All of it; some of it; none of it. Like always. Like everyone.
• • •
Time passes and passes. Afterward, of course, life is never the same.
Not that you’d choose to put it so starkly, but it seems to be important to the girls—Tilly especially—to acknowledge and quantify the accumulation of loss. And this “never the same” business is the one that seems to be hardest for them to accept, harder than the sale of the house in Washington, harder even than the memory of the woods, Scott’s fallen body, the leaves speckled with red.
They’re too young to understand how much of life is shaped by never the same. “You know, my life was never the same after you girls were born,” you tell them lightly, and you leave them to process it on their own.
In Iris’s nightmares, Scott doesn’t have a gun; for reasons whose meaning eludes you, he’s always holding a knife, drawing it slowly across his own throat. In Tilly’s dreams, the gun is front and center, and it’s always pointed directly at her. She wakes up when he pulls the trigger.
You spend a lot of time with them in the middle of the night, sitting in the dark, helping them fall back to sleep. You don’t mind it so much; it’s like when they were babies or when they’re sick. Their need for you is sweet in its urgency, its simplicity.
Your life now: well. It’s been hard, obviously. What do you do when everything is suddenly over? You cling to each other. You strip away everything that doesn’t matter. And sometimes, when your head stops spinning, you find that you’ve touched down in a land that you never would have discovered otherwise.
It turns out that Scott was right about how the world at large would interpret his legacy. The general consensus (and it doesn’t seem to matter what you have to say about it) is that you were taken in by a dangerous man, and you’re lucky that the outcome wasn’t worse. Maybe. But in your own mind, it’s a lot murkier than that. How do you feel about Scott Bean? You are furious at him; you hate him; you miss him terribly. It’s going to be a long, long time before you have it all figured out.
Here’s one of the details that tends to get overlooked in the news articles: back in the heady days when you were helping Scott plan Camp Harmony, one of the things that everyone agreed on was that the land should be owned equally by all of you. No one coerced you into anything—at least, not financially. You acted like grown-ups: you consulted lawyers, drew up documents, changed your wills. So after Scott’s death, one of the many questions left for you and the other Camp Harmony families to answer was what would happen to the site itself.
The Goughs just wanted out, understandably; they asked you to wire them their share. The last you heard, Candy’s dad had surrendered custody and turned himself in, though it remains to be seen what kind of consequences he’ll face, if any. Like everything else here, it’s complicated.
There was never any question of continuing to run the camp. But none of you seemed to want to leave right away: not you and Josh, not Tom and Janelle. At first it was barely even a decision, more of a stunned stasis. But when you were finally able to talk about it, you all believed that there might yet be something you could salvage from all of this. Not all of your ideas had been bad ones. There’s something to be said for choosing the company you want to keep; for living more simply; for getting support for the things you don’t know how to do on your own.
This winter you’ve been living in rental housing, homeschooling Tilly and Hayden; Iris is enrolled at the local middle school—her own choice. You’ve demolished the cabins and are currently drawing up plans for new housing and looking into the process of opening a charter school. It’s all very tentative and fragile, far from perfect, and a lot of the time you feel like you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. You wouldn’t say that you wake up every morning filled with joy, but there are days when the sheer lack of dread strikes you as miraculous.
You put it together bit by bit. You go to therapy. Josh takes on some consulting work, long distance. It’s not a permanent solution, but he’s around more than he used to be, and the cost of living is lower here.
You have time and space and friends. You’re thinking about what kind of community you want to be a part of. Josh’s mother will be retiring next summer, and you’ve talked about asking her to come live in New Hampshire. You’ll certainly have room for her.
Maybe you actually learned something from those video games you used to play: there’s no point in planting crops if you’re not going to stick around to tend them.
You’ve started writing, just a few lines here and there. It’s finally occurred to you that you might have something to say. Notes on autism and parenting, conversations overheard from the next room. You’re thinking that maybe soon you’ll get around to the question of cults and the potent mix of desperation and charisma that helps them thrive. Questions of personal agency and what makes some help dangerous to accept. Right now, the most concise thing you can say about it is this: You know Scott Bean wasn’t a villain. Your life will never be the same. And you’re grateful every day.
• • •
The Hammond Family Monument, you and Tilly decide during one of those middle-of-the-night conversations, is unusual in that it’s not fixed in space. Its location—and even its design—is always changing. It hovers in the air outside a house in Washington, DC, and in a forest clearing in New Hampshire where the rain is doing its patient work to wash the rocks clean of blood. It appears for brief moments on the side of a mountain and inside a Chinese restaurant with a slightly grubby floor. You can’t always see it, but it’s there in the landscape of your dreams and the stories you tell about your life. It’s hidden in plain sight, waiting to make its appearance in places you haven’t even visited yet.
