And I said, “It was weird.”
And Lydia said, “You know how I feel about you using that word during a session. It’s a catchall: the way you use it, it’s meaningless. Be specific.”
And for once I was specific. I was completely and totally specific and honest about what I was thinking right then in that moment. “I don’t know why,” I said, “but when I was talking to them, I kept picturing the two of them in a room in a hospital, which isn’t strange, I know, but it wasn’t the hospital they’re actually at, because I’ve never even been there, so how would I know what it looks like? Where I keep thinking of them as being is actually the abandoned hospital in Miles City. It’s called Holy Rosary, and like, even right now, if I try to picture my grandma in Ruth’s room, I just see it as abandoned Holy Rosary, all dirty and dark. I mean, I could change that picture, I think, and make it more accurate and put working machines and everything in the room, but that’s where my mind goes if I just let it. I see them in Holy Rosary.”
“Why do you think that is?” Lydia asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You must have some idea,” she said.
“Maybe because I’ve spent so much time there, more than I’ve ever spent in an actual, functioning hospital or whatever. Plus it’s a pretty hard place to forget.”
“But you weren’t supposed to be there, were you?” Lydia said, flipping to a clean page in her notebook, which she hardly ever did during my sessions because we covered so little ground.
“No,” I said. “We used to break in.”
It wasn’t like this was the first time that I’d ever mentioned Holy Rosary during a session. Of course we’d gotten to the topic of my unhealthy friendship with Jamie and the guys, what Lydia called my need to inappropriately emulate the reckless behavior of certain teenage males, which was part of my incorrect gender identity. We’d also covered, loosely, my underage drinking (which fell into that reckless behavior category), and we’d even gotten to what had eventually occurred between Lindsey and me, for the first time, in that abandoned hospital. But what fascinated Lydia, she told me, both that afternoon and for several one-on-ones to follow, was that I was connecting this place where I had experienced all kinds of sin with the guilt and sadness I was feeling over Aunt Ruth’s illness. And, according to Lydia, there was much work to be done, and progress to be made in “understanding that connection, digging it out and pushing it into the light and really facing it.”
I didn’t know that much about psychology. I’ve learned a few things about it recently, I guess, since leaving Promise; but when it was happening to me, when I was in the middle of my one-on-ones or group sessions, I couldn’t have told you where the religion part ended and the psychology part picked up. At least not when Lydia was running the show. With Reverend Rick, he might use a psychological term now and then, like gender identity or root cause, but most of the time he stuck to Scripture, to words like sin, repentance, obedience, and that’s only when he was talking in that authoritative kind of way, which he didn’t do very often, really. He mainly listened. But with Lydia everything mixed together, a passage from the Bible followed by an activity she’d gotten from NARTH—the National Association for the Research and Treatment of Homosexuality. Or maybe Lydia reminding us that sin was sin, and then talking about the pseudo-self-affirming behaviors associated with our sins. If the goal was to keep us from questioning the treatment we were getting in our support sessions because we didn’t know what, exactly, to question, to disagree with—the Bible or the psychology she was using—it kind of worked. But I don’t think it was necessarily so organized, so planned out as a means to manipulate us. I just think it really was the Wild West out there and they were making shit up as they went along. I mean, who was there to stop them? I know the word for all this now: it’s pseudoscientific. It’s kind of a great word: I like the s sound that comes twice in a row when you say it. But that day in the office with Lydia I didn’t know the word pseudoscientific, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have used it. I was glad she thought we were on the verge of uncovering something significant about my fucked-up development cycle, about just how I had become the vessel for sin that had earned me my place at Promise. I let her believe it, and not only because of Jane’s insistence that the three of us should get in good with the management to hasten our escape, but also because I thought, If I’m really gonna leave Promise forever, for good, and never look back, maybe I should spend the next month or so actually giving myself over to the place, its ways. Not giving in to it, not that. And not somehow acquiring faith and devotion by snapping my fingers. I knew that I would never be a Mark Turner: I didn’t have the capacity for it, or the upbringing, or the combination of the two, whatever. But I thought that if I could be honest with Lydia, really honest, and answer all of her questions fully, then maybe I could somehow figure out some things about myself. What the hell? is basically what I was thinking. What the hell?
Chapter Twenty
A week or so after Lydia let me make the phone call to the hospital, Bethany Kimbles-Erickson brought me a pretty amazing book. You wouldn’t necessarily think so the first time you saw it. Or at least I didn’t. It was about the thickness of an issue of National Geographic and it had a soft paper cover that smelled like mildew and basement, and it was sporting a coffee ring over the title, which was: The Night the Mountain Fell: The Story of the Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake. It was written by some guy named Ed Christopherson and it apparently cost one dollar when he self-published it in 1960. I knew this because in black, bold lettering at the bottom of the cover it read: ONE DOLLAR. But now, thirty-three years later, Bethany Kimbles-Erickson had paid only twenty-five cents for it at the annual Word of Life rummage sale, held in the church’s parking lot. That detail actually made me sort of sad for Ed Christopherson, wherever he was.
