Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (25 page)

S
ince Tina and I have seniority, we get our own private rooms as new girls come in and take our old room. On my orange wall I tape a picture Dallas drew for me—a field of flowers with bubble letters above it that read
Dallas loves Rita
. Next to it I put a picture of him grinning widely, looking at me. But in my new room, I miss my late nights with Tina. As if to make up for the new separation, we’ve started showering together in the evenings, giggling most of the time while we wash each other’s hair, scrub each other’s backs, and soap each other’s breasts. Hers feel so perfectly full in my hands, as if nothing has ever truly filled my hands before. Sometimes I can’t wait for dinner to be over just so I can feel connected to her body again.

One night before “lights out,” Tina steps into my doorway. This time she isn’t giggling. She picks her left foot up and places it on my night table, just for a second, just long enough for me to see under her long T-shirt. She isn’t wearing underwear.

It happens quickly, and then she walks away. “Wait, come back!” I call, but Ms. Hanlin quickly replaces Tina’s spot in my doorway. “Good night, you little rascal,” she says, bending down to hug me.

In the dark, I’m overcome with desire. I roll over and press my hands to the wall that separates our rooms. “Come back,” I whisper into the darkness. And then, as if to answer, she does.

My heart is pounding. She sits on the bed, and I sit up to meet her. This time there is no pause, just her lips against mine, warm and open—softer than any man’s. She kisses my neck, my collarbone, my breasts, and her hands on my body make me realize how loud breath can be. I want her as I have never wanted anyone. I want every part of her. We pull into each other, over and over, and I am born in her hands, into desire.

W
hen it’s finally time for me to go home, Tina won’t come out of her room, and I can’t bring myself to knock. We don’t know how to say goodbye to each other.

I’m wearing Taby’s dress, long and black with a low strappy back.

“You have my dress, so now you
have
to see me again,” she says, smiling.

“I can’t wait,” I say, squeezing her hard.

“Love ya like a sister!” she calls as I lug my suitcase to the door. Everyone is crowding around to give last hugs, and as I turn to wave, I catch the sunlight coming through the windows and glittering in her hair.

Though I know my mother doesn’t want me, this time she doesn’t have a choice. I am almost sixteen, and the system is finally ejecting me. “Let’s just hope you’re ready,” she said the week before.

“I’ve
been
ready,” I told her.

When I see her coming down the hall toward me with Joanne following behind, it’s Joanne who stops me flat. She’s twelve now, and in the year since I’ve seen her, her face has lost some of its roundness,
and her body has started to change. She stands with her hands straight down by her sides, and I can tell she’s unsure about where she is, and about what comes next, and that she’s biting her lower lip because she doesn’t want to cry.

Many of the memories I have of my sister are of her behind a window: waiting for me at the balcony door to come home from school; pounding her fists on the back window of my mother’s car as my mother drove away without me; crying behind my father’s patio door as I bolted away from her; sitting inside a kitchen on a cloudy day, the day I flew toward her, breaking the glass, running.

And now I’m walking toward her, and there is no glass between us—only the years we’ve lived apart. “I’m glad you’re coming home, Rita,” she says, and then she starts crying. I wrap her in my arms, but for me there are no tears, because for the first time I feel truly free.

It’s windy when Mr. Ware walks us out to the car and hands me a cassette. “This song will always remind me of you, and when you hear it, I want it to remind you of me, and of everything you learned here.” His eyes go red and watery. “And of everything that you are.” The song is Cat Stevens’s “Wild World.”

We hug goodbye one last time under a low gray sky, and before we part, Mr. Ware speaks into my hair, which tangles in the wind. “I’ll always remember you like a child, girl.”

W
hen I arrived home from Bread Loaf, I found the truth in T. S. Eliot’s words. I experienced those first tingling moments of recognition that come when you’ve been away for a while, when everything is at once familiar and new. This was our town—with its steeples at the center, its quiet porch lights glowing through the trees, its two-lane roads winding like stories—but it could have been any town. This was our black mailbox, our driveway, our windows hazed with light—but it could have been any house. For a moment I considered that maybe time had warped, that I was coming back to a town too late, to a house that was no longer mine. But then I saw my dogs sitting alert at the door, as if they knew I was coming, and then Larry appeared behind them, and they all came out to greet me, and Larry brought my suitcases back in, and within a few minutes the chimera disappeared and the sweetness of being home set in.

One of the first things I did was sit down at my desk to write. Really write—take those snippets in my notebook, and make something with them. Larry came to my door and stood without saying anything.

“Yes?” I said, smiling. “Can I help you?” He did that sometimes, just looked at me as if he were on the verge of speaking, as if all his words were collecting there, just behind the dam of his throat.

“I’m glad you’re home,” he said.

“You know, there was a moment, up on the mountain at Bread Loaf, when I got overwhelmed. It was all so intense, and parts of it reminded me of being in those institutions when I was younger, all crammed in with strangers, and suddenly I had this urge to leave. I felt like a runaway all over again.” I laughed. “But you know what kept me there, in that moment? Why I stayed?”

Larry looked at me tenderly. “Why?”

“Because I had your letters to open.”

