The Miseducation of Cameron Post (53 page)

She wasn’t finished, I could tell, but I said, “My choices are my own, not my parents’.”

A small look of surprise registered on her face, but not much. “Yes, and I’m glad that you’re acknowledging that,” she said. “But the conditions under which you made those choices, the treatment and expectations given to you as a child under their care, significantly contributed to the reasons you now make the choices that you make.” She paused, made a tepee with her hands atop the table, and said, “You had already started down this path while your parents were alive. You can’t move forward without acknowledging that.”

“I have acknowledged that,” I said, making my own hand tepee, doing it deliberately enough that she had to know I was mimicking her. “I kissed Irene Klauson the day
before
my parents’ accident. I wanted to kiss her again the entire day
of
their accident, and I did, that night. You think I don’t know the kinds of choices I was making before they died?” These were all things we’d spoken about before, but I’d never said them in quite this way, laying out the sequence of events that made me cringe with shame when I thought of them.

Lydia smiled at me—a real smile, not her disapproving smile, which was more a kind of grimace, I guess. But this was an actual smile, genuine, and then she said, “I think that you let your guilt over their deaths keep your memories of them swaddled in a kind of protective covering. You’ve so convinced yourself that God was punishing you for your sins with Irene that you’re blind to any other assessment, and because of that your parents are no longer people to you; they’re simply figures that were manipulated by God for his great plan to teach you a lesson.” She paused here, made sure I was looking right at her all-angles face, into her eyes couched beneath those severe eyebrows. She waited until I was, and then she said, “You need to stop making yourself such an important figure, Cameron Post. You have sinned, you continue to sin, you have sin in your heart, just like each and every one of God’s children; you are no better and no worse. Your parents did not die for your sins. They didn’t need to: Jesus already did so. If you can’t accept this and remember them for who they were, and not who you’ve made them to be, then you won’t heal.”

“I’m trying,” I said.

“I know, but you’ll have to try harder. It is now time to try harder.” She looked at her watch. “We’re done for the day,” she said. “How do you feel?”

“I feel ready to move on,” I said. That was an honest answer.

Lydia didn’t ask for clarification. She just said, “Good. That’s promising. I hope your actions convince me of that.”

That night Adam, Jane, and I packed our lunch for our approved “hike” the next day. We didn’t have much to say to each other, knowing what we did about our plans, what we were gonna try to pull off. Plus, we were in the kitchen, so anyone could wander in at any time. Steve did, in fact, twice, taking a bag of baby carrots the first time and then coming back for peanut butter.

“I was thinking maybe I’d come with you tomorrow,” he said, dipping carrots and chewing thick chews around his words. “How far is it to the rock thing?”

“It’s far,” Jane said, completely cool, sliding the plastic grips on a sandwich bag. “It’ll take all morning, and we’re heading out early if you’re coming.”

I hoped that I looked as calm as she did but worried that my signature blush was creeping. Adam had his back to Steve but was making big, freak-out eyes at Jane and me.

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Steve said. “I heard Lydia might take some of us into Bozeman in the afternoon. Maybe. You think you’ll be back in time for that?”

“No way,” Adam said. “Not even close.”

“I figured.” Steve twisted the lid back on the peanut butter. “You’ll go back again this summer anyway. Right?”

“Sure,” Jane said. “Rick always takes people out there.”

“I think I’ll wait and go then,” he said, and nabbed a handful of grapes off the bunch I was washing before walking out.

Nobody said anything until we were sure he was down the hallway.

“He could change his mind, easy as that,” Adam said. “Show up outside ready to go.”

“He won’t,” Jane said.

“He could,” Adam said. “You don’t know. And then we’re fucked.”

I shook my head and said, “I say if he does, we just don’t tell him what’s going on, just go with the plan. He doesn’t know where the rock is. He won’t know we’re not going that way.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “I think he might figure it out when we don’t ever arrive at a table-shaped rock.”

But Jane was grinning. “He will, but not until we’ve already covered lots of ground, and then we tell him what we’re doing, and if he wants to head back, he’ll have to do it alone, and we’ll be gone in the opposite direction.”

