The Girls of No Return (3 page)

 

HINDMAN BUTTS UP AGAINST THE SOUTHEAST END OF THE
Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area, a two-million-acre maze of mountains, lakes, rivers, and impassable canyons, with the occasional forest ranger thrown in to make the place seem manageable, which of course it's not. The Frank, as some call it, or River of No Return, as others do, is at once as mystical and unpredictable as its name implies. Winding through it all is the Salmon River, with its various forks, tributaries, Class Five rapids, and a penchant for sucking in the occasional rafter and sometimes, but only sometimes, spitting him back. You may be going to the Church, but you may never come out.

This is what Margaret told me as we wound our way northwest into the mountains, Bee jolting mercilessly around potholes and rocks on the dirt road that seemed to get narrower the farther we drove. Her voice had lost all traces of new-age bullshit the moment we turned from Hindman's main street onto the wilderness access road. Now, she seemed to be speaking with a tour train conductor's excited chatter. I couldn't tell whether I should write her off as a fraud or applaud her for being such a skilled chameleon.

“Over five hundred and twenty-eight different species of wildflowers, two hundred fifty types of wildlife, and more black bears per square mile than the San Diego Zoo,” she said in her low voice, glancing over at me. “Harmless, of course,” she added, “unless you piss them off. That's one of our rules up at Alice Marshall: Don't Piss Off the Bears.” She laughed. “Problem is, with bears as with people, you don't always know what's going to get under their skin.”

“I'll keep that in mind,” I said, looking out the window.

“Here's my policy.” Margaret continued as though she hadn't heard me. “Treat Them Like Trees. Only crazy people hug trees.”

“So you're not just a crunchy granola,” I said without thinking. My face turned red. I wondered if it was possible to get kicked out of school before you even got there.

Margaret glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. “I've found,” she said slowly, “that parents need to hear one thing, and students need to hear another. Some books have many covers, Lida. But don't get me wrong,” she added, swerving suddenly to avoid a chipmunk. “I've got more than enough hippy-dippy mantras and affirmations to go around. And they work.” She grinned at the windshield, as if she'd just told a private joke.

“Great,” I said.

We drove in silence for a while, Margaret murmuring to Bee and patting the dashboard every time we lurched over a bad pothole, me staring out the window at the increasingly dense vegetation, trees so tall and rangy that they almost blocked out the sun. I was trying not to think, and was finding it a strangely easy thing to do. Maybe the trend would continue. A year of not thinking. I could handle that.

Bee bounced past a small parking area by a trailhead with an outhouse next to it. No cars. There was a large mud-brown sign posted just past it on the road — courtesy, obviously, of the National Forest Service. D
ESIGNATED
W
ILDERESS
A
REA
, it read. N
O
M
OTORIZED
V
EHICLES
B
EYOND
T
HIS
P
OINT
. The road beyond the sign had devolved until it was little more than two ruts, overgrown with grass and a fine coating of pine needles. I looked at Margaret, who kept driving.

“Um,” I said. It occurred to me that she might actually consider the car to be a trusty old companion, like a dog or a horse. An extension of her legs. Certainly not something as
inhuman
as a motorized vehicle. I cleared my throat. “Um,” I said again. “Shouldn't we park or something?”

“Oh, right,” Margaret said. She was still driving. She smiled over at me. “That sign is for everyone else. This road here is just for us. It's our own highway to heaven.”

She maneuvered expertly around a root the size of a giant's thumb that had sprung up in the middle of the road. Highway to heaven, my ass.

Margaret kept talking. “You're not going to have to worry about strangers up here, Lida. There's a fire lookout a mile up from the school, but that's about it. No one can live on this land but us.”

It didn't seem like such a treat, this isolation. I may not have paid any attention to our neighbors in Bruno, but at least I knew that someone would hear me if I screamed, and that was a kind of comfort. “Pretty swanky,” I said.

