The Miseducation of Cameron Post - by Emily M. Danforth

Chapter Nineteen

Mark Turner didn’t come back to Promise. Not two weeks later. Not a month later. Never. At least not while I was there. Reverend Rick and Adam had to pack up his stuff and send it to him in Kearney, Nebraska. Adam never did get his fancy razor returned to him, not that he wanted it back, he said, but it disappeared from Promise, just like Mark. Just like the three of us were going to.

Pretty soon after Mark’s incident, which is what somehow everyone started calling it except for me and Jane and Adam, a guy from the state came out to inspect Promise, the classrooms, the dorms, everything. He worked for one of the licensing departments. Then a couple of other guys came, and a lady. The lady wore a plum-colored pantsuit with a gold-and-plum scarf, and I remember thinking that Aunt Ruth would call the combined effect a smart little look. All the men wore ties and jackets, and everyone who came worked for one state agency or another. Most of these people spent their time in Rick’s office, but one of the guys talked to each disciple for twenty minutes or so. I went in after Erin, but there was no chance to ask her what it was like; we just passed each other in the hallway outside the classroom where he’d set up shop for the day.

At first I liked this guy because he was so routine, and seemed, I don’t know, professional, or at least he didn’t talk down to me, or act like a counselor, probably because he wasn’t one. He introduced himself but I can’t remember his name, Mr. Blah-Blah from the Child and Family Services Department, I think. He started with a series of mundane questions: How often do you eat meals? How much time do you spend on schoolwork, both in the classroom and otherwise, each day? How much time do you spend completing other activities? What is the level of supervision for these activities? And then he asked a few less mundane questions: Do you feel safe in your dorm rooms at night? Do you feel threatened by any staff members or fellow students? (This guy used the word student, not disciple). Do you trust those in charge here? My answer to that question was the first I’d given that really seemed to interest him.

“Not really” is what I said.

He had been taking brief notes on a yellow legal pad, rarely even looking up at me, just reading from his stapled list of questions and then scribbling this or that and moving on. But now he paused and looked right at me, his pen hovered there. “You don’t trust the staff here?”

I guess, in answering that way, I had been expecting a reaction from him, but then I was sort of unsure of what to do with it once I got it. “Well, I mean, trust them how?” I asked. “What do you mean by trust?”

“Trust,” he said, doing one of those this-should-be-obvious-to-you kind of open-mouthed, head-bobbing faces. “Trust: belief in them and their abilities. Do you trust them with your safety and security while you’re living here? Do you believe that they have your best interests in mind?”

I shrugged. “You’re saying those things like they’re completely simple,” I said. “Or black and white or whatever.”

“I think they are black and white,” he said. “I’m not trying to trick you with these questions.” I could tell he was losing patience with me, or maybe he just didn’t like me very much. He had very hairy ears, I noticed. It was hard not to look at them once I did, actually, so much hair coming from the inside, and hair on the outside, too.

“Maybe if you lived here you would feel differently,” I said. Staring at his ears was making me feel like I could start in on uncontrollable giggles, just like Helen at our group session. I concentrated on his tie instead, which was a deeper shade of yellow than his notepad, but not far off. It had cerulean fleurs-de-lis all over it. Cerulean. I still loved that word. It was a nice tie. It was very nice.

“I like your tie,” I said.

He bent his neck to look at it, as if he’d forgotten which tie he’d chosen for the day. Maybe he had. “Thanks,” he said. “It’s new. My wife picked it out for me.”

“That’s nice,” I said. It was nice, sort of. It seemed so normal to have a wife who picked out your yellow ties for you. Whatever that meant: normal. It had to mean not living a life at Promise. It had to at least mean that.

“Yeah, she’s kind of a clothes horse,” he said. Then he seemed to remember what he was doing there with me. He consulted his notes and asked, “Do you think you can tell me more specifically what you mean when you say that you can’t trust the staff here?”

That time he did sound like every other counselor who’d ever asked me to elaborate on my feelings. I was surprised at myself for having picked him to open up to. I was surprised even as I was doing it. Maybe I picked him because I thought he would have to take me seriously, whatever I said, he seemed so fastidious and by the book, and he also seemed, precisely because of his position and that fastidiousness, a little nonjudgmental, I guess.

“I would say that Rick and Lydia and everybody else associated with Promise think that they’re doing what’s best for us, like spiritually or whatever,” I said. “But just because you think something doesn’t make it true.”

“Okaaaaay,” he said. “Can you go on?”

“Not really,” I said, but then tried to anyway. “I’m just saying that sometimes you can end up really messing somebody up because the way you’re trying to supposedly help them is really messed up.”

