Jane didn’t pretend not to look at me, naked and pale in the dark of that canyon, shivering, my face uplit and flickering with the flame of my candle, as afraid of messing things up as I’d ever been in my life. I loved her for that. She met my eyes and said, “You can do this. We’ll be here waiting for you.”
“What is it that I’m doing, again?”
“You know that already,” she said. “You just think that you don’t, but you do. It’s what you came all this way for.”
I nodded but wasn’t as confident in what I knew as Jane seemed to be.
I did, however, know better than to feel the cold water with only my toes, then my feet, and to try to slowly, slowly adjust, inch by inch. There wouldn’t be any adjusting to this lake on this night: there would be, at best, tolerating it. I stepped in, one foot after another, and just kept walking, the lake floor rocky in some places, gooey and thick in others. It was like walking on coals, maybe, if the coals and ash grew thicker and thicker with each step, burning with each stride a bit farther up your leg. By ten long steps out the water was at my hipbones, the cold sucking all the breath from my body. I concentrated on my candle flame, counted to three as I inhaled, and again to three as I blew out. And again. And again. My blood pounded in my ears, and something like an ice-cream headache pulsed along my temples. If I wanted to make it to that skeleton forest, I was going to have to swim.
I held the candle in my right hand, up and out from my body, away from the surface. I bent at the knees and let myself ease onto my back, so as not to jostle and splash the water any more than necessary. I let the burning water cradle me until I was all the way in a back float, face up to the sky, feet facing the bank where Jane and Adam were starting the fire, the candle still lit, above me in my hand. The wax poured along my thumb and wrist as I drew it back to me. It hardened almost instantly. I planted the candle’s base just above my belly button and held it there with both hands clenched around it as if it was something solid, something grounded: a sail mast, a flagpole. My heartbeat drummed in my stomach, and the candle shifted with my shivering, my strained breathing, but it flickered on.
My body wanted to be tense, that’s how it planned to keep me alive, by letting me know how serious the cold of this water was, how I needed to get out of it, by refusing to let me get used to it. The muscles in my neck strained like cables hauling something heavy, a piano or a tractor. I couldn’t unclench my jaw. My feet, out of the water except for the heels, were curled and stretched in strange positions, like the feet of really old people I’d seen when caroling with Firepower at the nursing home. I concentrated on my candle flame and tried to let those muscles ease, to let the water control me, to own me in this moment.
Once I got my breathing under control, I dropped my right hand from the candle and sculled the water, propelling myself forward, gnarled feet toward the gnarled trees and the arching cliffside and road my parents had toppled from behind those trees. It probably took no more than a minute and a half to reach the little grove, but my arm and shoulder were aching by then. I regripped the candle base with both hands and again concentrated on my breathing. From somewhere beyond the canyon, from the knuckles of the mountains looming in the distance, wind came, and I lifted my neck to watch it tumble its ways through the pines and down the slopes, out across the water to me. The wind made the skeleton trees creak and crack, those sounds harsh. The wind also blew out my candle, or it seemed to: it went out completely, the black wick naked, but then it was clothed in flame again. And it stayed lit.
My headache was making everything hurt, even my teeth. I opened my eyes and then shifted my body, dropped my hips, did all the things necessary to ruin a back float, and let first my legs, then my trunk, then my face, slip just beneath the surface, a thin sheet of water on top of my skin, all except for my hands, clenched around the candle, those remained above. I could still hear the crack of the trees but I liked the layer of padding that the water glued over the noises. I made myself remember my parents, first my mom, then my dad, not together but separate, their faces, their bodies, the way they walked into a room, held the news-paper, stirred their coffee. It was hard to do, but I did it the best I could, lifting my head and pointing my lips to suck air when I needed to, before slipping just below again, back to my parents. My mother puzzling over the placement of something at the museum. My father using the blue hankie he kept in his back pocket to wipe his forehead. My mother teaching me how to hold a paring knife to cut vegetables. My father driving the way he always did, with just one hand sort of lolled on the steering wheel.
I felt like I was fucking up this whole thing, this thing that I’d waited to do, and now here I was and I didn’t know what to do, or how to do it, or how to feel. None of my standbys would work: no quoting the movies, no making a joke. It had to be now. I wanted it to be. I lifted my head back out of the water.
“Mom and Dad,” I said, my voice sounding strange, like it belonged to the lake and not to me. Or maybe it was what I was saying with it. I hadn’t said Mom and Dad like that, as a form of address, in forever. It was somehow embarrassing to be talking to them, even all alone, with no one to hear but them, but I decided that embarrassment was okay, it was maybe even right, so I kept on. “I can remember lots of stupid stuff I watched in movies and whatever, but not things about the two of you that I think I should remember.”
