Imperfect Birds (40 page)

I
t was snowing and it was going to snow. That was a line from a poem Rosie had been assigned sophomore year, but she couldn’t think of the name of the guy who wrote it. She could not think straight or remember simple things, she could only sit in the dark mutter of her mind, in full hatred and devastation of her parents and life.

James and Lank had kidnapped her. She was going to be away for ninety days. It had taken thirteen hours to get to Utah in a car that Lank had rented because it had snow tires and a children’s safety lock to turn the backseat into a holding cell from which Rosie could not escape.

They had gone east at Sacramento, cut across Nevada, and taken her to a renovated cabin in a small town somewhere north of Salt Lake City. She had slept or kept her eyes closed most of the time, but not when she was upset. They had arrived in a blizzard at night; there were four other silent, furious kids who’d arrived before her, and their parents and duffel bags, and bearded men with clipboards hovering around. A lady found Rosie’s name on a computer. Lank had stayed in the car. Rosie had turned her back on James when he tried to say good-bye and how much they loved her. “Fuck off,” she said.

She was not allowed to speak to the other kids. They were offered lots of camping snacks, but no one accepted any. Then they were each given a ridiculous pack that weighed fifty pounds, according to the three male instructors, with a sleeping bag and a pad all wrapped up in a tarp that would also be their tent. A cooking tin, baggies of bulk food, a few pairs of dry socks, a journal, a pencil, zip-lock bags of sanitary pads and baby wipes for the girls, toothbrush and toothpaste were tied up into the tarp with what the instructors called p-cords. Rosie had gotten her birth control pills—you couldn’t just suddenly stop taking them, or your skin would break out, and the boy named Joel got his Zoloft. An instructor with a goatee escorted them outside and they started walking, just like that. There were three boys and one other girl. The p-cords cut into your shoulders and back. The other girl was screaming that she hated her parents, would never forgive them, and they’d never see her again when she got out. They hiked to a clearing where there was more dirt on the ground than snow, half an hour away, and then set up camp. One of the three instructors made a fire, and the other two helped the kids make tents with their tarps and low branches, thirty feet apart from one another.

She woke in the wilds before dawn, stunned beyond stunned, enraged beyond all words, a frozen deserted ghetto of one.

I
t was not snowing right now but there was snow everywhere, and pine trees, hundreds of feet tall. She was sitting against a ponderosa pine that smelled faintly of vanilla, and she was hungrier than she had ever been. There was only so much food in her pack, and it had to last seven days. The younger pines had tops that looked like pyramids. She decided to run off that night as far as she could and bury herself alive in the snow.

There were five silent kids in her tribe. That’s what the instructors called it, a tribe, like they were Scouts, two Girl Scouts, three Boy Scouts. Maybe they’d make potato prints later. The girl was like having someone on your chain gang who screeched and sobbed and flung herself to the ground, tripping up and dragging down everyone else. Rosie imagined killing her before they headed out tonight.

The three outdoor instructors were all huge woolly mountain men, and they followed you everywhere.

T
his first full day Rosie held snow in her gloved hand until it turned to ice balls, and then threw them at one instructor like a pitcher. He looked back at her with kind and infinite calm. “The gift of patience,” he said, “is patience.” All of the kids acted out all day, but the instructors had a way of getting you pretty calm pretty quickly. The handsome boy, Tyler, punched the smallest instructor, Mike D., who was only six feet or so, and he just said, “If you hurt me, I still love you. Tyler? I still love you.” Tyler wrestled Mike D. to his knees, and tried to kick him with his boot in his face, but Mike D. caught his foot and pushed him off balance. “However, we
will
tackle you if you go nuts,” he said.

Joel cried a lot in the beginning, like Rosie and the other girl, Kath, did, like when they were frozen solid or unable to learn the lessons the instructors taught, like how to set the traps made out of sticks. Joel was a meth-head junior from Chicago, small and ratty with bad skin. All the kids had exchanged whispered shreds of information and then gotten called on it because they were not allowed to talk to one another yet. This phase was called isolation, and the instructors said the idea was to throw you back on yourself.