“So are you saying that their method of treatment is abusive?” he asked me in a tone I didn’t like very much.

“Look, nobody’s beating us. They’re not even yelling at us. It’s not like that.” I sighed and shook my head. “You asked me if I trusted them, and like, I trust them to drive the vans safely on the highway, and I trust that they’ll buy food for us every week, but I don’t trust that they actually know what’s best for my soul, or how to make me the best person with a guaranteed slot in heaven or whatever.” I could tell I was losing him. Or maybe I’d never had him to begin with, and I was mad at myself for being so inarticulate, for messing up what I felt like I owed to Mark, even if he wouldn’t see it that way, which he probably wouldn’t.

“Whatever,” I said. “It’s hard to explain. I just don’t trust that a place like Promise is even necessary, or that I need to be here, or that any of us need to be here, and the whole point of being here is that we’re supposed to trust that what they’re doing is going to save us, so how could I answer yes to your question?”

“I guess you couldn’t,” he said.

I thought maybe I had an in, so I said, “It’s just that I know you’re here because of what happened to Mark.”

But before I could continue he said, “What Mr. Turner did to himself.”

“What?” I asked.

“You said what happened to him,” he said. “Something didn’t just happen to him. He injured himself. Severely.”

“Yeah, while under the care of this facility,” I said.

“Correct,” he said in another unreadable tone. “And that’s why I’m here: to investigate the care that is given by those who run this facility, but not to investigate the mission of the facility, unless that mission includes abuse or neglect.”

“But isn’t there like emotional abuse?” I asked.

“There is,” he said, completely noncommittal. “Do you feel that you’ve been emotionally abused by the staff here?”

“Oh my God,” I said, throwing my hands in the air, feeling every bit as dramatic as I was acting. “I just told you all about it—the whole fucking purpose of this place is to make us hate ourselves so that we change. We’re supposed to hate who we are, despise it.”

“I see,” he said, but I could tell that he didn’t at all. “Is there anything else?”

“No, I think the hate yourself part about covers it.”

He looked at me, unsure, searching for what to say, and then he took a breath and said, “Okay. I want you to know that I’ve written down what you’ve said and it will go in the official file. I’ll also share it with my committee.” He had jotted some things down as I was talking, but I definitely didn’t trust that he’d really written down what I had said, not really, at least not the way that I’d said it.

“Right,” I said. “Well, I’m sure that will be an effective method for change.” Now I hated this guy, and myself a little too—for hoping that I could make something happen just by answering a few questions honestly. For once.

“I’m not sure I understand,” he said.

And I believe that he really didn’t understand what I was trying to say; I do. But I also believe that he didn’t really want to, because he probably wasn’t so nonjudgmental after all, and maybe he even believed that people like me, like Mark, absolutely did belong at Promise. Or somewhere worse. And though I knew that I couldn’t explain all of that to him, make what I was feeling fit neatly into words, I tried, more for me and for Mark than for this guy’s understanding.

“My whole point,” I said, “is that what they teach here, what they believe, if you don’t trust it, if you doubt it at all, then you’re told that you’re going to hell, that not only everyone you know is ashamed of you, but that Jesus himself has given up on your soul. And if you’re like Mark, and you do believe all of this, you really do—you have faith in Jesus and this stupid Promise system, and even still, even with those things, you still can’t make yourself good enough, because what you’re trying to change isn’t changeable, it’s like your height or the shape of your ears, whatever, then it’s like this place does make things happen to you, or at least it’s supposed to convince you that you’re always gonna be a dirty sinner and that it’s completely your fault because you’re not trying hard enough to change yourself. It convinced Mark.”

“Are you saying that you think the staff should have anticipated that Mark would do something like this?” he asked, jotting again. “Were there warning signs?”

At that I just gave up completely.

“Yeah, I’d say his verbatim memorization of the most fucked-up passages in the Bible might have been one,” I said, looking right at him and trying to make my face as blank as his. “But here at Promise that’s seen as a sign of progress. It’s actually surprising that all of us disciples haven’t hacked off our privates with the handiest sharp object. I’ll probably do it when I get back to my room, first chance.”

That changed his flat face but he controlled it again pretty fast. “I’m sorry that you’re so upset,” he said. He didn’t say I’m sorry that I’ve upset you. He didn’t take the blame; but he was probably right not to. It wasn’t really his fault.

“I am upset,” I said. “That’s as good a word as any.”

He had other questions for me then, and he tried a couple more times to get me to give him specifics about this emotional abuse I felt I had suffered, but even the way he said it made it sound so stupid, and me like a whiny kid who didn’t like the appropriate punishment I was receiving on account of my bad, bad behavior. I gave him one- or two-word answers and it didn’t take more than maybe three minutes before he’d recapped his pen and thanked me for coming and asked me to “please send Steve Cromps in next.” So I did.

