Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (24 page)

I
’m learning that boys, like men, are always watching girls. But it’s different with boys—sweeter. So I flirt with all of them, and soon my name shows up inside hearts on several more notebooks. John, Dallas’s brainy friend, writes
Lovely Rita
on his. For years, my parents called me terrible names. But now, in black ink, I am lovely. “I don’t care,” Dallas says smiling, pointing to John’s notebook and tousling his hair—“He can write whatever he wants. I know you love me.” And I do. At fifteen, this is the most normal my life has ever felt. And every time Dallas smiles at me, I heal a little.

I cheer for Dallas on the baseball field, and he claps for me when I bowl a strike (or more often, a gutter ball) during one of our unit’s weekly outings. We gaze at each other across the room. We draw each other’s names in bubble letters and hang them on our walls. We take Polaroids of ourselves and give them to each other, as if we’re giving ourselves.
Here,
we keep saying,
I’m yours
.

M
r. Ware stares at me intently, leaning forward with his hands cupping his knees. A month has passed since I first arrived at the Jackson Unit. “So, you really like getting that attention from the boys, don’t you?” he asks, though it’s more of a statement.

“I don’t know.” I feel myself blush and look away.

“Bullshit, Rita. You know exactly what I mean.” He pulls his chair closer to me. “I mean, c’mon, anyone can see how you play them. And it works—you’ve got them all drooling. So now the question is why?”

I tap my foot nervously. “I don’t know.” Here, for the first time, someone is exposing me, and I don’t like it—not even from Mr. Ware.

“C’mon, you’re smarter than that. What do you think?”

“Maybe because I just want to feel pretty.”

“Maybe it’s because you’re afraid of what’s underneath. You present this façade—as if who you are without the makeup and the tight Harley shirt won’t be good enough.”

I chew on the tip of my finger. “What if I don’t know who I am?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out. We’re going to start focusing on the inside. You think Dallas loves you? Dallas doesn’t know you—and how can he if you don’t know yourself? What Dallas loves is an idea of you. And that’s not bad. It’s just not love.”

“What if nobody loves me?” I barely whisper.

“I do.” He pulls a book from the shelves and swings his chair around beside me. The book is white. On it is a pencil drawing of a little circle with an eye and a pie-shaped mouth. He opens the book and begins to read: “It was a missing piece. And it was not happy . . .”

I
n the dark, Tina and I keep whispering. She tells me about her family, about drugs, about things I promise to keep secret. “Tell me more about what it was like to be a runaway,” she says.

I turn over on my stomach and lean on my elbows, resting my face in my hands. I’ve never talked to anyone like this. “What do you want to know?”

“Where did you go?”

“Different places. I just met people, and they let me stay with them sometimes.” I don’t tell her about Duwahi and Karen, though sometimes they still find me in my dreams.

“What did you do when you didn’t have a place to stay?”

“I slept on staircases. And sometimes in empty cars. And once on a bus. And once I snuck into my father’s yard when he was in prison and slept on a lounge chair.”

“What was it like? Out there at night?”

I close my eyes and think. “It’s strange, but it stopped being scary. I mean, when I was with my parents, I was always afraid, especially at night. I had a lot of nightmares, and even when I woke up, it felt like I was still in them. But when I was on the run, it changed.
People
were scary sometimes, but nighttime, it was—I don’t know—
possible
.” I turn over again to lie on my back. “Kind of like now.”

“Yes,” she says. “Like now.”

“You know, the stars—I think they listen.”

“Do you think they’re listening now?”

“I think they’re always listening.”

We’re quiet for several minutes, and I wonder if Tina has fallen asleep. Then I hear her get out of bed. Without a word, she comes across the room in the dark and sits down next to me. Her hip presses against mine. She leans forward, so close I can feel her breath on my lips, and at that moment, the thing I want most in the world is for her to kiss me.

But she doesn’t. Instead, she lingers there, then gets up and goes back to her bed. In the silence, we breathe darkness. It’s as if she and I own it, the darkness, together.

W
e have some free time before an N.A. meeting, so I go outside. Dallas is leaving tomorrow; he’s going home. Right now I’m the only one out here. The sun has slipped behind a mountain and lit the sky in mauve, tangerine, sienna—a warm blanket lowering itself into every crevice. I sit on the grass in the middle of a hill and watch the sky drop in layers. At the top, a sapphire sheet deepens, starts spreading down. The buzz of insects is as steady as stillness. The air is electric, a charge to my skin. In this moment there is nothing but mountains and the swirling atmosphere and the invisible stars poised behind it all. There is no distinction between the air and the buzz and the mountains and me: we all flow into each other.

