Happiness for Beginners (3 page)

The Mary Poppins was the only voice I ever used to talk about my failed marriage, and I sat up straighter to execute it properly. “The guy I happened to marry,” I went on, channeling Julie Andrews so hard that I almost went British, “later turned into a raging alcoholic. When his problem began to impact our marriage, I gave him several chances to pull it together. Unfortunately for everyone, he just couldn't manage it.”

In conclusion, I took a successful sip of coffee, as if to say,
End of story! Spit spot! And now I am enjoying a delicious hot beverage.

“So you divorced him,” Jake said.

“So I divorced him,” I confirmed. I did not add:
After I lost our first baby at thirteen weeks pregnant. And he was nowhere to be found.

“A year ago,” he added, as if to say he was already up on all the details.

“A year ago,” I confirmed. Almost to the day. And I was fine now. Ish.

“And how that's going?” he asked.

“How's what going?”

“Being single.”

“Fine,” I said. “Great.” But I was hardly anything as adorable as “single.” I was just alone.

“You're okay?” He was frowning at me.

“I'm always okay,” I said.

“Nobody's always okay.”

“I am,” I declared. This conversation was beyond useless. Of course I wasn't okay—not “always,” or, lately, “often.” But even if I had wanted to discuss the infinite ways I'd felt utterly broken this year—which I frigging
did not
—Jake the bartender, inventor of “the forbidden drink of love,” would be the very last person I'd turn to.

I could feel his gaze traveling along my face.

I sat up even straighter. I kept my eyes on the road. I imagined the angle of Julie Andrews's chin and lifted mine to the very spot.

“Okay,” he said at last, unconvinced but willing to drop it. “If you say so.”

“I do say so,” I said.

“'Cause I was wondering if you might want to kill yourself.”

I coughed. “Kill myself?”

“What were you thinking, anyway? Signing up for a BCSC course?”

I shook my head. “I don't know. Probably the same thing you were.”

“You weren't thinking what I was,” he said, as if the idea were ridiculous.

I let it slide. “I want a challenge. I want to do something really hard. I want to push myself beyond my limitations.”

“Or maybe you just want to kill yourself.”

I looked over. “I do not want to kill myself.”

“People die on these trips all the time.”

“No, they don't.”

“Of all the outdoor adventure courses you could have chosen, you picked the most terrifying, the most reckless, the most lethal of them all. What's
that
about?”

“Duncan suggested it,” I said.

“Duncan suggested
a
course. Not
this
course.”

“He showed me the catalog.”

“You never do anything Duncan suggests.” Jake shook his head. “Why start now?”

It was true. But the fact that Duncan had suggested it was incidental. What got me hooked on the idea was a
People
magazine human interest story I stumbled on a few restless nights later about a guy who had lost a leg in Afghanistan and brought himself back to life by completing this very course. With one leg! He did it—and did it well enough to earn one of their prized “Certificates,” which were only given out to the top three participants. The article had echoed in my head for days afterwards: “I was lost,” the guy had said, “but I found myself out there.”

Was I lost? Not technically. But I had lost something that I couldn't even articulate—and I'd gone far too long without finding it. Was it waiting for me in the Wyoming wilderness? Probably not. But I had to start somewhere.

Clearly, Duncan also thought I never did anything he suggested. When I'd told him I'd signed up, he'd coughed in disbelief and tried to talk me out of it, insisting a course like this was no place for someone like me. In his view, it was both pretty extreme and kind of phony. It attracted the worst of the worst. Real hard-core hikers, Duncan had argued, knew what they were doing and organized their own trips. BCSC was for hard-core wannabes. They didn't want to study the terrain or buy the proper gear or actually take the time to know what they were doing—they just wanted to sign up and do it. Which made them not just daredevils, but lazy daredevils.

I glanced at Jake. “You signed up for it, too.”

“I've gone camping every year with my dad since I was three. I have tons of experience. Plus, I'm coordinated.”

