The Summer I Wasn't Me (8 page)

At first it’s shocking to me that everyone who has been called up for a Father Wound session so far has such specific incidences of abuse or trauma in their past. But the more I think about it, the more it doesn’t seem so strange. Everyone has something, right? I have my dad’s death and my mom’s mental instability and my broken heart. None of those things has anything to do with me being gay because they all happened
after
I already knew I liked girls, but still. Everyone has something.

I think about how Mr. Martin mentioned that some people who’ve experienced trauma didn’t become gay but instead turned to drugs or violence. The idea of all of this stemming from a tragic or damaging place in someone’s life makes sense when you think about it.

And if Gabe’s and Chris’s and Austin’s stories are any indication, maybe most people’s “something” happened a lot earlier in their lives than mine did. Maybe
they’re
not the exception. Maybe
I
am.

But still. There’s got to be a better way to go about all this.

The midday lunch break is just as uncomfortable as the Father Wound sessions themselves. The dining cabin is quiet, and no one will look directly at the three boys who were forced to give away their most painful memories and beat their caretakers to death in effigy.

Matthew, Daniel, Carolyn, and I sit together, but we are worlds apart, adrift in our own distant thoughts.

Since it’s so quiet, it’s not hard to hear what Gabe’s saying when he goes over to Mr. Martin’s table and asks to speak with him.

“Of course, Gabe,” Mr. Martin says. “How can I help you?”

“I know you said we should come to you if there’s anything we need,” Gabe says softly.

“Yes, absolutely.”

“Well…I know we’re not supposed to use the phone too much, but I’d really like to call my mother if that’s okay. I just want to make sure she’s all right.”

Mr. Martin says he understands completely and asks Counselor John to bring Gabe up to the main cabin so he can use the phone. Fifteen minutes later, Gabe and John return, and Gabe’s face looks a lot more relaxed than it did before he left. Guess everything’s okay at home. Even I feel happy knowing that—I can’t imagine how relieved Gabe feels.

We reconvene in the carpet cabin after lunch, emotionally and physically exhausted. But Mr. Martin shows no sign of slowing. “Now that we’ve all refueled,” he says, patting his oversized stomach, “let’s give a female camper a chance, shall we?”

What? No! He said today was the boys’ turn! I inch down in my seat and try to hide behind the girl in front of me. I know I’ll have to go up there eventually, but I’m hoping my turn will come later rather than sooner.

“Lexi!” Mr. Martin’s voice booms. “Why don’t you go next?”

I’ve never hated the sound of my own name until this moment.

I slide further down in my chair and pretend I didn’t hear him. I’m staring at the floor, but even without looking, I know that there are dozens of pairs of eyes on me. My face burns.

“Lexi,” Mr. Martin says again. “Don’t be scared. Gabe, Austin, and Chris got through it, didn’t they?”

Barely
.

“Please come up here, Lexi.”

Matthew places a hand on mine and gives it a quick squeeze. “Just get it over with,” he whispers. “He’s not going to back down.”

I take a deep breath.

I walk to the stage.

I sit in the chair.

I close my eyes.

Mr. Martin begins the same way as always: “Tell us about your childhood.”

“It was good,” I say. “Normal.”

“You were raised by a mother and a father?”

I nod.

“Any siblings?”

I shake my head.

“Why not?”

I shrug. “They tried, but it never happened.”

“What was it like growing up as an only child?” Mr. Martin says.

“I don’t know. Fine, I guess. My parents were always nice to me.”

“What about your other family members? Grandparents, aunts and uncles…”

“My mom’s parents were normal and boring too when they were alive. I don’t have any aunts or uncles, and my dad’s parents died before I was born.”

“Do any unpleasant memories stand out? Maybe something that happened at school, with a friend or a teacher?” Mr. Martin presses.

I hate this.

“No,” I say. “My childhood was fine. I don’t have a Father Wound.”

“Of course you do. We just need to uncover it.”

I press my lips together. I’m not going to be bullied into making up some lie about how awful my parents were to me just so Mr. Martin can feel better.

But then he surprises me.

“You know,” he says, and from the way his voice carries, I can tell he’s pacing around behind me, “when I met your mother yesterday, I couldn’t help but notice the way she was dressed.”

I open my eyes and turn to face him. “What’s wrong with how she was dressed?”

