The Miseducation of Cameron Post (54 page)

He looked at me. “Is it okay to skip this? I don’t want to trivialize the situation or whatever.”

“No, it’s fine,” I told him, watching the rock in his hand, wondering if I should have said no—waiting, almost frightened, to hear the stone bounce off the surface of the lake.

So he drew his arm back again, and this time, after another moment hovering there, he dropped all the stones back onto the ground, a swift trickle of clicks and clacks.

“I’ll just do it later,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like the time to be skipping rocks.” He sat on the ground near Jane, both of them waiting for me to do what it was I’d come here to do, but trying not to act like that’s what they were doing.

It was then that I decided I needed to go into the lake. I hadn’t been sure before that moment. Anytime I might have thought about visiting this place, daydreamed about it, I’d only seen myself on the shoreline. And in those daydreams it was a hazy shoreline, a smoky-swirly-dream version in which the main thing was that I’d made the journey, and what I’d do upon arriving was somehow both obvious and not as important as the fact that I’d arrived. But now, as I let the lake splash against the toes of my sneakers while an audience of two somehow crowded me, even in all this empty wilderness, I knew that I needed to be in that water, deep within it.

“I’m going in,” I said, and I shrugged off my backpack and dropped it near Jane, then unzipped my sweatshirt right after, flung it on the ground, worked my long-sleeved T-shirt up over my head and flung that too, just so that we’d all be sure that I meant my words, that there was no going back on them. I stood there in my bra and jeans, the air on my skin cold and good.

“It’ll be freezing,” Jane said, and then she rummaged through her backpack. “I did bring a towel, though, a precautionary measure.” She pulled it out and handed it to me. “Are you putting on your suit?”

“I left them,” I said. “I don’t know why; I could have had room for both.”

Not wanting to look conspicuous as we’d headed off on our hike, we’d each brought only one school-size backpack of belongings and supplies. We also thought that it would be better if, when our rooms were inspected, even if that wasn’t right away, it seemed like everything was basically there. But who would have noticed that my swimsuits were missing? Or what if I’d just taken one? Just one. I’d considered them—they were both in the top right corner of my dresser drawer—while packing my bag on Friday, after my one-on-one, the Viking Erin off on evangelical duty and our room empty. I’d looked for a lingering moment at my old swim-team version and my red guard suit, and then I’d left them. It seemed a stupid, stupid decision now that I stood in front of Jane without them. They were light and squishable and I would surely want them again at some point: like right now. I got that churned-up-stomach feeling you get when you wonder, upon recognizing one stupid decision you’ve made about something important, if it’s possibly only the first of many, many stupid decisions you’ve made about this important thing, and maybe is just the first clue that the whole thing will crack apart under the weight of all of those stupid decisions once they’ve piled up. “So stupid,” I said.

Jane reached for my backpack. “You don’t need one,” she said, removing the candles she’d told me to gather. “Don’t get hung up on it.” She dug in her leg compartment for a lighter.

“Thank you guys for this,” I said, the cold air now making my words come out shaky. “I mean for getting me here.”

“We’ll start a fire,” Adam said. “For when you get out.” For a moment he put his hand on my bare shoulder, and then he walked past me back into the forest to gather sticks. Jane set out our pilfered food supplies, both of them busy with their little jobs.

“I’m just gonna take off everything, I guess,” I told Jane, stepping with one foot onto the heel of the other foot’s sneaker to work it off, the exact way Ruth had repeatedly told me would
just ruin
my shoes.

Jane nodded toward my feet in my used-to-be-white-but-now-dingy cotton socks. I kept stripping, unbuttoning my jeans, pulling them down and stepping out of them, somehow freed from my usual self-consciousness by the weight of the task at hand.

She sparked the lighter, lit a candle. “Makes sense, you’d just have to dry your underwear when you got out anyway, and that might take a while. You don’t want to chafe.” She twisted and pushed the candle into the rocky ground until it stayed put, and then lit the next. “
Chafe
is such a fantastic word, though.”

“Can I have one of those?” I asked, tilting my head toward the candles, watching the orange flames bounce and sway but stay lit. They reminded me of this scene in one of the
Karate Kid
movies, the second one maybe, when Mr. Miagi takes Daniel-san to his homeland of Okinawa, and the villagers perform this sacred ceremony where they send lanterns out to drift along the water of a fishing harbor, their tiny, bobbing lights reflected in the surface: that scene still beautiful even with a Peter Cetera song playing in the background.