You’ve set up a life where your girls have fewer rules; they’re allowed to ramble, in their minds and along winding paths lined with pine trees. Iris is adjusting beautifully, all things considered, and that’s hardly a surprise. But Tilly. Tilly unconstrained is a magnificent thing to see.
Every day brings something new. She’s writing a book; she’s designing a video game; she’s filling the sky with new constellations. There’s a lot that she still needs help with, a lot that will need to happen in a few short years, if she’s going to be able to face the world on her own. But these talents she has—imagination and empathy, ambition and eagerness—will carry her a long way.
She’s a great kid. And as the days go by, you’re beginning to remember where she gets it from.
epilogue
Imagine that your child is born with wings. It’s a good thing, right? The freedom to step off the earth, to glide and soar and float. It represents not just flight, but the potential for flight. It works with all the metaphors of child-rearing.
You can see that there might be a downside; it makes things a little more complicated. She’s going to get teased; some people will stare. And the onesies you’ve bought aren’t going to fit, not without some alteration. There are plenty of things you could worry about, plenty of things you haven’t planned for, but so what? She’s your girl.
Her wings are small at first, like the rest of her. Feathered little nubs, lying folded against the skin of her back. They flutter against your arms while you’re nursing her; you see them twitching while she sleeps. And even though you wouldn’t say it in public, even though you gently remind strangers and friends alike that she’s not a supernatural being but an ordinary flesh-and-blood human baby, you can’t help but call her your angel once in a while.
When she learns to walk, you buy one of those child leashes. They have nice ones now, not horrible at all: the one you buy is a furry backpack that looks like a monkey, with an extra strap to secure it around her torso. As she zigzags down the street, three feet above the sidewalk, you keep a tight hold of the long tail.
Safety issues are different than they are with other children. She can’t sit comfortably in a stroller or car seat
without some jury-rigging. When visiting friends, the first thing you do is look around for ceiling fans and open windows. You have to be extra-careful with breakable items and cleaning products and medications. Whenever you see the phrase “Keep out of the reach of children,” you feel like calling the company and not hanging up until you find the right person to talk to. You want to explain your situation; you want to talk until you can make someone understand why you’re going to need alternate directions.
At the park, reactions are mixed. Other parents are kind and interested, or else they won’t meet your eyes. “Watch her, please,” one mother says sharply when your daughter flits up and tries to land in the stroller that holds her new baby.
Your daughter wrenches a shovel away from a little boy in the sandbox, carrying it up as far as she can go on her tether. As you’re handling the negotiations of sharing and apologizing, tugging gently to pull her back to earth, you see the moment when she realizes the paradox: she can keep the shovel away from the other children, but only if she never settles down in the sand to dig.
• • •
Your second child is born without wings. This is something that none of the parenting books cover. You find yourself loving this new child, this ordinary child, almost guiltily. Before you became a parent, this is what you’d imagined it would be like. This baby rolls on a blanket and finds tiny pieces of carpet fluff to put in her mouth. Baby-proofing takes place much lower to the ground. When you put her in her crib, you don’t have to zip a mesh tent over her to keep her from gliding over the railings during the night.
Your older daughter is fascinated by the soft, smooth skin of her sister’s back. One day, she asks when the baby’s wings are going to grow in, and you begin a conversation that you’ll probably be having for years. You tell her that the world is rich and varied; you tell her that we’re all different, and we’re all the same. Your task here is clear, and it isn’t really so different from anyone else’s. Like every parent, you have to teach your girl to live a contradiction, to be exceptional and ordinary, all at the same time.
You figure out ways to make it work. You enlist her help in dusting high corners and painting over water spots on the ceiling. You divide your grocery list into high shelves and low ones, ripping the paper in half and giving each child a piece to carry around the store. You make up new verses for the Hokey-Pokey.
Eventually, the time comes when there’s no way you can justify the leash. You set ground rules for flying: no flying at school, with a babysitter, or at a friend’s house. No flying higher than Daddy’s head. No flying across or above the street. No lifting anyone else to fly with you.
Clothes are an issue: as she grows, so do her wings. In the summer, in the early years, you generally let her go shirtless—let them both go shirtless, since it’s hard to make it seem fair to a two-year-old that she has to wear a shirt and her sister doesn’t. Your neighbors grow used to the sight of the two of them half naked in your front yard, making up elaborate games and mixing messy concoctions of mud and leaves. Sometimes when they’re caught up in playing, you see your older girl begin to flap her wings in excitement, not remembering until she’s a few feet off the ground that her sister doesn’t like it when she flies away from her. Her wings are remarkably expressive. She folds them up tight when she’s sad or hurt; when she’s happy, she flutters them softly, without seeming to notice that she’s doing it.