I thought for a little while before I spoke again. “I used to want to come here to tell you how sorry I was.” I took a breath in and then I just said it. “Not for kissing Irene, but for being relieved that you weren’t gonna find out, that I wasn’t going to be found out, because you were dead. That doesn’t make any sense, I know, because you know everything when you’re dead anyway, right? But even still.”
On the side of one of the mountains there were suddenly four perfect rectangles of yellow: windows in a cabin I hadn’t even distinguished from the dark of the trees until a light switch was flicked. I imagined people at those windows, looking out, down the mountainside to the lake, wondering about my single candle—or would it seem like there were two of them, with the flame’s reflection on the lake viewed at so great a distance? For some reason I really wanted there to be people at those windows.
I kept on with what I was saying. “I don’t think that I made your accident happen; I don’t anymore, so I didn’t come here for that. What I guess I wish for now is that I had figured out that you were people and not just my parents before you died. Like figured it out for real, and not like Lydia said, so I could blame you for the way I am. But even though I know that I would have wanted to know you as those people, I didn’t, and I’m not sure you knew me either, not beyond me being your daughter, I mean. Maybe while you were alive I hadn’t even become me yet. Maybe I still haven’t become me. I don’t know how you tell for sure when you finally have.” I tilted the candle just so and let all the melted wax pooled around the wick spill free and cascade down my knuckles, the trail at first translucent, then quickly hardening into a river of white on top of my skin. Lots of wax cascaded all the way down my hand, off the edge, and into the lake, and once there became magical, tiny floating polka dots, like wax versions of the droppings of a paper punch.
I watched one of the dots float beyond the glow of my candle, and then I kept talking. “I don’t know if you would have sent me to Promise, or to a place like it, or if you’d have wanted to even if you didn’t actually do it. But you weren’t around to and Ruth was, and I can’t believe her when she says that it’s what you’d have wanted for me. Even if it’s true, I don’t think it’s something I have to spend my life believing. Does that make sense? Like that it might have been true, if you’d known me now, but because you didn’t get the chance, I can just erase whatever might have been true about it? I hope that makes some sort of sense. The thing is, pretty much everything that’s happened since you died has convinced me that I was lucky to have had you as my parents, even for only twelve years, and even if I didn’t really know it when
you were alive. And I guess I just wanted to come here and say that I know it now, and I loved you, even though all of that probably sounds a little late in the coming, or not enough or whatever. But that’s something I’ve been able to figure out for sure.” I let myself spin some there in the water, circles, not fast or slow, but movement, one hand sculling me around. “I don’t know what will happen after I reach the shore,” I said. “Maybe you do—I don’t know how it works from where you are, what you can see. I like to think that you can see it all, and that whatever’s waiting won’t manage to trip me up. At least not too much.” I stopped talking. I had nothing left to say, nothing left I could put words to. But I kept spinning. I’d finally come to this place to which it seemed like everything in my life thus far had somehow been tied, somehow, even things that shouldn’t have been, and I wanted to soak in it. So I did. I kept spinning until I was dizzy. Probably I was dizzy from more than just that. I was frozen. Then I was done.
I didn’t know how to end, to feel like I was finished, so I did the one big thing I could think to do, the one movie trick, and I blew out the candle. And even though it was so sort of, I don’t know, sort of predictable, I guess, it still felt good and it felt like this act of closure or something. And then I swam toward the shore. I swam like I didn’t even think my body would let me swim, hard and fast, my muscles tight and unwilling, and I made them do it anyway. I kept the candle in my right hand. It thunked into the water with each downward pull, but I wasn’t letting go of it and I wasn’t slowing down. I swam as close to the shore as I could before my knees, scraping lake bottom, forced me to stop.
Adam sloshed into the water, soaking his shoes before grabbing me by the elbow, pulling me up fast and perfect as if he’d done it so many times before. Jane came around from behind him, her arms stretched wide with the bright striped beach towel strung between. She wrapped it around me. Then, one on either side, they walked me to the shore, which was black and endless. But there was a fire waiting. And there was a little meal laid out on a blanket. And there was a whole world beyond that shoreline, beyond the forest, beyond the knuckle mountains, beyond, beyond, beyond, not beneath the surface at all, but beyond and waiting.
Acknowledgments
These are unforgiveably long: please forgive me. Somehow, my phenomenal agent (before she was actually my agent), Jessica Regel, came to believe in this book while I drove her from Lincoln to Omaha, the day muggy and stifling, the air-conditioning whirring without much effect, and me doing a very ham-fisted job of summarizing Cameron Post’s world to her. Though we very nearly ran out of gas, and I managed to get us a little lost on a back road trying to find some, Jessica’s encouragement started during that short trip, and her guidance and dedication to the book have immeasurably helped me, and it, ever since. I am likewise indebted to my editor, Alessandra Balzer, for her great enthusiasm and kindness, and for not only knowing, at every stage, what’s best for this novel, but for helping me to see why. Thanks, also, to the fantastic Sara Sargent—in fact, there is a whole car on my love train reserved for the entire team at Balzer & Bray.
