Jesus Land (20 page)

Mother leans forward to take a Christmas cookie from a platter she’s set on the coffee table. Dad unfolds a map and points to the island, the Dominican Republic, next to Cuba. They found the school in an advertisement at the back of
Christianity Today,
Mother explains. Mother hands one brochure to David, who reaches out awkwardly with his cast to take it, and one to me.

I look at David, but he’s taking this news with the same dim eyes he’s had ever since Dad fractured his arm. He twists his nail ring round and round on his finger, the one he made to protect himself from harm.

On the top of the brochure is a cross surrounded by a circle with the words “New Horizons Youth Ministries, Inc.” inside it.

Do you have an adolescent who . . .

Rejects your family’s Christian values?

Is out of control?

Has a low self-image?

Is irresponsible, showing lack of character?

Runs with a negative crowd or has no friends?

Is unmotivated and failing in school?

Is disrespectful, rejecting your love and others?

New Horizons Youth Ministries can help.

I look up at Dad.

“Is this some kind of punishment or something?”

He takes a drink of his coffee before responding.

“David needs help, and these people can help him,” he says flatly.

He takes another sip of coffee.

“He’ll leave after New Year’s.”

“How long will he be there?” I ask, looking at David, who is staring blankly at his brochure.

“He’ll be there until the staff feel he’s ready to come back,” Dad says, rising from his chair. “Everything’s explained right there in the informational packet.”

Mother also stands.

“We have adult Bible study at the Vanderkoys at seven,” she says. “There’s leftovers for supper, and you may watch
The Waltons
at eight.”

I wait until they walk into the garage before turning to David.

“What do you think about all this?” I ask him.

“Does it matter?” he asks.

He tosses his brochure on the coffee table with his good arm, and I continue to read mine, skimming down the page.

Concept

Why in the Dominican Republic? Three reasons: atmosphere, culture shock, and distance.

Atmosphere

Escuela Caribe is set far away from the pervasive influences of American society; the materialism, the social ills, the negative peers, and the struggles in one’s family . . .

Culture Shock

A change in climate, racial differences, geographic surroundings, friends, daily routine, and language all make adolescents remarkably more dependent upon others for direction. This also renders them more malleable . . .

Distance

Living in a structured environment, teens start to appreciate Mom and Dad and begin to share their parents’ dream of a united family again . . .

“It’s a reform school,” David says quietly.

“But why?” I ask. “What’d you do?”

We both know there’s no answer to this. We sit in a tight silence as Rejoice Radio plays stale Christmas carols over the intercom, not knowing what to say. Out the great room windows, the sunset spills red across the snow-tossed landscape.

After a long while, David stands.

“I guess I’d best prepare myself,” he says, turning toward the basement.

The night before David leaves, I sit on his bed as he packs, next to a pile of underwear with SCHEERES written in Marksalot on the inside back of the waistbands. We’ve tuned his radio to Rejoice and set it in front of the intercom so we can talk privately.

“Don’t leave me here alone with them!” I plead as he slowly rolls a pair of jeans into a compact tube. They took his cast off early, and he’s being ginger with his arm.

“Come with me,” he says, laughing darkly.

“Uh . . . maybe I’ll come for a visit.”

He and Mother trekked into town several times this past week to revamp his wardrobe—
”no tight, torn, or revealing clothing,
no T-shirts with logos”
—and to get him a passport. In it, he glowers at the camera, dressed in a Sunday shirt.

I pick up a piece of paper lying next to his suitcase, a list the school sent, and skim down to the DO NOT BRING section:

No music

No secular reading material

No playing cards

No medications, without previous approval

Nothing that does not honor and glorify God

As he wedges the jeans into a corner of the suitcase, my eyes fall on his right forearm. The razor cuts have scabbed over into a row of dark tracks except for the places where he’s picked them off, which are pink. He sees me staring at his arm and pulls it against his stomach.

I stand and walk to the window. Outside it’s hailing, and there’s already a foot of snow on the ground.

“Just think, you’ll be lying on the beach down there, while I’m freezing my butt off back here,” I say, watching his reflection in the glass. He straightens and looks at me, and I turn around.

The intercom crackles.

“Julia, David needs to finish packing and go to bed,” Mother says over the sound of the radio. “We leave for Indy at 5:30 tomorrow.”

I ignore her and walk over to David.

“Gonna be real lonely around here without you, Baby Boo Boo,” I say, calling him by the nickname I never use anymore.

“You’d best write,” he says, pausing for a moment before adding “Ju-la-la.”

“I will,” I say. “You too.”

We stand there not looking at each other. We’ve never been separated for longer than a weekend since we were three. We
take each other’s presence—sometimes annoying, sometimes gratifying, always constant—for granted. The intercom speaker crackles again—Mother listening, waiting—and I punch him in the biceps, and he covers his arm with his hand and pretends it hurts. We’ve always expressed our affection through playful aggression—we don’t come from a kissing and hugging family and it’s the best we can do.

“I’ll miss you,” I say.

“I’ll miss you, too,” he says, smiling, “but not your abuse.”

