“Unpack.”
I nodded. “Good night,” I said, and closed the door.
Everything I own could fit in the top drawer of the big dresser.
I shooed the bats and shut the window.
It wasn’t even five o’clock, but I unzipped my suitcase and put it on the floor, took my toiletry kit to the bathroom, where I brushed my teeth, washed my face, put on my pajamas, put everything in the kit, took it to the bedroom, and placed it into the suitcase. Shoes in their bag in the suitcase, dirty clothes in a plastic grocery bag beside the socks in the suitcase, the tangled chain in the pillowcase of useless treasures tucked in safe, all closed and zippered and snapped up tight in the suitcase. I lay on the beautiful quilt on the big bed. Left side.
I pulled The Wilderness World from my suitcase and read in bed until the sun turned the room gold, and faded to dark. Then I read by key chain flashlight and tried not to think about Zola. When it’s time to leave, it’s time to leave. And when I go, no one comes with me. Otherwise I won’t make it.
It’s not like I’m dead inside. It’s that I am allergic to manufactured, insincere emotion. A lifetime of people saying one thing but doing the opposite has inoculated me, and now I understand how to survive with my freedom and sanity intact until I’m eighteen: I can have friends but can’t let myself “life or death” depend on them or let them “life or death” depend on me. I can go out with boys but not date them. I can have foster parents but cannot let them adopt me.
Joellen started worrying when I began refusing offers of adoption, that I’d become “emotionally detached.” In truth, I prefer to think of myself as “emotionally prescient”—there are better ways to express love than through obedience and submission. People stopped surprising me a long time ago. Which kind of breaks my heart.
See? Not dead inside!
The flashlight flickered and went out. Old batteries. Bat wings tapped the window. No night-light. How was I supposed to find the bathroom or remember where I was if I woke in the night? No snoring, no kids breathing—how could a person sleep in all this silence?
Joellen was going to be so disappointed. I’d promised her. Then the most dismal thought—living in a hotel. There was nothing, no place for me. Even if I wanted to ask Joellen to come get me, she couldn’t. I gave in and cried quietly as I could and tried to muster the hopeful feeling back into my heart. I thought about Salishwood—What was the deal with that? What if I could work there?—but alone in the loud dark, I knew: there was no way I could survive staying still, all by myself, for an entire year. Impossible.
* * *
I carry with me a thing I stole from a pile of tea bags in the trash at a house in the Queen Anne neighborhood during sixth grade. Seventh? The parents were a retired couple, white and basic, with their own grown children, who never visited. Counting me, it was a rotation of four foster kids, and the parents made us all walk to church every Sunday, even though none of us kids were church people. The mom there had no patience for my not eating meat.
“God says, his own words right here in the Bible, man has dominion over every living thing. Men are the stewards and all living things were created for him, to use or eat or whatever. Don’t be arrogant in God’s eyes—eat that chicken. It’s breaded with panko.”
I thought of poor John Muir, whose own father beat the crap out of his son until, by the age of eleven, he had memorized and could recite every word of the Old Testament, and most of the New. Nothing infuriated Muir more than the hypocrisy of white men claiming God-given blessing and authority to kill his supposed own creations.
I kept my head down, hid the chicken in my paper napkin to toss over the fence later to the neighbor’s dog, didn’t say any of the snarky rejoinders I had on deck. Like how I was not a man and didn’t care what the Bible said. Or that, if her actions were any indication, she didn’t seem to, either.
The house was big, brick, lots of bedrooms and a huge kitchen with a wide windowsill over the sink. Lined up on the sill was a parade of little white ceramic animals: horses and elephants and cows. My very favorite was the polar bear. I love polar bears. They adopt orphan cubs.
A couple of months after I went to live there, the mom got home from shopping one day and I helped her unload the groceries. I pulled out a cellophane-wrapped box of Red Rose tea.