The next morning, before Dallas leaves, the staff finally lets us have the embrace we’ve been waiting two months for. His hug is softer than I expected, and he smells like soap and sun and salt. Everyone has crowded around us, as if they’re rooting for us. We’re like the rehab version of prom king and queen. “When you get out, I’m comin’ for you,” he whispers in my ear. I am crying, in part because I’m going to miss him, and in part because I’ve already learned the mileage of these kinds of vows.

“
S
o, how are you going to keep yourself clean when you’re home, and your mother’s pissing you off, let’s say, and the thought of getting high starts to sound pretty damn good all of a sudden?”

Behind Mr. Ware’s head hangs a picture I made for him: a road starting in a dark slug-ridden pit and ending in a rainbow that arches right off the page. I wanted it to represent my journey—how the road before had been mostly dark, and how coming there, to him, to the Jackson Unit, to the mountains, to myself, I’d found light. It isn’t a particularly good drawing, but it was the best I could do.

I give the answers I’ve been taught, and though I love Mr. Ware, it’s
something of a performance: “Well, for one, I’m not going to engage in magical thinking, and if things get tough, I’m going to keep myself off the pity pot. I’m going to pray and definitely avoid people who use drugs. I’ll go to an N.A. meeting every day, and I’ll get a sponsor I can call for support. I’ll think before I speak or do something I might regret, and I’ll find hobbies and fill my time with things like writing and going on picnics and taking walks.” It’s not so much that I’m being dishonest as it is that I don’t really understand what I’m saying. These words have been repeated so much that they’ve lost their meaning. They’re flat. But even if they had a shape, I wouldn’t know how to fit them into the mystery of my future. I haven’t lived with my mother since I was nine, and I haven’t lived freely for years. I don’t know my sister anymore, aside from the occasional letters we send each other, and I don’t know where my father is. So a picnic with my family is a fantasy. Each time I think of it, all I can see is the ground, and a blanket, empty.

A
t Norm’s, we were working on my fear of highways. “They’re too fast,” I explained. “And too big, and too hard.”

“Too hard?”

“Yes. Too much concrete and metal. And tunnels and bridges—they’re just evil.”

“But you used to drive on the highway fine?”

“I used to drive on any highway, anywhere—and usually in the fast lane.”

By then, Norm had changed his EMDR approach and was doing something called RDI (Resource Development and Installation) with me. Instead of remembering trauma, I was supposed to remember positive things, because, as Norm said, “there’s just too much trauma.”

We’d switched from the earphones to a pair of sponge-covered clickers that took turns buzzing in my hands. I found the tactile aspect more relaxing than the visual and audio options. Norm handed me the
device and instructed me to remember a time I drove on the highway and liked it. The memory that sprung into focus was from my early twenties. I was on my way to Ocean City, Maryland, and I was alone, driving my boyfriend’s black convertible, blasting reggae down the road. As I crossed the Bay Bridge, I started steering with my knees as I took my hands off the wheel and shot them up into the air, the way you do on roller coasters, because I felt like I was flying in that wind, so high up, free.

Norm was writing on a pad. “ ‘Free.’ What other words would you use to describe how you felt?”

“Happy. Strong. Alive.”

“Good,” he said. “Now let’s go back and remember some more.”

T
hat day I didn’t drive home on the highway. Instead, I took the usual country roads, except for one extra turn: I stopped at a barn. I’d passed it once when I’d accidentally taken a wrong turn, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it after. The barn was painted white and had its own built-in silo, and the paddocks sprawled from the edge of the road to a distant line of pines. When I pulled in, a girl was riding a black horse, her spine straight. All my life I’d dreamed of riding a horse, but I didn’t know if I ever would. I’d never forgotten my friend Jennifer’s horse, who filled me with such untouchable desire that I could no longer be Jennifer’s friend, but eventually the years had faded that desire, and what was left had turned to fear.

Now I was determined to blast through that fear and give myself something my parents never could. Now I would finally step through that door between the horses and me.

Inside the barn, country music trickled from a small radio on a ledge. The horses stood quietly in their stalls, periodically swatting at flies with their tails. Sunlight sliced through the windows, dropped bright squares on the floor. A lone guitar shaped a sad tune. “Hello?” I called. The air smelled of hay and wood and horse sweat, sweetly musky.

