The Miseducation of Cameron Post - by Emily M. Danforth

Part Three

God’s Promise

1992–1993

 

Chapter Thirteen

It was Jane Fonda who gave Ruth and me our official welcome tour of the God’s Promise Christian School & Center for Healing. We were in the Fetus Mobile for six hours straight before getting there. Six hours straight except for when Ruth pulled into the Git ’n’ Split in Big Timber to get gas and treats and to let me pee. Ruth didn’t even go. She could hold it like a camel.

Back then Big Timber still had the only water park in Montana, and it sat right alongside the interstate. When we passed, I craned to see the strange toothpaste-green looping slides as they towered out of a field housing cement vats of too-blue water. The place was packed.

It was the last good week of August, and even whizzing by like that, I could feel the urgency in the actions of the kids as they swarmed about the place. Everything was heightened the way it always is when summer is slipping away to fall, and you’re younger than eighteen, and all you can do is suck your cherry Icee and let the chlorine sting your nose, all the way up into the pockets behind your eyes, and snap your towel at the pretty girl with the sunburn, and hope to do it all again come June. I turned around in my seat and kept staring until I could just barely make out those green twisting slides. They seemed like tunnels from a science fiction version of the future, with the charcoal and purple Crazy Mountains all stretched out behind them like they didn’t fit at all, like painted scenery at the school play.

At the Git ’n’ Split Ruth bought string cheese and little cartons of chocolate milk and a tube of Pringles. She offered them up in the Fetus Mobile as though she was bearing frankincense and myrrh.

“I hate sour cream and onion Pringles,” I told the dashboard, where I had my feet planted until Ruth pushed them down.

“But you love Pringles.” Ruth actually rattled the canister.

“I hate sour cream and onion anything. All lesbians do.” I blew heaps of bubbles into my milk with the tiny straw that came cellophaned to the carton.

“I want you to stop using that word.” Ruth jammed the lid back onto the can.

“Which word? Sour or cream?” I plastic laughed with my reflection in the passenger-side window.

I had spent the week postintervention moving from numbness to outright, unabashed hostility toward Ruth, while she, on the other hand, became increasingly talkative and positive about my situation. She busied herself with the many arrangements to be made on my behalf: buying me dorm supplies, talking to Hazel about my early retirement from Scanlan, filling out paperwork, scheduling my mandatory physical, helping Ray haul the phone and TV and VCR from my room. That arrangement came first, actually. But the biggest arrangement of all: She canceled the wedding. She postponed it, that is.

“Don’t,” I said. She hadn’t even told me she was doing it, actually. I surprised her in the kitchen, overheard her on the phone with the florist.

“It’s not the right time now,” Ruth had said. “The priority is getting you better.”

“I mean it: Don’t. Don’t stop the show for me; I’ll live with not being there.”

“It’s not about you, Cameron. It’s about me, and I don’t want to have it while you’re away.” She had left the room after that. But she was lying, of course. It was completely about me. Completely.

I had to be babysat at all times. Someone in my condition couldn’t very well be left alone. I met with Pastor Crawford each day, an hour or two at a go, but I never said much of anything. They were just Nancy Huntley sessions with God thrown in. I ate breakfast with Ruth, lunch with Ruth, dinner with Ruth and Ray. I stared out my window a lot. One afternoon I thought I saw Ty circling our block in his truck, around and around. I’m sure I did. But he never pulled up to the curb, put it in park; never charged up the stairs to teach me the violent version of the very same lesson God’s Promise would be attempting to teach me soon.

During my lockdown Ruth was Ruth: chipper—forced, but chipper. Ray was Ray: quiet and even more unsure of what to say to me. And Grandma was nowhere. That whole week she ghosted around the house, wouldn’t find herself alone in a room with me, took off in the Bel Air to who knows where for hours at a time. We ended up in the kitchen together one afternoon. I think she was hoping that I was still out meeting with Crawford, but I surprised her as she was mixing up a can of tuna with mayonnaise.

I didn’t try to be proud. I thought maybe I had just one chance. “I don’t want to go, Grandma,” I said.

“Don’t look at me, girl,” she said, still mixing the mayo in thick. “You brought this on yourself. This is all your doing, every last bit of it. I don’t know as Ruth’s way is right, but I know you need some straightening out.”

I don’t think she realized that her word choice was sort of funny, and it wasn’t really, right then, anyway.

“You’ll be fine,” she said, putting the mayo back into the door of the fridge, taking out the jar of sweet relish she wasn’t supposed to eat. “You do what they say. Read your Bible. You’ll be just fine.”

It seemed like she was saying it as much for her as for me, but that’s where the conversation stopped. I only saw her once more before we left. She emerged from the basement as we were loading the FM, gave me a loose hug that grew a little tighter right before she let go.

“I’ll write you some, once it’s allowed. You write too,” she said.

“Not for three months,” I said.

“You’ll be okay. It will fly by.”