“Oooh,” she said. “Let’s see.” She tore off the wrap, opened the box, and rummaged through the tidy rows of tea bags to pull out one of the ceramic animals. “Giraffe.” She smiled, triumphant, and put it on the sill with its friends.
Then she picked up the Red Rose box, an entire brand-new package of perfectly good tea bags, and tossed the whole thing in the garbage.
“Muiriel, fold up these grocery bags, will you?” She turned to organize the produce drawer.
I watched her do this every week. If she got an animal that was already on the sill, it wound up in the trash along with the tea. Poor little white hippos and tigers and pigs, helpless among the coffee grounds and orange rinds. It made my stomach hurt.
I started purposely hanging around on shopping days to help her unload the bags and then waited for her to leave the kitchen so I could rescue the tea and the wayward animals from the trash. I put them in clean Ziploc bags and surreptitiously dropped them into the donation bins at the church each Sunday.
I got home late from school once, a dark and rainy afternoon, and when I went to toss a banana peel in the trash, there were more tea bags, dumped loose and ruined in a pile of half-eaten breakfast scraps, and in the middle of the mess was a discarded polar bear.
I wiped him clean, hid him safely in the pillowcase, and dialed Joellen’s number.
I WOKE ALONE THAT FIRST MORNING in Francine’s house after nine hours of unusually dreamless, sound sleep and found the sharp edge of the hopeless impossibility a little dulled. Maybe anxiety had exhausted my brain and body enough that they were forced to shut down for a while? And despite the lonely room, holy cats was it quiet in Francine’s fiveish-acre wood. No middle-of-the-night emergencies or kids arriving, only me and the night wind and ship bells and the bats. Some completed REM cycles. It was disorienting. All that day I walked the island, ate some stuff, had polite but brief conversations with Francine, and then slept soundly again. And again. I clung to the renewed strength and hope the sleep was offering, resisted calling Joellen, investigated the Salishwood situation, and two days later I had an interview.
Technically—maybe legally—I should have told Francine about it, about wanting to work in general, but I waited. Some foster parents are not down with kids working. It interferes with school and makes the tether too long, but if we’re aging out, how else are we supposed to build a résumé so we can get a job to support ourselves when we’re out? I’ve played a long game, working a job in one way or another since the day I started dodging adoption.
I’ve been a barista, a grocery store bagger; I’ve pumped gas and cleaned car windows at a gas station; but my most recent job and very favorite in the world ever was tutoring and reading to little kids at the Seattle Central Library. Being alone on the island was making me miss little kids. I missed Zola. Sometimes I used to pick her up after school and take her with me on the bus to the library and let her color and read while I worked, and for that job I’d been fingerprinted and had security clearance with the Seattle police and with the freaking FBI. Salishwood, as it turned out, was looking for help with the little kids’ summer camp and day hikes. Which required security clearance. I mean. Magic.
Aside from my Muir-based knowledge of the world as our home, I am the least “Kumbaya” person I’ve ever met, but even to me this felt like the universe wanted me at Salishwood, which Jane from the poster, when I spoke to her on the phone, described as “two hundred fifty acres of forested land beside the water turned environmental research and education center.” Internship, so no pay, but internships can lead to jobs—i
n a forest. I hadn’t wanted anything so badly in a long time.
Francine, three days in, was being really nice—leaving me mostly to myself; she let me walk and made me eat only when I felt like it, but I was scared to ask her stance on kids working. So I took ye olde “It’s better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission” tack.
The sadness I’d felt pressed beneath lifted just a little with every step to the bus stop on the route to Salishwood. The driver let me off at the entrance to walk a one-lane road that wound through dense forest, and I made myself breathe in deep, exhale all I could. Birds sang, sunlight streamed through the dense branches to clover and ferns on the forest floor. I’d never felt more Muir.
