“Thank you, Mackenzie,” Pastor Evans said when at last he let her sit down. “It fills my heart with joy when pretty girls like you take an interest in the works of God.”
A couple of the big boys cracked up, elbowed each other. Carly shook her head at them. Later that evening, Pastor Evans took those boys aside and gave them a talking to. He did this in front of everyone, and I understood that the reproach was meant not only for the boys but for the girl who’d triggered their behavior. That was September 9: How to survive.
The next Saturday night the teens had a dance. Mac’s notes in the back of her book lists her talk, how to survive, as having taken place after the Hell entry. I would have reversed those two. Surely Hell refers to the events I’m about to relate.
The little kids got to sit against the far wall and watch the dance. I rooted for Mac to slip out, to go spend the evening with the bear on the dump, but she was being watched too closely now. Several of the boys asked her to dance, and it was obvious even to me that the staff had made them. Seeing that big strong girl, who knew how to survive in the wilderness, and more, the difference between soil and dirt, in the arms of a pallid, spineless boy made me want to throw up.
But here’s what broke my heart: I remembered what she had said about the bear, how it should be hunting its own good food, not eating garbage when it didn’t have to. It ate the garbage anyway, voluntarily. So did Mac. I could see it: she was trying. She wore black slacks instead of her jeans. She had on a yellow blouse rather than her T-shirt and plaid flannel. Stupid flats on her feet. She waited between dances, staring straight ahead, some false pride propping her up.
Pastor Evans and Carly milled among the dancing couples to make sure the teens didn’t touch too much. Most of the little kids fell asleep, sinking into sugar comas after all the cookies and juice. I stayed alert, felt as if I had to, not unlike the circulating ministry.
Then I saw her slip out, after all. I wanted to cheer.
Until Trevor stepped out right behind her.
I asked to go to the restroom and then raced down the hallway to another door to the outside. Mac and Trevor walked together now, crossing the parking lot, heading for the woods. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The woods belonged to Mac. The soft green mosses and joint-healing nettles. Why would she show them to him?
A hand clamped around my upper arm and a rough female voice said, “Get back inside.” It was Carly.
“But Mac and—”
“Mind your business.”
“No!” I cried, bursting into tears. I went limp as she dragged me back inside the church.
Now, decades later, standing in that very same parking lot getting pelted by rain, I imagined Mac going limp, too, out in the woods with Trevor. I now understood that theirs had been a sanctioned excursion to the woods. Where some kids needed to be restrained, others needed encouragement. Pastor Evans might have considered it a compassionate correction. Just a kiss, he might have suggested to the boy. Trevor needed to learn kindness. Mac needed to be unlocked. How I wished, standing there in the rain as an adult, I could have found a way, back then, to rescue Mac.
School started that week, and I had a hard teacher, lots of homework. It got dark earlier in the afternoons, and I never walked to the dump again.
But sometimes, if I had some money, I stopped in at the Arco convenience store in the late afternoon during Sylvia’s shift. I spent as long as I dared browsing the chips and candy, the beautiful girl a hot presence at my back. Then I’d carry the chosen snack to the counter and set it down with my dollar. I was afraid of her. Her face aflame with acne, her gaze scraped across me. Her tight clothes and big hoop earrings said fuck you. Still, I kept coming.
On about my tenth visit, she said, “You’re the girl who threw rocks.”
I quaked so hard I had to hold onto the edge of the counter. That day she wore a fuchsia sweater and skinny jeans tucked into high boots, a big belt.
“Little tattler,” she said. “Rat.”
“I didn’t tell,” I whispered.
“Right.” She crossed her arms and her breasts squooshed up. “Get lost.”
A guy plunked a six-pack of Coke down on the counter and she waved me aside. I stood outside the Arco station the rest of the afternoon, until the end of her shift, and when she came out, I said, speaking loudly and clearly this time, “I didn’t tell.”
“Go home,” she said. “Don’t come back.”
The way I felt about Sylvia wasn’t the Jesus feeling. There was no glow, no levitation. I admired Mac. I wanted to be her. Sylvia was gorgeous. I wanted to touch her.