And that’s where I first met Applesauce, the horse that started it all. The girls referred to him as “a fat gray sofa,” and my first thought when I saw him was
He’s big.
My second thought was
He’s big.
It’s difficult to understand just how big a horse is until you’re standing next to one, until you lose your balance by staring into one of his eyes. But it didn’t take long before I was accustomed to Applesauce’s size, as I groomed him the way the instructor showed me, using the currycomb to massage him in small circles along the sand dune of his back, then sweeping away the dust with quick flicks of the brush.

The instructor took me outside to a small sand-filled ring, and as the sun beat down on my shoulders, I climbed up the mounting block and, for the first time in my life, I mounted a horse. And when I felt him move beneath me, I was happy.

As I made my way home that day, all I could do was think about horses.
I ride horses now,
I was thinking.
I’m an
equestrian. All those years I gazed from the roadside at horses in fields, until they seemed farther and farther, until they were specks on the horizon and the sound of them in my mind felt like the most I would ever get of them. But now I had finally touched a horse. I’d groomed him. I’d climbed onto his back. And for a few short minutes as he walked lazily around, I’d ridden him.

And then, an already perfect day got more perfect: Larry came home with the mail.

“Guess what! I rode a horse today!” The words tumbled out before he’d managed to close the front door.

“A horse? Really? Where?” He put the mail down on the side table, and I kissed him.

“Yes, because I’m an
equestrian
now. I found this barn and rode a horse named Applesauce!”

“Wow, just like that? Your very first horse! Good for you, sweetie!” He leaned forward and hugged me. “I’m proud of you.” Then as he sorted through the mail, he pulled out a large envelope. “This is for you.”

It was a letter from Middlebury College in Vermont. I had gotten the scholarship to Bread Loaf.

A
few weeks later, on my way to my first real riding lesson with Tommy and Shaddad, I stopped at a tack shop and told the lady behind the counter that I’d just started riding horses. “Wonderful! Where do you ride?”

I looked at the shelves of boots on the wall, then back at her. “Actually, I’ve only ridden a horse once. And I didn’t exactly ride it—I more like sat on it. But I have a lesson today with someone new.”

“I see.” She nodded.

“Don’t I need some special clothes?” I asked.

“Do you have half chaps or breeches?”

I wasn’t entirely sure what those things were, but I was sure I didn’t have them. Within a half hour I’d purchased a helmet, a pair of tan breeches, brown paddock boots, and brown suede half chaps. When the lady caught me eyeing the tall black boots displayed on the wall, she told me, “Those are for after you’ve been riding for a while.” I wondered how that would happen—that one day when I would say,
It’s finally a while—now I can get those tall black boots!
I changed into my new ensemble in the dressing room, then paid for my merchandise, proud as a kid who wears her new shoes straight out of the shoe store.

Over the next year, I would ride many different horses, with many different instructors, before I would meet Claret. But no matter where I went, each horse would teach me something new. One of the most important things I came to understand is that horses are prey animals—they live on the edge of panic, always ready to flee—and they require us, as riders, to help them feel safe. One horse I rode spooked at wind, another at doors, and another at just about anything that moved. And always, they needed me to be brave. If I got scared as we neared a door, the horse knew instantly and turned away. But when I steeled my core
and kept my legs on firmly—when I looked ahead with determination at the object of fear—the horse moved with me, toward it. This, I learned, is how you move past fear.

O
ne particular afternoon, I was trying to come to terms with the whole idea of falling off a horse. Would it happen? Would it hurt? Would something break? Would I die? “If I fall,” I asked the instructor, “will it be very painful?”

“It’s not exactly going to feel
good
,” she said. “But, it’s not a matter of
if
; it’s a matter of
when
.”

That’s a strange feeling, that moment when you know,
I’m going to fall off a horse
. Most people don’t know what accidents await them in their futures, but I knew at least one of mine. At first this knowledge was difficult to reconcile. It was like an equation I wanted to recalculate until the numbers came up differently.
Maybe I’ll be the lucky one. Maybe I’ll become such a good rider that it will be as if my behind is glued to the saddle. Maybe I’ll stop riding
. I knew right then that I had to make a choice: I had to either go after my passion or give it up. There is no halfway with horses. Either you’re present or you’re gone. And I realized that if I let fear stop me from doing something I was passionate about, I was only one small step away from being back on my couch, afraid to even stand up. There’s risk in everything, from the moment we’re born, but, as Dylan says,
He not busy being born is busy dying
.

