Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  “Are you angry now?” she asked.

  After that, they fought through another ride, and he kicked another hole in the wall, and I got another bill for it. And the answer was yes, I was starting to get angry.

  On what would be another day of recent days that I drove home in tears, I played back the last few months in my mind. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where things had gone wrong, only that they were undeniably going wrong, and getting worse. I chalked some of that up to my inexperience with horses, but there was no doubt that the more Gerta fought with Claret, the worse things got. It seemed then that I had only one choice left: to move Claret to another barn. I had no idea how I would manage him on my own—I didn’t know a lot of things, but one thing being a runaway taught me is how to leave a place. And I knew as certainly as I knew anything that things would keep getting worse if we stayed there.

  I found a beautiful and quiet barn about twenty minutes from my house—acres of farmland and paddocks sprawling next to a tranquil pond—and I gave Gerta thirty days’ notice, and I gave the new barn owner a deposit, and when she asked who my trainer was, I told her I was taking a break from having a trainer for a while. Then I came back to Gerta’s barn and told Claret. “I’m sorry that you don’t like it here,” I said, “but don’t worry—I’m going to move you to a new barn. It’s got lots of grass and a pond.” He nuzzled into my neck then, and I closed my eyes and breathed him.

  FORTY

  A few days go by, and Duwahi brings a guy back to the motel from the naval base. By now a lot of the swelling on my face has gone down, but I still have a black eye and my left ear is bruised purple and my bottom lip is scabbed and swollen. The young man looks so fresh in his crisp white suit and white cap, with his pink cheeks. He fumbles awkwardly with his pants. My pants are already off.

  I fantasize about telling him to call for help, call the police, do anything—but I don’t dare. I know they are waiting outside. I know what they are capable of.

  “This is my first time, you know, paying,” he tells me. It’s as if he hasn’t noticed the marks on my face. “Because it’s not like I have to pay or anything.” He steps in front of me, and I give him what he wants.

  People don’t care about other people. This is the hardest lesson I never fully learn.

  Duwahi and Karen are talking about moving me, prostituting me across the country while scouting for other girls along the way. But they aren’t finished with the naval base yet, and who knows how long that will take. Each time they try making plans, they can never agree on where we should go. Karen wants to go south first, get a tan in Florida and a cowgirl hat in Texas, but Duwahi wants to go to Chicago. They speak as if I’m not there, which is fine by me. But the more they talk, the more tense things become. And the more tense things become, the more I have to have sex with them.

  “I know you like fucking her better,” Karen huffs. “You think I didn’t have a tight little pussy when I was fourteen?”

  Duwahi reaches for her shoulder, but she pushes his hand off. “I don’t like her better. I like you.”

  She pushes her hands into his chest. “You’re a liar and a bastard! And how come you get to hold all the money?”

  “You want to split the money? We’ll split it. Just calm down, okay?”

  “No, I’m not going to calm down. You’re a liar, and you know what else? You’re a lame fuck! A lame fuck and a stupid fucking Arab!”

  In a flash he knocks her down, and the two of them start rolling on the floor.

  I look at the door. The chain is hooked, the dead bolt locked. A lamp crashes down. I look back at the door. At the chain. At the dead bolt. Duwahi and Karen are rolling and flailing and punching. Karen is screaming. Duwahi is grunting. The lampshade comes off. I look at the door.

  I run.

  I swipe the chain and turn the lock and tear the door open, and then I am running and screaming outside in the live air, passing door after door as fast and loud as my body will go. I keep looking behind me, and for a second I see Duwahi pop out, still naked, then dart back in. I don’t stop running and screaming. A man steps out of his motel room. I am wearing nothing but underwear and knee-highs. He is holding the door open. I run into his room and lock his door and close his shades. He is frozen, eyeing me up and down. “Never in my wildest dreams,” he keeps saying, slowly shaking his head.

  “Please,” I say, “you have to be quiet. You don’t understand. If they find me, they’ll kill me.”