He points a finger at me and rotates it in a circular motion, indicating I should turn back around. I do, but I don’t close my eyes this time. “Her clothing wasn’t very
feminine
, was it? Jeans, hiking boots, hair almost as short as a man’s.”

“So what? Lots of moms dress that way.”

“Does your mother work, Lexi?” he says. But I know he already knows the answer.

“Yeah,” I say. I don’t know where this is going, but I don’t like Mr. Martin’s tone. “She’s a teacher. Why?”

“I’m just putting the pieces together,” Mr. Martin says.

“What pieces? What are you saying?”

“I’m thinking about your story yesterday during our first session. I recall you saying you became interested in fashion because you liked watching women in pretty clothes on television. And then you started to become more interested in the women than the clothes. Is that correct?”

“Yeah…”

“It seems to me that your unfeminine, working mother wasn’t setting an appropriate gender example for you, and therefore you were left to seek that example elsewhere.” His voice is cutting, accusatory. “Your mother’s demonstration of improper womanhood completely warped your understanding of gender roles, Lexi.”

The impulse I’ve been feeling all day to fight is suddenly unlocked. “Why are you attacking my mother like this?” I say, my voice betraying the emotion bubbling up inside me. “You don’t even know her!” He really thinks that because my mother has short hair and works as a schoolteacher that’s what made me gay? It just doesn’t make any sense. Plus, for someone who loves stereotypes, it seems like he’s going with the wrong one here—he’s conveniently ignoring the fact that traditionally, most teachers are not only female but
nurturing
as well. His argument holds absolutely no water.

“I’m not attacking anyone, Lexi,” Mr. Martin says calmly. “I’m just trying to help you. Let me help you.”

I open my mouth, about to tell Mr. Martin exactly what I think about his whole Father Wound exercise, when I catch Kaylee’s eye. She’s standing off to the side of the audience area, looking directly at me. She holds up one palm in a tiny, calm-down gesture, and I remember what she said earlier:
Just
stick
with
it. I promise it will get easier.

I take a few deep breaths and give her a little nod.

I look at the other faces in the crowd—they’re riveted. With a few exceptions, everyone is focused more on Mr. Martin than me, and they all have that same expression of reverence that I saw on Carolyn yesterday as she listened to him speak. Already, my fellow campers have so much faith in this man.

I need to too. It’s like Kaylee said yesterday—they’re doing a job. They have to be harsh and direct in order to get their message across, to cut into fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years of our making the wrong choices. Mr. Martin is a good person—he understands us; he wants to help us; he
was
us. He was so kind to Daniel and let Gabe call home and has been nothing but welcoming.

But then he catches me off guard again.

“Where’s your father, Lexi?”

I look at him, and the innocent smile on his face confirms that he knows exactly where my father is. Even if he didn’t speak with my mother before I came here, he heard her talking about the life insurance payment yesterday.

But he’s got me in his stronghold and isn’t going to let me go.

“He’s dead,” I say, as emotionless as I can, but it still comes out sharp. Even through the pain and anger swimming around in my head, I don’t miss the gasps. I guess, in this crowd, a dead parent is a lot rarer than an abusive one. “You already knew that.”

“But we’re not here for me, Lexi. We’re here for you. And we’re here for them.” He sweeps a hand out toward the fifteen other campers. “Saying the words out loud is a very important part of this process. It makes it a lot harder to deny the truth.”

“I’m not
denying
anything,” I say. “Believe me, I know all too well that my father is dead. I think about it all the time.”

“How did your father pass away?” Mr. Martin asks.

I hate talking about this. I hate even thinking about it. And I really don’t understand what it has to do with anything.

But I look at Carolyn out there in the crowd and I know that she’s listening, waiting, and suddenly I want her to know my story.

I sigh and lower my voice. “He had pancreatic cancer.”

“Tell us about it.”

“I guess he’d had it for a long time before they actually knew what it was,” I say. “He’d been losing weight and was always complaining of stomach and back pain, but the doctors told him it was stress and to take a vacation. He took me to the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas.” It’s a complicated memory for me—we had so much fun, but knowing now that the cancer was eating at him the whole time we were there, making him sicker, taints the whole thing. I hate that doctor who told him to go on vacation instead of believing my dad that there was something wrong and doing more tests.

“But then he started getting jaundice—his eyes and skin had this weird yellowish tint—and the doctors finally figured out what was causing it. But it was too late. They pumped all this chemo into him, and he lost his hair and he got really weak and had to leave his job…” I break off for a moment. My eyes are filling with tears and my throat is threatening to close up. I blink, and the moisture overflows, spilling down my face. “And then he died anyway. Seven months after he was diagnosed.”

