Set Me Free (9 page)

He was talking so seriously. All Willa could feel was skipping possibility, where before what she had felt was inevitable
disappointment. “I promise,” she said, and her smile verged on laughter.

“You can stay here,” Nat went on. “You really can. You’ll be very safe here—”

Willa did not want one of her father’s familiar talks about safety. She would not let him back out. “I’m going to get my backpack,”
she said. “Give me five minutes.” She ran into the art building while her father roused the sleeping Ariel and moved her to
the backseat.

A
MELIA

Stolen, Oregon
Monday, September 30, 1996

The beginning of the academic year at Ponderosa Academy was marked by an epic celebration. In the crisp light of early morning,
extended families—aunts, uncles, babies, grandmothers—crammed onto the gleaming floor of the gymnasium. This great cavern
of a room, at the heart of the academy’s campus, usually beat with the
dribbling of basketballs. The students sat cross-legged on the floor, opposite their families, lined up on folding chairs.
Everyone clapped as new teachers and students were introduced. Next, they all sat patiently through another of Elliot Barrow’s
stirring speeches, the old women observing how animated he became, like a windup toy that worked in reverse. These women always
remarked later that out of everyone there, Elliot was the one who became the most stirred of all. Elliot’s speech would end
“I have an unfortunate announcement: there will be no powwow tonight.” Groans and giggles would ripple through the room. Clapping.
Slick smiles on the faces of the older children. They had heard this before. He would go on. “It’s true. We didn’t have the
money this year. So say goodbye to your families. They wish you well. Let us now get to work. Let us embark together on this
great adventure of the mind.” At that moment, the two hundred some students, ranging in age from four and a half to twenty,
would stand and bid farewell to their families.

In the younger classes, rumors spread. There was always one first-grade girl who would cry: “But my brother
promised
there would be a powwow.” The grade school teachers would nod sympathetically, placing their hands on top of sweaty, disappointed
heads.

In the middle school, the issue of the powwow was debated; these kids were old enough to remember. But they were also getting
the hang of tradition, and they loved being in on the secret. On the playground, they’d bait the kindergarteners: “It’s too
bad they’re not having one this year. Last year’s was
awesome.’

The high school students would roll their eyes, acting as though they wanted nothing to do with it. “It’s stupid,” they’d
say. “I hate this school.” That’s high school. Those of us teaching them tried not to take it personally.

But even for the high-schoolers, there would come a moment in the day when, distracted by the high desert heat and the leftover
smell of summer, they would relish what they knew was coming.
Someone would hear shell dresses tinkling in the background. Over the whisper of syllabi being passed to the back of the classroom,
the students would hear their mothers laughing, their sisters nursing, their fathers cursing, their grandmothers bossing everyone
around. As the children held soft chalk to the blackboards and scribbled long division, they would anticipate the slick gym
floorboards smooth under their bare feet and smell the tantalizing smoke of the salmon bake as it wafted over campus.

At three o’clock, when learning was over, the children would open their classroom doors to find their regalia folded in their
cubbies. They’d race to the academy bathrooms and change. Then the whole herd of them, whooping, hopeful, giddy, would surge
back toward the gym. Just outside, in the hallway, the seniors barricaded the door and instructed the children to line up
in descending age order. The impatient kindergarteners were forced to hold up the back of the line. Then two distinguished
seniors, handpicked that very morning by Elliot, would hold high the school’s eagle staff and U.S. flag. These seniors would
ask the other children if they were ready. A whoop would rise up. And then these eldest children and their classmates would
thrust open the gym doors. The children would snake into the powwow arena, making their Grand Entry. Families cheered inside
as the drumming began. There was fancy dancing. Eating. Gossiping. And everyone was ready for another year of school.

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
1996, Amelia was not at Ponderosa Academy for the first day of school. It was the first time she’d missed all the hoopla.
She was across the mountain, in a green city, playing her violin, and so on that day she didn’t feel that she’d missed out.
The academy and Amelia had grown together, her father’s twin ambitions. Amelia was infinitely proud of her father, but she
couldn’t help feeling that after her mother had died—a mother she could not remember, a mother she had known for only twenty-two
days—Amelia had not been enough for Elliot. She was all he had
in the world, and he’d started the academy because he needed more.

But since this realization, Amelia had spent her childhood caught in a logical loop: didn’t she actually
want
her father to be distracted from every intimate detail of her life? Wasn’t that kind of the point? By middle school, she
had gotten good at ignoring the familiar cloying sensation that clung to her whenever she stepped out of bed. She hadn’t imagined
it could end. Even though Elliot never had time for her, he never had time without her. He was everywhere.

As she got better and better at the violin, she realized there might be ways of getting out. Amelia ran across an article
about the Benson Country Day Conservatory for the Arts in one of her father’s education magazines. Her heart skipped a beat
as she pored over the description
of
a boarding school with offerings for serious musicians. She didn’t know if she was a serious musician, but she knew she wanted
to be. Rather, she knew that she
wanted
to want to be. Which is a different thing entirely. Perhaps more relevant, she knew her musical ambition was the argument
with which she could win freedom. Even Lydia agreed: music was the sole way to get Elliot to let his daughter go.

It hadn’t taken much persuasion. Elliot furrowed his brow and hemmed and hawed, but he came around to Amelia’s side. He even
drove her to Portland for the entrance exam. And then she got in. And then she was going. And then she was there.

