Harmony (25 page)

Today's trip to the ER is similar on the surface: another long wait, another injury that's low priority and not life-threatening. But
not all trauma can be measured by X-ray. Tilly is uncharacteristically quiet and clingy, and you don't want to take your hands off her. Eventually Josh arrives, having sent Iris to a friend's house, and the three of you sit silently, late into the night, huddled together, watching Disney Channel sitcoms on a screen above your heads.

At some endless moment of night, you search through your purse, desperate for distraction, and your fingers land on one of the flyers you've been mailing out for Scott all week. Josh is sitting on the exam table, holding up Tilly, who's fallen asleep against him, her new purple cast resting heavily on her stomach. He looks as exhausted and frightened as you feel.

You're almost finished here; all you need is to be discharged, and you can go home. But that isn't a particularly reassuring thought.

You hand Josh the pamphlet, and he looks at it without seeming to see it.

“I think,” you say, but your voice doesn't come out right, so you clear your throat and start again. “I think this is something we might want to consider.”

 • • • 

In another world, you make it work. In another world, you never even hear the name “Scott Bean.” Or you do, and you maybe even subscribe to his newsletter, but on the night that he comes to speak at a library not far from your house, Iris is sent home from school with a stomach bug, or Josh is out of town and you don't want to hire a sitter. You figure you'll catch him next time. Later, when you hear his name on the news and it sounds familiar, you shake your head and think, “What a wacko.” It doesn't even occur to you to say, “That could have been me.” Because you know yourself, and it goes without saying. You would never get mixed up in something like that. End of story.

Instead, though, this is where you are. Right here, in the only
world you've ever known. Sitting with your husband in the last shambles of the day. He's got the Camp Harmony flyer in his hand.

“So,” you ask him. “What's life without risk?”

He smiles, just a little. “How bad could it be?”

You finish it up: “You've gotta do
something
.”

And just like that, you've decided.

You stand up on your tiptoes and kiss your husband. Rough bristles, soft lips, and the relief of being together in this life. For the first time in a long time, you feel something very close to hope.

When the police car pulls up, I'm over by the chicken coop, feeding Henny Penny and her babies. I think I'm the first one to see them; everyone else is busy with cleaning the cabins and doing laundry and all that. I stand and watch while two policemen get out of the car and go up to knock on the office door. But nobody answers because nobody's in there, and that's when one of them looks around and sees me.

The two cops come over and introduce themselves, and ask if I know where they can find Scott. I feel really funny about it, because they're being nice and I know that cops are supposed to help people. But I wonder if Scott's in trouble. And I wonder if I
want
Scott to be in trouble.

Anyway, I go with them to help them find Scott, who's in the dining hall, cleaning up from breakfast. He looks surprised to see them, but not worried, and then the three of them go up to the office and stay in there for a long time, like maybe an hour.

After they come out, the cops leave and Scott stays. That's good, right? They didn't arrest him. But he doesn't look too happy when he comes to lunch. And as soon as everyone's finished eating, he stands up and bangs his spoon against his glass.

“Emergency meeting,” he says. “Harmony Circle in five minutes.”

And I follow him. I follow him because I'm supposed to. Because those are the rules, and when you're here, every adult is your parent. All of us Core Family, kids and adults, form a loose line and follow him into the woods.

We get out there, into the clearing, and we sit down in a circle. No one bothers to make a campfire. It's still the middle of the day.

Scott stands in front of us, doing that thing where he looks at us for a minute before he talks.

“So,” he says, finally. “Help me understand what happened here. Did you guys wake up this morning—or maybe yesterday or sometime last week—and say, ‘Huh. Looks like a pretty good day to destroy Camp Harmony'?”

No one answers. At the beginning of the summer, I think people would have been yelling out answers, or arguing with him. But now it's like everyone's a kid, even the adults, and Scott's the parent or the teacher or something. We all know we're in trouble, and we all know we should probably just shut up and let him talk.

