The Miseducation of Cameron Post (39 page)

Rick again locked the closet. “We told them to go ahead and write you, if they wanted to, just that we didn’t know for sure when you’d be ready to get them.”

“Why am I ready now?” I asked. The letter from Coley was on top, her handwriting right there beneath my fingers. I pulled and snapped the rubber band against the envelopes a few times.

“I like what I saw in the kitchen this morning,” he said. “Breakthroughs don’t always happen during a session. Some-times it means more if they don’t.”

“Why is singing along with a tape a breakthrough?” I asked.
Snap, snap, snap
.

Rick covered my snapping hand with his. “It was more than that and you know it. For three minutes you didn’t have that steel wall up around you you’ve had since you got here. The one that’s back up now. You were letting yourself be vulnerable, and it takes vulnerability to change.”

“So now I can just have these?” I asked, lifting up the stack of letters a little. They felt weirdly dangerous in my hands.

“Yes, absolutely. They’re yours. You can have decoration privileges, too. Some. You can have some. Lydia has a sheet with the specifics, and she’ll go over that with you.”

“I don’t feel any more cured,” I said. It was my most honest moment with Rick up to that point.

Rick shook his head, closed his eyes, and overdid a sigh of exasperation. “We don’t cure people here, Cameron. We help them come to God.”

“I don’t think I feel any closer to God, either,” I said.

“Maybe God feels closer to you,” he said.

“Is there a difference?”

“Read your mail,” he said, opening the door. “Just don’t leave Adam for too long. I promised him.”

I checked out the care package first. Grandma had sent two bags of mini Halloween candy bars and a pack of nice white cotton running socks, and she’d baked brownies and blondies. They were now weeks old, but I tried a couple anyway. They tasted old. One of her letters talked all about how hard it was to bake with sugar and not eat anything she was making, but that she was willing to do it for me. Then she admitted that she actually had eaten some of the brownies.
But not too many
. The other letter was mostly about a new family of squirrels that had taken up residence in the backyard, and her alternating fascination and annoyance with them. She didn’t mention where I was or what I might be doing. Ruth’s letters, on the other hand, were all about how much I was missed, how much she was praying for me, how hard she knew this must be for me. Then I got to the one she must have sent first, and it was about how terrible she’d felt when driving away from Promise back in August, how she’d had to pull over to get herself together, and she chose the spot just before the sign to Quake Lake and it was like God was telling her to go there. Just to go there. So she did.

I hadn’t been to Q.L. since I went back with some flight attendant friends once in the eighties. This time I pulled into a scenic overlook and just cried and cried while I thought about what you had just said to me about how I probably am partly to blame for your condition. I had to really wrestle with that, Cameron, and I still am wrestling, but I’m willing to admit that maybe I am. I can take some of that blame. I can shoulder it. I saw you turning from God and acting out, unsure of yourself, and I let you go your own way instead of actively helping you to become the woman I know you can be. I so want a life of happiness for you. I hope one day you’ll see that this is the path to that happiness and, more importantly, to a lifetime beyond this one.

I re-enveloped that letter and put it aside. I took in a breath. I reached for Coley’s, considered all the elements: the stamp, a Virgin Mary Christmas version—it was sort of early for that; her neat penmanship; the soft, pearl-pink color of the envelope. I pulled free the letter, one single sheet of matching pink stationery.

Dear Cameron,

I am writing this letter because Pastor Crawford and my mother think it is a good thing for me to do. I am currently working through what happened between us, as I know you are too, but I am very angry at you for taking advantage of our friendship in the ways you did, so angry that it makes it hard even to write to you. I thought that it was too soon for you to hear all of this, but Pastor Crawford asked the people at Promise and they said that it’s good for disciples to see how much their sin can damage others and the destruction it can cause. I feel so sick and ashamed when I think of the summer. I’ve never known shame like this. I don’t know how I let you control me like you did. It’s like I wasn’t even me anymore. My mother started saying that even during Bucking Horse Sale, and she was right. I’m not saying that I didn’t sin, too. What I’m saying is that you already had this thing in you. I didn’t. However, I was weak, and you saw that and used it to your benefit. I sometimes just sit and stare into space and wonder why I did that, but I don’t have any answers yet. I’m working on them. Brett is being very supportive and he even says that he’s not mad at you, because he’s a bigger person and a better Christian than that. I know that you will be home for Christmas and maybe by then I’ll be ready to see you, not alone, but at church, I mean. I don’t know, though. I pray that you are finding GOD and in HIM are ridding yourself of this. I pray for you every night and I hope that you pray that I will heal from all of this as well. I have a long way to go. I feel like damaged goods right now.