I
had a dream that Larry and I were going on a bicycle ride. At first I was having some difficulty with my bike—the shocks were too stiff and the seat was too high and the gear shifters were
sticking
—so we pulled into a parking lot where, by our good fortune, we happened upon a bike repair crew. They took out their wrenches and screwdrivers and went assiduously to work. “Here, try it now,” they said. I sat down in the seat, and the bike fit my body like the hug of an old friend. I bounced up and down, the shocks yielding. “It’s perfect,” I declared. Larry was beside me on his, waiting. “I’m ready,” I said, excited for the adventure we were about embark upon together. We were going to take the road for all it was worth, he and I. We were going to coast down hills and feel the wind fluttering past. We were going to slow down sometimes and talk, just the two of us against a scrim of fog with the scent of the ocean in the distance. We began to pedal, and suddenly Larry started going very fast. He thought it was a race. It was the fastest
anyone had ridden a bicycle in the history of bicycles—so fast that he lifted off the ground. And suddenly we were in this very tall building, in a room one hundred feet to the top, and Larry kept ascending, almost to the ceiling by then in a magnificent arc, and I couldn’t believe what he was doing—he was heading straight for the windows. “What the
fuck
!” I yelled. Larry shattered the windows. I watched the impact hurt him—I could see the force of it temporarily stop him, the glass lacerating his face—but he kept going. He was in the air, at the apex now, so high up, flying over the grass, which turned out to be our own yard. He was coming down the arc’s other side, heading toward the neighbors’ property. I couldn’t reach him; I couldn’t stop it. I felt my organs seize as he came down and crashed into the fence.

“
W
e have to talk.”

Larry was on the couch, reviewing a legal case for which he would serve as a medical expert. He was surrounded by pages and pages of medical records.

I’d seen him on the witness stand once, when one of his cases had gone to trial. “No,” he was saying, “it is not below standard of care because this is an expected complication. It is well known than an intracerebral hemorrhage can occur from placement of an ICP monitor.” As he calmly and eloquently answered each question, I knew that he held the patient’s entire medical history in his mind.

He took a stack of pages off the couch and placed them down on the floor, then looked up at me expectantly. I sat down beside him and told him about my dream.

“That’s weird,” he said.

“I know. But I can’t stop thinking about it.”

He took my hand. “It was just a dream.”

“But it feels real.” I wrapped both of my hands around his.

“How?”

“It doesn’t feel like we’re pedaling together.”

“What do you mean?”

“In life.”

Larry adjusted his glasses with his free hand. “I think we’re pedaling together.”

And I realized then that the unspoken deal we’d made in the beginning of our relationship would not hold. I couldn’t go on pretending that I was only certain parts of myself, though for years that’s exactly what I’d done. I’d willingly tried to erase any part of my life I thought Larry might find unsavory or intimidating—in the name of innocence I did this, so that we could both clutch it for our own—but we are all of our lives, and I was beginning to understand that if innocence truly exists, then it can never really be lost.

“You don’t know me.”

“Of course I know you.”

“You don’t know about my past.”

“I know you now. You’re beautiful.”

“Who I am now is because of my past. And if I can’t tell you my story, how can you really know me?”

“I think that’s a fundamental difference between us. You want to know things. And I don’t.”

“But that’s not true. You want to know everything. You know more than anyone I’ve ever met.”

“Bad things, I mean. I admit, your past scares me.”

I let his hand go. “Sometimes we have to be more than our fears.”

O
ne evening while I was watching a fire climb the back of our fireplace, I was thinking about how lucky I was to have the life I had. If you would have asked me as a runaway what I was running for, I would have said
this, this life, this kind and steady man, these sweet dogs, this house, this fire
. There wasn’t a day of my life that I didn’t feel
grateful, if for nothing else than to simply be alive. And as I was thinking about these things—about how I finally had love, had a safe life, the kind of life I used to imagine the people in L.L. Bean Christmas catalogs had—I heard a voice ring clearly in my mind:
Too bad you will leave him
. The clarity and unexpectedness of that voice, and the words it spoke, jarred me for days. No, I wanted to argue with it, I will never leave him.

Thoreau writes, “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for
sauntering;
which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going
à la sainte terre
’—to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a
sainte-terrer,
’ a saunterer—a holy-lander. . . . Some, however, would derive the word from
sans terre,
without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.”

Safety is largely an illusion, and panic knows this. Panic disorder happens when this knowledge becomes unbalanced, when we apply all of our grit and muscle to railing against our own inexorable lack of control. I had always rejected my mother’s saying, “Man plans, God laughs,” but I was starting to see a wisdom in it. On the run, I’d never had the luxury of planning. Sometimes there were beautiful moments, and sometimes ugly ones. And after each, I moved forward with a kind of wonder over it all, wanting to know what would happen next. Life was a series of small choices, one by one—which street to walk down, which car to get into, which candy to buy with the change at the bottom of my purse—and without a map of my future, it was relatively easy to shake off the days when the road didn’t lead where I hoped it would. Panic, I’d found, had been like that; it was only when I surrendered to it that I started to become free.

So after days of railing against that matter-of-fact voice that told
me I would leave my husband, I neither rejected nor accepted it. I simply shrunk the scale: each day I would make a choice. And I would be grateful for my home, knowing also that there was a truth to Thoreau’s words, that in some ways, when we are present, when we abide by ourselves and our own lives, we can be equally at home anywhere.