One day, in the middle of math, my teacher got a call from the school office. After she hung up the phone, she said, “Your sister Sylvia is here for you, Robin. You have a dental appointment in fifteen minutes.”
An icy fear blatted in my stomach. I could have told my teacher that I didn’t have a sister, nor a dental appointment. But I packed up my books, all of them, my notebooks as well, as if leaving school for good, and then got my jacket out of the closet. I walked down the hall and entered the school office. An older girl I’d never seen before stood up from the row of visitor chairs and scolded, “So you, like, forgot, Robin? Mom’s really mad. Hurry up. Let’s go.”
I followed her out the door and into the cold, rainy day. She didn’t say another word and neither did I, though I snuck glances at her. She was tall and athletic, wore her dark blond hair short, and popped her knuckles continuously. We walked to the end of the block, and then around the corner, where the real Sylvia was waiting.
“Ha. It worked,” Sylvia said. To me she explained, “This is Lynne. With the color of my skin, they weren’t going to buy my being your sister.” She put a hand on my shoulder and nodded at the gold Mustang parked at the curb. “Get in.”
Lynne got behind the wheel, and Sylvia climbed in the front passenger seat and then cranked around to face me in the backseat. She looked cold, wearing just a sweater, and she crossed her arms, squooshing her breasts. Lynne looked straight ahead.
“Mac’s in trouble,” Sylvia said. “She tried to kill herself. She’s in the hospital.”
Lynne turned the key in the ignition, pulled the Mustang away from the curb.
A sound of anguish shot out of me, as rank as vomit, and I clamped my mouth shut. My fault. It was my fault. Her fortifying calm. Her glow. Gone. Because of me.
Sylvia welled up, too, her eyes full and her broken skin red. “I tried to see her but that pervert of a pastor of yours is in the room with her, won’t let me in. You’re in their church. He’ll let you in.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I croaked.
“Get her out of there.”
Of course Sylvia and Lynne, at ages fifteen and sixteen, were children, too. They didn’t have a real plan. They felt as desperate as I did. But I didn’t know any of this at the time. So far as I was concerned, they were more savvy than true adults. They handed me the job of getting Mac out of the hospital, and I strained under the weight of that grave responsibility. Not only had I caused Mac’s fall, her chances for life were now in my hands.
I got out of the Mustang and walked, alone, down the long corridors of the hospital. Nothing says despair better than a hospital room. The white. The tubes and instruments. The drips and astringent smells. The flickering of hope, like a flashing taunt. Maybe it’ll be okay, but probably not.
Mac was on her back, the bed propping her up. Her eyes were open and she stared at the wall below the mounted television. She looked so lost.
“Mac!” I cried and started into the room, but Pastor Evans stood abruptly and blocked my entrance.
“Please,” I told him as he pushed me into the corridor and shut the door behind us. “I need to see her.”
“Not now, Robin. Mackenzie is in critical condition. She needs your prayers. And you can do that at home.”
“I need to see her,” I wailed and tried to step around him.
“I know your heart is heavy,” he sai
d. “Shall we pray together?”
The words of his prayer wrapped around me like a rope. The wail continued inside me but his “Amen” was like a gag. After praying, he gave me a little shove down the corridor, and I went like a zombie back toward the exit and the Mustang in the parking lot. I got in the backseat and Lynne started the engine. They didn’t ask for an explanation and I didn’t have one to give. We were all frozen in our grief.
The next day I skipped school and walked the three miles out to the hospital. I arrived a little after ten o’clock, and Pastor Evans was just coming out the front door of the main entrance. He took hold of my arm, gripping it in the same way Carly had outside the dance that night, and looked closely at my face, as if detecting the same disease in me that had been discovered in Mac. “What are you doing out here? How did you find out about Mackenzie, anyway?”
I tried to shake him off, but he held on tight.
“I’ll drive you back to school.”
“Let go,” I said and kicked him in the shin.
“She’s gone,” Pastor Evans said angrily. “Mackenzie is gone.”
