For a while the favored version of the plan was to escape while on a mass outing in Bozeman, maybe even immediately following our exams, like immediately, just leave from the Lifegate Christian School itself. But if we did that, it would be nearly impossible to bring any supplies with us, even a change of clothes, not to mention that Lydia was supervigilant about watching us when we left the compound, especially since my thwarted marker heist.
Adam still pushed for stealing a van, but both Jane and I eventually convinced him, for certain this time, that that getaway would get us tracked down faster than any other. Finally we decided that even with Jane’s leg, cross-country trekking was our best option, especially considering that the three of us had an established outdoorsiness that would allow us, in those weeks of late spring, to realistically “disappear” on a hike for a portion of the day. We guessed that we could be gone from campus for probably six to seven hours before they’d go looking for us, or send anyone looking for us. Maybe more if we started out early in the day, said we were taking a picnic lunch. Plus, Jane really was, as she liked to remind us, a bit of an off-the-land type, and she could definitely read a map, work a compass, and build a fire.
There were dozens of campgrounds and trailheads and tourist traps, even a few tiny towns, within a fifteen- to twenty-mile radius of Promise, less depending on how you traveled it; and at any of those places we determined that we might be able to hitch a ride into Bozeman if we could just convincingly pass ourselves off as granola college kids, which we thought we could do: especially if we happened upon any actual granola college kids out hiking or camping.
“We’ll have no trouble making friends,” Adam said more than once. “I mean, we’ll come bearing pot. It’s the must-have get-to-know-you and thanks-for-letting-us-escape-our-degaying-camp gift of the year.”
Once in Bozeman, the plan was, we’d track down former Scanlan lifeguard and under-the-dock-make-out partner Mona Harris, who I believed would be willing to, at the very least, let us crash on the floor of her dorm room for a night or two until we could figure out what came next. Even once we had this much of the plan tacked down, things got very murky again with the what might come next part: murky for each of us. I thought I’d try to somehow contact Margot Keenan. I wasn’t sure yet how much I’d ask of her, or really even what I’d ask of her; but she was an adult I thought I could trust, someone I believed would help me and stay quiet about it. Jane planned to call her old flame, the tragedy of a woman she’d purchased the really strong pot off of at Christmas. She said this lady was a total wild card and that she might drive all the way to Bozeman to pick her up, or might tell her to go fuck herself, but Jane assured us that she wouldn’t be interested in ratting us out to the authorities because it would “entirely go against her sensibilities to play the narc.” Adam didn’t know what he planned to do once we got to Mona’s, but he seemed unconcerned about that. Whatever he decided, though, the idea was to go our separate ways from Bozeman, at least for a while: a while being until we were all eighteen. This part of the plan, the splitting-up part, however murky and unformed and kind of impossible to believe we’d ever even arrive at in reality, made me unbelievably sad to think of, all the same.
In early April, Jane got caught smoking up in the hayloft. (Somehow Adam and I weren’t with her when it happened. We were on garbage detail; it just worked out that way.) Jane had just finished her one-on-one and had a few minutes before dinner duty, so she went to the barn just to take a hit or two, because that afternoon was so nice, completely flushed with spring. Apparently, Dane Bunsky, also on dinner duty, had followed her from afar. He’d been strange since Mark’s incident, like he’d turned his anger into vigilance, not against Promise and its teachings, but for it, toward its goals. It was weird to see happen. Dane knew a thing or two about drugs; my guess is that he’d probably known about us smoking pot for a while, but this was the day he chose to go get Lydia and lead her to Jane, who had, as she put it, “a beautiful little joint between my lips when I saw first the white top of her head and then her face pop up over the edge of the loft. She actually climbed up the ladder to catch me; it was rather remarkable.”
Remarkable or not, Jane was given a more severe punishment than any I’d seen distributed in my time at Promise: all free-time hours replaced with supervised or in-room study hours; all decoration and correspondence privileges revoked until the infamous yet to be determined later date; parents informed; and, worst of all, mandatory one-on-one daily counseling with either Rick or Lydia, probably Lydia, because Rick had been traveling a ton, promoting both Promise and a Free from the Weight video series he was featured in as a success story.
Now Adam and I saw Jane only at meals or during other supervised activities like classroom hours and church services. And even then, Lydia would often come and eat at the same table with us, or sit in the same pew, continually grazing her icy eyes over us in a way you could feel even without looking at her. Through notes folded into tiny squares and passed in secret, and clipped sentences offered here and there, we found out that Jane had given up some of the pot she had hidden in the barn to appease Lydia and to hopefully convince her that was all of it, the whole stash. Lydia hadn’t discovered Jane’s prosthetic hiding spot. Jane didn’t think she would. And best, Jane hadn’t mentioned Adam and me as fellow smokers, nor had Dane, if he knew about us, which I’m pretty sure he must have.
“Your punishment couldn’t really have come at a more inconvenient time, could it?” Adam said at breakfast one morning while Lydia was still in line, carefully spooning the least watery sections from the scrambled eggs bin onto her plate.