“You don't know the half of it,” Margaret said, ignoring the sarcastic tone in my voice. “Give yourself a week. You'll see how blessed we are to be up here.”

“If it's so fantastic, why haven't more people bought up the land?” I supposed I could see how the dark trees and the stillness outside the window might hold some sort of allure. I could imagine a golf course, full-service spa, maybe a meditation center.

“Because they can't,” said Margaret. “Alice Marshall's father built the original school buildings in the late thirties, as a base camp for his fishing buddies. Legend has it that he was planning on turning it into a luxury fishing lodge, like they have up in Alaska. Died of a heart attack at age fifty-four, and Alice inherited it all. It's been a school since the mid-sixties. When Congress made this an official Wilderness Area in 1980, the buildings were grandfathered in.”

“What does that mean?” I imagined a grizzled old man leading a small line of buildings, tiny as LEGOs, through the woods.

“Means that the school could stay open even after Alice's death, stay where it is, because it was built before the River of No Return became essentially sacred. We're the only ones who can drive in and out of here — even supply trucks have to meet us in that parking lot that we passed a while back. It means,” she said, looking at me as we rocketed through another crater-sized pothole, “that the school is invaluable. Priceless.”

Or worthless
, I thought. Depending on how you looked at it, of course. “How long has it been a school for delinquents?” I asked.

“It's never been a school for
delinquents
.” Margaret shook her head. “There are other schools out there that are much better equipped for extreme misbehavior.” She caught sight of my raised eyebrows and said, “In the world of wilderness therapy schools, we're the equivalent of a misdemeanor. There are other schools that are more like felonies.”

I didn't quite get the difference, but I didn't say anything. Was that all I was? A B-grade miscreant?

“Oh, you'll see what I mean, eventually.” She paused. “In answer to your question, though, Alice Marshall was originally a boarding school for boys. In the early nineties, right before she died, Alice deeded it to her niece with the provision that it should be a safe haven for girls who find traditional schooling to be . . .” She paused, searching for the right word. “Challenging.”

“She must have hated high school too,” I said, and then catching myself, added, “or something.”

Margaret nodded. “I expect she did.”

The road became even narrower, so that it looked like a glorified hiking trail. Tree branches scraped against Bee's sides as we drove on, more slowly now. We were winding up, up, up through the forest, and every once in a while Margaret had to shift into a lower gear so that we lurched backward for one sickening moment and then finally forward again. Both of Margaret's hands were tight around the wheel. I thought it best not to talk.

We passed through an open cattle gate with two signs attached to its metal frame. One read N
O
T
RESPASSING
. The other read AMS. Of the two, the N
O
T
RESPASSING
sign was significantly larger. Its rusted red lettering and bullet-punctured, hanging-by-a-nail quality certainly had me convinced. A four-inch pine tree shot through the middle of the Alice Marshall sign, with the school initials kind of surrounding the tree in a Gothic font.

“Well,” said Margaret. “Here we are. Home sweet rustic home.”

About two hundred yards past the gate, the road ended abruptly in what was clearly a makeshift parking lot. Four vans were parked there, the same school crest as the sign on the gate painted onto their sides. There was just enough room for Bee. The trees surrounding the parking lot were huge and dense, and though I thought I could make out the shape of a building through the pines, I wasn't sure. Everything suddenly seemed very dark. Bee suddenly seemed very warm and cozy.

“It's not much to look at from inside the car,” said Margaret, catching the expression on my face. “But if you stand outside for a minute, I guarantee you'll feel your soul expanding.”

I wasn't convinced, but I got out. Not that I had a choice.

It was quiet. It was quiet and still, and it smelled like wood smoke, cider, and leather, and I won't say that my soul expanded, but it definitely didn't contract.

“There,” said Margaret, pulling my bag out of the car. “See?”

I shrugged. I was very good at shrugging. If shrugging had been an Olympic sport, I would have at least made the team.

