Jesus Land (42 page)

“Hey!” I shout.

“Hey what?” Tiffany shouts back, still massaging her shoulders.

“Quit pissing on me!”

She grabs the shampoo bottle from the ledge between us.

“You’re insane!” she says in a dismissive voice.

I turn to face her.

“Don’t do it again,” I say. “Or else.”

“Or else what?” she asks, finally looking at me.

She squeezes shampoo onto her head without another word and I rush to finish my shower. As I rinse off, I glance at her and she’s got a smug smile on her face that I’m tempted to slap off. Instead I grit my teeth and leave the bathroom. I’m too close to winning the game to fuck up now.

The Christmas tree is a branch, painted white. We try to gussy it up with popcorn and ribbons, but ultimately, it’s just a dead tree branch.

Starr is in a mournful state, with everyone struggling to adjust to the dead branch and the fact that they are not going home. Part of the deal for most kids was that if they agreed to attend Escuela Caribe, they’d be home for the holidays. And although they may be hardened reform school kids, it still breaks
their hearts that their parents lied to them.

At Starr, there are a lot of red eyes at the supper table and a lot of sniveling after lights-out.

The pain of not being home for the Great Family Holiday is especially sharp for David. Although he’s made First Level again, on many days during P.E. he doesn’t even bother chasing the ball, and now I’m the one urging him on with pleading eyes.

During Free Time, I often see him doing casitas, his thin body pushing slowly uphill, then stumbling down it. I watch him from Starr’s patio, silently cheering him on.
Don’t give up, David. Remember Florida
.

On a joint parental phone call, our parents shout their plans for us over the crackling phone line at Ted’s. We are still forbidden from communicating, so I repeat everything our parents say
(What? I’m flying back in June?)
so David knows what’s happening, and he does the same.

After I graduate Escuela Caribe, they’re sending me to Portugal for the summer with a group called Teen Missions to help build a missionary compound. In the fall, I’ll attend a Christian college in Upland, Indiana. I’ll be home for the shortest time possible between these events to “avoid problems,” they say.

David—who’s almost a year behind in his studies—will transfer to the sister school of Escuela Caribe in Marion, Indiana, in January. No, he can’t go back to Harrison or live at home, they say when he asks. It’s Marion or the Dominican Republic. He picks Marion.

By the time we hang up, it’s abundantly clear that neither of us will ever again return home to live. We’re on our own.

This news doesn’t surprise me, but it harms David. On the way back to The Property, he stares out the van window with a wooden face, and doesn’t look at me once. He’s finally realized
that his Brady Bunch dream will never come true. He’ll always be the outsider, seeking to belong. To family, to society, to something. I sense his sorrow and long to reach across the seat to grab his arm and remind him who I am—his sister, always—but Ted’s wife is sitting behind us, scrutinizing.

On Christmas Day, we gather in the chapel during a rainstorm to listen to Ted tell us that God gave the world the gift of His Only Son and that our parents gave us the gift of Escuela Caribe, and how both these gifts will redeem us.

Candles are passed around and we sing carols with our faces illuminated by the dancing flames. I can’t see David because he’s sitting behind me, and this frustrates me.

We exchanged gifts through Debbie earlier in the afternoon. I gave him a blue dress shirt and he gave me a hat to replace the one Bruce ruined. It’s a man’s fedora, dark brown. It sunk to my eyebrows when I put it on, but made me smile all the same.

“Tell him ‘Merry Christmas,’” I said to Debbie when she dropped it off at Starr. “And ‘Happy New Year,’ too.”

In the flickering chapel, the therapist plays “Silent Night, Holy Night” on the piano, and Susan and Janet, seated on either side of me, start to cry. I get a lump in my throat and hastily blow out my candle, splashing hot wax on my dress. Susan looks at me with a wet face and raised eyebrows. I give her a dirty look, and she turns away.

I set my candle on the pew beside me and dig my fingernails into their grooves, staring in silence at the wooden cross at the front of the chapel.
You will not break me.

During the summer of 1983, when we were sixteen and still a few months away from the time when everything started to fall apart, David’s favorite song was “Our House” by Madness.

He bought the single and played it over and over again on his cassette player. The song is about a large, boisterous family doing routine domestic things like getting ready for work and school and a mother who sends her kids off each morning with a small kiss. It’s about a nostalgia for this blissful mundanity, about a family that manages to stay joyful despite daily pressures. It’s about the family David longed for.

We are given a parting gift a few days before David returns to Indiana.

A weekend trip to the beach, accompanied by the P.E. teacher, Peter, and his wife, Marie, the therapist.

Ted calls us into his office one afternoon to announce this surprise and to give us permission to communicate again. He skips his usual “Jesus is watching and listening and knowing” speech and simply tells us to have fun.

“You’re practically adults now,” he says, shrugging and lifting the palms of his hands in a helpless gesture. “There’s not much more The Program can do for you.”

We leave The Property late on a Friday afternoon in an Escuela Caribe van, bumping down the mud-and-rock roads of the mountains to the sandy flatlands of the coast. During the three-hour ride, the Madsens play jazz instead of Sandi Patti, and
David and I sit behind them, jiggling our knees and pointing out at curiosities in the passing landscape.

