“He’s in the hospital in Bozeman,” Lydia said, and Rick gave her a look, I guess because she was so abrupt, and so she added, “I don’t see the sense in drawing this out.”
“There’s no need for cheap theatrics, right?” Dane said, sort of under his breath, but definitely loud enough for Lydia to hear him.
“No there’s not,” she said. “I agree.”
Helen started sniffling harder, and since she already had the box of tissues on her lap, she just plucked them, one after another, like pulling petals off a daisy, until her hand was crammed with them, enough to cover the whole of her face when she put them in front of it.
“He tried to kill himself, didn’t he?” Dane asked, which was probably what most of us were assuming, at least I was. Dane shook his head and pointed at Lydia. “I knew it was gonna go bad before we even got out of the room.” It was a strange merging, this bite beneath Dane’s accent. In group I’d heard him talk about things like letting a fortysomething father of three fuck him in the backseat of a Jetta so that he could score a hit (sans explicit details, of course); but even then his accent, the way he phrased things, usually made what he was talking about sound sort of like a campfire story, or something that happened once to someone else. All that detachment was gone from his voice now.
Lydia didn’t jump to answer this one. She waited for Rick, who seemed to be having trouble deciding which words to use.
Eventually he decided on “No, it wasn’t a suicide attempt, I don’t think. But he did hurt himself pretty badly.”
I thought that Reverend Rick would go on to explain; I think everyone else thought so too. But when he didn’t, and Lydia didn’t jump in to clarify, Steve said, “Well, did he have an accident or something?”
And Lydia said “No” just as Rick said, “Kind of—in a manner of speaking.”
“How can it be both no and kind of?” Dane asked. “What the hell kind of sense does that make?”
“I’m sorry,” Rick said. “That was confusing. I meant that Mark’s injury was accidental in the sense that he wasn’t really himself when it happened.” But as soon as he finished speaking, Rick looked sort of mad at himself for having said it that way, for being so cagey with us, which wasn’t his usual style, and he added, “Look, Mark was very confused yesterday; I don’t need to tell you, you all saw that. He was in a lot of emotional and spiritual pain, and he caused himself physical harm to try to make all of that go away.”
“Which is not an escape route,” Lydia said, her voice sharp and clear. “It didn’t work for Mark and it won’t work for you.”
Reverend Rick started again before Lydia could go on. “What’s important,” he said, “is that we got him to the hospital, and his dad has already flown in from Nebraska to be with him, and he’s stable; he’s going to be okay.”
“Fuck this,” Dane said. He put his hands in fists and hit the sides of his thighs, twice. “Y’all are talking like a hamster wheel. What did he do? If he didn’t try to kill himself, then what?”
“Yelling and swearing won’t make you feel any better about Mark,” Lydia said.
Dane snorted a mean kind of grunt. “See, there you’re wrong again, ’cause it does, actually. It really does make me feel a fuck of a lot better to say fuck, fuck, fuck right now.”
I guess because it was already tense in there, or because she was already worked up, this is the moment that Helen started giggling behind her wad of tissues in a way that she obviously couldn’t control. She had a surprisingly girly giggle, like a cheerleader in a teen movie. “I’m sorry,” she said, and kept giggling. “I’m sorry, I can’t stop.” More giggles.
Right then Reverend Rick slid his chair forward as he stood up behind it and clapped his hands and announced that this wasn’t quite working out and that we’d be having brief one-on-ones instead of group and that we should each go to our rooms and wait until either he or Lydia came by to talk with us, except for Dane and Helen, who they would start with right then. Lydia was looking at him like she didn’t like the spontaneity of this plan much at all, but I, for one, was glad to get out of there.
The Viking Erin was on dinner duty, so our room was empty when I got back to it. It smelled like houses sometimes do toward the end of winter, when they’ve been sealed off for too long, like old air, like dirty heating ducts, so I opened the window just a crack and stood in front of the stream of crisp air until I was shivering a little. There were angry clouds building up behind the mountains, black-gray clouds, great clumps of them colored just like cotton balls after Aunt Ruth cleaned off her eye makeup from a big night out, all gunky with mascara and eye shadow.
