Imperfect Birds (46 page)

J
ames did all the talking at the airport ticket counter, while Elizabeth stood beside him trying to calm herself. Her shoulders had rolled forward again. She felt like a mental patient being transferred by a federal marshal, or a drunken boater on the Seine, one foot in the rowboat, one foot onshore, her arms holding oars unsteadily above the water.

Everything in her ached like the visible part of the garden, dry from crying, twiggy, scratchy, holding its breath until the rains came. You had to remind yourself of all that the soil held, or you’d lose all hope. She found a seat near the ticket counter, took three aspirin, held her hands over her roiling stomach like a pregnant woman, and got out her letter to Rosie.

“Darling,” it began in her best penmanship on stationery. “This will be an inadequate attempt to tell you how devastating your drug use was to your family, your future, and especially to your health—mental, psychiatric, psychic, physical.” She looked up at James, still at the counter, tucking their boarding passes into the inside pocket of his ratty old jacket. His letter was so concise—you scared us to death, you treated your mother and me like shit, you were throwing away everything most precious to you, and to us—but hers meandered from mentions of Rosie’s lies and betrayal, to proclamations of love and respect and hope. James had helped her edit out the guilt-mongering, but insisted she not minimize the destruction they had lived through. How honest were you supposed to be with your kid, how honest was healthy for them to hear? Certainly not a cathartic spew. But in the jumble of terror, hatred, resentment, hope, rage, guilt, shame, and overwhelming love, what were the salient points? She’d written a heartbroken, lonely list of treachery and deceit—the drugs and alcohol, the money missing from Elizabeth’s purse, Rosie’s lies about where she was going, whom she would be with, the Adderall Alice confessed to, the raves Jody told Elizabeth about, a week after they sent Rosie away, the Ecstasy, the cough syrup, the bust on the hill, the sneaking out at night, driving stoned and drunk—good God almighty. As she read her list in the airport, it finally struck Elizabeth full-on in her gut—her kid had been totally out of control.

She shared this with James when he came over from the counter. Leaning over, she rustled her letter at him and whispered in his ear, “It’s starting to occur to me that our child
may
have had a little problem.”

He drew back to study her, incredulous, until they both smiled. “Ya think?” he said. He read the letter again. “You hit all the right notes.” She folded it and tucked it into her purse. He got up to get them some water—she had not seen him sit still once today—while she closed her eyes and pretended the snug plastic armrests were a straitjacket. She clung to what Jody had said, and to the candles lit the night before, for the kids who had died. All she could think to do was turn the whole shebang over, without knowing to whom or what she was turning it over. She imagined sliding it into the in-box of some lowercase god. She held one palm close to her face, and said in silence
,
as a supplicant,
I’ll be responsible for everything on this side of my palm. You be in charge of the outcome of everything else. Today I turn over the waves. I turn over the shore, and the oars, and will sit in the boat quietly with my hands in my lap, as we prepare for whatever is to come. Nothing I do, think, say, insist upon, or withhold will affect the course of events this weekend, only the course of me.
That was so depressing to think about, although James would probably say, Maybe not.

F
our hours later, at the lodge in Utah, they got food to go from the restaurant downstairs and took it up to their plain, cozy room. There was a down quilt, worn Oriental rugs, an antique chest of drawers, and a round ox-eye window near the ceiling. There had been one just like it in her grandmother’s house, no bigger than a porthole, with a vertical molding bisecting a horizontal one so it looked like the sniper sight on a giant’s rifle. Thin moonlight showed from the other side. She didn’t know how James could eat so much of his spaghetti: he had a lot at stake, too. He must have assumed that she would partly blame him if it didn’t work out, and maybe she would at first. He had been strict with Rosie all year, so hard on her sometimes. Elizabeth picked at a salad and fries.

At quarter of seven, he went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. “It’s time to get going,” he said, pulling her to her feet. “I just brushed my one remaining tooth. Your turn.”

A
dozen adults were sitting in a circle of chairs in the center of the conference room when Elizabeth and James stepped inside. People introduced themselves, and the parents announced which child was theirs. Rosie had described Bob to a tee in one of her letters—the hedgehog hair, the wide brown eyes, his quiet voice.

Rick was the therapy leader, a fireplug of dark hair and eyes, maybe Italian-American, who bristled with gregarious authority. Bob and the instructors would be there only the first night. Rick took the parents through the story of the past weeks, telling how far the kids had come from the first grim days, describing the willfulness and insolence the instructors still encountered, the anger the kids still felt toward their parents, their deep desire to come home, their impressive wilderness skills, their Search and Rescue techniques, and then outlined what this night would be like. Finally he looked up and smiled. “I know you are not desperate for me to keep talking. Let me get your kids.”