You remember being slightly horrified when a well-meaning aunt gave you a sewing machine at your bridal shower, but now you use it regularly. You cut long slits up the backs of your daughter’s shirts, then stitch the edges so they won’t fray. On cold mornings, it takes a while to work her wings through the different layers, and you’re impatient with her when she won’t stand still. Occasionally, someone will ask you if you would change things if you could, but it’s not a question that makes much sense. Your daughter has wings, and without them, she would not be your daughter. This is not the way you thought things would be, but it doesn’t make you wish there were someone else sleeping in her bed.
Her wings are, in many ways, just another part of her body. You pour soapy water over them in the tub; you pat them dry with a bath towel. She asks you to scratch them when she has an itch, and you run your nails gently over the stretches of feathered muscle, the hollow bones jutting at unexpected angles. They seem to get more sensitive for a while when she’s going through puberty; she complains that it hurts to lean back against the solid surface of a chair. It occurs to you once—one of those thoughts you wish you hadn’t had, but there’s not much you can do about it now—that perhaps someday they’ll be an erogenous zone for her. That her husband or boyfriend or partner or whatever—well, that’s as far as you want to take it, which is just as well, because that’s the part that stops you every time. You hope. You hope she’ll have everything she needs. Air and sky and, maybe one day, someone to fly beside her.
acknowledgments
My first thank-you, as always, goes to my extraordinary agent, Douglas Stewart, who has continually proven himself to be my best and shrewdest ally. I am also enormously grateful to my editor Pamela Dorman for her enthusiasm, support, and laser-sharp insight.
Thank you to the many wonderful people at Viking Penguin who helped bring this book into the world; I am especially grateful to Madeline McIntosh, Brian Tart, Andrea Schulz, Kate Stark, Lindsay Prevette, Rebecca Lang, Megan Gerrity, Mary Stone, Lydia Hirt, Jeramie Orton, and Emma Mohney. Thank you as well to the many fabulous readers in the sales department and beyond who provided such important early support for the book.
Thank you to Madeleine Clark, Taylor Bacques, Szilvia Molnar, and Danielle Bukowski at Sterling Lord Literistic; to Carole Welch, Nikki Barrow, Caitriona Horne, and Jenny Campbell at Sceptre; to Shari Smiley at the Gotham Group; and to Alison Callahan, who championed the book at its very earliest stages.
Thank you to the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, for providing me with much-needed time and space to write. (And a separate thank-you to the mysterious forces of the MacDowell Oracle, which told me in no uncertain terms that it was time to insert a werewolf into my current work.)
I have been extremely lucky to have a number of kind, talented, and hilarious friends who have made every part of this journey easier. Many, many thanks to Leslie Pietrzyk, Amy Stolls, and Paula Whyman for their ongoing support, advice, and friendship. Thank you to Cathy Alter and Michelle Brafman for reading early drafts and providing invaluable suggestions, and thank you to Caitriona Palmer, Kimberly Stephens, Judith Warner, Alexandra Zapruder, and Mary Kay Zuravleff for lunches, laughter, and helping keep me sane. Thank you to the wonderful community at Writers Room DC, including the father-son super-duo of Charles and Alexander Karelis. And thank you to Tracey von Phul Christensen, who was so helpful in answering my questions about homeschooling.
I owe much love and gratitude to my family—especially my mother, Doreen C. Parkhurst, MD; my father, William Parkhurst; and my grandmother Claire T. Carney, to whom this book is dedicated—for a lifetime of inspiration and encouragement. Many thanks also to Molly Katz, to all of my Carney uncles and aunts and cousins, and to Julie Ross, Matthew and Margaret Rosser, and David and Lynette Rosser.
Thank you to my children Henry and Ellie, who continue to amaze me and to teach me new things every day. And infinite thanks to my husband Evan Rosser, for each year of adventure and comfort, joy, and support.
And finally: Thank you to special-education teachers, every single one. Thank you to occupational therapists, physical therapists, and speech therapists. Thank you to pediatric neurologists and educational consultants, IEP coordinators and psychopharmacologists. Thank you to classroom aides and the National Institutes of Health. Thank you to Temple Grandin and John Elder Robison, Andrew Solomon and Simon Baron-Cohen. Thank you to respite workers and babysitters, camp counselors and leaders of social skills groups. Kind neighbors and helpful strangers, ov
erheard conversations and anecdotal evidence. Thanks to newspapers left on buses and the mysterious forces that dictate chance meetings. Thank you to the solace of the Internet, open all night, and to bright mornings that keep on arriving, no matter what.
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