In the Wilderness (21 page)

The distance between that filthy apartment in Lewiston and the house in the hollow could be counted in miles, in years, but not in any way that might measure the void separating my life before and my life after our move from the woods. Who was that twelve-year-old girl in long dresses, peering from behind her heavy-framed glasses, her smile true and uncompromised? And the girl on the sofa, still wearing her Levi’s, her sheer blouse, her makeup stolen from the local drugstore—who was she, is she? I cannot connect the two except through the telling of it, and even the story seems foreign, false somehow, memory that is both mine and not mine, as though the girls are simply characters I have invented. I can manipulate them, work their arms and legs like the wooden limbs of marionettes, make them laugh, hate, pray, believe in anything, believe in nothing.

What I cannot do is imagine the girl I was at twelve becoming the girl I was at fourteen. I remember the emotions vividly—at twelve, adolescent confusion tempered by the security of family, a sense of trust, openness, innocence, I guess. By the time I was fourteen, I felt only anger, loathing, a need to escape from the restrictions imposed by my parents and the church. Even now it scares me to understand how easily a soul may pass from one dimension of itself into another, as though the boundaries separating what we are and what we might become, given an infinite set of motivations and conditions, are little more than the line between waking and sleep, between story, memory, dream.

The most frightening thing of all is that each of those girls
is still with me, both vulnerable and bitter, believing and hardened against belief. I could become one or the other of them again, I think, and so steel myself to become neither. And if I had to, which would I choose—the near-child about to lose herself to spite and anger? or the near-woman already there, calloused to the pain in her mothers eyes, the grim discipline of her father, the prayers of the church, her own sense of guilt and sure damnation?

That morning, when I awoke in the apartment of my friend, her mother and the man were gone. I maneuvered my way through piles of dirty clothes, past the bed with its crumpled gray sheets and into the tiny bathroom. Ash floated in the toilet water. Hair and wadded Kleenex covered the floor. I gagged against the intimate odors of other bodies.

In the mirror, I saw my own smudged cheeks, my eyes darkened by yesterdays mascara and blue shadow. The face disgusted me. I splashed cold water in the sink, hardening myself, spitting out the metallic taste of last night’s wine. I’m nothing but a whore, I thought. Just like her. But even as I searched for a clean corner of the towel to dry my hands on, I never considered another course. There was comfort in the fatalism of my vision. Like my father, I yearned for my life to be expressed in absolutes. I had made my decision. I could never go back.

Patti and I never made it to California. That morning, as I walked from the apartment’s bathroom, I heard a hard knock. Patti jerked her head and I stepped backward into her mother’s room.

Two women were speaking. I recognized my mother’s voice and whirled to search the room for a place to hide. The single window, swollen from the shower’s mist, wouldn’t
budge. If it had, I would have jumped without hesitation to the ground two stories below. Instead, I crawled into the narrow closet, pulling the door shut behind me. I squatted beneath smoke-scented dresses and scratchy coats, piling shoes and boxes around my legs.

The voices moved toward me. Stop them, Patti, I thought. Jesus, please stop them.

The door swung open. Hands parted the clothes. I peered into the face of my mother and her friend Sally, eight months pregnant. Patti stood chewing her thumbnail like a child.
I could run. I could fly past them and out and run and they’d never catch me
. I looked at Sally’s bulging belly.
This isn’t fair
.

“Look at you.” My mother bent slightly toward me. I clutched my knees to my chest, nearly growling. My father appeared behind them, the shadow of his body blocking the light. “Come on, Kim. Let’s go,” he said, and though I had thought I’d make him drag me out, I rose and followed him past Patti and the sagging couches, through the greasy kitchen, down the stairs to the car. He did not look at me nor I at him as I slid into the backseat and rode the few miles home in silence.

There was little I felt then—not fear, or loathing, not a need to escape. I was still in that closet, my knees drawn tight, my chin tucked. It was dark and quiet. If I just sat still and breathed carefully in and out, no one would see me, know I was there. I might even forget myself.