Elizabeth felt James holding his breath, too, as Rick signaled for the big instructor Hank to open the door. The shuffle of boots on the ground broke the silence, and one by one teenagers in bright orange outdoor gear came in, not making eye contact, and trudged over to an alcove at the far end of the room, which held some gear, drums, a pile of twigs and sticks. Rosie, second in line, was the tallest of the five, and Elizabeth stared at the apparition: Rosie, broad in the shoulders, especially in foul-weather gear, her face thin and focused, pale as a soul, black tendrils spilling from her cap.

Hank closed the door.

The kids stood side by side like soldiers, holding branches in their hands, like ancient twig configurations, or rune sticks, and after a moment Elizabeth saw that the letters formed the gnarled word “trust.” Rosie, second from the right, had a letter S, twigs bent, curved, and held together with thin green vines.

“Trust,” the lead male said loudly at the far left. “T. Trust in our selves, trust in our teachers, trust in the land. T.”

“R. Respect that you and our teachers had for us once, that we had for ourselves, that we lost, that we threw away getting high,” said the girl holding the R. “R.” Rosie had written about Kath’s tantrums and episodes, but not about how pretty she was, black-haired, fair-skinned, with gigantic round brown eyes.

“U,” said the boy with the goofy expression. He looked sort of stoned. “You being here for us, you having the courage to be here. And us—the courage we have tonight, to face the past, to face the future. You, and us. U.”

“S. Sacred trust,” said Rosie, looking straight at Elizabeth, solemn, tired, older, but younger, too, without makeup, lost here, in the weirdness of the drill, but also found in a dark, deep confidence, and in her tribe. Their shoulders helped hold her up, as hers held them. “The sacred trust between parent and child, to try and do the best we can, to grow. The sacred trust of our instructors, to teach us the ways of survival, to teach us the ways of the elders. And sacred trust in ourselves, finally. S.”

“T. Trust!” intoned the black-haired boy on the end, the handsomest male, and the kids shouted together, “Trust!”

Then they broke into smiles. All the mothers wept and began to rise, but the instructors shook their heads and gestured for them to sit down. The kids put down their branches, then picked up various packs that were leaning against the wall, and one at a time brought them out. Kath announced, “This is the pack we each carry on our shoulders every day,” and took apart the tight bundle, held together with what she called a p-cord: a tarp on the outside, a thin pad inside, a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, cooking gear. Once it was all laid out, one of the boys said, “Go,” and in minutes, she assembled it all into a tight, lumpy burrito, which she slipped onto her back.

The parents cheered. Scowling, Kath stepped back. The mothers and James wiped at their eyes. The U boy demonstrated the water filtration system for the tribe, a banged-up steel water filter device with a red pump lever and plastic tubes, the ultimate symbol of sacred trust, because if you didn’t clean the filter perfectly when it was your turn, everyone ended up sick.

Rosie gathered dried leaves and grasses from a pile on the floor, and shaped them into some sort of nest, which she set down on a granite square that one of the boys had placed at her feet. She got an Altoids box from another pile of gear, and extracted a bit of black flug. She laid it on the leaves, and from her pocket pulled a rock and a metal handle of some sort. Then she smashed the metal handle against the quartz, over and over, until a thin plume of smoke rose from deep inside the nest, which Rosie blew into a low flame.

Finally the demonstration ended, and the kids looked over at Rick, who nodded. The room dissolved into pandemonium as the kids raced for their parents. Rosie plowed into her mother’s arms and then into James’s, tears pouring down her face. She pulled them into one corner of the alcove, then pushed them to the floor so they could all huddle together, cuddle and weep and exclaim over one another. “I know I only have you for an hour,” she implored. “I never thought I could forgive you, and I haven’t quite, but now I cannot stand that we can’t stay up all night together—I will go crazy between now and eight o’clock tomorrow.” She pawed Elizabeth’s weepy face with her sooty hand, and barreled up against James’s chest, handing him a horribly grimy olive-green kerchief on which to wipe himself up. Her face was bleary and scrunched with emotions, everything at once, all three of their faces showed ecstasy and pain, and they rolled into a mass, like bears, shoulders and chests, arms and legs. Rosie pulled off her foul-weather jacket. She was wearing the gray sweater she had worn when Lank and James had kidnapped her, over a black turtleneck. The hem of a pale blue undershirt peeked out below, and reaching to tuck it in, Elizabeth felt the bones of Rosie’s waist.