I sat in my desk chair, tipping it so that it was only resting on the back two legs, one of my feet propped against the corner of the desk, balancing me. I tried to do exercises in my Spanish workbook, but I mostly thought about all the terrible things Mark might have done to himself.
I wasn’t sure if it would be Rick or Lydia or both of them who would come, and so I was glad, half an hour or so later, when just Rick knocked on the open door of our room and said, “Hey, Cameron. Have you got a few minutes for me?”
It was classic Rick, acting like he was just stopping in for a routine chat and not like he’d sent us to our rooms with the express purpose of meeting with him, but he was so unfailingly nice that it was hard not to appreciate the way he phrased stuff like that.
I wasn’t sure where he’d sit, but he came to the back of the room, where I was, and pushed my shoulder forward, one firm nudge, so that my chair tipped back into position and he had room to pull Erin’s chair from its slot beneath her desk. It was a friendly sort of thing to do, casual.
“You know sitting like that breaks the legs, right?” he said. “At least that’s what my mom always told me.”
“My mom too, but I’ve yet to see it happen,” I said.
“Good point,” he said. And then, with no more filler, “So is there anything you wanna talk about?”
“About Mark?” I asked.
“About Mark, about yesterday’s group, about anything at all.”
“He’s gonna be all right?”
Rick nodded, tucked his hair behind his ear. “I think so. He really hurt himself; it’s a serious injury. He’ll be healing for a long time—all kinds of healing.”
It felt impossible, talking this way, around this terrible thing that I both did and didn’t want to know all the details of. I kept seeing these flashes of Mark with all of these Biblical kinds of tortures applied to him, his eyes gouged out or his hands impaled, and not knowing wasn’t making it easier.
“Did he do it in front of you?” I asked, which seemed all the more horrible to consider, that maybe he’d wanted them to watch, or that he was just so out of it that he didn’t know they were watching,
“No, he was in his room,” Rick said.
“Why’d you leave him alone if you were so worried about him?” I didn’t intend for that question to sound mean, exactly, but it did, and I didn’t regret asking it.
“I don’t have a very good answer for you,” he said, and then he looked at his hands. He was just sort of running the fingers of one hand over the palm of the other, tracing his guitar-playing calluses. “It could have been your voice in my head all day asking me that. Instead it was my own.”
I waited. He waited. Then he said, “He had calmed down considerably. It was very late when we walked him back from my office; Adam was in the room sleeping already. Lydia and I felt sure that Mark would do the same.”
We both waited some more. The unsaid everything waited there with us, hovering over us both. I stared at this picture of Erin and her parents at the Living Bible Museum in Ohio, all of them in khaki shorts and tucked-in T-shirts, grinning big grins, posed in front of a display of Moses on the mount. I’d stared at it all year, mostly thinking about how they looked really happy; happy to be there, to be together. But now their smiles, so stretched and thick, looked sort of terrible, like plastic smiles or mask
smiles, I don’t know. They were giving me a headache, those stretched grins. I looked back at Rick and I said, “I don’t know what else to ask you. I guess either you want us to know what happened and to talk about it or you don’t. This all just seems really fake if you’re not gonna tell us everything.”
“I will tell you,” he said. He said it just like that. “I’ll tell you if that’s what you want. It’s, ah . . .” He paused, did something with his lips between a grin and a grimace. “Well, Lydia and I have a difference of opinion about this, but I think it’s important to be honest with all of you, so that you know what happened exactly as it happened with no rumors or gossip wrapped around it. But it’s very ugly, Cameron.”
“I can handle ugly,” I said.
He nodded and said, “But just because you can handle something doesn’t mean that it’s good for you.”
I had this flash-memory of me and Hazel on the beach when she’d tried to warn me off lifeguarding with the same logic, but I was older now and felt it too, the weight of the months that had passed between then and now. “You just told me that it was important to be honest and now you’re backing off,” I said. “Dane’s right—you do talk like a hamster wheel.”