Again, shame. I’m to undress. My mother searches the bends of my knees and elbows for needle tracks. She leaves me, goes to her room, closes the door. My father comes, raises the back of his hand, says through his teeth, “Don’t you ever do this to your mother again.” I stare out the window. I am solid, I feel nothing. I wait for my
door to close, then pull back the clean blankets and place my body between the whitest sheets. After a while, pots clatter in the kitchen. The washing machine hums. I sleep for a long time
.

The next day, it is explained that I have become impossible. I understand that I have a choice: juvenile detention at St. Anthony, or summer spent living with the Langs outside of Spokane. Tve heard what happens to new girls at the juvenile detention center—rape, broken broomsticks, razors. I choose the Langs. I have not seen them for over a year. I think I can keep my new self safe from them. I think they cannot hurt me
.

The hills of the Palouse Prairie rose and fell outside my window like the deep swells of an emerald ocean. The land, only twenty miles north of Lewiston, seemed yet another kind of foreign—no trees, no water, only wheat and peas stretching off into the horizon. I leaned my head back against the seat and thought of all I had left behind: Patti, the slough, my hidden stash of makeup. One pack of cigarettes was tucked in my sock. I’d have to ration them carefully, not knowing how or when I’d get money to buy more.

What I’d been allowed to take was little: a suitcase full of clothing, and the blue leather Bible the Langs had given me two years before on my twelfth birthday. Whatever else I might need, the Langs and the Lord would provide.

I closed my eyes and imagined what Luke must look like.
Sixteen and taller, maybe different hair but the same eyes and smile. Still, he would be like them, shunning me for my sins. And I didn’t care. They could all rot in hell if they thought a few months were going to change anything.

The hills gave way to forest and I breathed in the familiar pine smell. Post Falls, where the Langs lived, spread out from the banks of the Spokane River, supported by a saw mill. We pulled to a stop in front of a modern split-level, so new the lawn had yet to sprout. I sat sullen until my father opened my door and motioned me out with a sideways nod.

Brother and Sister Lang greeted us with hoots, hugs for the women, hard back-claps between the men. Luke was at work—he had dropped out of school the year before and was doing home correspondence—but the others paid me the same attention they always had, as though nothing had changed. Their honest smiles and teasing coupled with the fact that no one mentioned our reason for being there gave the entire afternoon a feeling of unreality: I could find no opportunity to respond with disdain nor protest some remark critical of me or my friends. They ignored my hunched shoulders and tight-lipped scowl. Sister Lang offered me lemonade and cookies, which I refused. “Good,” she laughed. “More for me, then.”

My parents left that evening, just as the sun slipped its last light through the close branches of tamarack. I shivered a little, hands tucked against my sides. I watched their car find its way up the unpaved road and then onto the highway, where my mother leaned out her window and gave a final wave. I desperately wanted a cigarette and wiggled my foot up and down to feel the sweaty cellophane slide reassuringly between sock and skin. My Levi’s, split and frayed along the leg seams to fit over my hiking boots, hung as low on my hips as I could pull them. The back pockets were patched, an American
flag on one hip, a peace symbol on the other. POW bracelet, knotted leather necklace beaded with bones: I must have looked like the enemy. My one concession to modest attire was the bra I wore beneath my knitted midriff shirt; I chafed at the hooks biting my back.

Sister Lang took my arm and I stiffened. “Luke will be home any time. Let’s go make him some supper.” She grinned at me and started us both toward the house. I couldn’t say no.

Sister Lang gave me a knife and set me to peeling potatoes. Sarah hummed while she chopped onions, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her smock. They asked about my school, my friends, the boys I liked. I marveled at the lightness of their questions. Didn’t they know? Hadn’t my parents told them? I shrugged answers—“fine,” “okay”—and focused on the gritty strips of skin dropping into the sink.

When Sister Lang reached her hand to my face I flinched. She ran one finger behind my ear, smoothing back the strand of hair that hung over my eyes.

“After dinner, Sarah can curl your hair.”

I stood frozen, the knife and half-peeled potato in mid-air. Even silent and unsaid, it was a hiss, a vicious whisper:
Leave me alone
.