Lindsey called once, she just happened to, probably wanted to know what I thought of the care package, but Ruth answered the phone, told her that I’d be going away to school this year and wouldn’t be able to continue to communicate with her any longer. Just like that. I’m pretty sure she tried calling back, but I wasn’t allowed to answer the phone. Jamie stopped by and Ruth at least let him come into the entryway, but she hovered in the other room, made it obvious that she was listening.

“Everybody knows now, huh?” I asked him. It didn’t seem like there was any point wasting words by talking around the only thing worth talking about right then.

“They know one version,” Jamie said. “Brett’s been telling people. I don’t think Coley has.”

“Well, it’s the only version they’d believe, anyway,” I said.

“Probably.”

He hugged me fast, told me he’d see me at Christmas if the warden allowed it. That made me laugh.

I could have snuck out. I could have made secret phone calls. I could have rallied forces on my behalf. I could have. I could have. I didn’t. I didn’t even try.

By an hour outside of Miles City, Ruth had already given up on lecturing me on appreciating God’s gift of a facility like this right in my own state. I think she had given up on instilling in me a positive attitude before we even got on the road, but she quoted some scripture and walked through her lines as though she had written her little speech out beforehand. And knowing Ruth, she probably had—maybe in her daily prayer journal, maybe on the back of a grocery list. Ruth’s words were so stale by that point that I didn’t even hear most of them. I looked out my window with my nose tucked into my shoulder and smelled Coley. I was wearing one of her sweatshirts even though it was too hot for it. Ruth thought it was mine or she would have piled it into the cardboard box with the other things of Coley’s, of ours, that she and Crawford had confiscated, many of those things items from our friendship and not necessarily from whatever it was that we’d become those last few weeks: snapshots, lots of them prom-night pictures; notes written on lined paper and folded to the size of fifty-cent pieces; the thick wad of rubber-banded movie tickets, of course those; and also a couple of pressed thistles, once huge and thorny and boldly purple, now dried and feathery and the ghost of their original color, dust in your hand if you squeezed too hard, and Ruth did. The thistles I’d picked at Coley’s ranch, hauled back into town, and tacked upside down to the wall above my desk. But the sweatshirt, buried at the bottom of my laundry basket beneath clean but not-yet-folded beach towels and tank tops, had escaped. It still smelled like the kegger campfire at which she’d last worn it and something else I couldn’t place, but something unmistakably Coley.

For miles and miles I just let Ruth drone. I let her words crumble away between us, drop like those thistles into dusty bits on the seats and the console. All the while I smelled Coley, and thought Coley, and wondered when I would start hating Coley Taylor, just how long it would take for that to happen, because I wasn’t anywhere near that place yet, but I thought that maybe I should be. Or that maybe I would be one day. Eventually Ruth stopped talking to me and twisted the dial until she found Paul Harvey and laughed like she was drunk and had never heard mild radio humor before.

Those whole six hours, the only other snips of dialogue between us, other than the Pringles incident, were:

Ruth: Please roll up your window; I have the AC on.

Me: And this affects me how?

Ruth: I wish you would stop slumping like that. You’re rounding your shoulders and you’ll end up an old lady with a hump.

Me: Good. It will go nicely with the horns I’m working on.

Ruth: I know that you read your manual, Cammie; I saw you. It says you have to enter Promise with a teachable heart if you want this to work.

Me: Maybe I don’t have a heart, teachable or otherwise.

Ruth: Don’t you want this to work? I just can’t understand why anyone would want to stay like this if they knew they could change.

Me: Stay like what?

Ruth: You know exactly what.

Me: No I don’t. Say it.

Ruth: Stay in a life of sinful desire.

Me: Is that the same category for premarital sex?

Ruth: (Long pause.) What is that supposed to mean?

Me: I wonder.

Only a few miles before the turnoff to Promise we passed the sign for Quake Lake. It was battered and the metal was crunched in the middle, as though it had fallen down and been driven over by a semi and then put back up. I think Ruth and I noticed it at right the same time, and she turned to me, actually took her eyes from the road to look at me, for just a few seconds. But Ruth somehow managed not to say anything. And I didn’t say anything. And then we turned a corner and it was just trees and road in the rearview and that sign wasn’t some big signifier at all, but just one more place marker we’d driven by on our way. At least that’s what we both pretended right then.

The girl who met us in the Promise parking lot had an orange clipboard, a Polaroid camera, and a prosthetic right leg (from the knee down). She seemed about my age, high school for sure, and she waved that clipboard while walking toward the FM with surprising speed. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised: She was wearing running shorts.

Ruth didn’t even have the chance to say something like “Oh, lookit this poor thing” before the poor thing herself was at Ruth’s door, throwing it open and flashing a picture, all in what seemed to me the same moment.

Ruth made a gaspy-squeaky sort of noise and shook her head back and forth and blinked her eyes the way one of the Looney Tunes did after smacking into a brick wall.

“Sorry about the shock. I like to get one right away,” the girl told us, letting the big black camera hang around her neck, pulling her head down some. The photo slid forward like a tongue, but she didn’t pull it free. “Just as soon as folks get here I snap one. It has to be the very first moment; it’s the best.”

