The Miseducation of Cameron Post (44 page)

Chapter Eighteen

T
he next day neither Mark nor Adam was at morning prayers, nor breakfast, nor in the classrooms for study hours, and nobody seemed to have any info as to where they might be, not even Jane. I glimpsed Adam during lunch, but Rick had his arm around him and they were walking quickly down the hallway toward his office, and it was obvious that none of us were invited to join them.

At group Steve, Helen, Dane, and I sat and waited for Lydia, which had never happened before. The drink cart wasn’t there, pushed up against its usual wall. The lights weren’t even on, and none of us turned them on but instead just sat in the watery parallelograms of midafternoon, late- winter/early-spring sunshine that streamed through the big windows on the western wall. We waited for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, not saying much, and then both Lydia and Rick walked through the door and slid chairs into our small circle to join us. And then Rick walked back over to the entrance and flicked the light switch and the fluorescent lights buzzed on and made the room just a shade or two brighter.

Rick flipped his chair around and straddled it like a cowboy and patted his hands against the top of the plastic chair back, which was now in front of him, and said, “This is a hard day.”

At that, Helen started crying, not loud or big, though her tears were fat and slow to trail her cheeks, but she was a sniffler and her face got splotchy fast, and Lydia had to pass the requisite box of tissues for the second day in a row, probably, though I hadn’t actually seen Mark take a tissue the day before.

“I’m sorry,” Helen said, blowing hard into a tissue. “I don’t even know why I’m crying.”

“That’s okay,” Rick said. “That’s absolutely okay.” Though Lydia looked like she thought it was maybe less okay than he did. “I know yesterday’s session must have been really difficult for all of you, and I’m sorry that you had to process that on your own last night. We needed to be with Mark.”

“Where is he?” Dane asked with a little venom layered into his typically lazy accent, though he wasn’t as hostile as he’d been with Steve in the hallway the day before.

“He’s in the hospital in Bozeman,” Lydia said, and Rick gave her a look, I guess because she was so abrupt, and so she added, “I don’t see the sense in drawing this out.”

“There’s no need for cheap theatrics, right?” Dane said, sort of under his breath, but definitely loud enough for Lydia to hear him.

“No there’s not,” she said. “I agree.”

Helen started sniffling harder, and since she already had the box of tissues on her lap, she just plucked them, one after another, like pulling petals off a daisy, until her hand was crammed with them, enough to cover the whole of her face when she put them in front of it.

“He tried to kill himself, didn’t he?” Dane asked, which was probably what most of us were assuming, at least I was. Dane shook his head and pointed at Lydia. “I knew it was gonna go bad before we even got out of the room.” It was a strange merging, this bite beneath Dane’s accent. In group I’d heard him talk about things like letting a fortysomething father of three fuck him in the backseat of a Jetta so that he could score a hit (sans explicit details, of course); but even then his accent, the way he phrased things, usually made what he was talking about sound sort of like a campfire story, or something that happened once to someone else. All that detachment was gone from his voice now.

Lydia didn’t jump to answer this one. She waited for Rick, who seemed to be having trouble deciding which words to use.

Eventually he decided on “No, it wasn’t a suicide attempt, I don’t think. But he did hurt himself pretty badly.”

I thought that Reverend Rick would go on to explain; I think everyone else thought so too. But when he didn’t, and Lydia didn’t jump in to clarify, Steve said, “Well, did he have an accident or something?”

And Lydia said “No” just as Rick said, “Kind of—in a manner of speaking.”

“How can it be both no and kind of?” Dane asked. “What the hell kind of sense does that make?”

“I’m sorry,” Rick said. “That was confusing. I meant that Mark’s injury was accidental in the sense that he wasn’t really himself when it happened.” But as soon as he finished speaking, Rick looked sort of mad at himself for having said it that way, for being so cagey with us, which wasn’t his usual style, and he added, “Look, Mark was very confused yesterday; I don’t need to tell you, you all saw that. He was in a lot of emotional and spiritual pain, and he caused himself physical harm to try to make all of that go away.”

“Which is not an escape route,” Lydia said, her voice sharp and clear. “It didn’t work for Mark and it won’t work for you.”

