Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (27 page)

T
hings at the new pond-side barn started out promising. When I went to bring Claret in from the paddocks, he came to me. Where I led him, he followed me. What I asked of him, he gave to me. And though we weren’t piaffing and passaging around the arena, I rode him on my own, and we did okay. But I was aware that I still needed help. There was so much I didn’t know, and in the school of dressage, I was a toddler. So I tried a few lessons with Laura, the barn owner, and she seemed mellow and knowledgeable, and Claret seemed happy, so I agreed to let her train us.

Laura had grown up on the property, and her father built the barn for her when she was a girl. If life were an experiment, she would have been my opposite: a girl whose parents wanted to give her everything. I wondered what it had been like for her, growing up with that unshakable haven, knowing that wherever she went in the world, she had that to come home to. I wanted to ask her what Christmases were
like, what any ordinary morning was like, when the day shone ahead like a big fat jewel.

One day after a lesson, I was giving Claret a bath in the wash stall and he began to spook. I don’t know if it was the closed space of the stall or the birds flying in just over his head to a nest in the corner or the snake of a hose near his feet on the ground, but he started taking little hoppy steps as his head shot up and his lip quivered. I could see he felt trapped. As he tried to flee, he lunged forward, but the crossties stopped him and he fell backwards, his hind legs buckling beneath him. Now he was at the apex of panic, the adrenaline bulging out the veins in his neck, his hooves scrambling as he launched himself up and this time broke the crossties.

Fortunately, Sal, the equine massage therapist who worked on some of the horses there, happened to be standing nearby and helped me get ahold of him. “There, there,” he said in a gentle melodic voice that seemed incongruous with his hulking stature and rolled up sleeves bearing his muscles and tattoos. As he helped me lead Claret back to his stall, I thanked him and booked Claret’s very first massage. “He’s sure going to need one after that,” I said.

T
he next time Claret started to spook in the wash stall, I quickly unhooked the crossties while he hopped around, and I patted his neck. He was breathing hard, and I knew he wanted to flee again. “You’re okay,” I said, keeping my hand against him. “You’re okay.” And after a few seconds he was standing still again. When he turned to put his nose against my arm, I reached into my pocket and gave him a cookie, and with each chew, I could see him relax a little more. After another cookie, he began to lick my palm in a slow rhythm that seemed to be calming us both.

Just then, Laura walked over to me. “Enough babying,” she said. “He needs to learn to deal.”

She took Claret from me abruptly and tied him back into the wash
stall, and I could see the tension returning to his face, his eyes darting nervously at me and the door and the hose on the floor. I went to soothe him, but Laura told me to get out of the way. She turned on the hose, and as he started to spook again, she yelled, “Cut it out!” But he couldn’t cut it out. I knew; I had lived it. He was panicking, and I was watching the fear escalate, watching him try to get away. When he scooted over in Laura’s direction, she smacked him. “Don’t you crowd my space!” she yelled. Then she turned to me. “He’s too big a horse to be losing his shit like this. Believe me, you don’t want him smashing you into the wall. He needs to learn to stand still and respect your space.” She had a point. But even though I was a novice who had little more than a thimbleful of knowledge about horses, I knew what it was to be a flight animal. And I knew that the way to Claret’s heart would never be with a hard hand.

It didn’t take long before I learned that the kind of lesson we would have depended on Laura’s mood. Sometimes she sat in her chair in the doorway and taught the entire lesson without moving. Other times, she was up, yelling, chasing us around the arena. “Toes
in
, hands
down
,
look
where you’re going!” As I focused on my hands, I’d lose the position of my feet, and when I focused on my feet, I’d tilt my head down, and it seemed that I couldn’t get the independence I needed in my various body parts, or the synchronization.

On one very hot day, Claret and I had been circling the arena for over an hour. We were drenched in sweat, and I couldn’t seem to get it right, and a storm was coming. Through the little windows I could see the clouds rolling in, so dense I could almost feel their weight pressing on the roof. “I think he’s had enough,” I said meekly. I had come to accept that the cost of learning to ride a horse was to have someone yelling at you three days a week, so I rarely spoke up at all. “He’s fine,” she said. “Now hands
down
, feet
in
. . .” I was trying to get Claret to canter. I hadn’t cantered him in weeks, since Laura had started us on her training program. Everything I’d learned and read taught that you ask a horse to canter with the outside leg back, but Laura was insisting I ask with my inside leg. And I could not pick up the canter.

