The Miseducation of Cameron Post (50 page)

It also had tons of photographs, clear photographs that I didn’t have to squint at: an upside-down Cadillac and the highway it had been on now cracked and broken away like snapping one of Grandma’s sugar-free wafers; another highway, one that had circled Hebgen Lake, literally dropped off into nothingness, into the lake itself—now you see it, now you don’t; harried men in untucked shirts hoisting stretchers with bandaged people on them; crowds of onlookers come to view the damage, their big-finned cars lining the sides of the nonruined highways; what one photo’s caption called a “refugee family,” all of them in pajamas as they walked down a street in Virginia City, the grandmother, in a white bathrobe, holding the hand of the youngest child, a little girl with square bangs, the mousy mother carrying a kitten, the eldest daughter with her arms folded across her chest, refusing to look at the camera but smiling a shy smile off to the side, and the son, with his blond crew cut and bare feet, grinning right at the lens. That photo had no father in it. Maybe he was the one taking the picture, but maybe not. I don’t know—the caption didn’t say.

But the photograph that made me rethink Bethany’s use of the word
miracle
, and that also helped to finalize our escape plan. It was like the book itself: one that didn’t seem so special at first glance. Most of the image was focused on two enormous boulders that had, the caption explained, crashed down during the quake, crushing a pup tent and
killing David Keenan, age fourteen, of Billings
. But
miraculously
, not disturbing the food on his family’s campsite picnic table, nor the larger family tent. The picnic table was in the foreground, the boulders looming just behind it, having stopped their momentum, somehow, just in time to avoid the spread.

David was survived by his parents and sister
, the caption read
.
I’d scanned the photo while reading during classroom hours, and then had flipped on though, brought the book back to my room even, and had gone on with my day, or part of my day, before that name, David Keenan, fluttered back across my brain and made me shiver.

I was folding ratty bath towels in the laundry room when I made the connection, and I went to get the book right away, leaving the dryer door open, a bunch of wadded towels still waiting to be pulled out, more in the washer waiting to go in. David Keenan was Margot’s brother. David Keenan had kissed my mom in the pantry of the First Presbyterian Church in Billings. The book was on my desk, and once I picked it up, I flipped past the page the photo was on twice, my hands shaking. Then I flipped to it: Looking at that picture was like looking right into Margot’s memory, something that should have been completely private. Those were her family’s cups and plates on that table, their cardboard box, probably with a package of hot dog buns, a container of homemade chocolate chip cookies, maybe the stuff for s’mores, if s’mores were even around in 1959, I didn’t know for sure. Margot would have been in the
not pictured
larger tent, safe, when her brother died. The photo credit was given to the U.S. Forest Service. Some stranger who had snapped up her family’s tragedy. I thought that she probably wouldn’t need this photo to remember that table, those boulders, just about exactly, but I wondered if she knew about its existence, knew that it was in this
ONE DOLLAR
book. And wondering about that, of course, made me wonder about my own parents and all the photos of their Quake Lake death that might very well be around: their car being pulled from the lake; their bodies being pulled from the car; their IDs being pulled from my dad’s wallet, my mom’s purse. Probably there were lots of photos like that, in police files and newspaper articles, photos that I might never see, and thinking about that made me—for the first time since they’d died—want to go to Quake Lake and see things for myself. I’d told Margot Keenan that night at the Cattleman’s—my double-cherry Shirley Temple so pink there on the table in front of us—that I didn’t think I’d ever want to go to Quake Lake, ever. And she’d told me that was fine. She hadn’t even said that maybe I’d change my mind one day, the way adults always talk about stuff like that. She’d just let it be. But now, mostly because of the book, that photo, I had changed my mind. And it was practically right next door, certainly within hiking distance if you knew somebody who could read a map, work a compass, build a fire. And I did know that somebody.

