Imperfect Birds (43 page)

You always needed to squint, and this made your eyes hurt. Sometimes the snow was fluffy and light like feathers—how could anything so pretty make you feel so bad? Other times it was heavy and wet. The gloves were supposed to be good enough for the Arctic, but you were so cold you felt your hands were made of skeletal corpse-bones because none of your fingers could work together. But it was better than not feeling them, which meant you were in trouble. Trying to warm them up was agony, rubbing your big paws together, but it helped. The tips of their noses froze, and they rubbed them with the back of their frozen gloves like lepers.

O
n the seventh day, Bob did an incredible thing. He showed up with candy, peach gummy rings. You tied a piece of floss to the ring, and then the other end to your middle finger, and held the ring about six inches from your mouth. You had to focus on the ring and how badly you wanted it, and make it come to your mouth without moving your finger. “There are tiny muscles in your fingertips that you’ve never noticed you had, because you never needed to,” Bob said. “Your mind
is
in contact with that which will help you move the floss in a circle, until the ring passes by your mouth and you can eat it.”

It was true, like a Ouija board, how without your fingers’ even seeming to move, you could get the muscles to flicker, tremble, stir, and bring you the ring.

Bob said: “There is so much you have all been ignoring inside you, that you let die in yourselves, deep psychic muscles. You used your skills to get high, to get by, to maintain whatever illusions you needed to keep using.” He let them each try the rings five times, and they could all do it, could get the string moving in a circle, and each got five candy rings. Their moods were expansive as they laughed and chewed and marveled.

“What other flavors do you like?” he asked when he left that day. It was ridiculous—gummy rings as some sort of payout for their neglect and misery. Oh, well, what
ev
: “Watermelon and lime,” she called out one second before he disappeared.

“You got it. See you tomorrow, then.”

They all got to their feet and waddled on, like toddlers, or old people worrying about breaking their hips. There were so many ways to get hurt—fall on the treacherous surface and twist your ankle, or plunge through the ice that crunched underfoot and drown.

W
hatcha got for me today?” Bob asked.

She didn’t want to say. Last night she had felt psychotic in her sleeping bag, although she had not made a sound, just thrashed and moaned. He coaxed it out with his patience and his kind face.

“I’m going crazy here. My mind is like a horrible yammering, so noisy and miserable. Being here is destroying me. I’m afraid the cold will freeze me, but it will be so seductive that I won’t fight back. That I’ll die alone. Or go crazy and hurt someone. I’m afraid my mother will die while I’m gone. That if I let up, I’ll go nuts.”

“We’re all afraid of the same stuff. Mostly we’re afraid that we’re secretly not okay, that we’re disgusting, or frauds, or about to be diagnosed with cancer. Really, nearly everyone is, deep down. We want to teach you how to quiet the yammer without drugs, and TV, danger, et cetera. We’re going to teach you how you can create comfort, inside and outside, how you can get warm, how you can feed yourself. And even learn to get through silence.”

“There is no quiet place in me to rest, especially in all this snow.”

“There is, though. There is wilderness inside you, and a banquet. Both.”

E
lizabeth sneaked off to the library to use the computer there. She rarely felt the need to go online. She could use a computer in a limited way, and James had just taught her how to Google, but today she didn’t want him to find out what she was looking up.

Logging on, she felt like a pedophile looking over her own shoulder, heart pounding. She Googled “deaths at wilderness facilities, from exposure, suicide, violence.” She found a few mentions of death by neglect at army-style boot camps in the United States, and endless diatribes against wilderness programs in general. But she also found testimonial essays by kids who said they would have died without intervention, or ended up in jail or as runaways. Then she Googled “teenage traffic fatalities”: six thousand kids had died nationwide the previous year. She would have thought more. Then she looked up Greyhound schedules from San Francisco to Salt Lake City. Then she Googled James, and with held breath read responses to his radio essays, most of them complimentary, a few effusive, and a few fully demonic. She Googled the people who had written the most wrathful letters, but didn’t find anything actionable. She Googled Rae: her website, random praise for her weavings, and displays of her public successes. Then she Googled herself: nothing. That pretty much said it. What had she been expecting? Elizabeth Ferguson, stay-at-home mother and wife, recovering alcoholic with a history of psychiatric problems and a teenage child recently institutionalized for drugs, spends her days reading, ruminating, and playing with the cat.