“It won’t be that easy as we’re standing there in the woods telling him ‘Surprise! We’re running away.’”

“I guess we find out if it happens,” Jane said. “He’s not gonna show, anyway.”

“He could,” Adam said.

Jane threw up her hands. “Anything
could
happen,” she said. “He
could
show up. Lydia
could
decide that we’re not allowed to go. You
could
break your leg on the way out the door.”

“That wouldn’t stop you,” I said. And that made Adam laugh, Jane too.

“We made a good plan,” she said. “Now we just have to go through with it.”

After that we walked back to our rooms. Said good night. Tried to act normal. Erin was reading, so I pretended to read too. A couple of times I’d thought about leaving her a note, but I had decided against it. None of us was leaving anything behind that explained what we’d done. Eventually Erin turned out her light, so I turned out mine, too. I slept just fine, actually. And it didn’t take me that long to fall asleep, either. I don’t really know what that means.

Steve wasn’t even in the dining hall when we ate breakfast the next morning. We had our eggs and washed our dishes. Grabbed our lunches and our backpacks. It was cool, but sunny and bright and a good day for hiking. Each step in the plan clicked forth, like winding film on a camera:
click, click, click, click, click
. And then we were on the trail and on our way.

Chapter Twenty-one

Q
uake Lake is six miles long. It bends and curves around outcroppings of stone and forest, in some sections wide, blue, and full of waves; in others narrow and dark, always in shadow. We weren’t following the main road, US 287, which wraps up and around parts of the lake before dipping into the trees and then out again to climb along slopes overlooking the water, fallible guardrail here and there, when those slopes get steep and the turns get narrow and sharp. However, we could see some of that road and rail as we made our way down through thick tree growth to the shore. We couldn’t see the other side of the canyon very well; it was a ways off in the distance, across the water, but the reflective posts on the guardrail popped like flashbulbs every so often, depending on the angle from which we were situated and the glint of the sun.

“You think this is anywhere close to where it happened?” Jane asked from just behind my shoulder. She was out of breath. Her leg bind had been bothering her for the last couple of miles (we’d hiked fourteen thus far), but she trudged on, didn’t complain much, and didn’t let us stop very often to rest.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It seems right when we check it with the map. However far off we are, it’s still closer than I’ve ever been before.”

“But you’ve waited forever,” Jane said. “It should be the right place.”

“You wanna stop and check it again?” Adam asked from behind her.

“No—it’s gonna be right,” I said, to convince myself as much as the two of them.

We hiked on, the slope a steep decline in some places, the ground thick and slippery with pine needles. More than once I lost my footing and my feet surfed the needles until a rock or a fern or my hand on a tree trunk stopped the motion. Partly because of Jane’s leg, and partly because of the terrain itself, we’d done much of the hike, once entering the canyon area, in wide switchbacks, choosing the routes of least resistance down to the lake, even when those routes were anything but direct. Now that we could finally see the water, I just wanted to get down to it as quickly as possible, which meant looking at the ground and choosing my footing rather than focusing on the lake itself.

But at some point Adam asked, “Are those trees actually in the water or is it an optical illusion?”

The three of us stopped and we all looked out toward the lake. There were these trees, mostly trunks, just a few thick branches left at the top of a couple of them, stuck out in the water, a tiny grove left behind from before the quake and flood.

“They’re like the ghosts of trees,” Jane said.

“They’re skeleton trees,” I said. “They’re the remains of trees.”

“It’s eerie,” Adam said.

Jane nodded and said, “It is that.”

“There was a picture of something like them in one of the newspaper articles on my parents,” I said. The shot I was thinking of was mostly of the broken guardrail, smashed through, bent and hanging over the lake, the metal looking almost wilted; but part of the lake was in the foreground of that shot, and there were strange stick trees there.

“Then this is the place,” Jane said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess there could be lots of trees like that since the entire lake used to be a forest.”

“I think it’s right,” Adam said. “I think this is the place.”