“Actually, I think it’s providence,” Jane said fast. “It’s the best time of all.” She looked around for spies, but a lot of the disciples weren’t even in the room yet, or they were half asleep over their food. She lowered her voice even more anyway and said, “We still don’t know how we’re going to get our IDs out of the office. To make that happen, at least one of us needs to get special evangelical detail duties that none of us are candidates for right now. I’m going to use this punishment to pull a Dane Bunsky.”
“What?” Adam said before I could.
“I’ll spend the next month pretending to buy everything Lydia’s selling,” she said, her eyes bright and sort of wild. “Completely. I think you two should as well. But you can’t make it obvious that you’re doing it; you need a reason for your reform.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Adam said, and he was still speaking for both of us. “Dane’s not pretending anything.”
“He might not be trying to plan an escape, but he hasn’t actually found Christ,” Jane said. “Mark was his catalyst for change, for extreme devotion, and Lydia’s loving that. I got caught with pot, and so during my one-on-ones I’m being really honest about my passion for smoking up—by honest I mean I’m telling Lydia that I smoke pot to deal with my guilt over my sinful sexual perversion.”
“And that’s actually working?” I asked.
Jane nodded. “As far as I can tell. I mean, I’ve never really opened up to her before, and she knows it, so she can’t help but think we’re making progress. And I just started. Wait until I cry.”
“I’ve cried in my one-on-ones before,” Adam said.
“Of course you have,” Jane said. “Indubitably.”
“Oh, excuse me my delicacies, you woman of stone, you,” Adam said, pretending to pout.
Now Lydia was saying something to Erin, but her plate was full, her cup of tea in hand. She’d be joining us any second.
“I don’t know how convincing I can be,” I said. “I feel like she’ll get what I’m doing right off.”
“Even if she does,” Jane said, “she won’t really know why you’re doing it. I just think that the less time we three spend with each other right now, and the more we seem to commit ourselves to Promise, the better. We have to sacrifice today to benefit tomorrow.”
“Ugh, gross,” Adam said. “You already soun
d like her.”
“Good,” Jane said. “That’s the idea.”
Lydia sat down at our table just after that and we all talked about things she brought up for us to talk about, none of which I remember.
Not so many days later I received, in the mail, the perfect catalyst for explaining a change in my behavior during my one-on-ones, though it didn’t present itself as that right from the start. I mean, I didn’t like get it and think, Super, now I’ll manipulate Lydia with this sob story; it just sort of opened itself up to me as I went along.
What I got in the mail was a typed three-page letter from Grandma (with an additional handwritten one-page inclusion from Ruth) detailing the difficulties Ruth was having with her NF tumor, and the thwarted surgery that was supposed to remove it. The tumor had apparently been growing at what everyone called an alarming rate ever since Christmas, especially since Christmas, and it was now obvious that Ruth had this mass on her back. She wasn’t able to easily hide it beneath her clothes any longer. Plus it was now also painful, and it was making her tired, this thing basically feeding off her like a tick or a tapeworm, and so her Minnesota surgery was pushed up by a couple of weeks, and both Ray and Grandma went to Minneapolis with her to get the damned thing cut off. But all had not gone well.
Lydia gave me the envelope at the start of a one-on-one, and since all disciple mail was still opened and screened before we received it, she already knew the contents. We usually got mail at the end of one-on-ones, or in a mass delivery to our bedrooms on Saturdays, so I knew something was strange even as she handed it to me. Then she said, “Why don’t you read it now so that we can discuss it if you need to.” And I actually got kind of worried about what I might find inside.
In her letter, Grandma talked a lot about the trip to Minneapolis and the hospital itself, and also the very fancy visitors’ wing, where they had these old typewriters set up for kids to play around on, she guessed, but she had decided to sit down and type out this letter to me, just to see if she could still do it. I feel just like Jessica Fletcher. You remember her, from “Murder, She Wrote”?
This whole business has been a real mess. The surgeons here only took off the top of the tumor (nearly a pound and a half!) before they decided that they dare not go any closer to your aunt Ruth’s spinal cord (though they had told her originally that they were going to do just that). Also, she lost quite a lot of blood while they were operating and that was worrisome, as you might expect it would be. There was a whole g-damn football team of these doctors in green clothes (I asked, and they call them scrubs) and not one of them felt right going any closer to her spine. So now the biggest section of the tumor is gone, but everyone, this whole team of doctors, is convinced that it was just a quick fix and the tumor will keep growing again because that root (or whatever you call it) is still there. They did go ahead and do a biopsy on what they got and it was benign (that’s good--it means cancer free). But they pulled a small one off her thigh (she’s had them there before, you remember) and that one was malignant (the bad kind), so they have to give her some radiation to kill the cancer cells there. Also, Ruth has the makings of another tumor on her stomach. This one isn’t hard like the one on her back, but it is quite large, they said, for a brand-new growth. So we came over here to Minnesota to get just the one removed and now we have a whole other kettle of fish to deal with. How do you like that? I call it a mess. Ruth has to stay here in Minnesota for another two weeks for the radiation and all, and then she has to be on bed rest at home for some time as well, although I do not expect that she will follow those orders to the letter. (Though she should!) Ray is going home to Miles City because he needs to get back to work, but I plan to stay with Ruth and keep her company. I We sure wish that you were here with us, Spunky.