Tyler was black-haired and arrogant. Joel never looked anyone in the eye, but he was good with his hands and could make the traps. Jack was kind of a goofy Arlo Guthrie knock-off, who didn’t talk much but made funny googly-eyed faces.

Kath was skinny and slutty-pretty with scraggly dyed black hair. There was no way she had done well in school. She flung herself onto her back like a turtle every fifty feet when they hiked, and they had to wait for her to get up, while they froze to death. She definitely needed to be here.

They hiked for hours, lugging the hefty packs through the cold, heavy snow like prisoners of war, and Rosie laughed bitterly to herself, about her mother’s conviction that parenting was so hard, oh, oh, it was
so
arduous, like Bataan. Yeah, right. After a couple of hours, they made camp. All of them had to set up their own tents, using their tarps and trees, quite far away from one another. Even though she felt nothing for the people here, she hated the isolation of sleeping so far away from others. At the Parkade, you felt inclusion, you were locked into your people, but here the instructors were doing divide-and-conquer or something, so you got that when you’re so solitary, you’re also absurd.

She was too tired to run away and kill herself the night of the first full day.

By the second morning her skin had broken out and there was no mirror, so she picked at the zits and they bled. There were no combs or brushes, so you had to use your fingers or else your hair would start to dread. She should let that happen, plus let her nails grow long and black so that when they found her body, she would look insane from what they had done to her, like Howard Hughes at the end. Being here skanked you out. You could only take a billy bath, using a sock to wash yourself with water drawn from the river in billy cans. She was lonely as a loon, with an unfamiliar inside crazy laugh bubbling up from within. At the Parkade, your voices united together in a song, called We. Out here each person’s voice was thin and reedy and waiting to blow away.

E
lizabeth cried hardest at three every day, when school let out, even after James pointed out that Rosie came home in the afternoon only when she was grounded, and how rude or distant she’d be. Elizabeth threw up the first time she remembered that Rosie would not be home for Christmas, even after James reminded her how awful Rosie had been last year, withdrawn, spoiled, needing to be told two and three times to set the table, to ice the cinnamon buns and recycle the wrapping paper from her glut of presents.

James tried to make Elizabeth stop crying, until he called his sponsor, who told him to get off her back. It was what she needed to do, and besides, something beautiful was being revealed. James told him, “I am never going to call you again,” but then called him that same night and asked him what was so goddamn beautiful about his wife’s broken heart. “Truth,” James reported to Elizabeth. He looked years older in three days, blackish-red half-moons under his eyes. With his reading glasses on, he resembled a little old man. Elizabeth lay on the couch petting Rascal like a post-lobotomy patient. James slid underneath her feet, and placed them in his lap, and pretended to chew on the big toe of her left foot through the sock until she laughed for several seconds. But a few moments later she was crying as if the sorrow came in on the same wave as the laughter.

He made them both ginger tea. A moan of comfort escaped her. “I am temporarily semi-okay,” she said. They sat in silence, sipping their tea. “I used to drink this when I was pregnant with Rosie. I had the worst morning sickness.” She inhaled the scent. “Andrew was much happier than I was about having a child. I was afraid of how doomed you would be as a parent. And I was right.” Her reading glasses fogged up with steam, and she took them off and put them on the coffee table and screamed.

T
he girls combed their hair with their fingers and braided it. This was one of the few things that calmed Rosie’s rabbity freaked-out mind, besides the sheer physical exhaustion. Every morning they broke camp, hiked, set up their tarp tents in a new site, gathered wood, and failed at fire instruction. The instructors said, “You’ll get it, we promise,” and the kids’ hands bled.

Rosie obsessed about how long ago the first night seemed, the line of demarcation between all she had ever known and this new, alien existence. Time was all swirled up into a tangle, but she could still see the raggedy-ass cabin where this had all begun, the so-called SAR base, where she had been discarded by James and Lank. The cabin was used by search-and-rescue teams that operated in the mountains here. It was like a motel in the movies where all the promiscuous teenagers get killed. There was a box of shitty food for dinner, pita bread, peanut butter and jelly, granola bars, yogurt tubes. The instructors said, “Trust us. Eat the yogurt. You’re going to wish you had.” But all of them refused to eat, like six-year-olds.