Margaret laughed, a throaty smoker's chuckle. “Let's go meet Bev.” She handed me my pack and helped me wrestle it onto my shoulders. We headed down a pine-needle path toward two buildings that became slightly clearer the closer we got. One of them, set back among the trees, was a large rectangular structure. It had all the charm and personality of a prison. I pointed to it.

“Is that where we all sleep?”

“Goodness no. That behemoth is only used during Parents' Weekend.” Margaret looked at me sympathetically. “Don't worry. The student cabins look nothing like this.” She pointed through the trees to a small group of cabins that I could just barely make out beyond the dorm. “Those are the staff quarters,” she said, adding, “and they're off-limits.”

The smaller of the two buildings in front of us was a cabin, with a little log porch jutting out from the door. There was a windsock hanging off the side of the cabin that read W
ELCOME!
in an embarrassing shock of pastels, but it wasn't a windy day, and the sock had sagged and folded over itself so that it said W
EME!

“This is the director's cabin,” Margaret said, before knocking on the door.

“Why are you knocking, then?” I asked.

Margaret looked at me strangely. “Did you think I was the school director?”

I gave another one of my award-winning shrugs.

“You really didn't read the pamphlet, did you?” she asked, just as the door opened and I stared into the much older, much stonier, much more intimidating face of the real school director. Her short brown hair was perfectly curled around her head in a tight helmet. Her pants were pressed and pleated into sharp arrows. Even her shoes (brown loafers with buckles the size of collection plates) looked ready for battle.

“Beverly Cantrell,” she said. “You can call me Bev.” When I didn't respond, she shook her head. “And you are Lida. That much, at least, is clear.” Her voice was crisp, and she enunciated every word precisely, as though in a spelling bee. She turned to Margaret. “I trust that the drive up was uneventful?”

“Everything was just fine,” said Margaret softly. I was pleased to see that she was almost as cowed by this woman as I was.

“I'm glad to hear it.” Her manner was so perfunctory that I imagined her clapping her hands twice, quickly, like an old-fashioned schoolmarm or maybe a drill sergeant. She gave Margaret a tight smile and turned back to me. “Lida, I'm not sure what Margaret has told you about the Alice Marshall School. Much of it you will have to learn on your own, but there are some aspects of living and learning here that I'd like to discuss before you get settled in.”

Bev opened the door a little wider, motioning me and Margaret in. She followed us into a tidy living room that must have come straight out of an Eddie Bauer Home catalog — one where the models, all chiseled and perfect, frolic in the snow in their two- hundred-dollar coats before settling into the big room of their cabin for a night of board games and smoked salmon. The long leather couch was the color of caramel. It faced a coffee table that I could see was meant to appear just hewn by a local carpenter, even though the fancy carvings on its legs gave away its high-end furniture boutique pedigree. There were two large sitting chairs made out of a similar leather, with a pair of antlers emblazoned on the back cushion of each, like a rancher's brand. Watercolors depicting various stock western scenes were hanging on the walls. Probably by a famous artist, I thought, who was famous only because the people who made him so weren't from the West. In any case, this room was the perfect place to entertain the nervous parents of the school's inmates.

“By now you've read the informational materials,” Bev said matter-of-factly, pulling me from my reverie.

I nodded. I could feel Margaret's eyes hot on my back.

“You can set your backpack here.” Bev motioned toward the floor next to a chair before sitting in it herself. “Please make yourself comfortable on the couch.”

I placed the bag down next to her and sat next to Margaret. I could already feel the tension in my shoulders as I tried to maintain a straight posture. I wondered if Bev had that effect on everyone.

“The first thing you must know, Lida, is that we are very pleased to have you join our community.”

As Bev started talking, she casually unclasped the buckles on my backpack and opened the top compartment.

“Being a member of the Alice Marshall School is both an honor and a responsibility.”

She pulled out my sleeping bag first. Then she grabbed my T-shirts, my sweaters, and my jeans, and set them in a careful pile next to the backpack.

“It is up to you to earn that honor, and it is up to us to encourage that sense of responsibility.”