“Are you taking it in with you? Because I have a penlight somewhere if you’d rather,” she said, searching the front pocket of her backpack.

“No, I want the candle,” I said. “Even though it’ll no doubt go out.”

“Probably,” she said, but she lit the third candle, held it out to me anyway.

I stepped out of my underwear before taking it from her, the length of my body prickling from the cold even as my fingers clenched the smooth wax. I pulled the candle in to me, held it up in front of my chest, a choir girl on Christmas Eve. The tiny flame provided one small point of warmth, and I wanted it right next to my skin.

Jane didn’t pretend not to look at me, naked and pale in the dark of that canyon, shivering, my face uplit and flickering with the flame of my candle, as afraid of messing things up as I’d ever been in my life. I loved her for that. She met my eyes and said, “You can do this. We’ll be here waiting for you.”

“What is it that I’m doing, again?”

“You know that already,” she said. “You just think that you don’t, but you do. It’s what you came all this way for.”

I nodded but wasn’t as confident in what I knew as Jane seemed to be.

I did, however, know better than to feel the cold water with only my toes, then my feet, and to try to slowly, slowly adjust, inch by inch. There wouldn’t be any adjusting to this lake on this night: there would be, at best, tolerating it. I stepped in, one foot after another, and just kept walking, the lake floor rocky in some places, gooey and thick in others. It was like walking on coals, maybe, if the coals and ash grew thicker and thicker with each step, burning with each stride a bit farther up your leg. By ten long steps out the water was at my hipbones, the cold sucking all the breath from my body. I concentrated on my candle flame, counted to three as I inhaled, and again to three as I blew out. And again. And again. My blood pounded in my ears, and something like an ice-cream headache pulsed along my temples. If I wanted to make it to that skeleton forest, I was going to have to swim.

I held the candle in my right hand, up and out from my body, away from the surface. I bent at the knees and let myself ease onto my back, so as not to jostle and splash the water any more than necessary. I let the burning water cradle me until I was all the way in a back float, face up to the sky, feet facing the bank where Jane and Adam were starting the fire, the candle still lit, above me in my hand. The wax poured along my thumb and wrist as I drew it back to me. It hardened almost instantly. I planted the candle’s base just above my belly button and held it there with both hands clenched around it as if it was something solid, something grounded: a sail mast, a flagpole. My heartbeat drummed in my stomach, and the candle shifted with my shivering, my strained breathing, but it flickered on.

My body wanted to be tense, that’s how it planned to keep me alive, by letting me know how serious the cold of this water was, how I needed to get out of it, by refusing to let me get used to it. The muscles in my neck strained like cables hauling something heavy, a piano or a tractor. I couldn’t unclench my jaw. My feet, out of the water except for the heels, were curled and stretched in strange positions, like the feet of really old people I’d seen when caroling with Firepower at the nursing home. I concentrated on my candle flame and tried to let those muscles ease, to let the water control me, to own me in this moment.

Once I got my breathing under control, I dropped my right hand from the candle and sculled the water, propelling myself forward, gnarled feet toward the gnarled trees and the arching cliffside and road my parents had toppled from behind those trees. It probably took no more than a minute and a half to reach the little grove, but my arm and shoulder were aching by then. I regripped the candle base with both hands and again concentrated on my breathing. From somewhere beyond the canyon, from the knuckles of the mountains looming in the distance, wind came, and I lifted my neck to watch it tumble its ways through the pines and down the slopes, out across the water to me. The wind made the skeleton trees creak and crack, those sounds harsh. The wind also blew out my candle, or it seemed to: it went out completely, the black wick naked, but then it was clothed in flame again. And it stayed lit.