He tucked hair behind his other ear, though it didn’t need to be done. “Dane’s got a great way of putting things, doesn’t he?”
“There you go,” I said. “Spin, spin, spin.”
“I’m not,” he said. “At least I’m not trying to. I’m sorry; it’s a hard thing to tell.” He breathed in quick and blew it out and said, “Last night Mark used a razor to cut his genitals several times; then he poured bleach over the wounds.”
“Jesus,” I said. Rick didn’t blink at the word.
“He passed out after that, and Adam heard the bottle of bleach hit the floor. Or I guess he could have heard Mark hit the floor too. Adam’s the one who came and got me, and he helped me and Kevin carry Mark to the van after that. He was mostly out of it, completely incoherent; Mark, I mean.”
“Why didn’t Adam go get Kevin?” Kevin was a college student and one of the night monitors. He came two or three nights a week, but he arrived during study hours and was usually gone by breakfast, so unless you had to go to the bathroom, or were a light sleeper and noticed him when he did room checks, you didn’t really see him. He’d caught me trying to meet up with Jane and Adam once after lights out, but he had just walked me back to my room. Told me to go to bed. I don’t think he ever even mentioned my rule breaking to Rick or Lydia.
“He couldn’t find him,” Rick said. “I guess Kevin was making a sandwich in the kitchen and they just missed each other. Kevin’s taking it hard too.”
“Shouldn’t you have called an ambulance?” I asked. I already knew why they hadn’t: It was much faster just to drive him than to wait for one to get all the way out to Promise, but I was just trying to think of things to say because I didn’t know what else to do and I didn’t want to sit there in silence with Rick looking one of his ponderous looks at me.
“It would have taken too long,” Rick said. “It was faster to drive him myself.”
I nodded and said, “Yeah. Duh. I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “What do you really want to ask me?”
I was picturing Adam waking up to what he woke up to, the plastic smack of the bottle on the laminate, the chemical smell of bleach, Mark on the floor with his pants down, bloody and gruesome and a fucking mess, and Adam just barely awake, all bleary and confused. What I said to Rick, though, was “I don’t know.” Then I waited a little while, and he waited, and then I asked, “Is Adam doing okay?”
Rick smiled this weird, sad sort of smile at me and said, “I think so, all things considered. I’m sure he’ll want to talk to you about this. It’s gonna take him some time to process.”
That set me off. I hadn’t felt like I was ticking down to something, at least I didn’t think that’s what I was feeling. I had just felt sort of numb and baffled, but right after he said that thing about it taking Adam “some time to process,” I was like instantly enraged, just so fucking pissed at him, and at this stupid place, God’s Fucking Promise.
“How the fuck do you work out something like this?” I asked, my voice the kind of shrill it gets when I’m too mad to cry but have that burning in my throat anyway. I hate my voice like that but I just kept on. “I mean, seriously, you wake up to find your roommate with a bloody mess on his penis? What’s the worksheet Lydia’s gonna assign for that? Maybe Adam can fucking put it on his iceberg now.” I was so, so angry, as mad as I’d ever been, ever, in my life. I just started saying stuff, just whatever, anything, stuff like “You guys don’t even know what you’re doing here, do you? You’re just like making it up as you go along and then something like this happens and you’re gonna pretend like you have answers that you don’t even have and it’s completely fucking fake. You don’t know how to fix this. You should just say that: We fucked it up.” I said some other stuff, too. I don’t even know what all I said, but it was loud and angry and I just kept saying it.
Rick didn’t tell me to stop swearing or being such a asshole, not that he would have used that word but that’s sort of what I was being even if what I was saying was true, but he didn’t try to cut me off or jump in and stop me the way that Lydia would have. And that didn’t really surprise me, because Rick was good at being calm. What he did do, and it did surprise me, is start crying himself. He did it quietly, but he didn’t hide his face from me, he just sat in that chair, facing me, and cried. That stopped my tirade. It stopped it pretty fast. And then it was all the more terrible, the whole thing, when he said, still crying, “I don’t know how to answer you right now, Cam. I’m sorry.”