“Where were you?” James asked when she returned home.

“Oh, just hanging out at the library.”

After dinner the phone rang. When Elizabeth picked up, a woman with a sultry voice asked to talk with James, and Elizabeth’s mind flared with panic. He
was
having an affair. She’d been right all along—it wasn’t that KQED was his mistress: he’d been seeing someone young from the production department. Or who waitressed next door to the station. “Can I help you?” Elizabeth asked with enormous hostility. It was a woman from the valley, with a dog. Someone had come by who could take him, but she had promised James he could have first dibs. “Really,” Elizabeth said. “First dibs.” She felt busted—here she’d leapt to the conclusion he was having an affair, when he’d just been out
dog
hunting. God, maybe she’d been wrong about the extent of Rosie’s dark and secret life, too; maybe she and James had overreacted, and they could go pick her up. Then she smiled kindly to herself, and remembered the Post-it: Tomorrow.

She handed him the phone. “It’s a lady with a dog,” she said.

He grimaced with guilt, took the phone and listened. “Oh, dear,” he said. He looked over at Elizabeth. She kept her expression neutral, although she was seething—he’d gone to check out a dog behind her back. Their family was in deep shit, they were broke and overwhelmed, but he was saying to the woman, “Boy, Ichabod is a great dog. I fell in love with him. But I had no business pursuing this, and I have to say no. Thank you for checking, but we’ve got way too much going on.”

Elizabeth looked away, looked back at James in his guilt, and grabbed the phone.

She clenched her teeth. “Wait,” she said into the receiver. “Let us at least come by in the morning. Is nine too early? Let me find a pen.” Then she turned to James and mouthed, “Ichabod?” He nodded with deep contrition.

R
osie was raw all the time but she plodded on. Her nose ran and froze, and she tried to rub it away and that rubbed her skin raw. You sniveled all the time here. The snow turned you into something pathetic. It made your horrible leaky self visible.

On the seventh night they all got to write to their parents. Bob was going to call the parents tomorrow, and read the letters over the phone. They could use one whole side of a page of binder paper. And the parents could fax them a letter the day after.

Rosie thought for a long time before she began to write. It was so weird, how friendly she felt all of a sudden. Mama, who gave me life
,
she wrote. I am okay. I hated you for the first few days. I know you think you sent me here to save me. Although I think this is pretty extreme and I am still very mad. I miss you, though, and Rascal and James (sort of) and Lank and Rae. I want to come home. I would be so good, you could test me every morning. I know it is too late but I feel very desperate. Please find out from Jo or Alice about Fenn, even if it is bad news for me. I didn’t use NEARLY as much as the other kids here. Never meth. Well, once or twice. They say I get to see you and James at the end of the month. Please smuggle Rascal in your biggest purse. It is so cold here you won’t believe it. And at night it is so quiet that it is like hearing music among the planets (if there are owls in outer space). The snow is beautiful and a nightmare, and I will never voluntarily go into snow again. It looks like clouds and smoke and fog, and it burns the inside of your nose and lungs. It has incredible shadows in it and is also full of light. Every so often we see jackrabbits frozen in motion behind the trees. They look like they are judging us. (Tell James he cannot use this stuff!) Love you, miss you. Give Rascal a treat for me or a smack on the butt. Rosie.

T
he first thing Bob said to Elizabeth was, “Rosie is healthy—doing fine.”

“Fine? What does fine mean?” At her AA meetings, FINE was a common acronym for fucked up, insecure, neurotic, edgy.

“It means she’s eating, she’s learned to make fire. She’s doing her chores.”