While Sarah chatted about Terry’s new job, I drew the blade slowly toward my thumb, wondering if I could hide the knife, secret it away in my sock or pocket. And then what? I couldn’t imagine stabbing or slashing, only the knife between me and whoever tried to get in my way. I’d only run if it got too bad, but I’d need the knife; it seemed important, more a key than a weapon. I could save myself with it, cut my way out or in, open cans like the bums did—one hard stab and twist. I
could use it to fashion a pole, then find a string, bend a safety pin into a hook and fish the rivers to stay alive.

Luke’s voice from the door jolted me around. He nodded, dipping his head without moving his eyes from my own.

“Howdy.”

Cold water ran down my wrists and into the sleeves of my shirt. I turned back to the sink, steadying myself against the counter. His voice was deeper, his hands bigger. In his dirty work clothes, holding his thermos and black pail, he looked like a man—like my father and uncles coming home from the woods. Then the image of how I must look to him hit me: a girl standing with the women in the kitchen, scrubbing spuds. I pressed the sharp blade harder against my thumb, not so hard that the skin popped, just enough pressure to feel what was almost pain.

Luke pulled a chair away from the table and began unlacing his boots. I double-rinsed the potatoes, afraid to move from my place. I did not even know what the rest of the house looked like. Where had they put my bag? No matter which way I moved out of the kitchen, I’d have to pass by Luke, now working thick socks from his feet. From the corner of my eye, I could see his fingers move the cotton down his calves and over his ankles. How was it that a man’s feet could be so lovely?

“Done?” Sister Lang took the knife from my hand and pointed it toward the refrigerator. “There’s lettuce to be washed.”

A salad. Carrots to cut, tomatoes and celery. I took her orders, steadied by the chores I’d always despised.

“What’s for dinner?” Luke asked. I kept my head down.

“Steaks, potatoes and gravy,” Sarah answered. “Chocolate cake for dessert.”

He grunted, a small pleased noise. I listened as he moved down the hall. A door closed. His belted jeans clicked against the floor, water worked its way through the pipes. I imagined him beneath the hot spray, soaping his back and arms, suds running down his belly.

“Kim. Here.” A bowl hovered in front of me. I’d forgotten the lettuce. Sarah stood grinning and before I thought to glare I felt the heat rise from my hips to my throat and face.

Finally, we settled in at the dinner table, where Luke prayed beside me. “For this and all Thy blessings, we thank Thee. We ask that You also bless Sister Kim, who has joined us here today.”

I opened my eyes. For a moment I was twelve again, just come to the Sunday table. Some forgotten part of me responded to the memory, the easy laughter and affection, and I felt myself slipping back into that naive girl with her hair in tight braids.

No. I hated her. I never again wanted to be that vulnerable, foolish enough to believe in anything or anyone.

The knife was gone. The only weapon I had left was my bitterness, and I took deep breaths, feeling the fist in my chest tighten. It would be a fist, my heart, not an open hand. An open hand took what it was given. An open hand could be burned, branded. A fist took nothing—it kept its secrets.

I was wrong. I can’t survive here, I thought. These people will try to kill my soul and call it salvation.

In God one finds love, absolute and unconditional, but not infinite. We believed that the gates of Heaven could be closed against a hardened heart—a “seared conscience”—and never be opened again, no matter how sincere the penance. Having no context for my sin, I could believe only that I had fired my
soul in the worldly kiln to an impenetrable and lacquered armor. Even if I had wanted to regain my Father’s house, I would find no ingress, no welcome.

Here were these lovers of God. I could never again be one of them. In this I found a dark and fitting comfort in place of absolution. I opened my eyes to the gravy bowl and ladled the congealing sauce over white bread, took more salad than I could eat. My first bite of deer steak brought another tremor of memory: sitting on the dark stairs while the women made dinner, taking in Luke’s breath with the smell of hot grease and browning venison. I’d not tasted wild meat since we left the woods, and now it was all coming back and I couldn’t stop it: the church in Cardiff, the late-night games of basketball, the wonderful float of near-sleep as I lay on the couch listening to the stove pop and the men play their music; the night they didn’t find Matthew. My friends in Lewiston hadn’t known me then, but these people had. They’d seen me that way, they knew who I really was. I shoved myself from the table so hard my iced tea rocked and spilled.