I don’t know what any reports that were filed to state agencies about the incident concluded, but I do know that nothing much changed at Promise. Kevin the night monitor was fired, that was one thing. He was replaced by Harvey, a sixtysomething who used to do security for Walmart. Harvey wore squeaky, black, old-man sneakers and did this rapid, three-quick-blows nostril-clearing thing into his hanky every fifteen minutes or so. I felt confident that if he caught me outside of my room at night, Rick and Lydia would most definitely know about it. Also, our parents or guardians were told about the incident; probably that was required by law. Ruth wrote me a long letter about how sorry she was that it had happened. She didn’t write anything about possibly doubting the treatment I was receiving, or blaming it, or worrying that a similar fate might befall me. Other people’s parents reacted similarly. Nobody pulled their kids out of Promise or anything like that. (Well, except for Mark’s parents, of course.) For a few weeks right after, we were an even more exotic band of sinners when we attended off-campus church services at Word of Life. But the luster of us somehow being gruesome by association wore off pretty quickly, and soon we were just run-of-the-mill sexual deviants again.

I remember that my dad used to say that Montana only has two seasons: winter and road construction. I’ve heard lots of people say it since then, but I still think of it as something my dad said, something I remember him saying from when I was really, really little. I know all the reasons why people say stuff like that, the good-natured kidding about a state you’re actually completely in love with; the folksy way of articulating the suffocating qualities of a seemingly endless Montana winter and the dry heat and annoyances of the summer that so soon follows; the way a saying like that encapsulates just how present the natural world is in Montana, and how aware of it you are—the sky, the land, the weather, all of it. (Variations on the saying include: Montana has only two seasons: winter and forest fires; winter and whatever’s not; hunting season and waiting-for-hunting season.)

I can tell you for a fact, though, that there was most definitely a springtime in western Montana in 1993. And thank God for that, because our escape plan depended on it. Spring started to trickle in by the middle of March, a little bit here and there, and it had flooded the entire valley where Promise sat before the end of May. At first all our snowpack grew slushy, thawing during the day, refreezing at night, and repeat, and repeat, and then it melted into the ground entirely, leaving every path muddy, some places swampy, which sure didn’t stop Adam and me from resuming our trail runs, even when we had to wear sweatshirts and gloves, even when the second half of the run, back to the dorms, took almost twice as long as the first half, our sneakers so clumped up with thick mud that they might as well have been weights attached to our feet. It didn’t matter whose bedroom you walked past, now everybody had their windows open, letting all the good spring smells float in, the wet earth and new growth and the indescribable scent of icy mountain wind as it rushed from those peaks still covered in snowcaps that wouldn’t ever melt completely and weren’t really all that far outside our windows.

By the time the first crocuses appeared—there was a huge patch of them behind one of the summer camp cabins, and also these tiny yellow flowers that spread like shag carpet across the most unlikely ground, creeping out of crevices in rocks and alongside the edge of the barn—Jane and Adam and I had settled on a time to escape. We were gonna go at the beginning of June, just after we took our exams at the Lifegate Christian School in Bozeman but before the start of Camp Promise. I’d been working ahead on my classes, and if I passed the exams I’d be in the twelfth grade in terms of course credits, which is where Adam would be. But Jane would be graduating; she’d be finished. It was most important to her to have her transcripts in order.

We were still working out all of the details of our plan then, the whole thing looming vague and uncertain ahead of us, but from the very start Jane was pushing for us not to go until finals were over. She’d been arguing with Adam about it. He wanted us to leave sooner rather than later, and he definitely saw June as later.

Jane and I were talking it over quietly one morning while on cleaning duty together, the two of us scrubbing the always mildewy shower stalls, our voices echoey despite our attempts to speak lowly. Those stalls were heavy with the smell of Comet, something I still couldn’t be around without thinking of the terrible night Grandma told me the news. I was glad we had our escape plan for me to focus on instead.

Jane was in the middle of making yet another point about the benefits of waiting until June when I said, “I’m fine with going after finals, it’s cool. I get it. But then why even bother leaving with us?”

“What do you mean, ‘why bother’?” She squeezed her yellow scrub sponge into our shared bucket. “For all the same reasons you’re bothering.”

“I just mean that you’ll be done,” I said. “You can go to college. You don’t have to escape.”

“Hardly,” she said. “I don’t turn eighteen until August, which will make me a minor with a diploma until then, still technically under my mother’s guardianship, and she’ll want me to stay through summer camp, I can guarantee you that; the less time I’m under her roof, the better.” She dunked her sponge again, it made a squelchy-splashy noise as she twisted it. “Besides, you think I’m actually going to pursue my higher education at Bob Jones University? Or maybe Wayland Baptist in ever-progressive Plainview, Texas?”