“Why’s it the best?” I asked her, walking around the Fetus Mobile to see that leg up close. Her real one was bony and pasty white, but the fake one had some girth, some plasticky definition, and was Beach Barbie tanned.

“You can’t use words to describe it—that’s why the photos. I think it’s because it’s the purest moment. The most undiluted.”

Ruth did a weird kind of chuckle after she’d said that. I could tell she was uncomfortable with this girl as our greeter.

The girl finally plucked free the picture and held it up so only she and I could see it. The shot was mostly Ruth’s head too close to the lens and her mouth a line of displeasure, with me seeming far behind her, almost smiling.

“I’m Cameron,” I said. I knew that if I didn’t speak, Ruth would, and for some reason I wanted this girl to like me right away. Maybe because whoever it was I had been expecting to meet us, this girl wasn’t her.

“I know. We’ve all been talking about you coming. I’m Jane Fonda.” She was smiling and rocking a little on that leg. It squeaked like a bath toy.

“Serious? Jane Fonda?” I smiled back.

“I’m always serious,” she said. “Ask anybody. So the deal is that Rick’s in Bozeman at Sam’s Club buying food and stuff. I’ll give you the grand tour and then he’ll be back before too long.” She leaned toward me. “Sam’s Club and Walmart give us a big discount, and free food, sometimes. Mostly chicken breasts and bananas. He does a decent barbecue chicken, but he gets the cheap toilet paper—the scratchy kind you have to double up on.”

“There are worse things,” Ruth said. “Shall we bring the luggage now?”

“Indubitably,” Jane said.

“I can’t believe your name is actually Jane Fonda,” I said. “That’s crazy.”

She tapped her clipboard against her leg two times and it sounded sorta like when I was little and would tap my plastic drumsticks against my Mr. Potato Head. “Talk about the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “We swim in crazy here.”

The grounds at Promise had a little of everything that western Montana is famous for, things that the state tourism board makes sure show up on postcards and in guidebooks: golden-green fields for archery or horseback riding, densely wooded trails dotted with Indian paintbrush and lupine, two streams that, according to Jane, were just aching with trout, and a so-blue-it-looked-fake mountain lake only a mile and a half’s hike away from the main building. Both sides of the campus (the compound) were bordered by the grazing land of cattle ranchers sympathetic to the holy cause of saving our souls from a lifetime of sexual deviance. Even that hot August afternoon, the wind down from the mountains was crisp, and on it rode the sweet scent of hay, the good spice of pine and cedar.

Jane Fonda took us cross-country, that squeaky leg surprisingly springy, and Ruth determined not to lose step with a cripple, even if not losing step meant bouncing the battered, green, Winner’s-Airlines-issued wheelie suitcase now packed with my stuff over prairie-dog holes and sagebrush. I lugged a pink Sally-Q case, one that Ruth had told me she would be taking back with her, but I could keep the Winner’s one. Out with the old, in with the new.

Jane sort of motioned to the chicken coop (eggs were collected each morning by students on a rotating schedule); to an empty horse stable (they were planning to get some horses, though); to a cluster of metal-roofed cabins used only during the summer, for camp; to two small cabins where Reverend Rick and the school’s assistant director, Lydia March, lived. But Jane wasn’t so much a tour guide as someone we might have happened upon in a foreign town, someone who felt obligated to show us around a little. As we walked, I stared at the back of her T-shirt. On it was a black-and-white print of a female athlete, maybe a volleyball player, judging by her shorts and tank top, stretching after an exhausting match—her ponytail limp, her brow dewy. Next to the image were the purple words SEEK GOD IN ALL THAT YOU DO.

The main building was built, I think, to resemble an aspen lodge, with log siding and a grand entrance; but once we were inside, it felt just like Gates of Praise back in Miles City, but bigger, and with dorm rooms. The floors were all that industrial laminate poorly imitating hardwood. The windows were too few, fluorescent lighting everywhere. Someone had made an attempt with the main room—a fireplace, cheap Navajo-style woven rugs, a moose head over the mantel—but even that room smelled like disinfectant and floor cleaner.

“Where is everybody?” I asked, and was first answered by a cavernous echo of my own voice.

“Most everybody’s in Bozeman with Pastor Rick. Lydia’s somewhere in England—that’s where she’s from. She visits a couple times a year. But I think some disciples are at the lake, maybe. Summer camp just ended last week, so this is like transition time before the regular school session starts. Freedom time.” She flicked on a light switch and started down a hallway.

“So you kids just do whatever you want this week?” Aunt Ruth trot-trotted a little to catch her, the suitcase wheels spinning sprays of dirt and grass on those shiny floors.

“I mean not really. We just don’t have as many group activities, but we still do our Bible study and one-on-one sessions.” She stopped at a closed door, which had two things taped to it: a poster of the Christian rock band Audio Adrenaline and a Xerox copy of the Serenity Prayer, the purple ink so faded and the paper so yellowed and curled that it somehow had gained an air of history, almost of authenticity.

Jane tapped the door with her clipboard. “This is you. And Erin. She’s in Bozeman with Rick.”