“Nobody?” Scott says, after a minute. “Interesting. Because actually, that would have been the best-case scenario. If we've got an evil genius here somewhere, executing a brilliant and villainous plan, then maybe there's hope for us getting back on track. But if not, if you're all a bunch of idiots who just stumbled into this, then God help us all.”

“Just tell us, Scott,” says my dad. “What's going on? What did the police want?”

Scott smiles, but not in a happy way. “What did the police want? They wanted a whole bunch of things. They wanted to know if I was aware that there's a group of people, led by Candy's father and kidnapper, calling themselves the Families Against Scott Bean. Apparently, they're going around telling people that we're running some sort of cult out here. They've got a Facebook page and everything.

“Second, they wanted to show me a picture that popped up today—also on Facebook—of a child in a cage. Allegedly one of our
campers.” He looks straight at me. I look down at the grass. “They showed me a picture, and I explained that it was part of a game, but they didn't seem too impressed.

“Finally, they wanted me to know that they got a phone call from Frances Fincher, alerting them that someone at this camp has been searching for underage pornography on her phone.”

A lot of the grown-ups start talking now and asking questions all at once. Scott stops them by raising his hand.

“None of it's true,” he says. “It can all be explained. And as you can see, I'm not behind bars. But it's out there. People are hearing about it and making up their minds about what to believe. You think we're going to recover from that type of damage? You think we've got Guest Campers lined up to join us? No. Because as soon as a story like that gets printed, it becomes the truth. You understand? We're not ordinary people anymore. As far as the whole wide world is concerned, you're all members of a cult. And me? I'm your leader, I'm your Jim Jones. This is who we
are
now; it's our identity. And if you think we can change it, you're wrong.”

He pauses and rubs his hands over his face. Then he looks around at us, all of us in a circle, and smiles at us in a way that's sad and kind of tender. “It's just us here, guys,” he says. “So tell me: Where did we go wrong? When did you stop believing we had something good going on here, something worthwhile?”

“Scott,” says Tom. “I think you're blowing this out of proportion. I don't think this is as bad as you think.”

Scott shrugs. “Well, I don't know. Anyway, it's over.”

He reaches a hand behind him, like maybe he's tucking his shirt into the back of his pants. And when he brings it forward again, I can see he's got a gun.

There's an odd detail in the margin of the seventeenth panel of the Hammond Tapestry: nestled among the usual marginalia of fruit and cherubs is a black object, half hidden in the embroidered grass. It's small, almost a smudge, but its shape is distinctive; it appears to be a firearm, most likely a revolver.

Scholars are divided over the significance of this object. Elsewhere in the tapestry, marginal embroidery is used to illuminate some facet of the associated main panel, and Panel 17 is a crucial one, as it depicts the moment when Alexandra Hammond first becomes aware of the charismatic speaker Scott Bean and his teachings on Harmonious Parenting. In a Chinese restaurant—you can see, if you squint, the zodiac place mats on the table—two adults and a young girl watch as a second girl kneels beside their table and presses her face to the floor. The girl's behavior is enigmatic: Is she praying? Expressing submission? Enduring some obscure punishment by humiliation? Posture and body positioning are chosen very deliberately in the design of the tapestry; it's unlikely that the ambiguity is accidental.

What we know for sure is this: Alexandra watches as her daughter
bends to kiss the dirty tiles of the floor at Bamboo Garden. And somehow this moment is linked inextricably to an ugly black blotch that may or may not be a gun.

What if we say that the final section of the Hammond Tapestry has been missing for as long as anyone can remember? What if we say that maybe it's better if we never find it?

Everything that happens now is fast and strange and wrong. Scott has a gun, and he's holding it up in the air, not pointing it at anyone, just showing us that he has it.

There's noise and movement. I am screaming; everyone is screaming and pushing and starting to run, but Tilly is staring and silent. I take her arm and try to pull her away; maybe we can run into the trees, maybe we can escape through the forest. I can't tell if things are happening fast or slow.

“Stop,” says Scott, and I do. I turn back to hear what he's going to say. “Seriously?” he asks. “Even now, you think that's where this is going?”