  “Who?” he wants to know, and I say, “Please don’t speak, don’t say anything,” and so quietly he brings me a T-shirt, and I put it on.

  I don’t know why, but I want to call my mother. The operator puts the collect call through, and when my mother answers, I have never felt so relieved to hear her voice.

  “Mom, it’s me!”

  “Where are you?”

  I hold the phone with both hands, shaking. “I’m okay, Mom. I’m okay. I got away.”

  “Got away from what?”

  “These people. They kidnapped me, but I got away. Can I come home now? I just want to come home.”

  “Tell me where you are.”

  “And you’ll let me come home?”

  “Rita, you know you can’t.”

  I stand for a minute in this oversize T-shirt in this strange man’s room in this seedy motel in this place called Virginia Beach, where I have never seen the beach, and I let my mother’s words sink in, really sink in. My mother is not mine. Her love is not mine. Her home is not mine. I hang up the phone.

  And, thanks to the bored motel operator who was eavesdropping on my call, the police show up. I surrender, and they retrieve my clothes and purse from the motel room, where they place both Duwahi and Karen under arrest.

  The last time I see them is under the blaring lights of the police station: Karen is led in first, with Duwahi behind her. They are handcuffed. Karen has an open cut across her nose. Duwahi’s left eye is swollen. Though they walk right past me, neither of them looks at me. I’m sitting at a police officer’s desk, eating a muffin that he gave me. Later that night, the same officer takes me to a shelter, where from my room I can hear the women huddled together on the porch, speaking in hushed tones about me and my bruises and the story on the news. I pull the blanket over my head, and for a minute, I hear them faintly—that old sound, that familiar herd, the horses.

  Back at Montrose, I turn fifteen as quietly as I turned fourteen. I feel the dark mornings grow cooler, then cold. From behind the bars I watch the leaves turn and fall, then scatter across the grass. When Duwahi and Karen’s court date comes, I fly back with my mother to Virginia Beach and sit outside the courtroom waiting to testify, but they plea-bargain, so I never get called. Karen gets probation, and Duwahi gets deported back to Kuwait. But even with him gone, I still have nightmares of him finding me, folding me up, breaking my bones.

  Meanwhile, in these cold stone buildings, the rumors haven’t stopped—the ones about the ghost of a girl who never made it out. Even though this time the prisoners are different, the rumor has stayed the same.

  FORTY-ONE

  Sometimes when we change what we believe, we change who we are. I had always believed I was weakhearted. “You’re so gentle,” my grandmother used to tell me. “You’re not like the rest of the family.” And I took that to mean fragile. I didn’t trust my own body, and that mistrust held me back from many things and caused me to settle for many more.

  I had often felt nostalgic for my days as a runaway, a fact I’d struggled to understand. Why would I miss the callousness of the streets? The people who treated me as if I were nothing? The bad drug trips, the hunger, the childlike hope that people kept stepping on? It wasn’t until after that Valentine’s Day, when a stranger gave me my heart back, that I began to understand: it wasn’t the streets that I missed; it was myself. Nostalgia, after all, is in part a longing for ourselves through time;
it’s a way of looking back and saying, Hey, I remember you. You’re not gone from me. It’s a way of saying, That was some crazy shit we got into back then. I longed for that girl who ran away, because she wasn’t fragile. She was spirited and strong and fueled by hope. She was compelled by fairness and the stubborn existence of beauty. She was a fighter.

  We are many things. Depending on how we balance our lives, we can live some aspects of ourselves more fully than others. And sometimes the voices in our minds want to tell us two completely contradictory things at once. For example, by the time I was eleven and had first run away, blazing through our front door at the outer edge of dusk, a part of me knew that my parents were damaging me and that I could save myself if I got away. But that same year, another part of me believed that the problem lay within me. You’re defective, it said. Your heart is defective.