The next thing I did after studying the photo was go to the Promise library and take the fat dictionary off of the bottom shelf of the second bookcase and look up the word
miracle
. Sure, one of the definitions talked about the work of a
divine agency
operating outside of
natural or scientific laws
, and for that definition the usage example was:
the miracle of rising from the grave
. And yes, that definition seemed like way too much pressure for this particular situation I’d found myself in. However, the next definition—
a highly improbable or extraordinary event, development, or accomplishment that brings about welcome consequences
—worked much better. I didn’t know yet if our escape plan would work, if I’d make it to Quake Lake as my
welcome consequences
. But Bethany finding the book, then me finding that photo, and then the use of the word
miraculously
in the caption to describe the undisturbed food on the picnic table: I was willing to call all that a
highly improbable or extraordinary development
. What sucked was that I couldn’t tell Bethany Kimbles-Erickson about how she’d maybe been sort of right about everyday miracles, just this one time.

“Today shall we talk about the cottage-cheese containers under your bed?” Lydia asked me at the start of a one-on-one in early May.

“Okay,” I said, not necessarily surprised that she knew about the containers (of course she did), just surprised that I hadn’t heard about this knowledge beforehand in the form of some punishment for having them there in the first place. We were holding this one-on-one at a picnic table not far from the barn. An outdoor support session was a rare occurrence, especially when Lydia was conducting it; but it was the best day of spring thus far, high sixties and everything covered in crazy-bright sunshine, and even she couldn’t resist being out in it. Probably too my recent willingness to actually participate during our sessions had factored in.

“You must be wondering why I’ve never mentioned them,” she said, running her hand just over the top of her swim cap–tight, French-twisted white hair.

“I guess I wasn’t sure that you knew about them,” I said.

“Of course you were.” She flicked some tiny black bug off her notebook. “You certainly didn’t go to any lengths to hide them. You must have known that they’d be found during room inspections, which indicates that you wanted them found.”

“I thought that they could be like the Promise version of my dollhouse,” I said. Which was completely true, just like everything else I’d said during our sessions since I’d made that phone call to the hospital. It was actually a lot less work, this complete and total truth business, than whatever it was I’d been doing before.

“Did you find them as satisfying?” she asked. We’d already spent an entire one-on-one and part of a group session, actually, talking about the dollhouse.

“Nope,” I said. “Not really. I couldn’t ever lose myself to them like I could with the dollhouse. I haven’t even pulled them out since . . .” I thought about it, when that might have been. I shook my head. “I don’t even know when it was.”

Lydia opened a book that she carried around with her most of the time, but that wasn’t her composition book. This one was small and had a black cover that looked sort of like leather. Maybe it was leather. She flipped a couple of pages, and I could see that it was a daily planner or journal, something with the date written on each page. “When you had just returned from break,” she said, trailing her pen down the page as she scanned. “We did room inspections that next weekend and you had added—”

“Three Christmas lights,” I finished for her. “Yeah, I forgot. They were from this string of lights that Ray had tacked up to the roof, but they came loose on Christmas Eve and the wind blew them all around.”

There was a woodpecker jackhammering somewhere close by, or at least it sounded close by. I turned to look for it. The nonneedled trees hadn’t leafed out yet, but their branches were covered in bright green buds, like they had wads of already chewed spearmint gum stuck all over them. I couldn’t find the bird. When I turned back around, Lydia was looking at me the way she did when I hadn’t yet said enough for her to ask another question.

“My grandma and I went outside because we couldn’t figure out the noise. It was cool because they stayed lit while they got tossed around.” I felt like explaining it this way was ruining my memory of that moment, but Lydia kept on with that look of hers. “Ray tacked them down again, though.”

Lydia tapped her pen on the picnic table. “So how did you obtain three of these lights to put in the container that you had needlessly hidden beneath your bed, given that you already had decoration privileges?”

“When he took down all the lights, one strand was dead, and I pulled off three of the bulbs before we threw it away,” I said, and felt stupid enough just saying it aloud without looking at the kind of smirk face Lydia was making.

“So it mightn’t have even been the strand you saw with your grandmother,” she said.

“Yeah, I guess not. I don’t know for sure.”