Aunt Ruth tsk-tsked her head some. She still hadn’t come to terms with the roommate thing. Who could blame her? I hadn’t either. I’d been given her name earlier in the week and I’d been regularly picturing my new roommate, Erin, as a bespectacled, chubby girl with unruly curls and a smattering of acne across her perpetually flushed cheeks. Erin would be a pleaser. I just knew it. She would be working hard, asking God to help her so that the grungy but holy men in that poster on our door might actually do it for her—goose bumps on her neck, a prickle across her chest. Praying to Jesus to help her want them the way she had that girl from her study hall, from her science lab. He’s a tall drink of water she would tell me about some male movie star, some action hero, and then she would giggle. Erin would most definitely be a giggler.

We were still waiting outside the door. Jane nodded at the handle. “You can go in,” she said. “We don’t lock anything here. The doors aren’t usually even shut, but since no one’s in there, it’s fine, I guess.” She must’ve seen my face because she added, “You’ll get used to it.”

I couldn’t quite believe her.

Erin’s half of the room was done up in lots of yellows and purples: a yellow bedspread with purple pillows, a purple lamp with a yellow shade, a massive bulletin board with a yellow-and-purple-striped frame, the whole thing collaged with snapshots and Christian concert tickets and handwritten Bible quotes.

“Erin’s from Minnesota. Big Vikings fan,” Jane said. “Plus she’s a second year, and she’s earned some privileges you don’t have, I mean with the posters and whatever.” She looked at me, shrugged her shoulders. “Yet. You’ll get them eventually. Probably, anyway.”

My half of the room was sterile and blank, and I hadn’t really brought much to change that. We put my bags on the new-looking twin mattress. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to unpack right then, so I just pulled out a few random items and set them on my desk hutch: a stack of brand-new notebooks and a box of pens, purchased by Ruth; Kleenex; a picture of Mom and Dad and me one Christmas; Mom’s pre–Quake Lake picture; the picture of Margot and Mom, which Ruth had looked at sort of funny while inspecting my luggage but had let me keep. Make an effort, I thought. I added my Extreme Teen Bible.

Ruth was examining that big bulletin board. She seemed to be noticing my lack of color in the face of all that was the Viking Erin. Maybe it made her a little sad for me. She reminded me to grab the reading lamp and alarm clock from the Fetus Mobile before she left with them.

“I think you’re going to do really well here, Cammie. I mean it.” She reached out to put an arm around me and I stepped away from her, pretending that I had a sudden and compulsive interest in looking out the window I’d be looking out all year. The view was unbelievable, so there was that, anyway.

Thank God Jane got us out of there. “Would you like to stop by the dining hall? Rick thought you might be hungry. There’s sandwich stuff.”

“Sounds good,” Ruth said, already out the door.

Jane squeaked fast behind her. I paused at the bulletin board. There was one girl repeated in every photo. Had to be Erin. I was right about everything but the acne. Her skin was as clear as those girls in Noxzema ads, maybe due to her prayers before lights out. God grant me flawless pores. God grant me a healthy glow.

We were only just finished with egg salad on white when a big blue van pulled up outside, and the sliding door with the silver God’s Promise logo slid open, and my fellow diseased poured out like a rush of holy water to pass over me and cleanse me and envelop me into their stream.

It was Hi, I’m Helen. We’re just so glad that you’re here. And I’m Steve. We just bought tons of Cap’n Crunch. Are you into Cap’n Crunch? So good. And Mark and Dane said they’d show me the lake, and Adam said he’d heard that I was a runner, and that he ran in the mornings and had seen tons of elk and deer and even a moose once or twice. And those things are freakin’ huge. And it was these tight little embraces, and touching my arm, and these shiny, shiny eyes, and everyone smiling at me like we were all plastic characters out of some board game like Candy Land or Hi Ho! Cherry-O. And the thing I kept thinking was: Is it really okay to be doing all this touching?

I looked at Jane, who seemed just as royally awkward, that camera still hanging from her neck, and I checked to make sure, in all this goodness and light, that her fake leg hadn’t suddenly healed itself, sprouted anew and perfect and pure. It hadn’t. That was something.

The Viking Erin was the last off the van. She stepped from it like it was a carriage once sprung from a pumpkin, all these bright-eyed well-wishers her subjects, her court, and me the new lady-in-waiting. She was confident in her denim overalls and sandals, her curls shiny and healthy; everything about her—even her roundness, her softness—made her seem somehow healthy. Maybe I was totally wrong about this girl. Maybe she was their leader?

She shrieked when she saw me. And then the giggle, a trajectory of such giggles. As we hugged, she said everything that prayer on her door, that bulletin board, had told me she would. How she was so glad to again have a roommate, and so glad we would take this journey together, and so glad that I was athletic, because she had been really trying to become so herself. I was more pleased with me in that moment, in the actualization of my intuition, than I would be for weeks.