Coley Taylor

I read it a few times to be sure that I got it all. The worst part was, somehow, that she had signed her last name. I put it back in its matching envelope. I put all the envelopes in the box from Grandma. I got up, took the box, shut the door to the office, walked down the hallway, counting my steps, making them even and precise. It took me thirty-eight to get to the kitchen. Jane was now standing by the counter, she and Adam laughing about something.

“Hey, hey, Patty Privileges!” Jane said, using a long-handled wooden spoon to point to the box in my hands. “You get anything good?”

I shook my head.

“Mail call, soldier,” she said. “Who sent you what?”

“I got a letter from Snow White,” I said.

Jane laughed and said, “Just Snow White, none of the other Disney princesses?”

But Adam said, “No way? They let her write you? Lemme see.”

I handed it to him. He held it out so Jane could read it too. They did. Adam sort of gasped when he was somewhere in the middle; I don’t know which line made him do it. Then they were finished reading, they must have been, her letter wasn’t that long, but neither of them talked for a while.

Jane eventually said, “Well, she sure sounds like an enormous sack of good times.”

Since she’d tried for a joke I tried for a smile. Neither quite worked.

Adam waited a little longer, and then he came over and put one arm around my shoulders, the letter in the hand at his side. He said, “I don’t care what you say, if she hadn’t before she has now.”

“Has what?” Jane asked.

“Broken Cam’s heart,” he said.

“This girl?” Jane said, snatching the letter from him. “This Christian android–sounding thing?”

“She did,” I said.

“Well then, you glue it the frick back together,” Jane said. “You can’t let her.” She rattled the paper in the air, fast and angry. “Not this girl. No way, kids. Not pink-stationery girl.”

She turned, letter in hand. She flicked on the garbage disposal, pushed up the faucet handle so the water ran full blast, and fed the letter, one big gulp, to the drain. It was gone in a single fast and crackly gurgle. Then she turned off the disposal, pushed down the faucet, wiped her hands on her pants like that process had been muddy or something. “There. Now there was no letter,” she said. “That girl exists only as you want to remember her. I’d recommend not remembering her at all. That’s it. There was no letter from a clone who spits out dumbed-down Lydia talk like a stupid parrot. Okay?”

I was maybe a little stunned.

Jane took the few steps to me. I was still there under Adam’s arm. She took me by the chin and said, her face right up to mine, “Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay. Let’s smoke again before we stuff ourselves,” she said. “That’s always a nice Thanksgiving tradition.”

Chapter Sixteen

C
hristmas came just like that. I rode in a Promise van to Billings with a bunch of disciples. Everybody in there was catching a flight that they couldn’t catch from Bozeman. A flight to some part of the country that wasn’t Montana. Everybody but Adam and me. Aunt Ruth was meeting me at the airport to drive me to Miles City for two weeks of holiday visitation. Adam’s dad was meeting him at the airport to do the same thing, just not in Miles City.

While we’d had a few feet of snow at Promise, once we cleared the Bozeman pass, a lot of the state was wanting for it. For most of the drive the land alongside the highway was barren, dead, browns and grays, the big sky that wintertime dirty white it gets, plum and blueberry and gray mountains sometimes off in the distance, but otherwise a world of cold dirt: a world on mute. We had the same Christmas album on repeat for at least a hundred and fifty miles before Lydia, riding shotgun, finally just turned the stereo off and we were left to listen to the wind alongside the van, the sound of the engine, whatever was playing in our heads.