“Just because they made you apply to shit schools doesn’t mean you have to go to those schools,” I said. Bethany kept a file thick with brochures and catalogs for evangelical colleges, and Jane and a couple of the other disciples who would be graduating had spent some time that fall applying to them, which was, according to Jane, a formality, because, she said, those kinds of colleges let in everyone who can pay and is either authentically evangelical or willing to play the part. And indeed, many, many acceptance letters from those colleges had been arriving at Promise all spring, nobody turned away.

“Of course I don’t have to,” she said. “But they didn’t let me apply anywhere that I might actually want to go, and it’s too late now to try for this fall. Unless maybe I find a community college somewhere.” She had been squatting to dunk her sponge, and as she stood, I could tell her bad leg was bothering her. She kept shifting her hip so that her weight rested on the other leg as she passed her sponge up and down the shower wall. “It’s such a farce. Did I ever tell you that Lydia did her studying at Cambridge? And she looks the other way while they have us apply to the University of Christ on a Cross.”

“I’ve heard their field hockey team is outstanding,” I said.

Jane threw her sponge at me. It missed and flew out of the stall into the sink area, where it landed with a gross squelch against the wall. I grinned and moved to get it, but Jane put her hand up, started that way herself.

“I don’t even know if I want to go to college,” she said. “I think I’d rather be a student of the world for a while.”

“I guess,” I said. “But if that’s the case, it just seems like you don’t have to go to all the trouble of the running-away part. If you’re not planning to live with your mom while you’re a student of the world, anyway.”

“Heavens no,” Jane said, returning to the stall. “There’s nothing for me in her perfect slice of suburban America, sprinkles on top.”

“Exactly,” I said. “So if you’re not gonna live with her or go to the college she wants you to go to, why not just tell her, and if she freaks and tells you to never come back, it’s like the same thing as running away, anyway. I mean, no doubt Adam and I will be sent back here for another year if we don’t leave. But not you.”

“Do you not want me to come with you or something?” Jane asked, and she sounded hurt, especially for Jane, who barely ever sounded hurt. “You’re thinking maybe Hopalong might slow you two down?”

“No—shit, not at all,” I said, and I meant it. “It just seems like you’re taking the hard way when you don’t really have to.”

She stopped scrubbing then and stood there with her dirty sponge dripping fat drops onto the tiled shower floor. “It’s odd that you see it as the hard way,” she said, “because I see it exactly opposite. I’ve known for what feels like the longest, longest time that I’d have to escape my mother one day, and it seems much easier to do that with this big action, something she can’t ignore—that I’ve completely run away with all these people—than with anything I might say to her. I’ve said and said all the words there are to say about how her way isn’t my way, and as far as I can tell, it’s never made a dent.”

“You think this will make a dent?” I asked.

“The great thing is that I won’t be around to find out one way or another,” she said, smiling a Jane smile. “Besides, this way I get to do it with you and Adam and not just me all on my own. At least when we start out.”

This was where our plan got muddled, even after we agreed on a go time: where, exactly, it was that we were going, and just how long we would stay together after we got there. At first I think Adam assumed that we’d just move somewhere, all three of us, and I don’t know, set up house or something, and that didn’t sound completely unappealing to me until Jane reminded us that there would be people looking for us, that we were minors, and even worse, that once she turned eighteen and became an official adult, she could maybe be charged with aiding us in our flight or something. We weren’t really sure about any of the actual laws involved, but certainly I’d seen enough movies to know that all the bad guys split up when they were on the run, so that if one was caught, not everybody else got trapped too. And we sort of liked thinking of ourselves as the bad guys, but the kind who you root for, the ones who you want to make it.

For a while the favored version of the plan was to escape while on a mass outing in Bozeman, maybe even immediately following our exams, like immediately, just leave from the Lifegate Christian School itself. But if we did that, it would be nearly impossible to bring any supplies with us, even a change of clothes, not to mention that Lydia was supervigilant about watching us when we left the compound, especially since my thwarted marker heist.

Adam still pushed for stealing a van, but both Jane and I eventually convinced him, for certain this time, that that getaway would get us tracked down faster than any other. Finally we decided that even with Jane’s leg, cross-country trekking was our best option, especially considering that the three of us had an established outdoorsiness that would allow us, in those weeks of late spring, to realistically “disappear” on a hike for a portion of the day. We guessed that we could be gone from campus for probably six to seven hours before they’d go looking for us, or send anyone looking for us. Maybe more if we started out early in the day, said we were taking a picnic lunch. Plus, Jane really was, as she liked to remind us, a bit of an off-the-land type, and she could definitely read a map, work a compass, and build a fire.