Mr. Martin hands me a tissue, and I blow my nose.

“You must miss him,” Mr. Martin says tenderly.

“He was my best friend,” I say.

Mr. Martin nods. “I’m assuming that during your father’s illness, your mother had to take over his role as the head of the household?”

I shrug. “It wasn’t like that. He was never really the ‘head of the household,’ even when he was healthy. He and my mom made decisions together.”

“I see. But as his illness progressed, he wasn’t able to make those decisions anymore?”

I sniffle. “Yeah, I guess.” I don’t think it’s worth adding that it wasn’t my mom who took over as the head of the household; it was me. Mr. Martin, I’m sure, would have a field day with that nugget of information, and I don’t see any reason to give him anything else to work with.

Mr. Martin hands me another tissue and squats down in front of me. “Think about it, Lexi. Your whole life, your parents gave you mixed signals about the roles of men and women. Your mother worked out of the home. She dressed like a man. She shared the head of household duties with your father, thereby reducing his masculine identity. He became more of a friend to you than a disciplinarian.” He places a hand on my arm. I have to force myself not to shrug it off. “It’s clear that your parents loved you very much; I’m not disputing that. But they taught you wrong.”

I twist the unused tissue around and around in my hands so it becomes ropelike and cuts into the soft patch of flesh where my thumb and index finger meet.

“You were right,” Mr. Martin says. “You don’t have an individual incident for a Father Wound. Rather, the overall dynamic between your parents serves as the Father Wound in this instance. Now, the question is, how do we heal it?”

Mr. Martin walks in slow circles behind me, deep in thought. The continuous
squish
of his shoes sinking into the carpet is loud in my ears.

I look out over the crowded room. My eyes are blurry from the tears that I haven’t bothered to wipe away, and the blur of pink and blue before me reminds me of the ocean at sunset. It’s even moving like the ocean, the whole picture bobbing up and down faintly with each breath I take.

The seconds tick by, turning into minutes, but Mr. Martin still doesn’t provide an answer to his question:
how
do
we
heal
it?

But he doesn’t really mean
heal
. He means
negate
. Because, according to Mr. Martin, my Father Wound isn’t something bad, like a physically abusive father or an emotionally abusive babysitter. My Father Wound is my entire existence, my entire childhood, my entire relationship with my mother and father. But I refuse to believe my relationship with my parents was somehow bad.

It’s all I can do to hope Mr. Martin doesn’t make me beat up my “mother” or “father.” I really don’t think I could do that.

Suddenly Mr. Martin claps his hands together once, loudly, making me jump in my seat. “Of course!” he says to himself. He selects a few items from the prop collection and pulls them over to where I’m seated, a renewed spring in his step now that he’s figured out his course of action. They’re a fold-up cot, blanket, and pillow. I’m so relieved at the lack of punching bags and baseball bats that I don’t really question what the props are for.

“Daniel, will you assist us, please?” Mr. Martin says. Once Daniel’s joined us on the stage, Mr. Martin directs him to lie down on the cot with his head on the pillow and the blanket over him. He tells him not to speak and not to get up, no matter what happens or what I say. “Now, Lexi. Daniel is going to be playing the role of your father. In this scenario, your father is in the hospital and on the verge of passing away. This is your last moment with him. What would you like to say?”

“Wh-what?” I squeak out. “I…I don’t understand.”

“Your last memory of your father is as a friend,” Mr. Martin says. “That’s where the problem lies. Your perceptions of parental roles are distorted, and because your father has passed, those memories have been frozen. But if you continue remembering him that way, you’ll never be able to get on the right track. You need to
change
that memory of your father. You need to let him know that you know what he and your mother did to you, and you need to let him know how that makes you feel.”

I stare up at Mr. Martin, horror-struck. Why is he doing this to me?

But he just smiles back.

I look at Daniel, completely hidden beneath the blue blanket save for his face. How am I supposed to pretend that skinny boy is my father? How am I supposed to tell him what Mr. Martin wants me to tell him? How am I supposed to form the words that will supposedly change my last memory of my father? Why would I even
want
to?

But once again, I’m trapped. I have to do what Mr. Martin says. There’s no other choice here—there’s no way out, literally nowhere to run.