Reverend Rick started again before Lydia could go on. “What’s important,” he said, “is that we got him to the hospital, and his dad has already flown in from Nebraska to be with him, and he’s stable; he’s going to be okay.”

“Fuck this,” Dane said. He put his hands in fists and hit the sides of his thighs, twice. “Y’all are talking like a hamster wheel. What did he do? If he didn’t try to kill himself, then what?”

“Yelling and swearing won’t make you feel any better about Mark,” Lydia said.

Dane snorted a mean kind of grunt. “See, there you’re wrong again, ’cause it does, actually. It really does make me feel a fuck of a lot better to say
fuck, fuck, fuck
right now.”

I guess because it was already tense in there, or because she was already worked up, this is the moment that Helen started giggling behind her wad of tissues in a way that she obviously couldn’t control. She had a surprisingly girly giggle, like a cheerleader in a teen movie. “I’m sorry,” she said, and kept giggling. “I’m sorry, I can’t stop.” More giggles.

Right then Reverend Rick slid his chair forward as he stood up behind it and clapped his hands and announced that this
wasn’t
quite working out
and that we’d be having brief one-on-ones instead of group and that we should each go to our rooms and wait until either he or Lydia came by to talk with us, except for Dane and Helen, who they would start with right then. Lydia was looking at him like she didn’t like the spontaneity of this plan much at all, but I, for one, was glad to get out of there.

The Viking Erin was on dinner duty, so our room was empty when I got back to it. It smelled like houses sometimes do toward the end of winter, when they’ve been sealed off for too long, like old air, like dirty heating ducts, so I opened the window just a crack and stood in front of the stream of crisp air until I was shivering a little. There were angry clouds building up behind the mountains, black-gray clouds, great clumps of them colored just like cotton balls after Aunt Ruth cleaned off her eye makeup from a big night out, all gunky with mascara and eye shadow.

I sat in my desk chair, tipping it so that it was only resting on the back two legs, one of my feet propped against the corner of the desk, balancing me. I tried to do exercises in my Spanish workbook, but I mostly thought about all the terrible things Mark might have done to himself.

I wasn’t sure if it would be Rick or Lydia or both of them who would come, and so I was glad, half an hour or so later, when just Rick knocked on the open door of our room and said, “Hey, Cameron. Have you got a few minutes for me?”

It was classic Rick, acting like he was just stopping in for a routine chat and not like he’d sent us to our rooms with the express purpose of meeting with him, but he was so unfailingly nice that it was hard not to appreciate the way he phrased stuff like that.

I wasn’t sure where he’d sit, but he came to the back of the room, where I was, and pushed my shoulder forward, one firm nudge, so that my chair tipped back into position and he had room to pull Erin’s chair from its slot beneath her desk. It was a friendly sort of thing to do, casual.

“You know sitting like that breaks the legs, right?” he said. “At least that’s what my mom always told me.”

“My mom too, but I’ve yet to see it happen,” I said.

“Good point,” he said. And then, with no more filler, “So is there anything you wanna talk about?”

“About Mark?” I asked.

“About Mark, about yesterday’s group, about anything at all.”

“He’s gonna be all right?”

Rick nodded, tucked his hair behind his ear. “I think so. He really hurt himself; it’s a serious injury. He’ll be healing for a long time—all kinds of healing.”

It felt impossible, talking this way, around this terrible thing that I both did and didn’t want to know all the details of. I kept seeing these flashes of Mark with all of these Biblical kinds of tortures applied to him, his eyes gouged out or his hands impaled, and not knowing wasn’t making it easier.

“Did he do it in front of you?” I asked, which seemed all the more horrible to consider, that maybe he’d wanted them to watch, or that he was just so out of it that he didn’t know they were watching,

“No, he was in his room,” Rick said.

“Why’d you leave him alone if you were so worried about him?” I didn’t intend for that question to sound mean, exactly, but it did, and I didn’t regret asking it.

“I don’t have a very good answer for you,” he said, and then he looked at his hands. He was just sort of running the fingers of one hand over the palm of the other, tracing his guitar-playing calluses. “It could have been your voice in my head all day asking me that. Instead it was my own.”

I waited. He waited. Then he said, “He had calmed down considerably. It was very late when we walked him back from my office; Adam was in the room sleeping already. Lydia and I felt sure that Mark would do the same.”