His eyes meet mine, and he gives me a tiny smile. “Don't any of you trust me at all?”

My mother is pulling on the back of my shirt, and I'm staggering back, but I struggle against her, because I need to stay here. I need to keep watching Scott. He needs to know that I do trust him. I trust him and I keep on trusting him, right up until he lifts up the gun and sticks it inside his own mouth.

I scream. Someone yells, “No!” Maybe we all yell no. Maybe we all just stay there forever, all of us in the woods, all of us yelling no.

The gun jerks in the air, and there's noise and smoke. For a while, that's all there is; I am made of that noise, I am made of that smoke. And then someone grabs my shoulders and pulls me away, my heels dragging against the dirt. And I don't understand why we're all leaving. And I don't understand why Scott is lying on the ground.

After that, I don't know what happens exactly. We're back at the camp, we're in our cabin, everyone's crying, and my parents make a circle with their arms to hold me and Tilly inside. But Scott stays, lying where he falls. He stays with the dirt and the pine needles, with the smoke and the noise. He stays and stays, even after the rest of us are gone.

Among the million or more unhappy facts you learn that day—how the police go about testing a witness's hands for gunpowder residue, what a human being's brain matter looks like when it's spattered on the trunk of a tree—one of them is this: his name was not Scott Bean.

The name on his birth certificate and his driver's license (neither of which has ever been seen by anyone at Camp Harmony, because why would any of you think to ask?) is Jesse Scott. It means nothing to you, although Iris seems to find it significant: she bursts out with a confused story about stickers and fire and Scott being mean to a brother he didn't really have. But like so many other details you collect during these days, this one doesn't seem to slot into any particularly useful space.

It's true, at least, that he grew up in Montana. He was born to a teenage girl (unmarried) and was given up for adoption: not at birth, but at the age of three. This, at least, seems significant, though exactly what it signifies remains unclear. He ended up in the foster care system, but never stayed with a single family for more than a year; he had trouble in school, was branded a difficult child, and managed to
scrape by on the right side of delinquency until he turned eighteen and could be released to take care of himself.

So that explains it, maybe. But which part? His empathy toward children who were different or his grandiose (and sometimes paranoid) belief that he was the only one who could possibly help them? Is it more important that he was fired from a teaching job for striking a kid—another thing that Iris inexplicably knows before you do—or that every child who spent time at Camp Harmony seemed to improve under his care? Which matters more: that for a short time, you were happier than you'd been in years, or that you're not sure you'll ever stop hearing gunshots in your sleep? That he lied to you in order to convince you to give up every piece of the life you knew, or that you're still not sure you were wrong to do it?

All of it; some of it; none of it. Like always. Like everyone.

 • • • 

Time passes and passes. Afterward, of course, life is never the same.

Not that you'd choose to put it so starkly, but it seems to be important to the girls—Tilly especially—to acknowledge and quantify the accumulation of loss. And this “never the same” business is the one that seems to be hardest for them to accept, harder than the sale of the house in Washington, harder even than the memory of the woods, Scott's fallen body, the leaves speckled with red.

They're too young to understand how much of life is shaped by
never the same
. “You know, my life was never the same after you girls were born,” you tell them lightly, and you leave them to process it on their own.

In Iris's nightmares, Scott doesn't have a gun; for reasons whose meaning eludes you, he's always holding a knife, drawing it slowly across his own throat. In Tilly's dreams, the gun is front and center, and it's always pointed directly at her. She wakes up when he pulls the trigger.

You spend a lot of time with them in the middle of the night, sitting in the dark, helping them fall back to sleep. You don't mind it so much; it's like when they were babies or when they're sick. Their need for you is sweet in its urgency, its simplicity.

Your life now: well. It's been hard, obviously. What do you do when everything is suddenly over? You cling to each other. You strip away everything that doesn't matter. And sometimes, when your head stops spinning, you find that you've touched down in a land that you never would have discovered otherwise.