“I found it lying on the very top of a box of books I was moving to another table,” Bethany had told me probably ten times since she’d given it to me. “The very top. It’s one of those everyday kinds of miracles, it really is, because do you know how many boxes of books were at that sale? I would say hundreds. Really, honestly. And I didn’t even glance at half of them.”
Bethany tended to overuse the word miracle when describing coincidences, and even when she tacked on everyday to clarify just what kind of miracle we were talking about, it was still kind of annoying. So that’s what I thought her discovery of this book was: another coincidence polished up to shine like a miracle. At least that’s what I thought at first. I mean, without calling it a miracle I could still appreciate the perfect timing of her find.
Recently, those of us disciples who were in good shape for our final exams at Lifegate Christian, which included me, were allowed to work on independent projects in various subjects, Montana history being one of them. Just picking that as my subject made me feel sort of close to my mom and her work at the museum, but then I decided to research Quake Lake as my specific topic, to really find out all the history of its formation and how the facts might differ from family lore, and so Bethany’s find was very, very timely.
Those of us working on projects had already been taken to the Bozeman Public Library once, and would get to go again before the month was up, but before Bethany brought it to me, I’d not yet come across Ed Christopherson’s book. Actually, I’d spent most of my four hours at the library looking through microfilm archives of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, reading eyewitness accounts of the earthquake and spending lots of time squinting at the grainy photographs that accompanied those articles, trying to imagine my mom in her pageboy, her Campfire Girls T-shirt, sitting in the backseat of the family car, Ruth next to her, the morning after, my grandpa Wynton driving, my grandma Wynton looking back over the seat to check on her girls every few minutes, the car filled up with the heavy burden and joy of all of them knowing that they had escaped the exact site of the earthquake’s worst damage. But others hadn’t—no official word as to how many yet, but certainly
other campers had not been so fortunate.
I tried hard to imagine what my mom might have felt in the backseat on the long, hot, many-times-detoured-because-of-quake-damage drive home to Billings. Her father’s neck would have been tense and strained, the radio, when it tuned in, all endless earthquake coverage, the bottle of ginger ale bought at a gas station sweating and warming from where she had wedged it between her thighs, Mom unable to drink any more after the first swallow, when she’d thought of the Keenans, almost certainly dead, and how could she sit in the backseat and drink ginger ale if that was true? At some point while I was imagining all this, I would switch over to remembering the terrible, seemingly endless car ride into Miles City with Mr. Klauson the night he’d cut short my sleepover with Irene, the night Grandma had told me the news about my parents’ accident. This switch from imagination to memory happened automatically, young Mom in a car to me in a truck, a sort of reflex, I guess, but one triggered by what? Thinking of the sound of tires rolling over cracked, summer-hot Montana asphalt? Things left unsaid in moving vehicles? Guilt? I don’t know. And then Bethany brought me the book: The Night the Mountain Fell.
It had everything. It had graphs and charts, a fold-out cardboard map of the entire Madison Canyon Earthquake area with these funny little hand-drawn symbols all over it, like two parachutes to indicate the smoke jumpers who were called in to fight a forest fire that was started as a signal fire by some campers who had survived the quake but needed to be rescued, their cars gone, even the road they traveled to their campsites on gone.
It also had tons of photographs, clear photographs that I didn’t have to squint at: an upside-down Cadillac and the highway it had been on now cracked and broken away like snapping one of Grandma’s sugar-free wafers; another highway, one that had circled Hebgen Lake, literally dropped off into nothingness, into the lake itself—now you see it, now you don’t; harried men in untucked shirts hoisting stretchers with bandaged people on them; crowds of onlookers come to view the damage, their big-finned cars lining the sides of the nonruined highways; what one photo’s caption called a “refugee family,” all of them in pajamas as they walked down a street in Virginia City, the grandmother, in a white bathrobe, holding the hand of the youngest child, a little girl with square bangs, the mousy mother carrying a kitten, the eldest daughter with her arms folded across her chest, refusing to look at the camera but smiling a shy smile off to the side, and the son, with his blond crew cut and bare feet, grinning right at the lens. That photo had no father in it. Maybe he was the one taking the picture, but maybe not. I don’t know—the caption didn’t say.
But the photograph that made me rethink Bethany’s use of the word miracle, and that also helped to finalize our escape plan. It was like the book itself: one that didn’t seem so special at first glance. Most of the image was focused on two enormous boulders that had, the caption explained, crashed down during the quake, crushing a pup tent and killing David Keenan, age fourteen, of Billings. But miraculously, not disturbing the food on his family’s campsite picnic table, nor the larger family tent. The picnic table was in the foreground, the boulders looming just behind it, having stopped their momentum, somehow, just in time to avoid the spread.
David was survived by his parents and sister, the caption read. I’d scanned the photo while reading during classroom hours, and then had flipped on though, brought the book back to my room even, and had gone on with my day, or part of my day, before that name, David Keenan, fluttered back across my brain and made me shiver.