But while Erin was cheerful and pleasant, she lacked a certain something that some of her equally affectionate classmates did not. I just couldn’t place it, that something. I studied Jane’s face, tried to read it. One final embrace from Adam shrouded me briefly in a sweet, sticky smell that I struggled for a moment to identify, but only because of my surroundings. In the embrace’s release I caught the scent again. Unmistakable. Marijuana. These homos were high as kites.

Ruth was over with Reverend Rick, who was in his rock-star weekend attire of jeans and a T-shirt, and when we caught glances, he gave me a big smile and a wave. He seemed just the same as he had when he’d visited Gates of Praise. And Ruth wouldn’t know this smell if she was handed a joint. If she was handed a bong. Were they all high? Was Pastor Rick high too? I couldn’t get a read on Jane. She was talking with the Cap’n Crunch guy about the group’s purchases. A couple of them were already dispersing to their rooms, to the kitchen. Freedom time, Jane had said. I would have taken my high outdoors.

Despite how unnatural the movement, I leaned in close to Erin as she listed off various furniture arrangements we might try in our room, for fun. I pretended like I was having trouble hearing her. “So you’re all about the Vikings, huh?” I asked, inhaling deeply. Nothing except dryer sheet–smelling overalls.

“You know it! Don’t worry—you’ll get decoration privileges soon. Maybe you’ll become a Vikings fan in the meantime.” Erin started up a lengthy question-and-answer session, and for the second time that day, it was Jane who played my rescuer.

She was just so authentic with that clipboard. “Sorry, you two,” she said. “Rick needs to meet with your aunt. He said I should finish showing you around.”

I thought that I was done with Jane as semidisinterested tour guide, but seeing the clipboard, the implied authority of the good preacher, and Erin was off to our room. She couldn’t wait, though, she told me, until we could just gab and gab.

Jane said something to Reverend Rick. He nodded at me again, everything just so, well, cool, relaxed. Then Jane took me to the hayloft of the main barn. She struggled climbing the ladder, its wood old and gray, but she struggled like it was a common thing. I could tell she came here often. Me a townie kid and always discovering things of such importance in barns.

“So now you’ve met your fellow sinners,” Jane said as she motioned for me to sit at the loft’s edge, which I did, while she settled in next to me. She had to put her hand against a post to do it, but she was surprisingly nimble. Everything was surprising: Jane, the place itself. “Any thoughts, observations?”

I just went for it. Why not? “Were they all high?” I asked as our legs swung free over the edge, Jane’s with that squeak every second and a half or so.

She laughed a small laugh. “Good for you,” she said. “It’s not everyone—there’s actually only a few of us repeat offenders.”

“So you too?”

“Yeah. Me included. You didn’t think Erin was one, didja?” Jane did this little smile, but not at me. Out at the barn.

“No. I figured that out pretty quick.” I flicked pieces of hay over the edge just to watch them flutter and sail. “Doesn’t Reverend Rick catch on? A couple of them smelled like they came straight from Woodstock.”

“He can’t smell. Not at all. He hasn’t ever been able to—since birth. You’ll hear all about it. He loves to find meaning in his not being able to smell.” Jane flashed a quick picture of some falling hay. She used that camera like a whip.

“What about everybody else?”

“You just met them. They don’t need to get high. God is the best high, right?” Jane actually hooked my eyes to hers with that line. But she wouldn’t let them stay that way.

“Why don’t they tell on you?”

She smiled to herself again. “Sometimes they do.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll see. Whatever you think this place is, you’ll be in for a surprise. I mean it. You just have to be here for a while and you’ll understand.”

“It’s not like I have a choice,” I said. “I’m stuck here. This is where I am.”

“Then I’m guessing you’ll want in.”

“With what?”

“The pot,” Jane said, so matter-of-factly.

I hadn’t thought it would be this easy. Or maybe it wouldn’t be easy at all, but she had offered. “Absolutely,” I said.

“Do you have any money?”

“Some,” I said. We weren’t supposed to bring any money with us; that was in the manual. But I’d rolled about $500 worth of lifeguarding cash and leftover bills from Dad’s dresser drawer, twenties and fifties, into tight little bundles barely thicker than chopsticks, and I’d hidden those in various locations throughout my luggage, so that even if some of them were found, others might escape.

Jane was messing with the straps and buckles on her leg, pulling at things. It was grossing me out. The stump was all covered with a brace and padding, but I was afraid that if she didn’t stop messing with it soon, it wouldn’t be.

She noticed me noticing this. “I keep some of the stash in my leg. I have a little compartment hollowed out. You’ll get over it.”

“I’m fine with it,” I said, throwing lots of hay and not looking.

“No you’re not. But you will be after a couple of hits.” In her fingers was a baggie with a good amount of pot in it, and also a soapstone pipe.

I was impressed. “I’m impressed,” I said.

Jane packed the pipe like someone who had done it plenty of times before, replaced the bag, and pulled forth a red Bic. “I’m resourceful. I’m actually a bit of an off-the-land type, you know? I was born in a barn.”

It seemed like the setup for a punch line. “Oh yeah. You and Jesus.”

“Exactly,” she told me, exhaling, passing the pipe.

