The Miseducation of Cameron Post (49 page)

“You must be worried about her,” Lydia said.

“Yeah,” I said, quick, because it was the response that I was supposed to give, the response that, whatever had happened between Ruth and me, I still should have felt like giving, but it wasn’t honest. I wasn’t
not
worried about Ruth; I mean, I didn’t wish her sickness or more cancerous growths or whatever, but I was mainly thinking about Grandma in that big hospital in Minneapolis, wandering those long, antiseptic hospital hallways that always sort of glow green, getting herself and Ruth little snacks in the cafeteria, the kinds of food Grandma loved, slices of cream pies and a big salad bar to pick and choose from, watching her detective shows on the TV in Ruth’s room, the volume too low for her to really hear it because Ruth was resting, then
click-clacking
away on the typewriter in a sticky, crowded waiting room where everyone looked tired, was tired, just so she could send me a letter. Picturing Grandma carrying a tray topped with a couple of bowls of soup, riding an elevator up to Ruth’s floor, made me sadder than picturing Ruth in her hospital bed, even though she was the one who was actually sick.

Lydia must have been saying something that I didn’t hear, because when she said, “Is that something you’d like to do right now?” I had to ask, “Do what?”

And she pursed her lips and then said, “Call your aunt in the hospital. We can do so; as I said, I have the number.”

“Okay,” I said, hoping, as Lydia and I walked down to the main office, that I’d get to talk to Grandma, that she wouldn’t be tooling around the gift shop or outside getting some air.

She wasn’t. After Judy at the nurse’s station connected me to the room, it was Grandma who said, “Yes, hello.”

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spoken on the phonewith Grandma. Not since before my mom and dad died, I’m pretty sure. We used to call her in Billings sometimes on the weekends, though not that often, because usually she just came down to see us or we went to her. I’ve heard people say “tears sprang to my eyes” before, or I’ve read it, I guess, but I don’t think that I ever really felt like that had happened to me, like I didn’t have some sense that I might cry before I started doing so, at least not until Grandma answered the phone. I was just standing in the office with its officey smell of paper and permanent marker and the glue on the backs of postage stamps, and I was aware of Lydia standing just behind me—she’d dialed the number and was now planted behind me to monitor the call, my end, anyway, and then there was Grandma’s voice from some hospital room in Minneapolis, but it was like her voice out of the past too, out of my past, her voice speaking to the me who I wasn’t anymore and never would be again. And you know what, fucking tears sprang to my eyes. They did. They weren’t there and then they were, and I had to kind of take in a breath before I said, “It’s me, Grandma. It’s Cameron.”

After that kind of a beginning, the actual meat of the phone call wasn’t all that interesting. Grandma was superexcited to have me call, I could tell, and she told me all about the good cafeteria food, just like I knew she would, and all about these beautiful pink flowering trees in the hospital courtyard that she didn’t know the name of but that
sure made her sneeze
, and when the phone was passed to Ruth, she sounded tired, but also like she was trying to make her voice bright and not tired, which made her sound more sick than if she hadn’t done that. She and I didn’t talk for very long, but I told her that I hoped she felt better soon and that I was thinking about her, which was true.

After I’d hung up Lydia, motioned for me to sit in the spinny desk chair, and she took the nonspinny desk chair just across the room, but it was a small room and we were sitting very close, looking at each other. She just let me think for a moment or whatever, and then she said, “So how did that go?”

And I said, “It was weird.”

And Lydia said, “You know how I feel about you using that word during a session. It’s a catchall: the way you use it, it’s meaningless. Be specific.”

And for once I was specific. I was completely and totally specific and honest about what I was thinking right then in that moment. “I don’t know why,” I said, “but when I was talking to them, I kept picturing the two of them in a room in a hospital, which isn’t strange, I know, but it wasn’t the hospital they’re actually at, because I’ve never even been there, so how would I know what it looks like? Where I keep thinking of them as being is actually the abandoned hospital in Miles City. It’s called Holy Rosary, and like, even right now, if I try to picture my grandma in Ruth’s room, I just see it as abandoned Holy Rosary, all dirty and dark. I mean, I could change that picture, I think, and make it more accurate and put working machines and everything in the room, but that’s where my mind goes if I just let it. I see them in Holy Rosary.”