It turns out that Scott was right about how the world at large would interpret his legacy. The general consensus (and it doesn't seem to matter what you have to say about it) is that you were taken in by a dangerous man, and you're lucky that the outcome wasn't worse. Maybe. But in your own mind, it's a lot murkier than that. How do you feel about Scott Bean? You are furious at him; you hate him; you miss him terribly. It's going to be a long, long time before you have it all figured out.

Here's one of the details that tends to get overlooked in the news articles: back in the heady days when you were helping Scott plan Camp Harmony, one of the things that everyone agreed on was that the land should be owned equally by all of you. No one coerced you into anything—at least, not financially. You acted like grown-ups: you consulted lawyers, drew up documents, changed your wills. So after Scott's death, one of the many questions left for you and the other Camp Harmony families to answer was what would happen to the site itself.

The Goughs just wanted out, understandably; they asked you to wire them their share. The last you heard, Candy's dad had surrendered custody and turned himself in, though it remains to be seen what kind of consequences he'll face, if any. Like everything else here, it's complicated.

There was never any question of continuing to run the camp. But
none of you seemed to want to leave right away: not you and Josh, not Tom and Janelle. At first it was barely even a decision, more of a stunned stasis. But when you were finally able to talk about it, you all believed that there might yet be something you could salvage from all of this. Not all of your ideas had been bad ones. There's something to be said for choosing the company you want to keep; for living more simply; for getting support for the things you don't know how to do on your own.

This winter you've been living in rental housing, homeschooling Tilly and Hayden; Iris is enrolled at the local middle school—her own choice. You've demolished the cabins and are currently drawing up plans for new housing and looking into the process of opening a charter school. It's all very tentative and fragile, far from perfect, and a lot of the time you feel like you don't know what the hell you're doing. You wouldn't say that you wake up every morning filled with joy, but there are days when the sheer lack of dread strikes you as miraculous.

You put it together bit by bit. You go to therapy. Josh takes on some consulting work, long distance. It's not a permanent solution, but he's around more than he used to be, and the cost of living is lower here.

You have time and space and friends. You're thinking about what kind of community you want to be a part of. Josh's mother will be retiring next summer, and you've talked about asking her to come live in New Hampshire. You'll certainly have room for her.

Maybe you actually learned something from those video games you used to play: there's no point in planting crops if you're not going to stick around to tend them.

You've started writing, just a few lines here and there. It's finally occurred to you that you might have something to say. Notes on autism and parenting, conversations overheard from the next room. You're thinking that maybe soon you'll get around to the question of cults and the potent mix of desperation and charisma that helps
them thrive. Questions of personal agency and what makes some help dangerous to accept. Right now, the most concise thing you can say about it is this: You know Scott Bean wasn't a villain. Your life will never be the same. And you're grateful every day.

 • • • 

The Hammond Family Monument, you and Tilly decide during one of those middle-of-the-night conversations, is unusual in that it's not fixed in space. Its location—and even its design—is always changing. It hovers in the air outside a house in Washington, DC, and in a forest clearing in New Hampshire where the rain is doing its patient work to wash the rocks clean of blood. It appears for brief moments on the side of a mountain and inside a Chinese restaurant with a slightly grubby floor. You can't always see it, but it's there in the landscape of your dreams and the stories you tell about your life. It's hidden in plain sight, waiting to make its appearance in places you haven't even visited yet.

You've set up a life where your girls have fewer rules; they're allowed to ramble, in their minds and along winding paths lined with pine trees. Iris is adjusting beautifully, all things considered, and that's hardly a surprise. But Tilly. Tilly unconstrained is a magnificent thing to see.

Every day brings something new. She's writing a book; she's designing a video game; she's filling the sky with new constellations. There's a lot that she still needs help with, a lot that will need to happen in a few short years, if she's going to be able to face the world on her own. But these talents she has—imagination and empathy, ambition and eagerness—will carry her a long way.

She's a great kid. And as the days go by, you're beginning to remember where she gets it from.