Read Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir Online

Authors: Rita Zoey Chin

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Personal Memoir, #Retail

Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (21 page)

BOOK: Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir
8.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

FORTY-ONE

S
ometimes when we change what we believe, we change who we are. I had always believed I was weakhearted. “You’re so gentle,” my grandmother used to tell me. “You’re not like the rest of the family.” And I took that to mean fragile. I didn’t trust my own body, and that mistrust held me back from many things and caused me to settle for many more.

I had often felt nostalgic for my days as a runaway, a fact I’d struggled to understand. Why would I miss the callousness of the streets? The people who treated me as if I were nothing? The bad drug trips, the hunger, the childlike hope that people kept stepping on? It wasn’t until after that Valentine’s Day, when a stranger gave me my heart back, that I began to understand: it wasn’t the streets that I missed; it was myself. Nostalgia, after all, is in part a longing for ourselves through time; it’s a way of looking back and saying,
Hey, I remember you. You’re not gone from me.
It’s a way of saying,
That was some crazy shit we got into back
then
. I longed for that girl who ran away, because she wasn’t fragile. She was spirited and strong and fueled by hope. She was compelled by fairness and the stubborn existence of beauty. She was a fighter.

We are many things. Depending on how we balance our lives, we can live some aspects of ourselves more fully than others. And sometimes the voices in our minds want to tell us two completely contradictory things at once. For example, by the time I was eleven and had first run away, blazing through our front door at the outer edge of dusk, a part of me knew that my parents were damaging me and that I could save myself if I got away. But that same year, another part of me believed that the problem lay within me.
You’re defective
, it said.
Your heart is defective
.

And that voice—the voice that told me I was dying when I was eleven—was the same voice that told me I was dying when I called 911 at thirty-five. It told me I wasn’t safe, and I began to live the life of an unsafe person. The voice became so powerful that it even changed the way my brain functioned. I imagined my enlarged amygdala, agitated and unbalanced, perceiving everything as dangerous.
I don’t know
, it was saying,
that marshmallow looks pretty sketchy to me
.

Panic had sent me running for my life, by running
from
my life. But panic, it turns out, wasn’t the bully I thought it was. It wasn’t a virus or an erratic black bird. Though it felt like all of those things. It felt bigger than everything. But in the end, panic was
me
. And it wasn’t even all of me; it was one small part of me, grown wild. Realizing this, I suddenly felt like Grover in
The Monster at the End of This Book
: I’d been building brick walls to hide from
myself
.

If I wanted my life back, I finally had to accept that the only way to get it was to move toward panic, toward myself. I would have to reach for what scared me. I would, as the wise social worker I once knew said, have to suffer my suffering. Though running away from home nearly killed me more than once, it also saved my life. I had taken control in a situation that was out of control. I rejected the imbalance of my parents and sought solid footing. I didn’t always make the right choices, but
what mattered was that I was
making
choices, that my intention for love and health and balance
was
a kind of love and health and balance. And that intention was the same intention that I carried to the therapists and the practitioners, to the clay classes and cooking lessons, to the underlined passages of Rilke. It was what gave me one whole day without panic. Of fight-flight, it was the fight.

I had asked a question—what can I learn from panic?—and already I was learning a lot. There is a momentum that builds in the asking that carries you forward.

W
hen we got home after seeing the cardiologist that day, Larry gave me a gift. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said, handing me a piece of sketch paper, on which he’d drawn a picture of me. The picture was based on a photograph of me taking a photograph of a field. In it, I’m looking through the lens of my camera, while a tree arches over my head and purple and yellow clouds float by. He titled the drawing
The Observer.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, wrapping my arms around his neck. “I love it.”

I looked at it again. “It must have taken you ages. But I don’t have anything for you.” Shame moved through me, slimy and cool. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said, kissing my cheek. “You give me gifts every day.”