There were dozens of campgrounds and trailheads and tourist traps, even a few tiny towns, within a fifteen- to twenty-mile radius of Promise, less depending on how you traveled it; and at any of those places we determined that we might be able to hitch a ride into Bozeman if we could just convincingly pass ourselves off as granola college kids, which we thought we could do: especially if we happened upon any actual granola college kids out hiking or camping.

“We’ll have no trouble making friends,” Adam said more than once. “I mean, we’ll come bearing pot. It’s the must-have get-to-know-you and thanks-for-letting-us-escape-our-degaying-camp gift of the year.”

Once in Bozeman, the plan was, we’d track down former Scanlan lifeguard and under-the-dock-make-out partner Mona Harris, who I believed would be willing to, at the very least, let us crash on the floor of her dorm room for a night or two until we could figure out what came next. Even once we had this much of the plan tacked down, things got very murky again with the what might come next part: murky for each of us. I thought I’d try to somehow contact Margot Keenan. I wasn’t sure yet how much I’d ask of her, or really even what I’d ask of her; but she was an adult I thought I could trust, someone I believed would help me and stay quiet about it. Jane planned to call her old flame, the tragedy of a woman she’d purchased the really strong pot off of at Christmas. She said this lady was a total wild card and that she might drive all the way to Bozeman to pick her up, or might tell her to go fuck herself, but Jane assured us that she wouldn’t be interested in ratting us out to the authorities because it would “entirely go against her sensibilities to play the narc.” Adam didn’t know what he planned to do once we got to Mona’s, but he seemed unconcerned about that. Whatever he decided, though, the idea was to go our separate ways from Bozeman, at least for a while: a while being until we were all eighteen. This part of the plan, the splitting-up part, however murky and unformed and kind of impossible to believe we’d ever even arrive at in reality, made me unbelievably sad to think of, all the same.

In early April, Jane got caught smoking up in the hayloft. (Somehow Adam and I weren’t with her when it happened. We were on garbage detail; it just worked out that way.) Jane had just finished her one-on-one and had a few minutes before dinner duty, so she went to the barn just to take a hit or two, because that afternoon was so nice, completely flushed with spring. Apparently, Dane Bunsky, also on dinner duty, had followed her from afar. He’d been strange since Mark’s incident, like he’d turned his anger into vigilance, not against Promise and its teachings, but for it, toward its goals. It was weird to see happen. Dane knew a thing or two about drugs; my guess is that he’d probably known about us smoking pot for a while, but this was the day he chose to go get Lydia and lead her to Jane, who had, as she put it, “a beautiful little joint between my lips when I saw first the white top of her head and then her face pop up over the edge of the loft. She actually climbed up the ladder to catch me; it was rather remarkable.”

Remarkable or not, Jane was given a more severe punishment than any I’d seen distributed in my time at Promise: all free-time hours replaced with supervised or in-room study hours; all decoration and correspondence privileges revoked until the infamous yet to be determined later date; parents informed; and, worst of all, mandatory one-on-one daily counseling with either Rick or Lydia, probably Lydia, because Rick had been traveling a ton, promoting both Promise and a Free from the Weight video series he was featured in as a success story.

Now Adam and I saw Jane only at meals or during other supervised activities like classroom hours and church services. And even then, Lydia would often come and eat at the same table with us, or sit in the same pew, continually grazing her icy eyes over us in a way you could feel even without looking at her. Through notes folded into tiny squares and passed in secret, and clipped sentences offered here and there, we found out that Jane had given up some of the pot she had hidden in the barn to appease Lydia and to hopefully convince her that was all of it, the whole stash. Lydia hadn’t discovered Jane’s prosthetic hiding spot. Jane didn’t think she would. And best, Jane hadn’t mentioned Adam and me as fellow smokers, nor had Dane, if he knew about us, which I’m pretty sure he must have.

“Your punishment couldn’t really have come at a more inconvenient time, could it?” Adam said at breakfast one morning while Lydia was still in line, carefully spooning the least watery sections from the scrambled eggs bin onto her plate.

“Actually, I think it’s providence,” Jane said fast. “It’s the best time of all.” She looked around for spies, but a lot of the disciples weren’t even in the room yet, or they were half asleep over their food. She lowered her voice even more anyway and said, “We still don’t know how we’re going to get our IDs out of the office. To make that happen, at least one of us needs to get special evangelical detail duties that none of us are candidates for right now. I’m going to use this punishment to pull a Dane Bunsky.”

“What?” Adam said before I could.