At one point, Laura’s helper poked her head into the arena. “Hey guys, there’s a tornado coming. Just heard it on the radio. One touched down five miles from here.”

By then the rain and wind were already starting to whip against the windows and batter the roof. “Okay,” Laura said. “Try it again.”

“We’re going to die,” I said.

“No, you’re going to canter.”

So in a moment when she’d looked out at the crumbling heavens, I snuck my outside leg back and asked him to canter. And he cantered. I stroked his neck. “Good boy!”

“Now you’re finished,” Laura said.

I led Claret back to his stall and wondered how long it would take for a tornado to travel five miles. I gave him a cookie and buried my nose into his neck while he licked my open palm. I didn’t care that we were both sweaty—I took in the musk of him, and it grounded me. I began to massage Claret’s back, which I thought might be tight after our lesson, and he whipped his head around to massage mine with his lips, the way horses do to each other in the fields. “Thank you,” I said. The wind picked up, and we both stopped to look out the window. The trees were starting to bend, and the charcoal sky was beginning to boil. I considered trying to find better shelter but quickly decided against it. We were two wild things, he and I, and I would not leave him. Let the tornado come.

T
wenty years later, the corn still grows along the road. The old stone buildings still stand, some making a crooked ascent toward the sky. And the grounds are still beautiful—hilly, green. A few years after I left the Montrose detention center for the last time, it was condemned and shut down, and the Army National Guard bought the land. I walk from building to building alongside Major Kohler, a tall, affable veteran with eyelashes most women dream about. He’s wearing fatigues and a black beret, which suits his dark hair and handsome features well. Though he’s supposed to be escorting me, he lets me give the tour. “Here’s where I stayed,” I tell him, pointing to a mansion-size stone building that, even in the daylight, looms dark. Ivy spindles across its stone face, obscuring more than half of it.

Major Kohler sweeps his eyes over me. “It’s hard to believe
you
were in a detention center.” I’m wearing a flared skirt, a lacy camisole,
sandals, and a necklace I made out of kyanite, labradorite, and Roman glass. “What did you do wrong, anyway?” he wants to know.

I consider his question and find I have no good answer. “I ran away.”

The military has already renovated most of the buildings, many for office space, some for barracks, but a few are still in disarray. We walk through one that’s been gutted. Scraps of wood and nails are strewn across the subfloor. “Be careful,” Major Kohler says, holding the door for me. The dirt from the rubble turns my toes black.

The grounds are vacant as we stroll from building to building. There’s something intimate about sharing this quiet time with him, this late afternoon, these steps through the grass with this stranger who’s willing to let me go back, open doors, climb steps, crest hills. I can still see the girls piled into the bathroom, elbowing each other for water. I can see us on our knees, scrubbing the floors with steel wool pads. I can see us jammed together in that one big room with nothing to do but stare again and again at the same sullen faces, playing Spades over and over and poring over magazines until we memorized every recipe for pie, dreaming of a different life.

Major Kohler asks why I ran away, and again, I don’t know how to answer. How do I tell a stranger an answer like that? But then I realize the answer is simple. “I ran away because I believed there was something better out there.”

“Did you find it?” he asks.

I look around at the land and remember how I once gazed at it from inside the barred windows, how I longed for this, here, now—this very moment. A groundhog skitters by, all fat with summer. “Yes,” I tell him, “I did.” And something about the way Major Kohler slowly nods his head makes me believe he understands.

As we start to head back toward my car, we come upon a spider in her web in the corner of a building. The light pressing against it has created a brilliant rainbow, and we stare silently for a moment at the
luminous silk. “It’s kind of like your life in a way,” says Major Kohler, “finding a rainbow in a spiderweb.”

A place inside me turns quiet.
Some of us didn’t make it through
. A phantasm comes into focus, taps against me from inside. Taby. Her blue eyes. Her laugh. Her hair in the sun. Sometimes I think I can feel the impact of the car crash that killed her only two years after she left the Jackson Unit. I imagine the volume of it, the force. I imagine her laughing in her last seconds, probably with a beer in her hand, tilting her head to feel the wind rush through her open window.