Even though I knew, both at the time and after, that Jane’s garbage-disposal show had been mostly a kind of magic trick, a big, shocking maneuver to keep me from drowning in the wake of Coley’s letter, it had sort of worked. I guess sometimes you can recognize that you’re being manipulated and still appreciate it, even respond to it. And there was the part about Jane being right too, that the Coley Taylor I’d known, or thought I’d known, the Coley Taylor from the last row of the Montana Theatre, from the bed of a pickup truck, was certainly not the same Coley Taylor now walking the halls of Custer High as a girl tainted by my perversion, a victim of my sin. Or maybe they were exactly the same girl, but even if that was true, she couldn’t be the girl for me.

So I wasn’t hoping, the way that I might have, say, in September, that she had written the letter just to pacify those in charge of her healing, and that once I was home she’d seek me out for a secret rendezvous, explain herself, her sorrow over having written it, over having told in the first place. I wasn’t even hoping for a tearful reunion filled with apologies: even just apologies on my end and
I forgive yous
on hers. But I
was
hoping, just a little, for a single shared moment, maybe in the GOP vestibule, or maybe the coffee hall, a moment when we would be close to each other, just a few feet between us, a moment when we would be looking at each other, face-to- face. I wanted the moment, but if I got it, I hadn’t yet decided what to say. Something brief. Something memorable. It was hard to whittle away all the buildup between us to get to one solid something worth saying. But there was something to be said, I was sure, and I thought about what that something might be for most of the ride.

Ruth and Grandma were waiting just inside the airport entrance by a silver Christmas tree decorated with dozens of aviation ornaments: a helicopter piloted by Santa, built-to-scale models of passenger jets, a parachuting elf.

Grandma looked like she should have been grinning at me from a box of cake mix or a jar of old-fashioned preserves—her cheeks rosy, her powdered plumpness oddly healthy looking. Her stomach looked a little smaller than when I’d left, actually, and her formerly tenaciously black hair was now at least half old-lady gray, maybe even sixty percent old-lady gray. It was sort of startling how fast it had turned, or seemed to have turned, in my absence, like a lawn overtaken by clover in just one summer.

She was sort of rocking back and forth in her tan SAS comfort shoes, all of her twittering with anticipation, and when I hugged her, she said, over and over, “Well now, you’ll be home for a while. Now you’ll be home a good stretch.”

Ruth, on the other hand, didn’t look so good. She was in a new (to me) nearly floor-length red wool coat, a shiny green-and-gold Christmas wreath brooch at the lapel; she was put together, of course, she was still pretty; but her hair seemed flat and thin, not the shiny, healthy curls I thought of her with, and her face was sort of slack and puffy at the same time, like a layer of skin-colored modeling clay stuck on wrong over her real skin, with makeup tastefully applied but not quite doing the trick.

We barely got in our hugs, the scent of Ruth’s White Diamonds reassuring, when Lydia approached with some forms, instructions for my care. While they talked, a few feet away, I introduced Grandma to everyone.

“Good to meet you. Pleased to know ya. Good to meet you.” Grandma double-clasped everyone’s hands in both of hers as she said her hellos. Then she dug a tin with frolicking snowmen on it from the oversize quilted bag on her arm and opened it to reveal a layer of waxed paper. “Go on and pull it off, kiddo; you look thin enough to need ’em.”

I did. It was filled with those cornflake holly wreaths you make with lots of butter and marshmallows and green food coloring, three Red Hots atop each. They were all stuck together, despite Grandma’s best efforts. By the time Lydia and Ruth joined us, we all had Grinch green–tinted front teeth.

“Have a Merry Christmas, Cameron,” Lydia said, patting me on the back a few times. “Your aunt Ruth has a two-week plan for you. Try to stick to it.”

I didn’t have to answer her because Viking Erin pulled in for a big hug and said, “Write me, write me, write me! And call me, too. Or I’ll call you!”

Adam said, “Now don’t you come back pregnant,” in my ear as he hugged me.

“You either,” I said.

It was strange to see all the disciples walk off into the airport without me. It made me feel lonely in a way I can’t quite explain, especially since I was going home for the first time in months. But I guess that says something, maybe more than something, about what home now meant to me.