“I’ll spend the next month pretending to buy everything Lydia’s selling,” she said, her eyes bright and sort of wild. “Completely. I think you two should as well. But you can’t make it obvious that you’re doing it; you need a reason for your reform.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Adam said, and he was still speaking for both of us. “Dane’s not pretending anything.”

“He might not be trying to plan an escape, but he hasn’t actually found Christ,” Jane said. “Mark was his catalyst for change, for extreme devotion, and Lydia’s loving that. I got caught with pot, and so during my one-on-ones I’m being really honest about my passion for smoking up—by honest I mean I’m telling Lydia that I smoke pot to deal with my guilt over my sinful sexual perversion.”

“And that’s actually working?” I asked.

Jane nodded. “As far as I can tell. I mean, I’ve never really opened up to her before, and she knows it, so she can’t help but think we’re making progress. And I just started. Wait until I cry.”

“I’ve cried in my one-on-ones before,” Adam said.

“Of course you have,” Jane said. “Indubitably.”

“Oh, excuse me my delicacies, you woman of stone, you,” Adam said, pretending to pout.

Now Lydia was saying something to Erin, but her plate was full, her cup of tea in hand. She’d be joining us any second.

“I don’t know how convincing I can be,” I said. “I feel like she’ll get what I’m doing right off.”

“Even if she does,” Jane said, “she won’t really know why you’re doing it. I just think that the less time we three spend with each other right now, and the more we seem to commit ourselves to Promise, the better. We have to sacrifice today to benefit tomorrow.”

“Ugh, gross,” Adam said. “You already sound like her.”

“Good,” Jane said. “That’s the idea.”

Lydia sat down at our table just after that and we all talked about things she brought up for us to talk about, none of which I remember.

Not so many days later I received, in the mail, the perfect catalyst for explaining a change in my behavior during my one-on-ones, though it didn’t present itself as that right from the start. I mean, I didn’t like get it and think, Super, now I’ll manipulate Lydia with this sob story; it just sort of opened itself up to me as I went along.

What I got in the mail was a typed three-page letter from Grandma (with an additional handwritten one-page inclusion from Ruth) detailing the difficulties Ruth was having with her NF tumor, and the thwarted surgery that was supposed to remove it. The tumor had apparently been growing at what everyone called an alarming rate ever since Christmas, especially since Christmas, and it was now obvious that Ruth had this mass on her back. She wasn’t able to easily hide it beneath her clothes any longer. Plus it was now also painful, and it was making her tired, this thing basically feeding off her like a tick or a tapeworm, and so her Minnesota surgery was pushed up by a couple of weeks, and both Ray and Grandma went to Minneapolis with her to get the damned thing cut off. But all had not gone well.

Lydia gave me the envelope at the start of a one-on-one, and since all disciple mail was still opened and screened before we received it, she already knew the contents. We usually got mail at the end of one-on-ones, or in a mass delivery to our bedrooms on Saturdays, so I knew something was strange even as she handed it to me. Then she said, “Why don’t you read it now so that we can discuss it if you need to.” And I actually got kind of worried about what I might find inside.

In her letter, Grandma talked a lot about the trip to Minneapolis and the hospital itself, and also the very fancy visitors’ wing, where they had these old typewriters set up for kids to play around on, she guessed, but she had decided to sit down and type out this letter to me, just to see if she could still do it. I feel just like Jessica Fletcher. You remember her, from “Murder, She Wrote”?

This whole business has been a real mess. The surgeons here only took off the top of the tumor (nearly a pound and a half!) before they decided that they dare not go any closer to your aunt Ruth’s spinal cord (though they had told her originally that they were going to do just that). Also, she lost quite a lot of blood while they were operating and that was worrisome, as you might expect it would be. There was a whole g-damn football team of these doctors in green clothes (I asked, and they call them scrubs) and not one of them felt right going any closer to her spine. So now the biggest section of the tumor is gone, but everyone, this whole team of doctors, is convinced that it was just a quick fix and the tumor will keep growing again because that root (or whatever you call it) is still there. They did go ahead and do a biopsy on what they got and it was benign (that’s good--it means cancer free). But they pulled a small one off her thigh (she’s had them there before, you remember) and that one was malignant (the bad kind), so they have to give her some radiation to kill the cancer cells there. Also, Ruth has the makings of another tumor on her stomach. This one isn’t hard like the one on her back, but it is quite large, they said, for a brand-new growth. So we came over here to Minnesota to get just the one removed and now we have a whole other kettle of fish to deal with. How do you like that? I call it a mess. Ruth has to stay here in Minnesota for another two weeks for the radiation and all, and then she has to be on bed rest at home for some time as well, although I do not expect that she will follow those orders to the letter. (Though she should!) Ray is going home to Miles City because he needs to get back to work, but I plan to stay with Ruth and keep her company. I We sure wish that you were here with us, Spunky.