And Dallas. On a summer night three years after he wrote our names in bubble letters, he blew his head off with a shotgun. His last moments are harder for me to picture. I get as far as his hands shaking at the barrel, its large hole of a mouth pointed at the center of his face. His face—that’s where, each time, I’m sent back to the mountains, to his inquisitive and playful eyes. I keep seeing that ready smile, those dimples. And I hear his voice—
I’m comin’ for you
. I can’t let him pull the trigger.

I
almost didn’t make it through, either. When they released me from the Jackson Unit, things between my mother and me didn’t change: it wasn’t the happy ending I’d hoped for that day when Mr. Ware put a Cat Stevens cassette tape into my hand and I drove off suddenly reunited with my family. I will never know why, exactly, my mother had so much hatred for me, but I think part of it was displaced hatred for herself. Part of it may have also been the demands I brought to her young life, and the divorce battle with my father, when I told the judge I no longer wanted to live with her, and a raw jealousy that was born the moment I started to become a woman—but knowing these things didn’t change them. So I spent a few months in her apartment before moving out: I ran away from her for the last time by driving off with the first guy who was reasonably nice to me. He was a construction
worker with long hair and freckles and a habit of putting his cigarettes out on the heels of his cowboy boots. I had just turned sixteen. He was twenty-four. Our life was threadbare.

After years of bouncing back and forth between institutions and the streets, I’d finally come to a halt, and I didn’t know what to do with myself in the stillness. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know how to live in anything other than the present tense. What I did know—what I felt late at night when I was the only one awake—was a nameless desire pulsing in me so insistently, so powerfully, that I thought it would crack me open.

I got a job as a hostess in a restaurant and started drinking after my shifts, whenever the bartender felt like sneaking me shots. I didn’t love the man I lived with, and when I started coming home at four in the morning with the scent of other men’s cologne on my neck, he left. Weeks later I let a man I barely knew slip a needle into the tender part of my arm, and for the first time, my desire was sated. That was all it took—that one rush, that one moment that rose up from my life like a hydrogen bomb.
Here
, it was saying,
is your present tense
. In the months that followed, there was nothing else. I shot cocaine into my arms until the track marks became scabs, which I kept poking through with more needles. It was summer, and unlike the other junkies, I didn’t try to hide my arms—I wore those dark red lines proudly wherever I went. Some might say my flagrant display of what should have been my wicked secret was, in fact, a cry for help, but I think it was more a kind of testimony, as was the blood left on the sheets after I’d lost my virginity:
I have endured
.

I went days without sleeping or eating. I weighed eighty-five pounds. I was shrinking; I was being consumed. And it felt right, as if this were the destruction my life had been heading toward all along. So I pledged myself to cocaine, gave all the love I had to it. I worked as a stripper on the Block in Baltimore for it. I hocked almost everything in my apartment for it. I scammed for it. I unsuccessfully tried to break
into a neighbor’s apartment with a butter knife for it. I slept with men I wouldn’t want to admit to knowing for it. And even after accidentally overdosing—after falling unconscious into a fit of seizures on my kitchen floor—I woke still wanting it.

I was nearly dead when I finally put the needle down. I’d lost my apartment and was living with a fellow junkie named Kevin in a rodent-infested house in the middle of nowhere. We slept on a bed without any sheets, and at night I could hear the mice scratching in the nightstand next to my head. One day it had started to rain. Kevin had taken a mouthful of pills and had systematically and inexplicably begun to move what few belongings I had left out onto the lawn. Raindrops were beading up on my stereo, which I struggled to lug back toward the house. I begged him to stop, but by then even my voice was weak. The rain picked up, made a rustling sound like a forest of old leaves waking to wind. Kevin didn’t speak. And he didn’t stop. His eyes looked past me, disconnected, inhuman.