We both waited some more. The unsaid everything waited there with us, hovering over us both. I stared at this picture of Erin and her parents at the Living Bible Museum in Ohio, all of them in khaki shorts and tucked-in T-shirts, grinning big grins, posed in front of a display of Moses on the mount. I’d stared at it all year, mostly thinking about how they looked really happy; happy to be there, to be together. But now their smiles, so stretched and thick, looked sort of terrible, like plastic smiles or mask smiles, I don’t know. They were giving me a headache, those stretched grins. I looked back at Rick and I said, “I don’t know what else to ask you. I guess either you want us to know what happened and to talk about it or you don’t. This all just seems really fake if you’re not gonna tell us everything.”

“I will tell you,” he said. He said it just like that. “I’ll tell you if that’s what you want. It’s, ah . . .” He paused, did something with his lips between a grin and a grimace. “Well, Lydia and I have a difference of opinion about this, but I think it’s important to be honest with all of you, so that you know what happened exactly as it happened with no rumors or gossip wrapped around it. But it’s very ugly, Cameron.”

“I can handle ugly,” I said.

He nodded and said, “But just because you can handle something doesn’t mean that it’s good for you.”

I had this flash-memory of me and Hazel on the beach when she’d tried to warn me off lifeguarding with the same logic, but I was older now and felt it too, the weight of the months that had passed between then and now. “You just told me that it was important to be honest and now you’re backing off,” I said. “Dane’s right—you do talk like a hamster wheel.”

He tucked hair behind his other ear, though it didn’t need to be done. “Dane’s got a great way of putting things, doesn’t he?”

“There you go,” I said. “Spin, spin, spin.”

“I’m not,” he said. “At least I’m not trying to. I’m sorry; it’s a hard thing to tell.” He breathed in quick and blew it out and said, “Last night Mark used a razor to cut his genitals several times; then he poured bleach over the wounds.”

“Jesus,” I said. Rick didn’t blink at the word.

“He passed out after that, and Adam heard the bottle of bleach hit the floor. Or I guess he could have heard Mark hit the floor too. Adam’s the one who came and got me, and he helped me and Kevin carry Mark to the van after that. He was mostly out of it, completely incoherent; Mark, I mean.”

“Why didn’t Adam go get Kevin?” Kevin was a college student and one of the night monitors. He came two or three nights a week, but he arrived during study hours and was usually gone by breakfast, so unless you had to go to the bathroom, or were a light sleeper and noticed him when he did room checks, you didn’t really see him. He’d caught me trying to meet up with Jane and Adam once after lights out, but he had just walked me back to my room. Told me to
go to bed
. I don’t think he ever even mentioned my rule breaking to Rick or Lydia.

“He couldn’t find him,” Rick said. “I guess Kevin was making a sandwich in the kitchen and they just missed each other. Kevin’s taking it hard too.”

“Shouldn’t you have called an ambulance?” I asked. I already knew why they hadn’t: It was much faster just to drive him than to wait for one to get all the way out to Promise, but I was just trying to think of things to say because I didn’t know what else to do and I didn’t want to sit there in silence with Rick looking one of his ponderous looks at me.

“It would have taken too long,” Rick said. “It was faster to drive him myself.”

I nodded and said, “Yeah. Duh. I wasn’t thinking.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “What do you really want to ask me?”

I was picturing Adam waking up to what he woke up to, the plastic smack of the bottle on the laminate, the chemical smell of bleach, Mark on the floor with his pants down, bloody and gruesome and a fucking mess, and Adam just barely awake, all bleary and confused. What I said to Rick, though, was “I don’t know.” Then I waited a little while, and he waited, and then I asked, “Is Adam doing okay?”

Rick smiled this weird, sad sort of smile at me and said, “I think so, all things considered. I’m sure he’ll want to talk to you about this. It’s gonna take him some time to process.”

That set me off. I hadn’t felt like I was ticking down to something, at least I didn’t think that’s what I was feeling. I had just felt sort of numb and baffled, but right after he said that thing about it taking Adam “some time to process,” I was like instantly enraged, just so fucking pissed at him, and at this stupid place, God’s Fucking Promise.