We arrive in Sosua, a fishing village on the island’s north shore, as the sun melts golden orange into the ocean. Our hotel is on the beach, a stucco block building with rickety metal balconies. The therapist and I stay in one room, David and the P.E. teacher in another.

There are cigarette holes burned into the bed sheets, but the mattresses are thick and lush, and when Marie goes into the bathroom, I take off my shoes and bounce on mine silently to celebrate.

The four of us eat a supper of fried plantains and pinto beans in the dingy hotel dining room, then play Concentration with a beat-up pack of cards we find in the lobby, and go to bed early. I fall asleep instantly on the soft mattress, lulled by the swish of waves, and, for once in a very long time, am not woken by the cries of nightmaring girls.

On Saturday morning, the four of us line up our beach towels and read through a box of American magazines that were left at the hotel. They are months old and filled with information that was sometimes reported back to us, and sometimes not.

We knew, for example, that President Reagan had been reelected and that a new edition of the New International Version of the Bible had been released. We did not know that Duran Duran had released a new album or that
Three’s Company
ended its seven-year run. Important moments in history have passed us by, and it dismays us.

David and I don’t want to abuse the privilege of being together, so we stick close to our chaperones. We wade in the ocean when they do, buy conch fritters and coconut popsicles from street vendors when they do, return to our towels when they do.

After supper,
Tootsie
is playing on a tiny black-and-white television in the hotel lobby, and the Madsens let us watch it despite the sex and the profanity and the man in a dress. The screen keeps dissolving into rolling gray static, but David and I sit in rapt attention—it’s the first TV we’ve seen since we left the States. The Madsens laugh at the funny parts as hard as we do.

“Don’t tell Ted,” Pete says, winking.

Saturday night, I lie awake for hours on the soft mattress, watching the salty breeze billow the balcony curtain, listening to the waves, and thinking about David.

Tomorrow is our last day together. The last day of our childhood, really. We’re about to take separate paths in life, and don’t know when we’ll see each other again.

Maybe we’ll meet up in the fall, when I start college and David’s finishing high school in Marion, fifteen miles away. But he’ll be eighteen in June, and why would he stay in reform school when he’s not marooned on an island or obligated by law? As he says, you don’t need a diploma to be an actor.

What will become of him? Of us?

After surviving Escuela Caribe together, I cannot imagine life without the daily comfort of his presence. Nobody knows me as well as he does. Who will be with me when life grows unbearable, and force me to laugh despite myself? And how will I know he’s okay if I can’t read his eyes? These are the thoughts that keep me awake as the sea breeze billows the curtains.

“Why don’t you two go off and spend the day together?” Marie suggests at the breakfast table the next morning. “I’m sure you’ll want to catch up before David leaves.”

We exchange a wide-eyed look before shrugging and looking nonchalant. If we show our excitement, they might change their minds.

“Okay,” I say.

“We’ll meet you back here later,” Pete says.

“What time, six?” David asks.

“Make it eight,” Marie says.

We walk barefoot into the sunshine and cross the empty white sand beach to the end of the horseshoe-shaped bay, following the lapping waves to a small rise where we could see the Madsens coming if they tried to sneak up on us. Better safe than sorry.

We unfurl our towels and sit down.

The ocean spreads turquoise before us, and seagulls swoop and cry over pastel-colored fishing boats rocking in the center of the bay. Somewhere beyond the horizon lies Florida, and the United States, and our future.

We sit in our swimsuits staring at the bay and contemplating all this in silence. The sun beams down on us, already tingling hot at ten o’clock. This is an important day, and we both know it. The knowledge juts awkwardly between us, and I almost wish the Madsens were here to distract us.

I scoop up a palmful of sand and let it rain through my fingers and David draws up his knees and hooks his arms around them.

We watch a pelican dive-bomb the water and surface with a flash of silver in its beak. It tosses its head back and the fish tumbles into the leather bag of its gullet, snap, snap, swallow.

Where to begin talking? How to begin sorting out everything we’ve been through? Jay’s punch and The Pastor’s dirty threat and Indiana before that, the shameful times I turned my back on him, and the time he kicked me in the stomach and when he
sliced his wrist and when Dad broke his arm. It is not our habit to talk about such things. We don’t know how to do it.

I unzip my backpack and take out a
Glamour
and a
Sports Illustrated
.

“Something to read,” I say, handing David the sports magazine.

He frowns down at the cover photograph of a black baseball player named Darryl Strawberry. “The Straw That Stirs the Mets,” it says.

“I’m not into sports,” he says. “Only Purdue.”

“I know, but it’s all they had.”

He lays the magazine on the sand and goes back to staring at the water as I flip through
Glamour
. It’s the September 1984 issue, five months old. Last fall, mismatched socks were in, side ponytails were out, and men still wanted women to be virgins in public and whores in private.

“Wanna go in?” David asks.

I look up and he points at the ocean with his chin.

“Okay,” I say, returning the magazine to my backpack, just in case the Madsens come by.

We stand and David takes off his glasses and flings them onto his towel.

He turns to me, and grins.

“Last one in is a mango-assed redneck!” he shouts.

We take off thumping over the hot sand, our feet sinking in, scrambling toward the water. David reaches it first and thrashes through the foam before diving into an oncoming wave.

He’s a fast runner, but I’m a faster swimmer. I chase him through the bathtub-warm water, grab the hard knob of his ankle, and yank it backward before plunging his shoulders underwater.