So I kept riding, kept seeking the horses, kept stepping each day a little farther from my fear. And all of those steps—and pauses and lurches and swerves—would lead me to a barn in New Hampshire, where a copper-colored, bright-eyed horse was waiting for me.

I
sent my confirmation letter back to Bread Loaf, and started driving on the highway again. At first I’d merge on and whip right off at the next exit, my palms clammy, my heart knocking. But
then I’d get back on again. I’d play music and look at the clouds and hang in the right lane, close to the shoulder so that I always had a way off. After a few tries, I began to feel comfortable with it again.
Highways are good
, I thought.
They get you places
. Sometimes the child voice would say,
Oh my God, you need to get off RIGHT NOW. These cars are going TOO FAST
. And I’d say,
It’s okay. I’ve got it under control. Just stick with me, kiddo.

When it was time for me to leave for Vermont, Larry loaded my things into my car. A consummate gentleman, he’d always rushed to open every door, to carry my heavy suitcases, to fill up his arms with grocery bags. It was August, the light a miasma hovering over the grass, the chatty birds dipping through it, these last warm mornings of the year, and Larry was standing in the middle of it with a gift he held out in front of him with both hands, the way he’d once held chocolate at my doorstep when we were dating: a box wrapped in metallic paper with sunbursts on it. On the top he’d written in black marker:
RITA’S BREAD LOAF BOX.
“They’re letters,” he said, “one for you to open each day you’re there.” He kissed me softly on the mouth. “Now go have a good time, and come home to me.”

Larry pushed my car door closed, and I drove away. I drove on one highway, and then another, and another. I passed trees and jutting rock walls and mountains. I passed a fading sign on the roadside that said,
PACKING PEANUTS WANTED.
I passed little huts selling firecrackers. It was the farthest I’d driven in more than a year, and I wasn’t scared for one moment of it. Instead I felt like a kid on her first day of school, eager and nervous and ready to learn.

Bread Loaf—which was held on a gorgeous sprawling campus on a mountain with no cell phone coverage and a single pay phone surrounded by sunflowers out in the grass—was a whirlwind in another world. We waiters didn’t stop—whether it was working our shifts or attending workshops or craft classes or talks or readings or late night parties where we danced in living rooms in our socks. We were a tribe of motion and mutual love. Just keeping up took all of my energy—I
barely had time to eat or sleep let alone think of panic—and I was smitten and aroused by every minute, by this chance to be so completely thrown into a world of kindred spirits, with the mountains rising and falling all around us and the Milky Way floating above us like snow suspended in the black sky.

The entirety of my eleven days there was like that sky—a swath of dazzling fragments: Ilya Kaminsky singing his poems until there was no one left in the room who wasn’t crying; a woman in a classroom with the chalk in her hand—
ut pictura poesis (as is painting so is poetry);
snippets of conversation overhead between girls while I showered—“I felt so stupid in my tsunami dream”; Steve Orlen, my workshop leader, offering the etymology of my maiden name: “descended from martyrs”; sitting on steps with a beautiful girl who had a Snoopy shirt that matched mine, who stood at a podium in a red halter dress and transfixed me utterly as she read to us about the ways we hold on to things; the tremble and passion in my heart when it was my turn to stand at the podium and read a poem about a two-fingered boy; watching the sun set over the mountains from a bench on a porch beside a lovely woman, the last light holding her face as we looked at each other and out at the sky, which was changing—one moment, the protracted swipe of a flamingo’s wing, the next, the exhalation of a toy dragon—while the waxing moon appeared low over the hills, ready to drop.

In quick stolen minutes at my bed, I opened Larry’s letters. Each envelope was dated and had a small gift tucked inside—rocket stickers, Albert Einstein stickers, a miniature pen-drawn self-portrait of Larry waving, a sushi-shaped eraser, a blue button with a green bird and the word
rare
—and in each card, Larry inscribed a quotation from a famous writer. On the first day’s letter, he quoted T. S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

In one card was a button with a picture of a tree and the word
hugger
below it.
The world’s tallest tree is a redwood in California measuring over 360 feet
, Larry wrote.
The oldest trees are the 4600-year-old bristlecone pines
. In another note he invited me to the sky:
The moon phase tonight is a waxing crescent. Meet me in orbit around Luna. Let’s be astronauts!
He asked if I was eating and sleeping, he told me to be brave and to shine, he said he loved me and missed me, and he reminded me that he was always a phone call away. Larry’s box of letters was the most magical, thoughtful, loving present anyone had ever given me. It gave me hope that things could change for us, that we could be closer, and that when I came home, maybe I would know the place for the first time.