“You're saying I'm not coordinated?”

He tilted his head. Yes. That's what he was saying. And he wasn't wrong, either.

“I've been camping,” I said at last.

“When?” he demanded.

“I drove to Colorado with my high school boyfriend.”

“That's not camping. That's a slumber party. I bet you ate fluffer-nutters on white bread.”

“We did not!” I said. We'd eaten beef jerky. And Oreos.

“The point is,” Jake went on, “this is totally over your head.”

“They took my application. They let me in.”

“That's because they don't care if you die.”

In truth, several people had died—or at least been maimed—on trips with this group. Duncan had Googled it hoping to convince me to do Outward Bound, instead—or something more sane and reasonable. But I didn't want sane and reasonable. I wanted crazy and unreasonable. I wanted to amaze everybody, including myself. My own personal campaign of shock and awe.

“They're under new management now,” I said.

“I think they
like
it when people die,” Jake said. “These guys have cornered the market on hard-core nut-job wannabes, and a clear-and-present threat of death just improves their appeal. To crazy people.”

Was that me? Maybe.

I had signed about fifty waivers, declaring BCSC blameless for every possible life-threatening, or life-ending, situation I might encounter out there, including bear attacks, avalanches, hypothermia, and “fatal diarrhea.”

Nothing about this course should have appealed to me. BCSC was notorious for taking the steepest slopes, following the rockiest paths, and exploring the most remote locations. Google “BCSC,” and there's article after article of broken collarbones, rockslides, bear attacks, missing hikers, and hypothermia. That's how they'd become the patron saints of crazies, thrill-seekers, and people with nothing left to lose. Which, needless to say, wasn't me. I was a first-grade teacher, for Pete's sake!

I couldn't believe the tone in Jake's voice. “Why are you asking me about this? This has nothing to do with you.”

“Well,” he said, “it kind of does. Since I'm here.”

“I didn't ask you to be here!”

He closed his mouth and looked away.

“I'm going to get a Certificate,” I said.

“You think you're going to be one of the top three on this trip?” he said, in a tone like,
Come on.

“Yes.”

“Well, I don't. I think you'll be lucky to survive.”

“That's because you're looking at the old me. This,” I patted myself on the head, “is the former me. The me I'm
about to become
is someone else entirely. You wouldn't dare patronize her. She'd claw out your eyeballs and feed them to her dog.”

“I can't wait to meet her.”

“She's going to ruin your life, man.”

“I don't doubt it,” he said.

And despite the unabashed mockery in his voice, a quieter, raspier sound had crept in, too. One that made me wonder if he maybe, really, actually thought she would.

 

Chapter 3

We fell quiet as we made our way out of the city. Jake read his whale book and let me concentrate on navigating the roads and roundabouts of Boston, which are so convoluted my ex-husband Mike used to joke they were laid out by ferrets.

Ex-husband.
It had taken me so long to get used to the word “husband,” but “ex-husband” was taking even longer. At the thought of him, my chest got that familiar squeeze—as if all the sorrows of the past year were still in there, still collapsing inward like my own personal intergalactic black hole.

Mike. He was the reason for this crazy trip, though I wasn't fleeing him, exactly, so much as the person I'd become in the wake of our marriage. I'd met so many women this year who swore their divorces were the best things that ever happened to them. It was time—past time—to become one of those women. I needed to do something wild and brave and stupefying, though how I had settled on a survival course, I still wasn't sure.

In hindsight, it seemed far too literal.

But it was the cure I'd chosen, and I was going to try like hell to do it right.

I mentally reviewed my list of goals for the coming weeks. I'd actually taken the time to write them down on some old stationery. In my neatest print, I'd written “In the Wilderness I Plan to:” and then, below, made a bullet list with little optimistic boxes to check off:

  Find a deeper spiritual connection to nature

  Push myself beyond my physical and emotional limitations

  Rise up from my own ashes like a phoenix

  Toughen the hell up

  Become awesome