Rick didn’t call me Cam, nobody was supposed to at Promise, because it was, according to Lydia, an even more masculine adaptation of my already androgynous name. Sometimes Jane and Adam and Steve might, because it would just come out that way, but they tried not to do it around Rick or Lydia, and Rick had definitely never slipped up before.
He really was a handsome guy, and his face was sort of horribly beautiful right then, maybe because it was so vulnerable, I don’t know, but it was one of those moments that’s just unbearable to be in the middle of, everything raw and open and thick with emotion, and it’s not something I can really explain, even now, but I got up and I gave him a hug, a hug that was even more awkward because he was still sitting and I was leaning over, but I did it, and then, after a few seconds, he stood up and we hugged like that, which was a little bit less awkward.
Eventually he sort of backed a step or two away but still held me by my shoulders and said, “We got this backwards. I came in here to make you feel better.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I do sort of feel better.”
“You’re right to be upset about this, and to wonder how it might change what we’re doing here. But for now the best thing I can tell you is that we’ll let Christ lead us to our answers. When in doubt He’s the best guy to follow, right?”
“Sure,” I said, but I didn’t mean it, because it was precisely because he hadn’t tried to give me any answers, because he’d told me that he didn’t have any, and had started crying and had seemed doubtful, unsure, that I was feeling any better at all. All that seemed more honest than anything else he (and Lydia) might eventually invent to deal with this because Christ had led them to it. That would just make it worse.
“This means something to me,” he said, and he pulled me back in for another quick squeeze before he let go. “Thank you for letting me have this with you. I know it doesn’t come easy.”
“This isn’t easy for anybody,” I said. “It’s not like it’s worse on me. I didn’t find him on the floor.”
“I’m thanking you for being honest with me. It was brave.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Whatever.” I didn’t want to talk anymore about what had just happened; I hated that about Promise. Why couldn’t a moment just happen, and both of
us be aware of it, without having to comment on it forever and ever?
“Anything else you want to ask me?” Rick said.
And out of nowhere, I mean, completely unplanned, I said, “Is Lydia really your aunt?”
He made a face like What the hell? and then laughed and said, “I wasn’t expecting that one.” But then he added, “As a matter of fact, she is. Jane must have told you, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Right after I got here. I just wasn’t sure if I should believe her.”
“About that you should,” he said. “Lydia was my mom’s sister.”
“Was,” I said. “Not anymore?”
“My mom died a few years ago.”
I nodded. “Sorry,” I said. I had lots more questions I might have asked him about Lydia, about the two of them, about his dead mom, but it didn’t quite seem like the time to be doing it, and anyway, Erin walked in, before she recognized that Rick was in the room, she just walked in and then said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll come back when you’re done.”
Rick said, “I think we are done, right?”
I nodded.
He walked to the door and said to Erin, “You stay; I’m just on my way to find Steve.” Then he put an arm around her waist and squeezed, quick, and said, “It’s a hard day, isn’t it?”
Erin nodded but kept it together.
“We’re all gonna meet in the chapel in twenty minutes or so,” he said, one hand hanging on the doorframe and one hand looking at his simple watch, the one I liked, with the white face and the tan-and-navy canvas strap.
“We are?” I asked.
“Yeah, Lydia came and told those of us in the kitchen,” Erin said.
I looked at Rick, who nodded, smiled, then patted the doorframe twice and left.
Erin wanted to talk about Mark and I didn’t. I wanted to climb into bed, all my clothes on, and sleep. Better yet: I wanted a VCR and a stack of videos and I wanted to play them one after another after another. Erin hadn’t heard all the details about what had happened—she’d just heard it was a self-inflicted injury and that he was stable. I didn’t fill in the gaps for her, because I knew some other disciple would, eventually. I just didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post Page 34