But now she was back. Nearly a month into the Ponderosa Academy school year. It seemed almost impossible that she’d ever been
away. She wanted to slip back into this familiar life in a way that no one would notice, but her father called an assembly
on the morning of her first day back. As she heard the assembly bell ringing—a pair of second-graders was always given the
task of wandering through the maze of classrooms with a cowbell—Amelia cringed. This was the last thing she wanted. It would
mean everyone would notice her, as they always did, remember how different
she was because of her skin, because of her father, because of her stupid shy way of being. She made her way reluctantly to
the gym, where the children sat cross-legged (I can’t resist any further—they sat Indian-style) and stared up at her father,
looking not unlike Christ himself, expounding to the heathens.

Sure enough, her father encouraged everyone to welcome “my lovely daughter, Amelia, back into our fold.” Lydia was sitting
next to Amelia, providing ongoing commentary. As everyone turned to look and clap, as Amelia watched some of the boys snicker
and make caustic comments to one another, Lydia whispered, “Jeez, your dad is talking more like a priest each day.” Amelia
waved a lame little wave at the sea of fellow students. But the truth was that she was happy to be back in this comfort. She
hadn’t outgrown it at all. Benson was nothing to her now. She never had to think of that place again.

A tall young man entered the door behind her father and waited patiently for him to stop speaking. Amelia and her classmates
noticed him immediately. He was lean, solemn. Elliot straightened at his students’ sudden raptness, oblivious to the handsome
interloper behind him. The young man tapped Elliot on the shoulder and garnered a hug from the headmaster himself as a wave
of curiosity rippled through the assembly.

“Mr. Littlefoot, so nice to see you,” Elliot said demonstratively. “Many of you will remember Victor. He attended Ponderosa
through, what, third grade? And now he joins us from Chicago. Welcome back, Victor.” Amelia noticed that Victor Littlefoot’s
smile came on fast, like a blaze overtaking the prairie. She wanted him to smile like that at her.

Lydia mouthed, “Oh. My. God,” as a forest of whispers grew up through the room. Everyone remembered Victor Littlefoot. Amelia
felt a blush spread over her cheeks. Something loomed in the back of her mind, but she couldn’t see it. It wouldn’t take form.
The room was suddenly too hot, and she felt her breath quicken as if she were panicking, but it was a good feeling, which
was strange.

Victor strode toward the students, looking for a place on the floor with a bunch of twelfth-grade boys. He was gangly, and
as Amelia watched him, she couldn’t imagine how his long limbs would fold up properly so as to sit. As he walked, she noticed
him scanning the faces of her classmates. When he saw her, he locked eyes with her and did not look away until he was sitting.
He high-fived the boys, he nodded hello to the girls. He did not say anything to Amelia, did not nod, did not wave. But as
they looked at each other, she saw that this looking meant something. Her stomach flipped and flipped again. Lydia squeezed
Amelia’s hand. “He didn’t look like
that
when we were seven.”

H
ELEN

New York, New York
Tuesday, October 1, 1996

T
he First Stage Theater was on the Lower East Side, nestled in the heart of what had been, not too many years before, a genuinely
bohemian (read: dangerous) neighborhood of drugs and artistic revolution. You don’t need my description here; all you need
is a reference to Basquiat and Haring, and you know exactly what Avenue A looked like in 1984, when Helen Bernstein and Duncan
Reilly made their initial investment in an unused, uninhabitable former furniture factory. Now, twelve years later, their
company was doing exceptionally well for itself. With six shows a year, a new-playwrights’ contest, sold-out performances,
eager benefactors, and exuberant raves, Helen and Duncan had created a wildly successful regional theater in the heart of
Manhattan. It didn’t get much better than that.

Except.

When they’d bought the space together, they weren’t a couple. What they were was a couple of people with a crazy idea. What
had happened was inevitable, not to mention terribly romantic in the eyes of the press and friends and, it seemed at times,
the whole world. They had fallen in love. Sometime around 1985, Helen awoke in Duncan’s sun-strewn bedroom in the West Village
and knew, for the second time in her life, that her safety had been dis-
engaged. She would go anywhere this man asked, do anything this man wanted. In retrospect, she wasn’t the best judge of character.
But that hadn’t been the point, had it? A recurring theme.

It came to pass that on the first day of October 1996, Helen entered the First Stage to drop in on Duncan’s
Romeo and Juliet
rehearsal. For years she’d reminded him that as producers, they had to hire other directors; though nepotism was convenient,
it wasn’t the most responsible way to run an artistic company. The main reason they had founded the First Stage was so they’d
both get the chance to direct what they loved, the old masters: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Aeschylus, Euripides, Chekhov. Directing
was what brought Helen her greatest joy. But as the First Stage became more legitimate, got reviewed in the
Times,
consistently drew the world’s best living actors, Helen began to feel that she and Duncan should step back and be the administrators
they promised to be on their letterhead. There was something profoundly embarrassing about showing off your own “brilliant”
ideas year in, year out. She began to realize that the more brilliant ideas you had, the less brilliant they became. So in
1992 she cut her project,
The Bacchae,
out of the season. Duncan was enraged. She’d expected him to give her a speech about sticking to her dreams, about the tragedy
of letting her talent wane in the face of others’ mediocrity. She would have bought it. Instead, red-faced, he declared, “I
hope you know I’m not giving up my own fucking show.” And that was that.