It was strong but harsh, potent is maybe the word, though not necessarily enjoyable going in. My eyes watered immediately.

“You’ll get used to it,” Jane said as I hacked like a sick cat. “I do the best I can for what’s essentially ditch weed.”

I nodded at her, squinting, and tried again, let the smoke fill me up while closing my eyes, passing her the pipe before letting myself fall back into the hay. “Where do you guys buy from?”

“From me. I grow it a couple of miles from here, just enough to last us the winter. If we’re careful,” she added before sucking in again.

I propped myself up on my elbow and studied her as she held in the smoke. “No shit? You’re the resident weed farmer?”

She passed the bowl again and settled herself down in the hay with me. “I just told you; I’m an off-the-land type.”

“So how’d you end up here?”

Jane raised her eyebrows in what I guessed was supposed to be a mysterious way. “The tabloids,” she said, offering nothing else.

“Like because of your name?” I asked.

“Sort of. Not exactly.”

Jane was relishing this moment, I could tell. She’d been around long enough to see new students come to Promise and leave Promise, and she knew exactly what I was looking for: her story, her past, the sequence of events that had led her to this place to be saved, just like me. Something about being sent to Promise made me desperate to hear her tell it, to hear all the stories of all the students, right up to the part where their parents, their aunts, whoever, drove down that road and into the parking lot to drop them off. I don’t know why the desperation, exactly. I still don’t know. Maybe it was feeling like we all had shared history, somehow. That understanding somebody else’s path to Promise would help me make sense of my own. What I know is that all of us, all of us, collected each other’s pasts and shared them, like trading Garbage Pail Kids cards—each one wackier and stranger and more unlikely than the next. But I don’t think anybody’s ever quite trumped Jane’s.

Her whole story was suspended in the thick fog of strong pot and a hot August afternoon in a hayloft, so the way I remember things, and the way she told them, might not be one and the same. But that doesn’t matter so much as the realization I had while she was telling it—namely that my own past maybe wasn’t nearly so movie-of-the-week as a lifetime in Miles City had convinced me it was.

Jane was raised until the age of eleven on a commune just north of Chubbuck, Idaho. The way she told it, it was as if roadies for the Grateful Dead had crossed with some Amish, and this place was the result. It was good land, left to one of the founders by a grandfather. The commune citizens dug crystals of quartz and amethyst out of the ground, polished them up, sold them at touristy gem shops or art fairs. They grew corn and carrots, Idaho potatoes for sure, and hunted deer and elk. Jane’s mother was a beauty, a dark-haired woman from New Mexico, and she was the commune’s princess, loved by all. And given all that loving, Jane had two dads.

At a place like that, Jane told me, paternity tests meant nothing. Who can truly claim ownership of a soul? Of a life? Shit like that. One possible father was Rishel—the commune mechanic with watery eyes and a slouchy walk and always a roll of all-cherry Life Savers in his back pocket. The other possibility was Gabe. He was some sort of professor. He’d work at a community college for a semester teaching literature and poetry and then spend the next semester on the commune. He rode a Vespa and had a little beard, smoked a Sherlock Holmes pipe mainly as a prop.

Somehow those men, who in high school might have slunk away from one another in an empty hallway, found respect for each other out there on that commune. Or at least something like respect. The naming of the baby was only a minor roadblock.

Rishel wanted Jane, for his mother: a wedding-cake maker from Chubbuck who had put her head in her bakery’s oven after finishing a five-tier. Gabe wanted Jane for, you guessed it, his own mother: a breast cancer–surviving meter maid from Saratoga. And there was no question of the last name, Jane would take her mother’s, and it was Fonda, and they had all enjoyed Barbarella (for varying reasons—Gabe: ironically; Rishel: genuinely), so there you go. Jane Fonda it was.

Gabe called the name a triumph of postmodernism.

Rishel called the name simple and straightforward. Plain. A good choice.

Jane Fonda was born in the commune barn in December, with a retired ER nurse named Pat pulling her free. Pat was apparently the nurse straight outta Romeo and Juliet, loud and self-assured, with a mass of gray braids and pink hands like slices of ham. Pat and her lover, Candace, a retired cop, had recently moved to the commune to spend their pensions toward the good of the whole. Before Idaho they’d lived on one of the lesbian separatist Womyn’s Lands in Southern California, owned and run by several of Berkeley’s Gutter Dykes. Pat and Candace had enjoyed their time in a womyn-only utopia until they’d headed to Canada for a folk festival, stopped to see friends in Chubbuck, and just never quite made it back.

Pat and Jane Fonda were close. Then Pat died in a snow-mobile accident, the same accident during which Jane mangled her leg. So in one afternoon, there went her leg, from the knee down, and there went her nurse and role model. Gabe hadn’t been back on the commune for maybe two years before that, and Rishel never knew quite what to say about tragedy without still sounding like The Farmer’s Almanac.

Not on the night of Jane’s birth, not at all, but later, Jane’s mother would glean from the evening all kinds of Christian significance. The manger, the month, the bright starry night, even the trio of wise-ass commune musicians plucking out tunes to birth by and passing around a pie for all to share. No one could ever quite get straight why Jane was born in a barn in the first place. They had a couple of cabins, several warm tepees.