As deep in the canyon as we were, it was practically night, at least it felt that way. The dipping sun was only a suggestion of light from beyond those high walls, brightening the sky far above us but less and less of the ground around us. It was the kind of place where I might be tempted to mistake the breath of wind fluttering the trees for some cheesy scary movie ghost whisper that somehow wasn’t cheesy at all.

The closer we got, the stranger those skeleton trees looked too—there, just past the center of that section of the lake, many of them twisted or bent, their wood bleached and weathered, but in all these years since the earthquake, since the water had come and come and settled around them, soaked their roots beyond their capacity to grow, they hadn’t toppled. Still they rose up out of the water, like gnarled walking sticks left behind by a race of giants. Or worse, the bones of the giants themselves, picked over by even more gigantic giants.

“What’s the name of the invisible giant?” I asked over my shoulder. We weren’t far at all now, and I wanted to fill up the silence, to talk away my nervousness.

“The BFG?” Jane said. “I don’t think he was invisible.”

“No, I meant Adam,” I said, and turned around to look at him. “Who was that Lakota giant—the one who was supposed to be like visible to man forever ago, but isn’t now, and lives on a mountain surrounded by water?”

“Yata,” Adam said. “Why, did you see him?” He pretended to scan the forest around us, feigning anxiousness.

I stumbled because I wasn’t looking where I was going. I lurched forward, but Jane somehow got a grip on my backpack and held me up. We stopped again so that I could find my balance.

“And which one of us has a Barbie leg?” she asked, smiling.

“Thanks for using your catlike reflexes,” I said, shifting my backpack to resettle it and unbunch the straps that she’d pulled on.

Adam asked again, “So why’d you wanna know about Yata?”

I nodded toward the lake. “Those trees make me think of walking sticks for giants,” I said.

“Cool,” Jane said, and then she took a Polaroid. I was actually glad that she’d brought her camera; it was somehow calming to see her with it, this thing she always had. We continued on.

“That actually sort of works,” Adam said. “This could be Yata territory. Yata is way into ceremonies. That’s kind of what you’re doing here, right?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Don’t pile the additional pressure of a mystic giant on me.”

“No pressure,” he said.

The lake didn’t offer much of a shoreline, at least not the section we had worked our way down to: just tumbled rocks and a thin rim of gray-white pebbles worn smooth right at the place where water met land. I stopped a few feet before it and stood still, silent. Jane and Adam pulled up beside me. They looked at me, looked away, looked back, maybe waiting for me to pull some kind of memento from my backpack, let them in on some important funeral-type ceremony they thought I had all planned out. I went on staring at the water; they went on staring at me.

“It’s pretty, but it’s—” Jane started without finishing.

“It’s creepy, right?” I said.

“Sort of,” she said. She took my hand. “It’s just those trees, I think.”

“It’s more than the trees,” Adam said. “There’s all kinds of powerful energy here. It’s unsettled or something.”

“Like unfinished business,” Jane said, squeezing her fingers.

I studied the skeleton trees, wondered at the strength and depth of their roots to have kept them upright in the lake for all these years. I felt like everyone was waiting on me, including me. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do yet, okay?” I said. “Just give me a minute or two.”

“We three now own a seemingly endless supply of minutes,” Jane said. “Feel free to use them at will.”

Adam raised his eyebrows but controlled his expression of surprise, I guess for my benefit. “Don’t you think they’re looking for us by now?” he asked her quietly.

Jane shook her head. “No. I really don’t. But even if they are, they won’t start here. They’ll branch out from where we were supposed to be picnicking, and that’s almost thirty miles of Gallatin National Forest from where we are now.” She snapped a Polaroid and then sat down on a big, black hunk of silver-flecked rock to unstrap her leg.

Adam stooped over the ground, hunting for smooth stones, skipping stones, I could tell, the way he connoisseured what he plucked: flat rocks, most about palm size. His hands full, he drew back his arm so as to send one hopping along the smooth surface, and right as he should have released, he stopped, arm frozen there.