He was eleven when his father, seeking harsher religious doctrine, brought the family to America, away from the Scottish hillsides and rocky seashore young Muir loved and walked. His father made him work for years in a machine factory in Wisconsin, where Muir was blinded in an accident with metal tools. He hid for months in a blackened room, scared he would never see again. When he emerged, depressed but with his sight miraculously restored, he was so grateful and hungry to see every tree and mountain and river and lake and ocean and blade of grass, he swore never to live within walls again if he could help it. He walked outside and did not stop.
Made haste with all my heart, bid adieu to all thoughts of inventing machinery and determined to devote the rest of my life to studying the inventions of God.
He packed his bread and compass and books and walked a thousand miles, to the solace and beauty of the natural world, and lived to save Yosemite Valley from destruction; he saved the redwoods and sequoias of California and the alpine wilderness of Washington’s Mount Rainier. He gave those places his life in return for saving his, with Joellen-level dedication to protecting vulnerable, innocent nature, emboldened by fury at his fellow white men who would harm it. He would have been an excellent social worker.
The Salishwood road widened into a small parking lot, and beyond it was what looked like a cathedral, made of cedar, with a glass ceiling that reached into the treetops and seemed part of the forest. Jane—white, with a long gray braid and a young, smiling face, dressed like me but with dangly beaded earrings—walked to me and took my hand in both of hers.
“Muiriel,” she said, “come inside.” She led me in, talking the whole time. “So, we’re in the great hall.” The whole wide cedarwood room glowed in the sunlight streaming from the vaulted glass roof. I stared up into the trees.
“Beautiful.” An understatement.
“Inspired by Suquamish architecture. Suquamish were the first people who lived on the island. The tribe has education centers and a museum near Agate Pass and the Port Madison Indian Reservation. Cut to: not how it should be, but now here we are.”
I sat beside her on a wooden bench bathed in sunlight.
“So,” she said, “want to help us teach a bunch of kids that the land and sea and sky are not now and never were ours and the least we can do is learn how to respect and care for them?”
“Yes, please.”
She smiled and tucked her legs beneath her on the bench, buzzing like a five-year-old at Christmas. “I can’t begin to tell you how thrilled we were to see your résumé, especially your experience with kids—that’s the hardest part, and you’ve already got it. We’ll get you trained for the wilderness ethics curriculum on the job. Starting with: hiking in jeans might not be the best idea.”
My face flushed.
“Shorts are good, hiking pants if you have them. Have I said I’m jealous of your name? Your parents are brilliant. Speaking of, we’ll need a signed parental consent and proof of school credit, and you’ll be all set—you’re at the high school in the fall, right?”
I nodded and silently worked out ways to put off the consent form signing as long as possible.
A school bus pulled into the circular drive over a thick carpet of pine needles.
“Here we go,” she said.
She led me outside to a field of grass encircled by dorm-style cabins and, beyond, the forest. Two guys filled hiking bottles at a water spigot near a wooden picnic table.
“Men, introduce yourselves; this is Muiriel. I’ll be back with the wildlings.”
And she left me there with them. One looked my age, the other older, both white guys who stopped their conversation and stood looking at me.
“I’m Muiriel,” I said, and raised my hand in greeting to their general direction. The older one was unreasonably tall, over six feet, and he grabbed my hand.
“Excellent,” he said. “Finally some new female energy. Thank you, Mother Gaia!”
He put his palms together and tipped his head down, revealing long, stringy dirty-blond hair tied in a bun. “Welcome, sister. I’m Natan.”
Good God. The other guy winced and stayed real interested in his water bottle. I side-eye noticed he was lean, he had well-defined arm muscles in a blue T-shirt, and he wore what were definitely actual hiking pants—lots of zippered pockets. I turned back to Man Bun. “Nathan?”
He closed watery blue eyes and exhaled out his nose. “Natan,” he said, in a way that he probably intended to show great patience and restraint over my admittedly failed pronunciation of his name but was instead super condescending, delivered through his overwrought beard and complicated waxed mustache.
The other guy smiled into his water bottle.