My head is spinning. The only reason I’m even at New Horizons in the first place is because I have to fix my family. And now Mr. Martin is saying that for the de-gayifying to work, I have to reject everything that my family was and is. So what, then, is the point of all of this?

I squeeze my eyes shut and make myself think.

I could just give up now. Tell Mr. Martin I want to go home and forget I even came here at all. Go back to living with a shell of a mother who fears for my soul, hanging out with friends who don’t really know me, working overtime to pay my mom back the $9,500. It’s just as well. If Mr. Martin has his way, my relationship with my mom will never be the same again anyway. And if I left now, at least I wouldn’t have to participate in this whole Dad-deathbed charade
or
wear these awful clothes for an entire summer.

But Kaylee’s words repeat in my head.
I
promise
it
will
get
easier.
Maybe she’s right—it
is
only the second day. And it’s a two-month program. And Mr. Martin said we’d only be working on this Father Wound thing for a few days. Maybe the rest of the summer won’t be nearly as bad. Kaylee would know—after all, she’s sat where I’m sitting now. And she said it was the best decision she ever made. Maybe I could still get something out of New Horizons even if I’m not fully behind this particular exercise. Maybe, if I stick it out, I can find the gray area Kaylee talked about, my own way to make the de-gayifying work and get the life I want but without sacrificing the things that are important to me.

The thought of my mom’s inevitable breakdown when she hears I gave up on New Horizons after only two days is what seals it for me.

“Dad…” I say to Daniel. This is by far the strangest thing I have ever done in my life. It’s flat-out
wrong
in so many ways. But I do my best to detach myself from the memory of my real dad and his real illness and the real last time I spoke to him, and instead focus on playing the part that Mr. Martin wants me to play. “You’ve been a good father. But you and Mom…you kind of messed me up.”

“Kind of?” Mr. Martin repeats. “Don’t be
weak
, Lexi!”

I shake my head. “No, not kind of. You really messed me up. You didn’t act the way normal mothers and fathers are supposed to act. You didn’t…lead by example. And now I’m confused.” I look to Mr. Martin, and he nods for me to continue. “I feel like I don’t know how men and women are actually supposed to act around each other. It’s affected me in some very big ways.”

“So what are you going to do, Lexi?” Mr. Martin says.

“I…um…” I falter. I don’t know if I can do this.

“Say it!” One look at Mr. Martin’s face confirms what his tone already gave away. This is not a suggestion—it’s an order.

“So, Dad, I want you to know…” I swallow. “Before you, um,
go
…that I am going to remember you as a father. I am going to forget all the things you did and said to make me think that we were friends, instead of what we actually are—father and daughter. And I am going to get my life back on track.”

“Tell him about the times he was a real father to you,” Mr. Martin says. “Concentrate on those memories now.”

I think long and hard, carefully choosing which memories to share. “I will always remember the time you came home from work with the swing set in your trunk and how you spent the whole weekend putting it together for me.”

I glance at Mr. Martin again—he’s moving his hand around and around, waving for me to keep going.

“I will always remember the time I got a D plus on my life science lab and how you took my allowance away until I got at least a B minus. And I will always remember you as the man who never once forgot Mom’s birthday or a Valentine’s Day or your wedding anniversary. You were a good husband to her.”

For good measure, I lean over and kiss Daniel on the cheek. His eyes flutter open in surprise and his face turns a dark shade of red, but he follows Mr. Martin’s instructions and doesn’t say anything.

“Good-bye, Daddy,” I say, and my voice cracks.

“Well
done
, Lexi!” Mr. Martin says, rejoining us at the center of the stage. He stands me up and takes my hands. “How do you feel?”

I put on my most grateful smile and say, “Much better. Really. You were right. That was exactly what I needed.”

“I’m so glad to hear it! And thank you so much for your courageous work here today.”

The campers and counselors break into applause, and I’m finally free from this hell. But as I make my way back to my seat, the relief is replaced by heartache as the detachment wears off and I am forced to face what just happened. I just told my dad that I would forget him—not him entirely, but our friendship. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t mean it or that I said it to someone who was only pretending to be him or that I only said it because Mr. Martin forced me to. I said, out loud, that I would never again think about all those times he was so much
more
than just a father figure. The fun times we had together are the best memories I have, and now they’re tainted.

I don’t know if I believe in ghosts or angels or the idea that the dead watch over us, but just in case, I whisper, so low that no one can hear over the sound of the clapping, “I’m sorry.”