Ruth had this to say (to me, anyway):
I think your grandmother just about covered it. Who knew she was such a typist?! I just wanted to write you and say that I am doing well. I am tired, but I feel strong, and I think this surgery was progress, even if it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. I know what the doctors are saying about regrowth, but doctors don’t know everything, and I, for one, am willing to hold out some hope that it will stay the size they’ve left it now for another ten or twenty years or even longer, who knows, maybe forever. . . . I’ve had it back there for so many years with not one change to it that I do not consider it foolish to think this might happen. As for the one on my leg, I think the radiation will zap all of its cancerous remnants away.
It is a blessing to have your grandmother here with me, and we talk about you every day. You are missed. I hope that you will add my recovery to your prayers for your own, and I want you to know that I am still praying for you too, Cameron. I love you very, very much.
When I’d finished them both and was tucking them back into the envelope, Lydia said, “I was sorry to learn of your aunt’s illness. This is something she’s had for some time?”
I thought it was sort of funny that Lydia said to learn of your aunt’s illness when what she really should have said was I opened your letters and read all about your aunt’s illness.What I said, though, was “Yeah, but it’s not usually like this. It’s, normally, she just gets these little growths removed every few years and she’s okay. I don’t think it’s ever been this bad.”
“It’s a form of cancer, then?” Lydia asked, her voice with that kind of hushed quality that some people always use to talk about cancer.
“NF isn’t,” I said. “It’s a genetic thing where you get these tumors on your nerves—I don’t really understand it that well, but it isn’t actually cancer. But if you have it, you have like a much better chance of developing cancer, which I guess happened in the tumor on her leg.”
“You must be worried about her,” Lydia said.
“Yeah,” I said, quick, because it was the response that I was supposed to give, the response that, whatever had happened between Ruth and me, I still should have felt like giving, but it wasn’t honest. I wasn’t not worried about Ruth; I mean, I didn’t wish her sickness or more cancerous growths or whatever, but I was mainly thinking about Grandma in that big hospital in Minneapolis, wandering those long, antiseptic hospital hallways that always sort of glow green, getting herself and Ruth little snacks in the cafeteria, the kinds of food Grandma loved, slices of cream pies and a big salad bar to pick and choose from, watching her detective shows on the TV in Ruth’s room, the volume too low for her to really hear it because Ruth was resting, then click-clacking away on the typewriter in a sticky, crowded waiting room where everyone looked tired, was tired, just so she could send me a letter. Picturing Grandma carrying a tray topped with a couple of bowls of soup, riding an elevator up to Ruth’s floor, made me sadder than picturing Ruth in her hospital bed, even though she was the one who was actually sick.
Lydia must have been saying something that I didn’t hear, because when she said, “Is that something you’d like to do right now?” I had to ask, “Do what?”
And she pursed her lips and then said, “Call your aunt in the hospital. We can do so; as I said, I have the number.”
“Okay,” I said, hoping, as Lydia and I walked down to the main office, that I’d get to talk to Grandma, that she wouldn’t be tooling around the gift shop or outside getting some air.
She wasn’t. After Judy at the nurse’s station connected me to the room, it was Grandma who said, “Yes, hello.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spoken on the phonewith Grandma. Not since before my mom and dad died, I’m pretty sure. We used to call her in Billings sometimes on the weekends, though not that often, because usually she just came down to see us or we went to her. I’ve heard people say “tears sprang to my eyes” before, or I’ve read it, I guess, but I don’t think that I ever really felt like that had happened to me, like I didn’t have some sense that I might cry before I started doing so, at least not until Grandma answered the phone. I was just standing in the office with its officey smell of paper a
nd permanent marker and the glue on the backs of postage stamps, and I was aware of Lydia standing just behind me—she’d dialed the number and was now planted behind me to monitor the call, my end, anyway, and then there was Grandma’s voice from some hospital room in Minneapolis, but it was like her voice out of the past too, out of my past, her voice speaking to the me who I wasn’t anymore and never would be again. And you know what, fucking tears sprang to my eyes. They did. They weren’t there and then they were, and I had to kind of take in a breath before I said, “It’s me, Grandma. It’s Cameron.”
After that kind of a beginning, the actual meat of the phone call wasn’t all that interesting. Grandma was superexcited to have me call, I could tell, and she told me all about the good cafeteria food, just like I knew she would, and all about these beautiful pink flowering trees in the hospital courtyard that she didn’t know the name of but that sure made her sneeze, and when the phone was passed to Ruth, she sounded tired, but also like she was trying to make her voice bright and not tired, which made her sound more sick than if she hadn’t done that. She and I didn’t talk for very long, but I told her that I hoped she felt better soon and that I was thinking about her, which was true.
After I’d hung up Lydia, motioned for me to sit in the spinny desk chair, and she took the nonspinny desk chair just across the room, but it was a small room and we were sitting very close, looking at each other. She just let me think for a moment or whatever, and then she said, “So how did that go?”
The Miseducation of Cameron Post Page 37