“Why do you think that is?” Lydia asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You must have some idea,” she said.

“Maybe because I’ve spent so much time there, more than I’ve ever spent in an actual, functioning hospital or whatever. Plus it’s a pretty hard place to forget.”

“But you weren’t supposed to be there, were you?” Lydia said, flipping to a clean page in her notebook, which she hardly ever did during my sessions because we covered so little ground.

“No,” I said. “We used to break in.”

It wasn’t like this was the first time that I’d ever mentioned Holy Rosary during a session. Of course we’d gotten to the topic of my
unhealthy friendship
with Jamie and the guys, what Lydia called my need to
inappropriately emulate the reckless behavior of certain teenage males
, which was part of my
incorrect gender identity
. We’d also covered, loosely, my underage drinking (which fell into that reckless behavior category), and we’d even gotten to what had eventually occurred between Lindsey and me, for the first time, in that abandoned hospital. But what fascinated Lydia, she told me, both that afternoon and for several one-on-ones to follow, was that I was connecting this place where I had experienced all kinds of sin with the guilt and sadness I was feeling over Aunt Ruth’s illness. And, according to Lydia, there was much work to be done, and progress to be made in “understanding that connection, digging it out and pushing it into the light and really facing it.”

I didn’t know that much about psychology. I’ve learned a few things about it recently, I guess, since leaving Promise; but when it was happening to me, when I was in the middle of my one-on-ones or group sessions, I couldn’t have told you where the religion part ended and the psychology part picked up. At least not when Lydia was running the show. With Reverend Rick, he might use a psychological term now and then, like
gender identity
or
root cause
, but most of the time he stuck to Scripture, to words like
sin
,
repentance
,
obedience
, and that’s only when he was talking in that authoritative kind of way, which he didn’t do very often, really. He mainly listened. But with Lydia everything mixed together, a passage from the Bible followed by an activity she’d gotten from NARTH—the National Association for the Research and Treatment of Homosexuality
.
Or maybe Lydia reminding us that
sin was sin
, and then talking about the
pseudo-self-affirming behaviors
associated with our sins. If the goal was to keep us from questioning the treatment we were getting in our support sessions because we didn’t know what, exactly, to question, to disagree with—the Bible or the psychology she was using—it kind of worked. But I don’t think it was necessarily so organized, so planned out as a means to manipulate us. I just think it really was the Wild West out there and they were making shit up as they went along. I mean, who was there to stop them? I know the word for all this now: it’s
pseudoscientific
. It’s kind of a great word: I like the
s
sound that comes twice in a row when you say it. But that day in the office with Lydia I didn’t know the word
pseudoscientific
, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have used it. I was glad she thought we were on the verge of uncovering something significant about my fucked-up
development cycle
, about just how I had become the vessel for sin that had earned me my place at Promise. I let her believe it, and not only because of Jane’s insistence that the three of us should get in good with the management to hasten our escape, but also because I thought,
If I’m really gonna leave Promise forever, for good, and never look back, maybe I should spend the next month or so actually giving myself over to the place, its ways
. Not giving in to it, not that. And not somehow acquiring faith and devotion by snapping my fingers. I knew that I would never be a Mark Turner: I didn’t have the capacity for it, or the upbringing, or the combination of the two, whatever. But I thought that if I could be honest with Lydia, really honest, and answer all of her questions fully, then maybe I could somehow figure out some things about myself.
What the hell?
is basically what I was thinking. What the hell?