“And yet you felt compelled to take these three lightbulbs and hide them in your luggage and bring them all the way back to your room here at Promise and then glue them to the inside of a cottage-cheese container?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly what I did.”

“I know that’s what you did, Cameron, but that’s simply the chronology. We’re trying to understand
why
you would do something like that. Why you continually do things just like this.”

“I know,” I said. I had my tan sweater on that day. It was a weekday so I was in uniform, and I was suddenly too hot.

Or maybe I wasn’t suddenly too hot but I had just noticed that I was too hot, with both my sweater and my long-sleeved shirt, so I started to pull off the sweater and had it halfway up my torso, my chin tucked and arms in that weird midpull position with my hands gripping the sweater’s hem and my elbows pointed up by my ears, when Lydia said, “Stop that right now.”

“Huh?” I said, stopping but maintaining the weird position.

“We do not undress ourselves in front of others as if all public spaces are changing rooms,” Lydia said.

“I just got too hot,” I said, pulling the sweater back down. “I have a shirt on under this.” I lifted the sweater again, with just one hand this time, and pointed at my shirt with the other.

“An undershirt, or lack thereof, is not my concern. If you would like to remove an article of clothing, then you ask to be excused so that you may do so in private.”

“Okay,” I said, keeping the sarcasm completely in check because we’d already had several conversations about that, too. “I’d like to remove my sweater because I’m too hot. May I please be excused to do so?”

She checked her watch and said, “I think you can manage your discomfort for the remainder of our session, at which time you’ll be free to return to your room and remove your sweater in private.”

“Okay,” I said.

Lydia was like this all the time. I mean, the more I opened up to her, was a model patient or whatever, the icier she got, correcting pretty much everything out of my mouth and at least half of my silent actions as well. But the thing was that her near-constant admonitions actually made me like her more. I think because witnessing her administration of ten zillion rules and codes of conduct, all of which she applied to her own life, made her seem fragile and weak, in need of the constant protection of all those rules, instead of the opposite, the way I know that she wanted to be seen, the way I’d seen her when I first arrived: powerful and all knowing.

“You’re ready to continue, then?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Good,” she said. “Because I don’t want you to avoid this subject by creating a disturbance.”

“I wasn’t doing that at all,” I said.

She ignored me and continued with the pronouncement that it seemed like she’d worked out long before our session had even begun, which happened fairly often. I didn’t always understand what she was even talking about when she made these pronouncements, but I’m not sure that it mattered. “What’s fascinating,” she said, “is that you’ve developed this pattern of stealing these material fragments that, more often than not, remind you of some sin that you’ve committed. The act of stealing these items is a sin in and of itself, of course, but often these are tokens from the various reckless things you’ve done. They’re trophies of your sins.”

“Not the lights,” I said.

And Lydia said, “Please do not interrupt.” And then she was silent for a moment or two, as if I might not be able to resist an additional outburst. Then she took a breath and said, “As I was saying, while not all these items are directly related to your sinful behavior, many of them are, or at the very least, they come from your experiences with individuals with whom you have troubled relationships. First you collect these items, and then you display them as a way of attempting, I think, to control your guilt and discomfort regarding both these relationships and your behavior.” She consulted her notes before continuing, running her hand across the top of her hair again. Her voice was sort of lofty and speechified, as though she was talking into a handheld tape recorder for all of posterity and not to the person sitting across a picnic table from her, the person about whom the claims were being made. “These many sinful experiences are ultimately not sitting well with you, and you’ve been struggling in vain to put them to rest by attempting to glue them to a fixed surface as a means of controlling them, and thereby controlling your guilt. Of course this method is failing, which you already know. Choosing to hide the cottage-cheese containers when you knew that they would be easily found was one thing, but then continuing to hide them even after you had decoration privileges and they were no longer contraband was a blatant cry for help. You could have had those containers sitting plainly on your desk. You chose to try to imbue them with significance by hiding them. I’m not at all surprised that as you’ve made progress in your support sessions, you’ve felt less and less inclined to work on them.”