I hung my drawing over my desk and went upstairs to take a shower. Since I’d started panicking, I’d always left the shower door partially open—just in case—even with Larry in the room. But on that evening, Larry wasn’t in the room. And I closed the door all the way. Now that I was sure nothing was wrong with my heart, I had no excuse. And then midway through my shower, I realized something: even with the door closed, I wasn’t alone. I stepped out of the water’s spray and stood beside it, dripping in the mist.
Hi
, I said.
I’m here
. In the reverb of the shower, the words seemed to travel, to move in every direction at
once—all the directions I’d ever run in, reversed. They resounded, small but powerful as a heart. I realized then that I’d never really been alone—I had been with myself from the beginning and would be so until the end. I knew then that wherever life took me, I could count on myself. I would abide. And the water roared. And my skin was red and alive. And I could feel how palpable this gift was—this gift of presence within us, which no one can ever take away.

FORTY-TWO

O
n the morning of my court hearing for violating my probation, I know I’m in trouble. Since my mother pressed those fake charges against me, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve violated my probation by running away. If I hadn’t called her when I got away from Karen and Duwahi, I might still be on the run. But now that I’m back at Montrose, it’s almost certain I’ll be committed here indefinitely. So when a grumpy staff member gives me a razor to shave my legs, I run it across both of my wrists instead.

I don’t intend to kill myself. But I don’t know any other way to get the judge’s attention. What I’ve learned is that the courts already have an opinion of us before we even get there, that standing before the judge is little more than a formality that usually lands me in handcuffs. And I’ve learned that the juvenile justice system has nothing to do with justice. I don’t cut too deep—just deep enough to draw blood, and to keep stinging after.

The best possible thing I can hope for is to be sent to a drug rehab. Everyone in lockup knows these are the most coveted placements when you can’t go home and, for some, even when you can. Though my father’s out of prison, I haven’t heard from him in a long time; I’m not even sure where he is. As for my mother, I’ve learned to stop asking. So when I stand before the judge, whose white hair and flushed cheeks make him look a little like Santa, I tell him that I never committed that crime against my mother, that it had always been the other way around—me on the end of her blows, of my father’s. I tell him that I ran away to find a better home, that I got myself into trouble with sex and drugs instead. And I tell him that I still want that life, the one I ran away to find.

I have sworn to tell the truth, and I am telling it. “Your Honor, if you commit me to Montrose, I will not live. I can survive a lot of things, but I don’t believe years at Montrose are one of them.”

Though I’d planned to show him my wrists, I don’t have to, because he shows me mercy. “You seem like a very bright girl,” he says, “and I agree: you don’t belong in Montrose.”

T
he Jackson Unit is a coed adolescent drug rehab in a psychiatric hospital called the Finan Center, sprawled out amid the Appalachian Mountains in Cumberland, Maryland, and when I arrive, I am sure I have never seen a place more spectacular. I fall instantly in love with the mountains all around, jutting into the clouds. I fall in love with the space and the open doors and the people who work there—their smiles and their knowing eyes and their kindness. For the first time in years, I don’t want to run.

In the mornings they take us for long walks while the sun is still low in the sky. It angles through the trees in a mosaic of light so that when you least expect it, a burst flashes warm on your face. The birds sing lazily, as if they, too, are just waking. Everywhere, the green shines. Sometimes from the vastness, a butterfly quivers its loopy course across
the small road we walk on. Sometimes a grasshopper leaps out of the grass, the whole of life bound in its springy legs. Sometimes the sound of someone laughing rises tall into air.

In the main sitting room a large corkboard hangs on the wall. “Warm Fuzzy Board” it’s called: a board to leave “warm fuzzies” for each other: notes of affection and encouragement: things like
Great job in group today! I know how hard it was for you
. Or
Don’t ever forget what a beautiful person you are.
Seeing my name up there is like getting a Valentine:
Welcome, Rita. We’re glad you’re here
. “That’s what the world’s missing,” says my therapist, “warm fuzzies.”