I am endlessly grateful to the teachers and mentors who have offered me their insight, patience, and time: Eric Brogger, Julia Markus, and Paul Zimmerman at Hofstra University—thanks, Paul, for your early encouragement, your continued support all these years later, and your wit along the way. Thanks also to Gina Crance Gutmann, who made a small-town Montanan feel instantly welcome in the wilds of Long Island—without your support I’d never have survived freshman year, RA training, or poison oak.Though she wasn’t yet named, I developed Cameron’s voice during Danzy Senna’s fiction workshop at the University of Montana MFA program, and it was Danzy who first encouraged me to continue with the piece, originally written as a short story. In Missoula I was also privileged to study with Jill Bergman (all those “scribbling women”); Judy Blunt; Casey Charles; Deirdre McNamer; Brady Udall, who was a fantastic adviser; and Debra Magpie Earling, who has always been so generous to me. Most recently, at the PhD in Creative Writing Program at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln, I was honored to work with and learn from Amelia M. L. Montes; Gwendolyn Foster; Jonis Agee; Barbara DiBernard, who taught me so much about teaching and who is, without question, one of the all-around coolest people I have ever known; Judith Slater, who rooted for this novel early on and who is endlessly calm and wise; Gerald Shapiro, who has near-perfect comic timing, knows a thing or two about falafel, and made me want to come to UNL in the first place; and the effortlessly brilliant Timothy Schaffert, who always has the best answers to even my stupidest questions (of which there have been many), and whose catalog of 1970s pop-culture references never ceases to delight me.
I am so grateful to my talented and funny friends, many of them writers, all of them inspiring: Rose Bunch, who once put shiny dinosaur stickers on one of my story drafts, which is maybe the best positive feedback ever; Kelly Grey Carlisle, who let me use the time pre and post our swims to go on and on about the book and who is a phenomenal giver of pep talks; Carrie Shipers, who read and edited some of the earliest drafts and who said such smart things, asked such smart questions, and remembered the kinds of details, weeks and months later, that made me proud to have her as a reader; Mike Kelly, who is my nineties-music kindred spirit and who read the first half of the book when that’s all I had finished and asked where the rest of it was already; Adam Parkening, who tells me everything I need to know about films I’ll probably never watch; Rebecca Rotert, who is my favorite reason to visit Omaha and who needs to finish her own novel already (ahem); Marcus Tegtmeier, artist and website designer extraordinaire; and Ben Chevrette, who is absurdly stylish and charming, who was one of the two best things to happen to me in college, and who will always, always be my favorite gay.
Love and thanks to my family, the Danforths, the Loendorfs, the Finnemans, and the Edsells. Thanks especially to my brother, William, and sister, Rachel: that Thriller-related torture experiment of yours probably ultimately did me more good than harm. (Probably, though it’s still too early to say for certain.) I am also deeply grateful to my parents, for raising me to be curious about the world and everything in it and for their love and support as I’ve made my way.
Finally, and most of all, my love and thanks to Erica: for reasons too many to list. I know you tell people that you had nothing to do with the writing of this novel, and while that might technically be true, you had absolutely everything to do with my being able to write it at all.
In memory of Catherine Havilland Anne Elizabeth Mary Victoria Bailey Woods, who not only had the best and longest name of any friend I’ve ever had, but who was also the truest friend, the most honest friend, and the one with the greatest imagination.
About the Author
EMILY M. DANFORTH was born and raised in Miles City, Montana. She has an MFA in fiction from the University of Montana and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she’s worked as the assistant director of the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference. She teaches creative writing and literature courses at Rhode Island College and is coeditor of The Cupboard. This is her first novel. You can visit her online at www.emdanforth.com.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Credits
Jacket art © 2012 David Oliver/GettyImages
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
An altered version of the first chapter of this novel was previously published in Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post
Copyright © 2012 by Emily M. Danforth
Interior art copyright © 2012 by Marcus Tegtmeier
All rights res
erved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.epicreads.com
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Danforth, Emily M.
The miseducation of Cameron Post / Emily M. Danforth. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: In the early 1990s, when gay teenager Cameron Post rebels against her conservative Montana ranch town and her family decides she needs to change her ways, she is sent to a gay conversion therapy center.
ISBN 978-0-06-202056-7 (trade bdg.)
1. Lesbians—Fiction. 2. Gays—Fiction. 3. Orphans—Fiction. 4. Montana—Fiction.] I. Title. II. Title: Mis-education of Cameron Post.
PZ7.D2136Mi 2012
[Fic]—dc22
2011001947
CIP
AC
* * *
12 13 14 15 16 LP/BV 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
Epub Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN: 9780062101969
About the Publisher
The Miseducation of Cameron Post Page 42