. I felt unhinged. “No, thank you.” There were tears in my eyes, and I blinked quickly, hoping Margaret hadn't noticed.

“Lida,” Margaret said more softly, “I understand how you're feeling. You're afraid that you'll expose your pain and that nothing will change.”

One tear rolled down my cheek, and I swiped at it angrily with the cuff of my hoodie.

Margaret continued. “But I can promise you: Telling your truth makes all the difference in the world. Some of the girls here will be grappling with the consequences of the things they've done for years. Some of them have already been to juvie, you know, and some will end up going back. But they will be in a different place when they do. It's not what they've done that changes; it's how they relate to it.”

There was a slight wind coming off the lake, and I hugged myself.

“Look,” she went on. “Why don't you start by writing it down. You don't have to show anyone. Just get it out somehow. Start at the beginning. Leave nothing out. Can you do that?”

I nodded once.

“Good.” Margaret turned to go. With her back to me, she said, “And, Lida, this isn't a suggestion. It's a requirement — if you want to stay here, that is.” She walked back down the length of the dock, her footfall as gentle and quiet as a cat's.

That night, after Bev had checked on our cabin, I pulled my headlamp out from under my pillow and put it on. I opened my unicorn journal in the weak light of the beam.

“What are you doing?” asked Jules from across the room.

“Mapping my world,” I said. “It's very therapeutic.”

“Good luck,” said Boone. “If you figure out where you are, let us know.”

“Ha-ha,” I said.

We'd been Mapping Our World for a couple of weeks now, though I didn't have much to show for it. A few doodles of trees and flowers; one rough sketch of a woman, her hand resting on a doorknob.

The cabin was quiet. I turned to a fresh page in the journal.
Start at the beginning
, Margaret had said.
Leave nothing out.

I stabbed at the journal swiftly with my pen. It poked a tiny hole through the paper.
There
, I thought to myself.
That's
what it was like. I stabbed at it again. And again. And then I started writing.

My mother's not dead.

I put the pen down and looked at what I'd written. I could see the letters, but it was strange — they didn't seem to work together to make a whole word, a complete sentence. So I grabbed the pen and wrote it down again.

My mother's not dead.

Now they started to make sense. I kept writing.

She's not dead, but I don't know where she is.

It was so hard to keep my hand steady as I wrote. I was shaking, and I knew it was just a matter of time before the tears started to fall, so I wrote faster, the words starting to resemble scattered twigs across the page.

It'd be so easy to say it doesn't matter. To say, maybe, that an eight-year-old can't know her mother that well anyway, and that kids heal, they're resilient, blah blah blah — all the things I said to the family therapists that my dad and Terri dragged me to those first few years.

Deep breath.

But I did know her. I knew her in fragments.

Making up a new recipe on a Sunday morning, laughing as we threw eggs and flour and basil and celery into a pan and watching it bubble through the clear oven door.

Walking around the neighborhood together when I couldn't sleep. Summertime, the evening still light enough for me to see the outline of her hands, stuffed in her pockets. Her voice a perfect monotone as she answered my stupid questions about flowers and trees.

Waiting for her inside the school after everyone else had been picked up. How she ran in, her apology too loud. How, in the car, her face had dissolved into someone else's face.
Why didn't you remind me. You have to remind me next time.
She was only wearing one earring. She'd forgotten her shoes.

Watching my birthday cake sail into the backyard, landing upside down in the rhubarb.

Dancing in the living room to an old ABBA record. Her arms like propellers. Her head like a hammer.

And this one, again and again: Standing next to her at the kitchen table, waiting for her to look at me. How she'd reach over and touch my head absentmindedly from time to time, like she was reminding herself that I was still there. Still a burden. Still the one wrong thing in her life that she couldn't get away from.

Until she did.

If my father knows where she is, or has heard from her over the years, he's given no indication. He's never talked about where the divorce papers came from, though I saw them once in an envelope on the kitchen table. I didn't ask, because I didn't want to know. Even then, I understood that there's never going to be some great drama in which I finally meet my mother again and ask her why she left and it turns out that she worked for the mob, or had a tragic past that was about to catch up with her, or even that she just got lost one day and never found her way back. That's not what happened.

And sometimes, I can even convince myself that I'm okay without her. Okay with not knowing why she left, or why she hasn't come back, not once, to see how I've grown. But other times, I know that her absence means
everything
. Then I feel this canyon inside of me, and I know that, somewhere at the bottom, is her reason for leaving. And that reason was me: something I did, something I said. Or maybe everything I ever did or said — all of it wrong, from the very beginning.

I reached up and angrily wiped my face with the back of my hand. I turned more toward the wall so that no one could see me crying if they woke up.

Oh, Dad tried, at first. He said everything the child psychologist told him to, like it wasn't my fault and I still had him, and my mother loved me even though she left. Then he ran out of steam, and I stopped being eight. We never mention her anymore, and if we do, it goes something like this:

Me: Why the hell would you ever buy a compost bin, if you don't like vegetables?

Dad: I didn't. That other person did.

Terri: Who wants some coffee?

Me: Fuck off.

That other person. It's what we've always called her. As in, that other person in the checkout line, that other person in the emergency exit row, that other person in the room right here, right now, every single day, breathing in my ear, looking past me, telling me good-bye.

There it was — my Sea Level Thing, my pain. I hoped that my cabinmates couldn't hear me crying, my breath coming out in harsh bursts. I was suddenly so tired. I wanted nothing more than to put the pen down and go to sleep, but I knew I couldn't stop now. I was done lying — I'd shared the beginning. Now I had to share the rest. I had to write about what I'd done.

And so I kept writing. I wrote until the cabin's windows started to shimmer with the approaching dawn. I wrote until it was all there, every contour line accounted for, what happened that day in the bathroom, what happened at the hospital. I put into words, for the first time, what I'd done and why I'd done it: my Thing. And then I slept soundly, filled with a peaceful exhaustion that I hadn't felt since I was seven.

 

 

I know I look terrible. I didn't sleep last night, because I was up writing, collecting the words from somewhere in the back of my mind and setting them down again. It was the second night in a row that I haven't slept, and my hair, which hangs below my shoulders now, is greasy and tangled. Normally, I wouldn't go to school with it looking like this, but some things are more important than glossy, cascading locks. Besides, the
BHS Telegram
is meeting later today for the last time before graduation, and nothing says “literary magazine” like poetically disheveled hair.

I'll never forget how it felt to write in that purple unicorn journal. I've done a lot of work over the past year and a half, hard work involving expressing and explaining and dialoguing and internalizing and externalizing — all words Dr. Hemler has thrown at me (and with good reason). But nothing I've done can compare with what it was like to write down my Thing for the first time, to just put it on paper and make it
real.
It seems so clear to me now, but I didn't even know what my Sea Level Thing was until I started writing.

And now I'm doing it again. Therapists are smart, but they don't always ask the right questions. Dr. Hemler might say: “Have you made your peace with what happened, Lida?” and I would say, “Yes.” But if he were to ask me, for instance, if I've forgiven myself, I would have to say, “I'm trying. I'm really trying.” And then I'd pick up my pen.