Ruth had this to say (to me, anyway):

I think your grandmother just about covered it. Who knew she was such a typist?! I just wanted to write you and say that I am doing well. I am tired, but I feel strong, and I think this surgery was progress, even if it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. I know what the doctors are saying about regrowth, but doctors don’t know everything, and I, for one, am willing to hold out some hope that it will stay the size they’ve left it now for another ten or twenty years or even longer, who knows, maybe forever. . . . I’ve had it back there for so many years with not one change to it that I do not consider it foolish to think this might happen. As for the one on my leg, I think the radiation will zap all of its cancerous remnants away.

It is a blessing to have your grandmother here with me, and we talk about you every day. You are missed. I hope that you will add my recovery to your prayers for your own, and I want you to know that I am still praying for you too, Cameron. I love you very, very much.

When I’d finished them both and was tucking them back into the envelope, Lydia said, “I was sorry to learn of your aunt’s illness. This is something she’s had for some time?”

I thought it was sort of funny that Lydia said to learn of your aunt’s illness when what she really should have said was I opened your letters and read all about your aunt’s illness.What I said, though, was “Yeah, but it’s not usually like this. It’s, normally, she just gets these little growths removed every few years and she’s okay. I don’t think it’s ever been this bad.”

“It’s a form of cancer, then?” Lydia asked, her voice with that kind of hushed quality that some people always use to talk about cancer.

“NF isn’t,” I said. “It’s a genetic thing where you get these tumors on your nerves—I don’t really understand it that well, but it isn’t actually cancer. But if you have it, you have like a much better chance of developing cancer, which I guess happened in the tumor on her leg.”

“You must be worried about her,” Lydia said.

“Yeah,” I said, quick, because it was the response that I was supposed to give, the response that, whatever had happened between Ruth and me, I still should have felt like giving, but it wasn’t honest. I wasn’t not worried about Ruth; I mean, I didn’t wish her sickness or more cancerous growths or whatever, but I was mainly thinking about Grandma in that big hospital in Minneapolis, wandering those long, antiseptic hospital hallways that always sort of glow green, getting herself and Ruth little snacks in the cafeteria, the kinds of food Grandma loved, slices of cream pies and a big salad bar to pick and choose from, watching her detective shows on the TV in Ruth’s room, the volume too low for her to really hear it because Ruth was resting, then click-clacking away on the typewriter in a sticky, crowded waiting room where everyone looked tired, was tired, just so she could send me a letter. Picturing Grandma carrying a tray topped with a couple of bowls of soup, riding an elevator up to Ruth’s floor, made me sadder than picturing Ruth in her hospital bed, even though she was the one who was actually sick.

Lydia must have been saying something that I didn’t hear, because when she said, “Is that something you’d like to do right now?” I had to ask, “Do what?”

And she pursed her lips and then said, “Call your aunt in the hospital. We can do so; as I said, I have the number.”

“Okay,” I said, hoping, as Lydia and I walked down to the main office, that I’d get to talk to Grandma, that she wouldn’t be tooling around the gift shop or outside getting some air.

She wasn’t. After Judy at the nurse’s station connected me to the room, it was Grandma who said, “Yes, hello.”

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spoken on the phonewith Grandma. Not since before my mom and dad died, I’m pretty sure. We used to call her in Billings sometimes on the weekends, though not that often, because usually she just came down to see us or we went to her. I’ve heard people say “tears sprang to my eyes” before, or I’ve read it, I guess, but I don’t think that I ever really felt like that had happened to me, like I didn’t have some sense that I might cry before I started doing so, at least not until Grandma answered the phone. I was just standing in the office with its officey smell of paper and permanent marker and the glue on the backs of postage stamps, and I was aware of Lydia standing just behind me—she’d dialed the number and was now planted behind me to monitor the call, my end, anyway, and then there was Grandma’s voice from some hospital room in Minneapolis, but it was like her voice out of the past too, out of my past, her voice speaking to the me who I wasn’t anymore and never would be again. And you know what, fucking tears sprang to my eyes. They did. They weren’t there and then they were, and I had to kind of take in a breath before I said, “It’s me, Grandma. It’s Cameron.”

After that kind of a beginning, the actual meat of the phone call wasn’t all that interesting. Grandma was superexcited to have me call, I could tell, and she told me all about the good cafeteria food, just like I knew she would, and all about these beautiful pink flowering trees in the hospital courtyard that she didn’t know the name of but that sure made her sneeze, and when the phone was passed to Ruth, she sounded tired, but also like she was trying to make her voice bright and not tired, which made her sound more sick than if she hadn’t done that. She and I didn’t talk for very long, but I told her that I hoped she felt better soon and that I was thinking about her, which was true.

