Set Me Free (25 page)

Elliot’s office door was flung open with such speed and force that he didn’t have a moment to protest before his daughter
was looming over him, fierce and angry. “When were you planning on mentioning your plans with Benson Country Day?” She could
be so tall when she wanted to be.

“Now, Amelia—”

“Don’t ‘Amelia’ me,
Elliot.”
Her voice was full of mocking. “You can’t keep things from me. This place is too small. I hear about them. Don’t you get
it yet? Your ex-wife shows up, I’m going to find out she’s your ex-wife. You send me to a boarding school—a boarding school
that I wanted to leave, so it should have been easy for you to tell the place was bad—and now you’ve decided to set
up an exchange program with it? Guess what? I’m going. To hear. About it.”

“Sweetheart, you never said you hated it there.”

“You’re not an idiot, Dad. And you’re so proud of being the perfect father. Well, that’s not possible, because if you knew
me at all, if you really knew me, you’d know that I left Benson for a good reason. And hatred was part of it. I mean, if I’m
going to be your live-in educational experiment, at least you should pay attention to how the experiment’s going. You should
learn
from it.”

“You’re not being fair. I’ve never, ever viewed you as an experiment.”

“C’mon, Dad. You’re an educator! You mean to say you never once tried something out on me—the violin, for instance—to see
whether it would work?” Amelia paused, but her anger filled the pause so fully that Elliot did not speak. “That’s not even
the important part. Benson Country Day. Don’t you care why I left that place?”

Elliot’s voice became infused with concern. Graveness. “Amelia, is there something you’re not telling me? Did something happen
to you there?”

Amelia held her angry silence, a burning coal in her chest.

Elliot went on, suddenly gentle. “Honey, I don’t want you to keep things from me. Let’s face it. If we’re going to move forward
together, beyond this, we have to tell each other things. We have to trust each other to understand the truth.”

Amelia could feel the nastiness glinting in her voice. “Like you trusted me with the truth about Helen, right? That would
be the kind of honesty we need?”

“Sweetheart, all I can do is apologize. I just need you to tell me the truth.”

“Truth? You want the truth?” Amelia felt a power rising inside her.“Well, how’s this? I wanted to go to Benson to get away
from“—she waved her hands in the air—“this!” A pure rage sculpted each syllable. “Don’t get me wrong, Elliot. I mean
you.
I
mean this school.” She laughed bitterly. “I’m getting the picture. I bet I was accepted at Benson because of your little scheme,
wasn’t I? I bet you wanted this exchange and used me to sweeten the deal.” She shook her head. “So here’s the truth. I wanted
to go not just because of a chance to play the violin; I wanted to go because I can’t breathe here. In your experiment, day
in, day out. I’m suffocating. We’re all suffocating.” She felt her father’s vulnerability and dug in. “Have you ever considered
the fact that if your grand vision for Ponderosa Academy accomplishes what it’s supposed to accomplish, everyone will leave
this place? We’ll all go away to college, Dad, and we won’t come back. The Neige Courante kids will move off the reservation
and see a different life out there, and they won’t come back here to do anything. They won’t want the lives their parents
have. I’ll let you in on a secret: I don’t want it. I know that already. I don’t want this stupid school and your narcissism
and your myths about how brilliant you are and how many lives you save on a daily basis.”

That was when Elliot’s temper broke. That was when he did exactly the wrong thing. He stood still, fists clenched at his sides;
he raised his voice, boomed forth: “I am your father! I will not allow this rudeness. Don’t you ever,
ever
speak to me this way again.”

Amelia let her visible anger dissipate before she spoke. When she did, her voice was calm and even. Low. Calculating. “Something
pretty fucked up happened at that school. But you’re right, Dad. It’s better for me to keep my thoughts to myself. You’re
my father. You know what’s best.” Amelia turned and left his office. She was mighty. She was victorious.

W
ILLA

Day Three
Mitchell, Illinois, to Salina, Kansas
Friday, May 9, 1997

W
ilia wanted to drive. She needed distraction. She needed to live in a trance. When she reemerged forty-five minutes after
leaving Nat alone at the car, she held out her hand. “Can I have the keys?” He wasn’t about to deny her a thing.

The land flattened. As they plowed through Missouri and into Kansas, she could see farther and farther into the distance.
She fixed her eyes on the highway unspooling into the horizon. The sky was blue and enormous. Dirty snow lurked in the fields
on either side of the road.

To Nat’s credit, he didn’t try to fix anything with words. He didn’t speak much at all. Which was the right thing. Willa was
angry and confused. But she also felt an odd sense of relief, as if her whole life up until this moment had been lived underwater.
Finally, she got to know the way the earth scratched under everyone else’s feet. She didn’t want her father’s words to distract
her from feeling this, whatever it was named: this sickness at the bottom of her stomach, this chill up her spine, this humming
in the cavern of her head. All she wanted was to look at the world and drive into it.

When they got to Salina, Kansas, Willa didn’t want to leave the car, even though the night was long dark and she was exhausted.
They had stopped twice since the Mississippi, and both times were only because they needed fuel. The first time Nat brought
her a sandwich and a Coke. The second time he made her get out and go to the bathroom. She loved the car more and more with
each passing mile. She loved knowing its established perimeters: that the snacks were in the canvas bag wedged behind the
passenger seat, that Ariel’s favorite spot when she awoke was the sunny armrest between the two front seats, that the old
Volvo whined when Willa tried to push it above seventy. The dimensions of the car were Willa’s armor. Outside, the world slipped
silently by.

