Come Back (26 page)

Each step outdoors in the Luberon valley is redolent with scent—thyme, lavender, honey. Provence smells like pleasure. It’s a perfect place to write a love story.

And to continue discovering what began when I danced in a red dress—a genuine, visceral awareness of my physical presence in the world. Till that day, I wasn’t really aware that I’d been walking around like a brain on a stick. I feel so physically present now, I can feel the air on my skin when I walk in the woods, my fingers notice my face when I wash it.

Of all the things I’m feeling blessed with in this beautiful place, what makes me happiest is that my voice returned. I sit on the deep window ledge and sing a lullaby out to the stars to carry to my girl in Montana who’s struggling right now. I feel the kind of crazywild love for Mia now that I did when she was little.

The ancient farmhouse sits on a hill, with a plum orchard and old stone walls. I perch my laptop on my knees and work on the screenplay beneath a giant fig tree, and my pleasure infuses the work. John and Charlotte’s scenes together now have a vibrance and intensity they lacked. You can feel their hunger for tenderness, their impatience for joy.

If I write enough hours in the morning, Jordana deigns to let me walk to the village, where I have as many mishaps and commit as many faux pas as I did in Brno. Only the French are much more vocal. Czechs stare; the French huff, argue, and publicly chastise. How am I supposed to know you don’t squeeze your own tomatoes here or that you’re supposed to jump in the roadside ditch to let a car pass? For a dog or a bicyclist
they’ll swerve fifty feet out of the way. A pedestrian? Forget it—
des animaux tués par les voitures
(roadkill).

When they’re not yelling at you or ignoring you, however, they’re very tender and sentimental, a national character I find familiar and endearing, not unlike my mother’s.

I vary my route to town, discovering paths once walked by Romans and revolutionaries. Along the way, I often gather fruit, thyme, lavender. While I walk, I let my mind wander back to my childhood without Morticia’s dark glasses and I’m rewarded with happy memories. One afternoon, as I stoop to pick up fallen plums, I see the veins on the back of my hands and think of my mother’s hands in an old photo I have.

I had always thought my mother’s lack of physical affection was because I looked just like my father, who turned out to be a rather less than ideal husband. In this photo, she’s a slender, blue-eyed blond around thirty, holding a fat, squawky baby named Claire. You can see the veins in her hands, and that she’s smiling. As I see my mother in my hands, I realize for the first time that, far from disliking me because I looked like my dad, whom she still loved then, I was a source of joy for her. I was the first new life in her arms after losing her family in the war.

I’ve spent so much time blaming and being angry at her for not telling me she loved me for forty years, I didn’t see the most obvious thing, something that must have hurt her very much—that
I
waited forty years to tell
her
. Me, an expressive, modern woman, for whom saying I love you should have been no big deal, was mad at a woman who had no blueprint for such things.

Her mother was hardly warm and cuddly. She didn’t have the luxury; she was dying of kidney failure while trying to raise four kids. She died when my mother was only twelve, a few years before the rest of her family was taken to the camps. My mother was on her own at thirteen and in hiding by sixteen, when she wasn’t doing slave labor. Or passing as a Gentile without false papers, just guts and Aryan-looking beauty.

Whatever else I’ve learned about her history has taken my sisters and me thirty years of coaxing out. In this regard, survivors fall into two cate
gories, those who never stop talking about the war, and those who never speak. Only a few years ago, out of the blue, my mother mentioned at lunch why she’s never been a big fan of Raoul Wallenberg. She used to overhear Wallenberg and Eichmann making deals under the staircase in one of the buildings she was hiding in. “He only saved you if you had money, what are you ordering, Claire?”

My parents refuse to pull me, so there’s no way I’m going home. Which means I have 18 months left in this hellhole because I refuse to work this program. I’ve learned what I’m going to and at this point it’s just circus tricks, a game.