  And that voice—the voice that told me I was dying when I was eleven—was the same voice that told me I was dying when I called 911 at thirty-five. It told me I wasn’t safe, and I began to live the life of an unsafe person. The voice became so powerful that it even changed the way my brain functioned. I imagined my enlarged amygdala, agitated and unbalanced, perceiving everything as dangerous. I don’t know, it was saying, that marshmallow looks pretty sketchy to me.

  Panic had sent me running for my life, by running from my life. But panic, it turns out, wasn’t the bully I thought it was. It wasn’t a virus or an erratic black bird. Though it felt like all of those things. It felt bigger than everything. But in the end, panic was me. And it wasn’t even all of me; it was one small part of me, grown wild. Realizing this, I suddenly felt like Grover in The Monster at the End of This Book: I’d been building brick walls to hide from myself.

  If I wanted my life back, I finally had to accept that the only way to get it was to move toward panic, toward myself. I would have to reach for what scared me. I would, as the wise social worker I once knew said, have to suffer my suffering. Though running away from home nearly killed me more than once, it also saved my life. I had taken control in a situation that was out of control. I rejected the imbalance of my parents and sought solid footing. I didn’t always make the right choices, but what mattered was that I was making choices, that my intention for love and health and balance was a kind of love and health and balance. And that intention was the same intention that I carried to the therapists and the practitioners, to the clay classes and cooking lessons, to the underlined passages of Rilke. It was what gave me one whole day without panic. Of fight-flight, it was the fight.

  I had asked a question—what can I learn from panic?—and already I was learning a lot. There is a momentum that builds in the asking that carries you forward.

  When we got home after seeing the cardiologist that day, Larry gave me a gift. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said, handing me a piece of sketch paper, on which he’d drawn a picture of me. The picture was based on a photograph of me taking a photograph of a field. In it, I’m looking through the lens of my camera, while a tree arches over my head and purple and yellow clouds float by. He titled the drawing The Observer.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, wrapping my arms around his neck. “I love it.”

  I looked at it again. “It must have taken you ages. But I don’t have anything for you.” Shame moved through me, slimy and cool. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said, kissing my cheek. “You give me gifts every day.”

  I hung my drawing over my desk and went upstairs to take a shower. Since I’d started panicking, I’d always left the shower door partially open—just in case—even with Larry in the room. But on that evening, Larry wasn’t in the room. And I closed the door all the way. Now that I was sure nothing was wrong with my heart, I had no excuse. And then midway through my shower, I realized something: even with the door closed, I wasn’t alone. I stepped out of the water’s spray and stood beside it, dripping in the mist. Hi, I said. I’m here. In the reverb of the shower, the words seemed to travel, to move in every direction at once—all the directions I’d ever run in, reversed. They resounded, small but powerful as a heart. I realized then that I’d never really been alone—I had been with myself from the beginning and would be so until the end. I knew then that wherever life took me, I could count on myself. I would abide. And the water roared. And my skin was red and alive. And I could feel how palpable this gift was—this gift of presence within us, which no one can ever take away.

  FORTY-TWO

  On the morning of my court hearing for violating my probation, I know I’m in trouble. Since my mother pressed those fake charges against me, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve violated my probation by running away. If I hadn’t called her when I got away from Karen and Duwahi, I might still be on the run. But now that I’m back at Montrose, it’s almost certain I’ll be committed here indefinitely. So when a grumpy staff member gives me a razor to shave my legs, I run it across both of my wrists instead.

  I don’t intend to kill myself. But I don’t know any other way to get the judge’s attention. What I’ve learned is that the courts already have an opinion of us before we even get there, that standing before the judge is little more than a formality that usually lands me in handcuffs. And I’ve learned that the juvenile justice system has nothing to do with justice. I don’t cut too deep—just deep enough to draw blood, and to keep stinging after.