“Because it was God’s hand,” Jane’s mom had later decided. Jane’s mom was sticking with that.

After that snowmobile accident, soon after, Jane’s mother found Christ in the supermarket checkout line. She was on commune “nongrowables” detail that week: toothpaste, TP, and Tampax. One of those shock papers caught her eye—a supposed picture of Jesus on the cross had formed in a dust cloud over Kansas. And why the hell not? If crystals could be powerful and chanting could make you whole, then why not? And the other featured article on the cover of that tabloid? A story about Hollywood Jane Fonda’s difficulties filming her new workout video: Jane Fonda’s Pregnancy, Birth, and Recovery Workout. Jesus and Jane Fonda on the cover of one magazine, right there, staring her down in the checkout lane: It was too much to be just coincidental.

Jane’s mom, now with a cripple for a daughter, was ready to leave the commune, to do her believing from a suburban split-level with a Dairy Queen close at hand. She was never entirely okay with Pat and Candace, even before the accident. Some things were just more unnatural than others. She blamed the dead Pat, maybe rightly, for Jane being a cripple, and for maybe infecting her daughter with something more. Just a few days before the supermarket tabloid she had discovered Jane with the red-haired, toothy daughter of one of the commune’s newest families. Both girls had their shirts off, playing “chiropractor,” they said. (The new girl’s father was one.) But they were too old for playing doctor. So Jane’s mom did something about it. And they moved. And this time, her mother married a good man: a church-going, lawn-mowing, youth T-ball–coaching man. And it wasn’t too many years later that Jane Fonda wound up at Promise.

“But what did you do, specifically?” I asked Jane that day in the hayloft. “To land you here, I mean. What was the final act?” She’d long since put the pipe back into her leg compartment. We’d been up in the thick heat and sweet stink of that loft for close to an hour, maybe longer. I hoped that Ruth was looking for me, that she had been looking for me for a while, that she was ready to drive off and leave me but couldn’t because I was nowhere to be found and still technically, at least for another few minutes, on her watch.

“What didn’t I do?” Jane said. “That’s the typical stuff, anyway. I just told you all the good parts.”

I shrugged my shoulders. That “stuff” she was leaving out didn’t seem typical to me.

“What? You want to hear about how I was still playing doctor with girls at fourteen? Only nobody calls it playing doctor when you’re fourteen. Besides, what I was doing with those girls was more gynecologist than general practitioner.”

I laughed. “Your mom caught you again?”

Jane shook her head at me, like I was way slow on the uptake. Probably I was. “She didn’t need to catch me with anyone. I was living my sin right out loud. I was calling myself a proud member of Dyke Nation, and I got a friend to use her brother’s electric razor to shave off all my hair. I tried to hop a Greyhound to the coast, either coast, wherever, more than once. You can’t catch somebody doing something they’re not hiding.”

I asked the inevitable question. The only one left to ask. “So are you cured now?”

“You mean you can’t tell?” Jane asked, doing that weird grin she did so well, the one that didn’t reveal anything.

I would have thought of something to say back to her, but Pastor Rick and Aunt Ruth came into the barn. They looked up at the two of us, parked there at the edge of the loft. Rick smiled his dimpled, rock-star smile. Ruth looked calm. Well, calmer than she had looked when we’d arrived.

“Isn’t this nice out here?’ Ruth asked. “All this fresh air.”

“We’re very blessed to have these grounds,” Rick said. “We make good use of them, huh, Jane?”

“Indubitably,” Jane said.

“It’s a beautiful place, it really is,” Ruth said. “But I suppose . . .” She looked up at me.

I looked right back down at her, trying to reveal nothing, just like Jane. Nobody said anything for lots of seconds.

Then Rick asked, “You’ve got a long drive ahead of you?” He didn’t say what some adults might have—Your aunt has a long drive ahead of her, Cameron—to scold me, to make a point, to back up Ruth. He could have, but he didn’t.

“I do,” Ruth said. “Though I’m just going to Billings tonight. I have a Sally-Q party there tomorrow afternoon.”

She explained Sally-Q to him while Jane and I stood up, brushed away the straw stuck to us. Rick pretended to be interested in what Ruth was saying about tools for women. Or maybe he wasn’t pretending at all.

At the ladder, as she was maneuvering her leg onto the top rung, Jane said to me, quietly, “You’re not going to feel any better if you’re wretched to her as she’s leaving.”

“How do you know what I’ll feel like?”

“I know whole bunches of things,” Jane said. “And that I know.”

This was our good-bye: out, alone, next to the FM, the breeze down from the mountains still cool and spicy, the sun still hot, glinting off the white paint of the hood, Ruth hugging me tight, already crying a little, and me with my hands shoved in my pockets, refusing to hug her back.

“Rick and I talked about this anger you have toward me,” Ruth said into my neck. “You have so much anger in you.”

I said nothing.