Ever since I dropped, Sunny’s the only junior staff who doesn’t treat me any differently, even though she probably gets reamed by other junior staff for “supporting me in my crap.” Roxanne has totally avoided me. I love how in one conversation I’ve managed to do a one-eighty. Never mind anything else, she talked about sex, OH MY GOD, she’s a terrible person.

This drop was the last straw. A favorite expression here is that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Well, I’ve been working the program for fourteen months and, obviously, I’m still not home.

Being out of control of your own time, of your own life, is the worst sensation. To know the world keeps on turning while I’m locked up makes me so frustrated, so furious, I dig my nails into my skin to keep from screaming at the top of my lungs. I feel like I’m rotting.

The past few months, I’ve divided my days between working in the kitchen to avoid my family and Miss Kim, and deliberately getting myself sent to worksheets when I accumulate enough points to move up.

I’ve thought about running, but there’s no point. I couldn’t go home, they’d just send me back and I don’t want to live on the streets anymore. It’s like they’ve destroyed my desire to do one thing without replacing it with another.

Five minutes to the end of group, thank God. Most of the girls who shared today were new and full of shit, all they do is bitch and blame and not actually deal with anything.

“Okay, girls, see you tomorrow,” Miss Kim says as we line up.

“Wait!” Sunny cries.

We all turn, puzzled by her outburst. She looks like she’s about to either laugh or cry. Then, she takes a deep breath, raises her head high, thrusts out her chest, and announces like Spartacus:

“I…AM…LESBIAN!”

Not I am gay, not I am A Lesbian, but I Am Lesbian, as in hear me roar. Only Sunny.

Roxanne rolls her eyes. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

Several girls ditto her, including Miss Kim. Sunny bursts into tears. “Oh, you guys, this is just faaabulous!”

“Time’s up, kiddo.”

Mike tosses me my coat and reaches to scoop up the pile of candy wrappers I left on his desk.

“I’ll get those.”

“Oh, I’m not cleaning up your mess, just counting it. Twenty-three, know what that means?”

“What—I’ll soon be rich and famous?”

“You ate more than you spoke today.”

“You have interesting ways of measuring productivity, Mike.”

“You have interesting ways of justifying sitting on your ass.”

I shove my arms through my jacket, annoyed.

“So, you’re jumping on the bandwagon now, too? We both know you don’t need to graduate to succeed. I’ve been through all the seminars, I’ve been almost every level there is to be in here, I’m done, I get it, this place is wasting my fucking life!”

“Then go home.”

Is he not hearing me? I open my mouth to swear at him, but stop myself. Mike’s the last person I need to be getting mad at now. I sit back down in the chair, frustrated.

“I almost cut myself the other day, Mike.”

His eyebrows shoot up and his eyes flash surprise and hurt.

“I found a safety pin from when I was on the upper levels. I was in a stall, just pissed about being locked up, it was that same feeling of being out of control I felt whenever I cut myself back home. But it just seemed pointless and stupid. I don’t want to hurt myself anymore.

“And that’s the thing, Mike, I haven’t wanted to do drugs or run away in eons. And everyone thinks I’m in my crap because I won’t work the program, but they don’t get why.”

“Bull! Everyone thinks you’re in your crap because you are. You’re sabotaging yourself to prove a point. And this situation translated into the outside world scares the hell out of me. There’s always a “man,” there’s always a system, and the sooner you get over it, the quicker you can get what you want. I don’t particularly like paying taxes, I could say lock me up, I’m not giving you a dime. But, then I’d be missing my kids’ birthdays while Bubba tries to bend me over. And I don’t really like that idea.

“You know what you need to do to get what you want and the only thing stopping you is
you.”

“Hey, you have a minute?”

Roxanne’s the last person I expect to hear this from.

“Yeah, one sec.”

I grab my toiletries from out of the shower and sit next to her on my bunk. Without a word, she starts brushing my hair like old times.

“Your hair’s grown a lot since the last time I did this! Remember how fried it was when you came in?”