I was folding ratty bath towels in the laundry room when I made the connection, and I went to get the book right away, leaving the dryer door open, a bunch of wadded towels still waiting to be pulled out, more in the washer waiting to go in. David Keenan was Margot’s brother. David Keenan had kissed my mom in the pantry of the First Presbyterian Church in Billings. The book was on my desk, and once I picked it up, I flipped past the page the photo was on twice, my hands shaking. Then I flipped to it: Looking at that picture was like looking right into Margot’s memory, something that should have been completely private. Those were her family’s cups and plates on that table, their cardboard box, probably with a package of hot dog buns, a container of homemade chocolate chip cookies, maybe the stuff for s’mores, if s’mores were even around in 1959, I didn’t know for sure. Margot would have been in the not pictured larger tent, safe, when her brother died. The photo credit was given to the U.S. Forest Service. Some stranger who had snapped up her family’s tragedy. I thought that she probably wouldn’t need this photo to remember that table, those boulders, just about exactly, but I wondered if she knew about its existence, knew that it was in this ONE DOLLAR book. And wondering about that, of course, made me wonder about my own parents and all the photos of their Quake Lake death that might very well be around: their car being pulled from the lake; their bodies being pulled from the car; their IDs being pulled from my dad’s wallet, my mom’s purse. Probably there were lots of photos like that, in police files and newspaper articles, photos that I might never see, and thinking about that made me—for the first time since they’d died—want to go to Quake Lake and see things for myself. I’d told Margot Keenan that night at the Cattleman’s—my double-cherry Shirley Temple so pink there on the table in front of us—that I didn’t think I’d ever want to go to Quake Lake, ever. And she’d told me that was fine. She hadn’t even said that maybe I’d change my mind one day, the way adults always talk about stuff like that. She’d just let it be. But now, mostly because of the book, that photo, I had changed my mind. And it was practically right next door, certainly within hiking distance if you knew somebody who could read a map, work a compass, build a fire. And I did know that somebody.
The next thing I did after studying the photo was go to the Promise library and take the fat dictionary off of the bottom shelf of the second bookcase and look up the word miracle. Sure, one of the definitions talked about the work of a divine agency operating outside of natural or scientific laws, and for that definition the usage example was: the miracle of rising from the grave. And yes, that definition seemed like way too much pressure for this particular situation I’d found myself in. However, the next definition—a highly improbable or extraordinary event, development, or accomplishment that brings about welcome consequences—worked much better. I didn’t know yet if our escape plan would work, if I’d make it to Quake Lake as my welcome consequences. But Bethany finding the book, then me finding that photo, and then the use of the word miraculously in the caption to describe the undisturbed food on the picnic table: I was willing to call all that a highly improbable or extraordinary development. What sucked was that I couldn’t tell Bethany Kimbles-Erickson about how she’d maybe been sort of right about everyday miracles, just this one time.
“Today shall we talk about the cottage-cheese containers under your bed?” Lydia asked me at the start of a one-on-one in early May.
“Okay,” I said, not necessarily surprised that she knew about the containers (of course she did), just surprised that I hadn’t heard about this knowledge beforehand in the form of some punishment for having them there in the first place. We were holding this one-on-one at a picnic table not far from the barn. An outdoor support session was a rare occurrence, especially when Lydia was conducting it; but it was the best day of spring thus far, high sixties and everything covered in crazy-bright sunshine, and even she couldn’t resist being out in it. Probably too my recent willingness to actually participate during our sessions had factored in.
“You must be wondering why I’ve never mentioned them,” she said, running her hand just over the top of her swim cap–tight, French-twisted white hair.
“I guess I wasn’t sure that you knew about them,” I said.
“Of course you were.” She flicked some tiny black bug off her notebook. “You certainly didn’t go to any lengths to hide them. You must have known that they’d be found during room inspections, which indicates that you wanted them found.”
“Did you find them as satisfying?” she asked. We’d already spent an entire one-on-one and part of a group session, actually, talking about the dollhouse.
“Nope,” I said. “Not really. I couldn’t ever lose myself to them like I could with the dollhouse. I haven’t even pulled them out since . . .” I thought about it, when that might have been. I shook my head. “I don’t even know when it was.”
Lydia opened a book that she carried around with her most of the time, but that wasn’t her composition book. This one was small and had a black cover that looked sort of like leather. Maybe it was leather. She flipped a couple of pages, and I could see that it was a daily planner or journal, something with the date written on each page. “When you had just returned from break,” she said, trailing her pen down the page as she scanned. “We did room inspections that next weekend and you had added—”
“Three Christmas lights,” I finished for her. “Yeah, I forgot. They were from this string of lights that Ray had tacked up to the roof, but they came loose on Christmas Eve and the wind blew them all around.”
There was a woodpecker jackhammering somewhere close by, or at least it sounded close by. I turned to look for it. The nonneedled trees hadn’t leafed out yet, but their branches were covered in bright green buds, like they had wads of already chewed spearmint gum stuck all over them. I couldn’t find the bird. When I turned back around, Lydia was looking at me the way she did when I hadn’t yet said enough for her to ask another question.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post Page 38