My headache was making everything hurt, even my teeth. I opened my eyes and then shifted my body, dropped my hips, did all the things necessary to ruin a back float, and let first my legs, then my trunk, then my face, slip just beneath the surface, a thin sheet of water on top of my skin, all except for my hands, clenched around the candle, those remained above. I could still hear the crack of the trees but I liked the layer of padding that the water glued over the noises. I made myself remember my parents, first my mom, then my dad, not together but separate, their faces, their bodies, the way they walked into a room, held the news-paper, stirred their coffee. It was hard to do, but I did it the best I could, lifting my head and pointing my lips to suck air when I needed to, before slipping just below again, back to my parents. My mother puzzling over the placement of something at the museum. My father using the blue hankie he kept in his back pocket to wipe his forehead. My mother teaching me how to hold a paring knife to cut vegetables. My father driving the way he always did, with just one hand sort of lolled on the steering wheel.

I felt like I was fucking up this whole thing, this thing that I’d waited to do, and now here I was and I didn’t know what to do, or how to do it, or how to feel. None of my standbys would work: no quoting the movies, no making a joke. It had to be now. I wanted it to be. I lifted my head back out of the water.

“Mom and Dad,” I said, my voice sounding strange, like it belonged to the lake and not to me. Or maybe it was what I was saying with it. I hadn’t said Mom and Dad like that, as a form of address, in forever. It was somehow embarrassing to be talking to them, even all alone, with no one to hear but them, but I decided that embarrassment was okay, it was maybe even right, so I kept on. “I can remember lots of stupid stuff I watched in movies and whatever, but not things about the two of you that I think I should remember.”

I thought for a little while before I spoke again. “I used to want to come here to tell you how sorry I was.” I took a breath in and then I just said it. “Not for kissing Irene, but for being relieved that you weren’t gonna find out, that I wasn’t going to be found out, because you were dead. That doesn’t make any sense, I know, because you know everything when you’re dead anyway, right? But even still.”

On the side of one of the mountains there were suddenly four perfect rectangles of yellow: windows in a cabin I hadn’t even distinguished from the dark of the trees until a light switch was flicked. I imagined people at those windows, looking out, down the mountainside to the lake, wondering about my single candle—or would it seem like there were two of them, with the flame’s reflection on the lake viewed at so great a distance? For some reason I really wanted there to be people at those windows.

I kept on with what I was saying. “I don’t think that I made your accident happen; I don’t anymore, so I didn’t come here for that. What I guess I wish for now is that I had figured out that you were people and not just my parents before you died. Like figured it out for real, and not like Lydia said, so I could blame you for the way I am. But even though I know that I would have wanted to know you as those people, I didn’t, and I’m not sure you knew me either, not beyond me being your daughter, I mean. Maybe while you were alive I hadn’t even become me yet. Maybe I still haven’t become me. I don’t know how you tell for sure when you finally have.” I tilted the candle just so and let all the melted wax pooled around the wick spill free and cascade down my knuckles, the trail at first translucent, then quickly hardening into a river of white on top of my skin. Lots of wax cascaded all the way down my hand, off the edge, and into the lake, and once there became magical, tiny floating polka dots, like wax versions of the droppings of a paper punch.

I watched one of the dots float beyond the glow of my candle, and then I kept talking. “I don’t know if you would have sent me to Promise, or to a place like it, or if you’d have wanted to even if you didn’t actually do it. But you weren’t around to and Ruth was, and I can’t believe her when she says that it’s what you’d have wanted for me. Even if it’s true, I don’t think it’s something I have to spend my life believing. Does that make sense? Like that it might have been true, if you’d known me now, but because you didn’t get the chance, I can just erase whatever might have been true about it? I hope that makes some sort of sense. The thing is, pretty much everything that’s happened since you died has convinced me that I was lucky to have had you as my parents, even for only twelve years, and even if I didn’t really know it when you were alive. And I guess I just wanted to come here and say that I know it now, and I loved you, even though all of that probably sounds a little late in the coming, or not enough or whatever. But that’s something I’ve been able to figure out for sure.” I let myself spin some there in the water, circles, not fast or slow, but movement, one hand sculling me around. “I don’t know what will happen after I reach the shore,” I said. “Maybe you do—I don’t know how it works from where you are, what you can see. I like to think that you can see it all, and that whatever’s waiting won’t manage to trip me up. At least not too much.” I stopped talking. I had nothing left to say, nothing left I could put words to. But I kept spinning. I’d finally come to this place to which it seemed like everything in my life thus far had somehow been tied, somehow, even things that shouldn’t have been, and I wanted to soak in it. So I did. I kept spinning until I was dizzy. Probably I was dizzy from more than just that. I was frozen. Then I was done.