Seeing that look in his eyes, I knew then that I’d become exactly like the people in those N.A. meetings I’d attended when I was at the Jackson Unit, the people whose lives I couldn’t fathom back when I was flirting with Dallas and watching the sun set over the mountains. I remembered what they’d said about addicts having to “hit rock bottom” in order to stop getting high, and how for many addicts that bottom is death. Maybe it was the ghostly way Kevin was standing there, almost transparent, pulling out the last little scraps of my life into the rain. Maybe it was the rain, its impenetrable gray, the way it was collecting on my stereo. Maybe it was how Kevin was holding my box of record albums, tilting them forward, aiming them for the grave.

Maybe it was that for the first time in my life, I was too weak to run.

What I knew was that I was as low as I was going to get. Any lower would have been in the ground.

Knowing this, I managed to summon one last flicker from my spirit—the same spirit that first sent me running out the door of my
father’s house with an answer I would later forget that I had:
No
. No, I had not wanted my parents’ violence. No, I had not wanted to spend my teenage years institutionalized for a crime I didn’t commit. No, I did not want to have loveless sex, and I did not want to mistake sex for love. No, I did not want this corpse of a man killing my music. I did not want death.

I corralled what traces of strength I had left and pulled my box of records from Kevin’s hands. He resisted at first, and his eyes, for a second, flared, but then like a monster that pops out of a 3-D movie, he quickly receded, and I left him standing there in that overgrown grass in the rain. I called a friend, and we filled her car with what we could and left the rest to the rodents.

After I drove away from Kevin’s that day—after I dropped to my knees and cried every kind of cry I could cry and begged any God who would listen to let me keep my life in exchange for a vow I would keep all of the years after: I would never get high again—I asked my grandparents for three hundred bucks and got a tiny apartment on the top floor of an old Victorian. And slowly, slowly, I began to heal.

I didn’t have much in the way of internal reserves—there hadn’t been a lot of love in my life, and my confidence was as creaky as my living room floor—but I had a belief stubborn enough to weather any bomb: the belief that there was beauty to be had in this world. There was love. And thanks to the Jackson Unit, my sanctuary in the mountains, I’d been given enough love to carry me through the darkness still to come. So I took that love, that wonder, into my new days. I noticed things like dandelions sprouting up in sidewalk cracks, and the way it felt to go for a walk and know I had a place to come home to, and stars. Sometimes life felt vast and unknowable, and sometimes a terror fished through my heart so intensely that I was left gasping. But I kept walking, kept looking, kept writing in notebooks about what I saw. And the pages added up—the days added up—to something.

Ultimately, there was no one thing that lifted me from the muck of my past. But there was my first real boyfriend, who was free-spirited
and funny, who gave me crystals he’d mined in Arkansas and who taught me that sex with a man could actually feel good. There was a beautiful friend—a fairy with long red hair—who brought me chocolate cake and poems, who sang to me, who was compassionate and generous and true. There was an older man who rode a Harley and who introduced me to the ocean and Joni Mitchell and beurre blanc sauce, who gave me a haven for five years in which I could heal. During that time, there were hikes deep into the woods, explorations into unmarked caves, sublime moments swimming with stingrays in the sea. There were the books I devoured, the ones I should have read in high school—Steinbeck, Salinger, Plath. There was the poetry of Mary Oliver, who put into words a peace I carry with me still. There was the day I walked into a room that seemed as big as a baseball field, holding two No. 2 pencils and that same stubborn hope—the one that almost killed me, the one that saved my life—that I could keep moving forward. There was the day I learned that I’d passed my high school equivalency test. And there was the day I went to my first college class—on a campus where I would later teach—ready to learn.

I was one of the lucky ones.

M
ajor Kohler and I run into two other guardsmen who greet him with a salute. I know they’re curious about me and why I’m there, walking around with Major Kohler. In the parking lot, we lean up against Major Kohler’s pickup, and I tell them briefly about my time there. They listen, while the sun drops and swells and the air begins to cool.

One of them says he’s heard ghost stories about Montrose.

“Really?” I ask. “Like what?”

He shoots a glance at Major Kohler, then at his friend, then finally to me. “A lot of guys here say they’ve heard a girl crying.” He turns his head and points. “Word is she hung herself right back there in that building.”

The officer beside him nods slowly. “I’ve never seen her before, myself, but one of my buddies swears he actually saw her one night. Looked right at her!” He motions with his hand by gliding it forward in my direction. “Probably wasn’t any farther than you are from me.”