More than thirty years have passed since that day. Pastor Evans might be sixty. He might be sitting in the church office a few yards away, writing this Sunday’s sermon. I didn’t need to find out. I didn’t trust myself to behave honorably, not with my mother’s death fresh in my heart, opening up all the other complicated wounds, too. Instead I drove to the Arco station. Of course Sylvia wouldn’t still work there, but I went inside anyway. I recognized the man behind the counter. It was Gregory, the boy-now-man whose father owned the station. This would be the second time I asked him about Sylvia.
“Sure, I remember her. She’s in Portland now. Runs a shelter for runaway kids. She comes back all the time to see her folks. They still live out on Walker Road.”
I drove all the way back to Portland that same day and checked back into the same hotel. My mother’s service would have been over by then, and no doubt the mourners had clucked about my absence. Well, I gave them something to be sanctimonious about. My gift to my mother’s congregation.
In the morning, I found the shelter for runaway kids and, moments later, found Sylvia herself. I like to think I’m handsome enough. My short brown hair is lightened by gray, and my face is lined and brightened by a life in the outdoors. I try to hold inside me that glow I first discovered with Mac, a love of the bear and crows and forest. Though I’ve been haunted by my part in Mac’s death, I’ve also survived because of what she showed me. I don’t know what Sylvia saw when I stepped into her office.
She said, “Can I help you?”
Her smile was still quick and asymmetrical. She crossed her arms, that same gesture all these years later, and yes, it still squooshed her breasts. She’d plumped up quite a bit, and her acne had cleared, leaving scars. Her hair was still black and glossy as crow feathers, and she wore it shoulder length. She was still gorgeous.
“I’m Robin,” I said. “The girl who threw rocks.”
I watched her face as the memory came into focus. “Oh, my god.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Wow.” I talked fast, wanting to establish a connection, and so I told her about my work organizing wilderness adventures for girls to learn self-esteem and build confidence, how maybe our programs could partner. Then I blushed.
“Awesome. Yeah, we should talk.” She looked down, crossed and uncrossed her arms, and said, “It’s because of Mac, isn’t it? That you do this work?”
“Absolutely,” I said, grateful that she had spoken her name.
The quick, asymmetrical smile. “Me, too. Let’s have dinner tonight. Are you free?”
“Very.”
She laughed and I realized that she was no longer the older girl. I wasn’t twelve to her fifteen anymore; I was forty-five to her forty-eight.
“Okay, look,” she said and glanced at her watch as if it were almost dinnertime rather than midmorning. “I’ve had two crises already today. More surely to come. But I should be able to get out of here by eight o’clock. Is that too late?”
“That’s fine.”
“Good. I have an idea. Meet me here, okay?”
At eight o’clock sharp, I parked on the street, a block away from the shelter, and walked down to get Sylvia. She locked her office, a fat ring of keys jangling in her hands, and waved goodbye to the kids and attending adults remaining for the night.
“It’s raining,” I said as she headed outside without a coat.
She shrugged. “I’m lucky to get out of the house with underwear on, let alone outerwear.”
There was a lovely recklessness about Sylvia. Drops of rain caught in her hair as we walked down Burnside, passing Powell’s Books. When she stopped at the door of a bar and pulled it open, I felt disappointed. I would have preferred somewhere more upscale, some roasted halibut and field greens, maybe a crème brulée, rather than a bar burger with rancid fries. We stepped into the dark interior and climbed a set of stairs. At the top, she grinned at me, as if delighted by our destination.
It was a lesbian joint. I mean, big deal, right? Maybe she wanted to confirm that she was in fact queer. But why so super pleased? She sashayed right up to the bar and kissed the cheek of a woman holding a beer and watching the television. The woman looked at Sylvia, then looked at me.
Mac. It was Mac.
She shouted, “Fucking A! It’s the kid. Sylvia! It’s the kid, isn’t it?” She jumped off the barstool and grabbed me in a headlock, mussed my hair with her knuckles, as if I were still twelve years old. “How the hell are you?” she asked, releasing me.