A lifetime of people deciding they know all about me after two seconds of introduction and the words foster care has taught me to try not to prejudge anyone else, because it’s total bullshit—but oh my God there still is such a thing as instinct, and Natan was making it difficult to stay neutral about him.
“Are you replacing Jason?” Natan asked, rocking on his heels, arms folded.
“I guess,” I said, edging away from him and toward the table. “Was Jason the intern?”
He nodded. “My man J had to answer the call of duty.”
“Oh, wow,” I said, “he’s in the military?”
Another wry, mustached smile. “Duty to his soul. He needed to wander this world to find his true purpose, honor the light within himself.”
The other guy spoke up. “Jason got a job at the Honolulu Hilton handing pool towels to tourists.”
“Sean,” Natan sighed. “Our journeys are all our own.”
Sean.
Sean smiled again, at me this time. I offered my hand, which he accepted, and gave one firm shake. Inches shorter than Natan, Sean stood nearly directly at my eye level, and I’m not real tall for a girl. I liked it. Dark eyes, tanned skin, blessedly close-cropped dark hair. “Sean,” I said. “You”—his eyes are so dark, they’re almost black—“work here all year?”
“Sean’s our high school kid. Part-time come fall, right, little bro? I’m full-time,” Natan droned on. “Salishwood’s MS program with U Dub. Guess I’m the big man on campus—in every way, right, little guy?” He punched Sean’s arm.
Sure thing, big jerk.
Sean just rolled his eyes, ducked out of Natan’s punching range, and busied himself tightening the straps on a day pack. He looked up past the lodge. “Here they come.”
Streams of little kids came screaming into the field.
A rush of familiarness swelled in me: raucous, hyper little kids. I felt my whole body brighten, then remembered these kids were my on-the-job interviewers. “Wait,” I said. “Are we— What do I do?”
“Just stick with me,” Natan oozed. He put his hand on my shoulder, and his long, bony fingers massaged my skin through my T-shirt.
I recoiled and ducked away, nearly knocking Sean to the ground.
“Sorry,” I said, moving fast to put Sean between me and Creepy Fingers, who strode ahead of us.
“You hike?” Sean said, eyeing my jeans.
“I…walk,” I said. “A lot. But in the city. On side
walks. Sometimes in parks. But mostly on concrete…” I stopped walking. “Don’t tell Jane. I really want this job.”
He stopped and turned to me.
“I would never,” he said. “Honestly, hiking is just a dirty walk—God, no, I mean a walk in the dirt.”
I smiled. Muir hated the implied rush of the word hiking. He preferred to saunter through the forest, stroll into the woods.
“The kids are easy,” Sean said kindly. “The trails are all marked; you’ll figure it out as we go. Don’t worry.”
Had I only ever known super-tall boys? Because his eyes were just…still right there at mine, and sort of killing me. “Thank you,” I said. “Sean.”
“You’re welcome. Muiriel.”
We walked together into the swarm of kids.
Three hours and a three-mile dirt(y) walk with a bunch of second graders later, I sat filthy, sweaty, and tired on the bus back to Francine’s house.
Before I left, Jane took me aside in the lodge and offered me a cold fizzy water from the staff fridge. “The kids looked pretty happy. Did you have fun?”
“I did,” I said. “Thank you. But did I…do it right?”
She laughed. “You did. You’ll learn fast; I’m not worried.”
“So I can come back? I can stay?”
She walked with me out into the sunshine. “Muiriel,” she said. “I think you might be just what Salishwood needed. See you Monday, first thing. Seven o’clock.”
“Monday. Seven. Okay.”
I walked back through the trees to the bus stop. Floating.
I have been “useful.” I have been “not a problem.” I have never been what anyone needed.
Sean sped past me on a bike, raised one lean, strong arm, and called, “See you Monday!”
On the bus I caught my reflection in the window. Smiling.
I could not remember a happier day.
* * *
—
What I Carry Page 4