  The best possible thing I can hope for is to be sent to a drug rehab. Everyone in lockup knows these are the most coveted placements when you can’t go home and, for some, even when you can. Though my father’s out of prison, I haven’t heard from him in a long time; I’m not even sure where he is. As for my mother, I’ve learned to stop asking. So when I stand before the judge, whose white hair and flushed cheeks make him look a little like Santa, I tell him that I never committed that crime against my mother, that it had always been the other way around—me on the end of her blows, of my father’s. I tell him that I ran away to find a better home, that I got myself into trouble with sex and drugs instead. And I tell him that I still want that life, the one I ran away to find.

  I have sworn to tell the truth, and I am telling it. “Your Honor, if you commit me to Montrose, I will not live. I can survive a lot of things, but I don’t believe years at Montrose are one of them.”

  Though I’d planned to show him my wrists, I don’t have to, because he shows me mercy. “You seem like a very bright girl,” he says, “and I agree: you don’t belong in Montrose.”

  The Jackson Unit is a coed adolescent drug rehab in a psychiatric hospital called the Finan Center, sprawled out amid the Appalachian Mountains in Cumberland, Maryland, and when I arrive, I am sure I have never seen a place more spectacular. I fall instantly in love with the mountains all around, jutting into the clouds. I fall in love with the space and the open doors and the people who work there—their smiles and their knowing eyes and their kindness. For the first time in years, I don’t want to run.

  In the mornings they take us for long walks while the sun is still low in the sky. It angles through the trees in a mosaic of light so that when you least expect it, a burst flashes warm on your face. The birds sing lazily, as if they, too, are just waking. Everywhere, the green shines. Sometimes from the vastness, a butterfly quivers its loopy course across the small road we walk on. Sometimes a grasshopper leaps out of the grass, the whole of life bound in its springy legs. Sometimes the sound of someone laughing rises tall into air.

  In the main sitting room a large corkboard hangs on the wall. “Warm Fuzzy Board” it’s called: a board to leave “warm fuzzies” for each other: notes of affection and encouragement: things like Great job in group today! I know how hard it was for you. Or Don’t ever forget what a beautiful person you are. Seeing my name up there is like getting a Valentine: Welcome, Rita. We’re glad you’re here. “That’s what the world’s missing,” says my therapist, “warm fuzzies.”

  He’s a sprig
htly, bearded guy named Buck Ware. He rides a motorcycle and has spiky hair and is so direct that it throws me a little off balance at first. Five minutes into our first meeting, he sits forward in his office chair and tells me, “When I was a boy, I was abused.” His eyes are like talons; they won’t let go. “See, now I’ve trusted you with something. And maybe you’ll start to trust me.”

  I laugh. I don’t mean to, but it comes out, a kind of nervous reflex. No adult has ever talked to me that way, and it seems like a lot of responsibility to receive that kind of information from someone you just met. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s not funny, what you said.” But then, in spite of myself, I laugh again.

  “It’s okay,” he reassures. “That was a nervous laugh. And just below the laughter, my friend, are the tears.”

  During the week, we sit at small round tables scattered throughout the room, and a teacher comes and gives us easy schoolwork. I always finish mine before lunch, then spend most of the day flirting with Dallas, a boy whose dark, inquisitive eyes and ready smile make me feel shy. I want to give him presents. On his notebook he writes my name inside a heart, and then I can’t stop thinking about him. Everything about him—his dimples, the sound of his laugh, the sheen of his black hair—is exciting to me.

  In those rare moments when I’m not imagining Dallas’s kiss, I’ve taken to reading Emerson, mainly because the book is thick and I don’t understand half of it. Mr. Ware gave it to me. “You have to challenge yourself,” he said. As I turn the pages, I know I’m reading something important. “You’ve been looking in the wrong places for love,” he told me, “when it’s been all around you the whole time. It’s like nature—it’s always there.” Sometimes a line from the book echoes in my mind for days, the way the scent of sunlight can linger in your hair: Nature is loved by what is best in us.