“Soon you’ll be back for more,” I say, backing toward the door.

“Julia,” he calls when I have the doorknob in my hand.

I turn; he stands there with a serious face, eyebrows raised, eyes beseeching.

“Don’t forget about me.”

I shake my head.

“Nope. Never.”

I leave his door open and walk up the stairwell. Mother and Dad are reading on the sofa. When I reach the hallway, there’s the sharp crinkle of a newspaper hastily put down.

“Julia, the draft!” Mother calls. “How many times do I have to tell you to keep that door closed?”

I go back to it and gently nudge the door into its frame, so that it’s shut, but not quite closed.

In preschool, color became a problem. There were kids who didn’t like David because he was black and there were kids who didn’t like me because I was his sister.

Others were just curious and asked stupid questions.

“How’d you get that color?” they’d ask. “If you scratch your skin, are you white underneath?”

I’d thrust myself between David and his interrogators.

“He was born that way, dummy!” I’d say. “If you scratch your skin are you black underneath?”

But their questions never ended.

“Is your blood green?”

“How do people see you at night? Are you invisible?”

“Is your hair plastic?”

They regarded him as a fascinating freak, and David dutifully answered their questions, letting them poke and prod at him.

But as we got older, this curiosity turned into rejection. Insults were hurled on the playground—”Jungle bunny,” “Poo boy,” “Velcro head.” They called us the “Oreo Twins,” and we were often left to play alone at recess.

That was fine by us, because we were best friends anyway.

A buzzer sounds and the cell door jerks open. I open my eyes, run them over the vomit-colored cement block walls, and close them again. The air con is still blasting down from the ceiling vent. I shiver and pull the stingy gray blanket around my shoulders, waiting for the next thing to happen.

“The time is six
A.M.
,” a female voice announces. “Breakfast is served. You have fifteen minutes to eat breakfast, do your toilet, and return to your cell. Next meal, twelve noon.”

Footsteps shuffle past my head on the other side of the bars. I swing my feet over the side of the metal shelf and stand, hiking up the waist of my XL orange jumpsuit before bending to put on my sneakers—the only “personal effect” they allowed me to keep.

In the common area, three girls in similar orange jumpsuits sit at a plastic yellow picnic table. There’s a number on each girl’s back and I wonder what mine is; I was too dazed last night to notice it.

Across from the picnic table is a long window and two female guards sit behind it, sipping coffee and watching
Donahue
on a TV jutting from the wall.

I sit down next to LJ452, a fat girl with short brown hair. She and the girl sitting opposite her are about my age, but the girl sitting directly across from me still has baby fat in her cheeks and looks to be about twelve or thirteen years old. What did
she
do? She catches me staring and scowls, so I look down at the plate in front of me, two chocolate-covered donuts and a cup of Tang. Juvenile food. Juvenile delinquent food.

The last month has been strange.

After David was sent to the Dominican Republic, things didn’t calm down at home.

Mother read my diary and found out I’d snuck into
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
—
“They showed some teats is all,”
I’d written— and my parents started becoming suspicious of my whereabouts.

One evening Father confronted me in the kitchen, demanding to know where I’d gone after a baby sitting job the night before. I knew he suspected me of seeing Scott, whom my parents officially disapproved of after learning his family weren’t church people and that a neighbor had spotted a porno magazine in their living room.

That night I actually hadn’t seen Scott, but Dad kept insisting I tell him “the truth” and I kept insisting I had come straight home. His face grew redder, his voice fiercer, until something inside him popped and he threw me on the kitchen counter and came racing at my throat with his hands. I instinctively knocked them away, and then Mother—who was sitting on the sofa—stood up to say she’d found an Arby’s cup beside the driver’s seat of her Audi, which I’d borrowed because the Toyota was in the shop.

I’d forgotten about the Jamocha shake. I’d gone by the Arby’s drive-through on my way home and had left the container in her car. Huge Mistake, apparently. Huger than I ever could have ever imagined.

That day I realized I wasn’t immune to my father’s violence. For years, while my brothers were whipped and I was spared, I thought I had some kind of biological privilege—that my father wouldn’t harm his own genetic material. But in their absence, my father didn’t have anywhere to train the spotlight of his rage on but me.

So when my parents left for another missionary meeting in California and the nurse from my dad’s clinic who was staying with me caught Scott climbing out of my bedroom window one morning, I left home. If my father wanted to choke me over a forgotten milkshake, what would he do to me for losing my virginity?

I moved in with my brother Dan and his three roommates at Purdue and found a part-time job as a busgirl at the Howard Johnson’s Hotel on Highway 52. I biked to work, and to Harrison—an hour’s ride away—if I couldn’t find someone to drive me. I didn’t go to school if I wasn’t in the mood for it, and a couple of teachers threatened to flunk me before passing me with D’s.

Although I was dirt poor—I paid half Dan’s rent, and frequently resorted to eating off the room service trays I was sent to collect from the hotel hallways—I was happy. I didn’t have to go to church, spent hours watching MTV, and didn’t need permission to do anything. I was free.