Chapter Twenty

A
week or so after Lydia let me make the phone call to the hospital, Bethany Kimbles-Erickson brought me a pretty amazing book. You wouldn’t necessarily think so the first time you saw it. Or at least I didn’t. It was about the thickness of an issue of
National Geographic
and it had a soft paper cover that smelled like mildew and basement, and it was sporting a coffee ring over the title, which was:
The Night the Mountain Fell: The Story of the Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake
. It was written by some guy named Ed Christopherson and it apparently cost one dollar when he self-published it in 1960. I knew this because in black, bold lettering at the bottom of the cover it read:
ONE DOLLAR
. But now, thirty-three years later, Bethany Kimbles-Erickson had paid only twenty-five cents for it at the annual Word of Life rummage sale, held in the church’s parking lot. That detail actually made me sort of sad for Ed Christopherson, wherever he was.

“I found it lying on the very top of a box of books I was moving to another table,” Bethany had told me probably ten times since she’d given it to me. “The very top. It’s one of those everyday kinds of miracles, it really is, because do you know how many boxes of books were at that sale? I would say hundreds. Really, honestly. And I didn’t even glance at half of them.”

Bethany tended to overuse the word
miracle
when describing coincidences, and even when she tacked on
everyday
to clarify just what kind of miracle we were talking about, it was still kind of annoying. So that’s what I thought her discovery of this book was: another coincidence polished up to shine like a miracle. At least that’s what I thought at first. I mean, without calling it a
miracle
I could still appreciate the perfect timing of her find.

Recently, those of us disciples who were in good shape for our final exams at Lifegate Christian, which included me, were allowed to work on independent projects in various subjects, Montana history being one of them. Just picking that as my subject made me feel sort of close to my mom and her work at the museum, but then I decided to research Quake Lake as my specific topic, to really find out all the history of its formation and how the facts might differ from family lore, and so Bethany’s find was very, very timely.

Those of us working on projects had already been taken to the Bozeman Public Library once, and would get to go again before the month was up, but before Bethany brought it to me, I’d not yet come across Ed Christopherson’s book. Actually, I’d spent most of my four hours at the library looking through microfilm archives of the
Bozeman Daily Chronicle
, reading eyewitness accounts of the earthquake and spending lots of time squinting at the grainy photographs that accompanied those articles, trying to imagine my mom in her pageboy, her Campfire Girls T-shirt, sitting in the backseat of the family car, Ruth next to her, the morning after, my grandpa Wynton driving, my grandma Wynton looking back over the seat to check on her girls every few minutes, the car filled up with the heavy burden and joy of all of them knowing that they had escaped the exact site of the earthquake’s worst damage. But others hadn’t—no official word as to how many yet, but certainly other campers had not been so fortunate.

I tried hard to imagine what my mom might have felt in the backseat on the long, hot, many-times-detoured-because-of-quake-damage drive home to Billings. Her father’s neck would have been tense and strained, the radio, when it tuned in, all endless earthquake coverage, the bottle of ginger ale bought at a gas station sweating and warming from where she had wedged it between her thighs, Mom unable to drink any more after the first swallow, when she’d thought of the Keenans, almost certainly dead, and how could she sit in the backseat and drink ginger ale if that was true? At some point while I was imagining all this, I would switch over to remembering the terrible, seemingly endless car ride into Miles City with Mr. Klauson the night he’d cut short my sleepover with Irene, the night Grandma had told me the news about my parents’ accident. This switch from imagination to memory happened automatically, young Mom in a car to me in a truck, a sort of reflex, I guess, but one triggered by what? Thinking of the sound of tires rolling over cracked, summer-hot Montana asphalt? Things left unsaid in moving vehicles? Guilt? I don’t know. And then Bethany brought me the book:
The Night the Mountain Fell
.

It had everything. It had graphs and charts, a fold-out cardboard map of the entire Madison Canyon Earthquake area with these funny little hand-drawn symbols all over it, like two parachutes to indicate the smoke jumpers who were called in to fight a forest fire that was started as a signal fire by some campers who had survived the quake but needed to be rescued, their cars gone, even the road they traveled to their campsites on gone.