“Yeah. I was jealous because you had this thick, shiny hair, but when you—”

“Mia, I’m going to the next PC2.”

I turn around and we stare at each other for a minute in silence. PC2 is the final seminar, it means graduation. And just like that, it’s like we never fought, like I never dropped, like we never left Morava. We both start apologizing, she for avoiding me, me for resenting her for doing what I wasn’t.

“It’s crazy,” she says. “I’ve hated being here but I really think some of the best memories of my life came out of it.”

“Yeah, remember when Lupe put on “Bohemian Rhapsody” during dinner?”

“And when you and Brooke had that chugging contest at Halloween with cranberry juice and you both puked gallons of pink vomit!”

“And
das penis brot!”

The other girls in the cabin look over at us, they have no idea what we’re talking about.

“I can’t believe you’re going home.”

She reaches over to hug me and I feel two things: sadness at losing someone like a sister to me and frustration because I should be in her shoes.

A sudden shaking rouses me from a dream. My first groggy thought is that it’s an earthquake. Then I hear Chaffin’s booming voice, “Wake up! You have five seconds to get in line!” The shaking is fourteen girls jumping out of bunks to line up heel to toe.

“FIVE! Anybody talks and you’re all back to Level 1! FOUR!”

We’re marched along an icy road, slipping as we try to stay heel to toe. We finally stop at the edge of a huge crater full of mud, big rocks, and junior staff.

“Ladies, welcome to the Gravel Pit!”

We’ve all heard of this process, but don’t know anything about it, just that it’s “powerful,” which can mean many things here at Spring Creek.

Chaffin starts shouting orders like some sinister ringmaster, and we’re the circus animals. Our first performance is to move an enormous pile of rocks from one side of the pit to the other. The icy drizzle is turning to sleet. Our fingers are frozen so we keep dropping the rocks on our toes. Why is he doing this to us?

Junior Staff surrounds us, taunting and antagonizing.

“Come on, Mia!” Max yells, following me. “Your mom’s not gonna come rescue you this time, hurry it up!”

We’re ordered to freeze where we are and squat, then to walk in this position in a circle ten times. Like ducks! Brooke waddles in front of me, sniffling as she moves pieces of mud-covered hair from her eyes. Chaffin’s yelling again, this time to go up the sides of the rocky pit and back down ten times. This is unbelievable! It’s two in the morning, I’m frozen, and my knees are killing me from squatting. There’s no possible reason for this! Nobody tried to run, no one stole meds or passed notes, no one did anything wrong!

Some girls are crying, others silently fuming for fear of losing points. Brooke’s totally given up now and sits crying in a mud puddle at the bottom of the hill.

“Get up, Brooke!” a girl shouts at her. “This is just like the way you let guys shit all over you back home while you just sat there and cried.”

Brooke slings a handful of mud in the girl’s face before screaming and running up the hill. I follow the orders as long as I can until I feel my knees give. As
I start to fall, I feel a pair of strong arms reach out and lift me to the top where I’m given some water.

Chaffin blows his whistle and circles us up.

“All I said was move the rocks from here to there! I never said you each had to do it on your own! But you were all so busy being in your crap it didn’t occur to you to stop and think, you all went right to the same patterns that landed you here! You could have made a line and passed the rocks hand to hand in no time!”

He continues yelling at us collectively, then he starts in on us one by one.

“Mia, do you think your parents knew what the hell was going on when you ran away? Did they know if you were ever coming back? If you were dead or alive?!”

He goes on and on till I get it, really get it. I had no idea what was going on tonight, it came out of nowhere. It seemed mean and pointless, I didn’t deserve it, I was hurting, I was scared, I wanted it to end. All the things my parents felt every time I took off. For the first time I really, literally, felt how they did. Only, for them it wasn’t over rocks and frozen fingers. It was over their daughter.

Then I think of my mom’s miscarriage. The first time she opens up to me, I throw it in her face. I did exactly what she was scared I’d do.