H
ELEN

Stolen, Oregon
Wednesday, October 16, 1996

In the girls’ locker room, Helen conveyed her shoulders into the stream of hot—nearly scalding—water. She was trying to warm
up. Bed was plenty toasty, what with the dog and the comforters and the hot-water bottle and the wool cap Amelia had knit,
but by morning the woodstove was ice-cold, so getting out of bed was torture. Even Ferdinand groaned when his feet hit the
floor. It didn’t matter how many layers of wool socks Helen had on. Her travel alarm went off and she spent a good fifteen
minutes wrestling with the terrible reality of having to get out of bed.

That was the worst of it, though. All the other things about the cabin that she had feared had, in fact, been okay (so far,
knock on wood). It was not so terrible to be without a telephone. It was not so terrible to own one plate and one set of utensils
and cook yourself easy things that a girl who wanted to please you delivered to your door. Eating an apple, because it was
so hard to get, was like devouring manna from heaven. And showering? Showering was ecstasy. The steam, the splatter sound
of the water, the heat on her back, not to mention the briskness of the early-morning walk from the cabin to the gym where
the showers lay, all made her feel so much more
in
herself than she had been her whole adulthood. And
the bathroom part of things, which she had been most worried about, was not all that bad. She timed her visits so that only
her before-bed pee took her into the outhouse; all other bathroom time was spent with a real toilet up on campus. She knew
it was going to get colder and harder. Something would break. But there was an element of fondness in this challenge.

Light curled against the steam. Helen closed her eyes and pulled back into the water. She was scared. Today was the day she
was meeting with the children. Today she was starting them on Shakespeare. She had spent so much energy defending her project
to Cal, discussing the importance of her project with Elliot, advertising her project to the children, that she hadn’t had
any time to think about what her project actually
was.
She hated imagining how she would sound outside her head, talking about Shakespeare as though he could save the world. She
felt Elliot moving through her when she believed in something with this much conviction: Elliot too was all big thought and
salvation and hero worship, but where Helen’s heroes were the old masters of drama and literature, his heroes were political:
Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Dorothy Day. She corrected herself: those
had
been his heroes. She didn’t know what he believed in these days.

Shakespeare made her think of Duncan. And that was where her heart sank, because she had done a good job these last couple
of weeks pretending that she was not married, that she had not discovered her husband in the act of cheating, that the matter
of the house wouldn’t have to be dealt with, nor that of the theater. She had not thought about how her life was being divided,
parceled out. Her real life was a mess—the life away from this Elliot Barrow fantasy camp. It was so nice not to feel that
her life was a mess. She promised herself that she’d make a phone call or two this evening, if Elliot and Amelia didn’t mind.

W
HERE TO BEGIN
? What do you say to a group of twenty-two adolescents—fifteen of them lanky boys, seven of them beautiful,
big-eyed girls—who are blinking back at you during their lunch period, when it’s obvious they’d much rather be playing basketball
or flirting on the sidelines? Do you ask them why on earth they gave up their precious lunch period for
this?
Do you tell them you have never known children, never liked them much, never really worked with them? Helen knew teenagers
were like dogs: they could smell fear. So she smiled broadly at them, taking comfort in Amelia and Lydia, and greeted the
group.

She had suggested, in the apparently successful pitches she’d made to each English class the previous week, that anyone interested
in joining her group of actors should read
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Norton Shakespeare
was a required book for anyone entering the ninth grade at the academy—one of my lovely jobs was cold-calling New York publishing
houses and strongly proposing that they donate boxes of books to us brown people out west—so she knew these kids would have
the play in their possession, along with all the sonnets, and every one of the tragedies, comedies, and histories. What Helen
hadn’t expected was this many people. She hadn’t expected the few who did come to have read the play. So she was surprised
when one of the tall boys who looked like he’d been made for running like lightning across a gym floor raised his hand and
asked, “Mrs. Barrow, is it okay if we were only able to read Act One?”

“Oh,” she said quickly, “I’m not Mrs. Barrow.”

“But aren’t you married to Mr.—”

“I used to be”—she smiled tolerantly—“but that was a long time ago. Call me Helen, please.” She glanced at Amelia, who, in
turn, glared at Lydia. Lydia shrugged. Helen tried to remember that she was the one in control. “Let’s start by saying what
brings us here. I’m pleased to see so many of you. Feel free to eat.” Some of the kids unwrapped sandwiches. Addressing the
tall boy who had spoken, Helen said, “Why don’t we start with you?”

“Oh.” He looked down at his long white sneakers and managed to mumble, “Victor said I should come.”

“What’s your name?”

“Caleb.” He looked terrified.

“Okay.” She smiled. “Well, I’m glad Victor encouraged you to join us.” She nodded at the boy sitting next to Caleb in the
semicircle. “And you?”

“Victor,” he said.

“Your name’s Victor too?”

“No, man.” He laughed. “I’m Jesse. Victor said I should come.” He already had the laugh of a middle-aged man, jolly, belly-deep.
He had cracked himself up. “I mean, I like old dead English guys as much as the next person, but…” He wheezed himself into
another fit of laughter.