He’s a sprightly, bearded guy named Buck Ware. He rides a motorcycle and has spiky hair and is so direct that it throws me a little off balance at first. Five minutes into our first meeting, he sits forward in his office chair and tells me, “When I was a boy, I was abused.” His eyes are like talons; they won’t let go. “See, now I’ve trusted you with something. And maybe you’ll start to trust me.”

I laugh. I don’t mean to, but it comes out, a kind of nervous reflex. No adult has ever talked to me that way, and it seems like a lot of responsibility to receive that kind of information from someone you just met. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s not funny, what you said.” But then, in spite of myself, I laugh again.

“It’s okay,” he reassures. “That was a nervous laugh. And just below the laughter, my friend, are the tears.”

D
uring the week, we sit at small round tables scattered throughout the room, and a teacher comes and gives us easy schoolwork. I always finish mine before lunch, then spend most of the day flirting with Dallas, a boy whose dark, inquisitive eyes and ready smile make me feel shy. I want to give him presents. On his notebook he writes my name inside a heart, and then I can’t stop thinking about him. Everything about him—his dimples, the sound of his laugh, the sheen of his black hair—is exciting to me.

In those rare moments when I’m not imagining Dallas’s kiss, I’ve taken to reading Emerson, mainly because the book is thick and I don’t understand half of it. Mr. Ware gave it to me. “You have to challenge yourself,” he said. As I turn the pages, I know I’m reading something important. “You’ve been looking in the wrong places for love,” he told me, “when it’s been all around you the whole time. It’s like nature—it’s always there.” Sometimes a line from the book echoes in my mind for days, the way the scent of sunlight can linger in your hair:
Nature is loved by what is best in us
.

Randomly I yank a word from the book and start using it, completely unaware of its meaning. My favorite is
hobgoblin
. I love the sound of it. I start calling everyone hobgoblin, just because. “You’re one crazy girl,” Taby says with a laugh. But I know she likes it.

I’d met Taby once before, at Noyes, a detention center slightly less menacing than Montrose, and we became friends immediately. She was short and bouncy, the kind of girl who was always ready for an adventure. In that way, she made the time at Noyes easier, because she filled the room with sparks of possibility. So when she arrived here at the Jackson Unit, we tackled each other to the ground in a hug. We’re family; we share a life most people know nothing about.

She and I go outside and throw horseshoes together as the sun is setting. “I’m really glad you’re here, Rita,” Taby says to me. She’s looking out at the mountains. Her eyes are blue as wildflowers.

“I’m glad you’re here, too.” I look out beside her, and the light begins to smolder.

M
s. Hanlin is a night counselor on the unit. She’s a large woman, and her spider black hair, regardless of the weather, is invariably frizzy and unkempt. Her skin is sallow and pocked, but at night, when I lie in bed and look up at her face, just before she bends down to hug me and turn out the lights for the night, she is as beautiful as anything.

I share a room with a perky but capricious girl named Tina. She is someone who would always be described as cute, but never beautiful. She has freckles and a bob haircut and an upturned nose that gets pink in the sun. At night, we lie awake and tell secrets in the dark until our voices get tired from whispering.

One night she asks me if I’ve ever kissed a girl.

I pause for a moment, deciding whether or not to tell the truth. “Yes,” I confess, “but it was never a girl I wanted to kiss.”

“Is there a girl that you
have
wanted to kiss?” Her question makes my body stir.

“I don’t know yet,” I say. “What about you?”

Now she pauses. “I don’t know yet, either.”

Then we both shift in our beds for a long time, without saying a word.

BOOK: Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir
8.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Aethersmith (Book 2) by J.S. Morin
House Arrest by K.A. Holt
Changes of Heart by Paige Lee Elliston
All Clear by Connie Willis
The Bear Who Loved Me by Kathy Lyons
Cybernarc by Robert Cain
Range Ghost by Bradford Scott
Ghost Killer by Robin D. Owens