“The worst thing I could possibly do right now is give up on you because I let your anger get to me. I won’t do that to you, Cammie. I know that you can’t see it now, but that would be the terrible thing to do. Not bringing you here; giving up on you.”

I still didn’t say anything.

Ruth put one of her hands on each of my shoulders and pushed back from me, held me at arm’s length in front of her. “I won’t do that to you. Your anger with me won’t change my mind. And I won’t do that to your parents’ memory, either.”

I jerked out from under her grip and stepped back. “Don’t talk about my parents,” I said. “My parents would never send me to a fucked-up place like this.”

“I have an obligation you can’t understand, Cameron,” Ruth said, keeping her voice level and calm. And then, more quietly, she said, “And to be clear, you don’t know everything there is to know about your mom and dad and what they’d want for you. I knew them both for a much longer time than you did. Can’t you even consider for a minute that this is exactly what they would do in this situation?”

What she said wasn’t any profound thing, but it landed on me like a football tackle all the same. It was just the place to hit me to make me feel weak and stupid and guilty, and most of all, afraid, because she was right: I didn’t know much at all about the people my parents had been. Not really. And Ruth had called me on it, finally, and I hated her for doing it.

Ruth kept going, “I don’t want to leave you this way, with all this anger between us—”

But I didn’t let her finish. I took a step toward her. I made myself look right at her. I was careful and slow with my words. “Did you ever think that maybe it was you coming that made me this way? Maybe I would have been fine, but then every single choice you’ve made since they died was the wrong one?”

The face she made confirmed just how terrible my words were, and they were lies, of course. But I couldn’t stop. I didn’t stop. I got louder. The words just came and came. “Who do I have but you, Ruth? And you let me down. And now you have to send me here to try and fix me, quick, before it’s too late. Before I’m fucked up for good. Quick! Fix me, fix me fast, Jesus. Heal me up! Quick, before it sets in for life!”

She didn’t slap me. I so wanted to head back into that fake lodge with a bright, hot, red slash across my face. But Ruth didn’t slap me. She stood sobbing tears more genuine than any I’d ever seen her cry over me. I believed that, the authenticity of those tears. Those sobs kept on coming, even as she got into the FM and pulled away. I could see her heaving great sobs through the window, unable to look at me, or unwilling, and I felt that, finally, finally, I had actually done something awful enough to deserve that reaction.

That first night at Promise, after Erin and I had circled around and back again our lives and dreams and newfound purposes—hers authentic, mine made up for my present company (accept Jesus’s help, heal, find a fella)—I listened to the sound of her breathing, the rustle of the covers on her bed, all the other sounds that you hear in the night when you’re staying in a new place with a bunch of other people. I thought not of Coley but of Irene Klauson, away at boarding school on her first night, hearing these same kinds of sounds, thinking, maybe, of me. Eventually all that thinking and quiet noise put me to sleep.

I dreamed that the real Jane Fonda came to visit me at Promise. I hadn’t rented that many movies with her in them, but On Golden Pond had been on TV one afternoon. Katharine Hepburn’s in it, but she’s already all-shaky Katharine Hepburn and she keeps telling her husband, an even older Henry Fonda, to look at “The loons, Norman! The loons!” Jane Fonda’s supposed to be like the fuck-up daughter or something, but her dad is crotchety and old and probably has dementia, and so it’s hard for them to resolve anything. Maybe they do eventually. I don’t know, because Ruth came home and I had to help her with something and I missed the rest of it. I’m not even sure about the significance of the loons.

But in my dream Jane Fonda is all tanned angles and blond hair blowing out behind her without any real wind, and I’m giving her this tour of the place. We go through all the buildings, and then when we open the door to leave the cafeteria, all of a sudden we’re at Irene Klauson’s ranch at the height of the dinosaur dig, but it’s like it is Irene’s ranch and it isn’t, the same way it always is and isn’t in a dream. And when we step out onto the ranch, into the sunlight, and I smell the churned-up dirt, I think maybe Promise is where I’m supposed to be. Something about that smell, and the way the light is settling, seems somehow right.

I try to ask Jane Fonda about this, but she’s not standing next to me anymore. She’s over by the barn with some tall man in a gray suit. It takes me a long time to walk to them, like I’m walking on one of those blow-up bounce houses at a carnival, and the ground shifts up and down, the surface all puffed with air. Not until I’m almost right in front of them do I see that it’s Katharine Hepburn Jane’s talking to, but the young Katharine Hepburn, in a man’s suit and tie with all that billowy auburn hair. And then Katharine Hepburn sort of bounds her way to me, over the ground, which is still more balloon than earth, and she says, “You don’t know anything about God. You don’t even know anything about the movies.” Then she leans in with red lips too full and big to be real and she kisses me with them, and when we pull apart I have those lips between my teeth, but they’re wax. They’re the oversize wax lips like from Halloween and my teeth sink into them all the way up to my gums, and they’re stuck there. And I want to say something, but I can’t, because those lips are all stuck on my teeth and my mouth can’t get around them to form the words. And then Jane Fonda is laughing from somewhere far off—though I’m not sure if that part is still my dream.