Speechless.
“I wanted to surprise you,” Sylvia said.
Thunderstruck.
“Can I get you a beer?” Mac asked. “Whiskey? Whadda ya want? It’s on me.”
This was a dream. It had to be. So I treated it like one. I jumped right to the heart of the matter, before I woke up and lost my opportunity. “Mac, I never told.”
She frowned, smiled, frowned. She looked at Sylvia, and then back at me. “Say what?”
“That day at the dump. When I threw rocks at you and Sylvia. I never told anyone.” I was talking to a dead person. This had to be some surreal manifestation of angst about my mother’s death.
Mac slammed a palm down on the bar top and shouted, “Ha! I remember that! That was fucking hilarious!” She looked at Sylvia again and then bent over laughing. “God, that was funny,” she said, straightening. “That was so funny.”
“I thought you thought I told the pastor.”
“You tell? That would have been rich. Baby butch that you were? You would have only implicated yourself.” She punched my arm.
“That’s not why I didn’t tell,” I said.
But she’d turned to order another beer from the bartender and drank half of it before looking at me again. This wasn’t a dream. Mac was alive. Had been, all these years. She looked the same, thin and angular, though now her hair was short and her arms were covered with tattoos.
“We’re going to get a bite,” Sylvia said. “Come with us.”
“Game’s on,” Mac said, nodding toward the mounted television. It reminded me of the one in her hospital room. “But it’s great to see you,” she said to me, and for a moment her eyes softened, lingered, so that I could hope those couple of times sitting on the hill above the dump, walking through the woods, had meant something to her, too.
Sylvia and I did go somewhere upscale for dinner, and I even ordered halibut. When our glasses of wine arrived, she said, “You look really shook up. I’m sorry I sprung Mac as a surprise. I guess I’ve had time to assimilate everything and didn’t think how it’d be for you.” She pushed her wild hair off her face, sipped her wine, pressed her lips together. “Actually, I should apologize for back then, as well. You were even younger than we were, just a little girl. I’m sorry we involved you in our drama.”
“Your drama?”
“It took me years,” she said, “to understand that it wa
sn’t me who caused Mac’s suicide attempt.”
“You?”
“Yeah.” She was wistful now, twisting a strand of hair in her fingers. Half a lifetime of emotion skidded across her face.
I shook my head, signaling my incomprehension.
“Me and Lynne. That big tall basketball chick with the gold Mustang. Who can resist that?” She laughed. “We were just kids. We didn’t know our mouths from our feet. Seriously. But I did love Mac. We were each other’s first, and it was so intense. But that sick church you all were in. Shit. It wreaked havoc with Mac’s sweet soul. Know what I mean?”
Oh yeah.
“She couldn’t handle it. What was happening between me and her, and how that played with her Jesus thing. And I couldn’t handle the conflict tearing her up. I was only fifteen! I wanted to have fun. So I did. With Lynne. Mac found out and went apeshit.”
“August 18?” I asked. The day marked Hell.
Sylvia squinted, looked at the ceiling for a long calculation, and then, “You know, that’s probably about right.”
All these years I had thought her dissolution had been my fault.
“But it wasn’t my fault,” Sylvia said. “It was that sick church. It’d been years in the making, her inability to reconcile who she thought she was supposed to be with who she really was. Our falling in love—” She paused and laughed. “Even if only for a couple of months at age fifteen. That was just the crisis that tipped the whole cart.”
Pastor Evans’s words had been thrumming in my ears all evening. She’s gone. Mackenzie is gone.
“I thought she died.”
“Died? You mean . . .”
“Yes. All these years I thought Mac was dead. Until I saw her in the bar an hour ago.”
“Oh, Robin.” Sylvia reached across the table for my hand. “God. I’m so, so sorry. I never would have . . . Why would you have thought . . . ?”
I held her hand tight, twelve years old, after all.
“Jesus,” Sylvia said, understanding coming into her face. “No one tells kids anything.” She took a gulp of wine. “She ran away. She left from the hospital that night.”
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