After I’d hung up Lydia, motioned for me to sit in the spinny desk chair, and she took the nonspinny desk chair just across the room, but it was a small room and we were sitting very close, looking at each other. She just let me think for a moment or whatever, and then she said, “So how did that go?”

And I said, “It was weird.”

And Lydia said, “You know how I feel about you using that word during a session. It’s a catchall: the way you use it, it’s meaningless. Be specific.”

And for once I was specific. I was completely and totally specific and honest about what I was thinking right then in that moment. “I don’t know why,” I said, “but when I was talking to them, I kept picturing the two of them in a room in a hospital, which isn’t strange, I know, but it wasn’t the hospital they’re actually at, because I’ve never even been there, so how would I know what it looks like? Where I keep thinking of them as being is actually the abandoned hospital in Miles City. It’s called Holy Rosary, and like, even right now, if I try to picture my grandma in Ruth’s room, I just see it as abandoned Holy Rosary, all dirty and dark. I mean, I could change that picture, I think, and make it more accurate and put working machines and everything in the room, but that’s where my mind goes if I just let it. I see them in Holy Rosary.”

“Why do you think that is?” Lydia asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You must have some idea,” she said.

“Maybe because I’ve spent so much time there, more than I’ve ever spent in an actual, functioning hospital or whatever. Plus it’s a pretty hard place to forget.”

“But you weren’t supposed to be there, were you?” Lydia said, flipping to a clean page in her notebook, which she hardly ever did during my sessions because we covered so little ground.

“No,” I said. “We used to break in.”

It wasn’t like this was the first time that I’d ever mentioned Holy Rosary during a session. Of course we’d gotten to the topic of my unhealthy friendship with Jamie and the guys, what Lydia called my need to inappropriately emulate the reckless behavior of certain teenage males, which was part of my incorrect gender identity. We’d also covered, loosely, my underage drinking (which fell into that reckless behavior category), and we’d even gotten to what had eventually occurred between Lindsey and me, for the first time, in that abandoned hospital. But what fascinated Lydia, she told me, both that afternoon and for several one-on-ones to follow, was that I was connecting this place where I had experienced all kinds of sin with the guilt and sadness I was feeling over Aunt Ruth’s illness. And, according to Lydia, there was much work to be done, and progress to be made in “understanding that connection, digging it out and pushing it into the light and really facing it.”

I didn’t know that much about psychology. I’ve learned a few things about it recently, I guess, since leaving Promise; but when it was happening to me, when I was in the middle of my one-on-ones or group sessions, I couldn’t have told you where the religion part ended and the psychology part picked up. At least not when Lydia was running the show. With Reverend Rick, he might use a psychological term now and then, like gender identity or root cause, but most of the time he stuck to Scripture, to words like sin, repentance, obedience, and that’s only when he was talking in that authoritative kind of way, which he didn’t do very often, really. He mainly listened. But with Lydia everything mixed together, a passage from the Bible followed by an activity she’d gotten from NARTH—the National Association for the Research and Treatment of Homosexuality. Or maybe Lydia reminding us that sin was sin, and then talking about the pseudo-self-affirming behaviors associated with our sins. If the goal was to keep us from questioning the treatment we were getting in our support sessions because we didn’t know what, exactly, to question, to disagree with—the Bible or the psychology she was using—it kind of worked. But I don’t think it was necessarily so organized, so planned out as a means to manipulate us. I just think it really was the Wild West out there and they were making shit up as they went along. I mean, who was there to stop them? I know the word for all this now: it’s pseudoscientific. It’s kind of a great word: I like the s sound that comes twice in a row when you say it. But that day in the office with Lydia I didn’t know the word pseudoscientific, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have used it. I was glad she thought we were on the verge of uncovering something significant about my fucked-up development cycle, about just how I had become the vessel for sin that had earned me my place at Promise. I let her believe it, and not only because of Jane’s insistence that the three of us should get in good with the management to hasten our escape, but also because I thought, If I’m really gonna leave Promise forever, for good, and never look back, maybe I should spend the next month or so actually giving myself over to the place, its ways. Not giving in to it, not that. And not somehow acquiring faith and devotion by snapping my fingers. I knew that I would never be a Mark Turner: I didn’t have the capacity for it, or the upbringing, or the combination of the two, whatever. But I thought that if I could be honest with Lydia, really honest, and answer all of her questions fully, then maybe I could somehow figure out some things about myself. What the hell? is basically what I was thinking. What the hell?