Girl in the Woods: A Memoir Read online

  The highway was narrow and without traffic, a green sign with black pine trees said in capital white letters, OREGON WELCOMES YOU. I felt a pang of regret. After all those months of approaching, all those miles dreaming, I crossed the Oregon border in a car on a highway and not on foot in the woods; I missed the crossing. I parted my lips to tell the driver, but I knew it was a tragedy she wouldn’t really understand.

  In Ashland I found the Shakespeare Youth Hostel and got a bunk and took the pills and used the ointment, which was glassy yellow like my pus and burned hot as red-lit steel. I didn’t swallow the pills; instead I would open the translucent teal capsules and pour their grainy contents into my old Gatorade water bottle, shake it up. The flecks would float, not dissolving. I’d drink them. Each time, three times a day, the taste would make me gag. I felt a shame the source of which I could not place.

  I willed this sickness to be just some weird sort of rash I could deal with without going home. I was walking to escape my rape, yes, but also my child-self. To leave the trail and return to my mother was to abandon the development of the able woman I was slowly becoming. In wilderness, I had become fit. I was overcoming the bonds of my mother, enduring situations in which my freshman-self would have collapsed. I feared that if I went home my mother might not let me return to the trail.

  I tried to imagine home—the Newton house. My sight divided, blurred as if seen through ancient crystals strung up, tinkling and brittle, patterning whitewashed fences in an old washed-out dream from years ago, locked in the past. My father was a faint cloud in my vision.

  I wondered what it would be like to see him now. My dad had been so helpful to me on the trail—I felt fortunate and grateful—I thought I should be excited to be with him again. I should want to. But I didn’t, there was something wrong. Despite his support, his warmth and guidance and love, I didn’t want to see him in person. We had never spoken of my rape; I’d never directly told him it had even happened. I thought my mother must have told him—at one point I’d asked her not to, but they had a very honest relationship. Yet he hadn’t said anything about it to me at all. He hadn’t ever asked me about it, or how I was feeling. I really wished he had. I wished he’d immediately called me after my rape, desperate to tell me, “Mom told me, honey I’m sorry.” He didn’t say, “I love you and I’m here.”

  Either it made him so uncomfortable that he could say nothing about it—or she really had never told him. I realized: I really wasn’t positive that he knew that it had even happened. Both possibilities left me desolate. One meant he, my father, would rather leave me unsupported, not knowing what he thought of me now; the other: my mom was erasing my story—within our own family.

  I didn’t know if my mom had told him about the unsent letter, or how he felt about my desire to speak out.

  The thought of seeing my father made me panicky—I just wanted to get better and stay removed.

  The pills made me allergic to the sun; my skin blistered. I couldn’t go outside. I took scalding showers, only hot water no cold. I held my butt-rash under them, directly in the burning spray. It was so painful my heart revved wildly, but then it felt wonderful, like I was washing everything terrible out, purging myself of a germ I had long carried. In the hot water I ran my hand over and over the area. It was rough, raised like burn blisters, the dead bubbles of skin flaking off, my skin falling away. It looked like it should hurt but it felt wonderful.

  I wrapped myself in a soft white towel and walked to my cot in the girls’ bunk room, lay on my stomach, the only girl in the room at this midday hour. I lay, not moving, waterlogged and hurting, until the growing mark on me again began to burn. I walked back to the shower, through the public hall in the old house-hostel, wrapped only in my towel, not caring, turned on the hot, no cold. I showered again, held my mark under the burning steaming water. Back to my cot. Fingers dish-panned. To the shower again. As the sky dimmed, through night’s darkness, as first light broke in blue dusk I showered hourly. Shower to bunk, shower to a cot that turned out to be some other girl’s—I was in desperate patterns those first smudged days off the PCT, in blinding pain, hoping I could somehow break out and save myself.

  I kept on paying eighteen dollars for another day and another day at the hostel, hoping for the antibiotics to kick in. They never did.

  For five days and five nights I stayed in Ashland’s youth hostel. Its walls and steps were painted with lines from Shakespeare poems and plays. I took a picture of the line Journeys end in lovers meeting, and felt gloomy. I feared my journey might be ending. I felt longing, saw no lover, wished for one. The pus-thing had grown to the size of my open hand.

  I felt dread, called my mother, told her the truth.

  She said, “Debby! My God.” I waited as she cried, looking at the eggshell-yellow wall, the lines from Shakespeare plays I’d read and seen. The wall blurred as she told me, “Daddy’s ordering your ticket. You fly from Medford, Oregon, home, direct.”

  I blinked; my vision cleared. The line remained. Journeys end in lovers meeting. Journeys end in rear-end rashes. Journeys end in Mommy’s helping. Journeys end, and I have reached nowhere.

  I pressed my palm firm against the rash and flushed with the pain. I said, “Thanks, Mom. I’m coming home.”

  When I printed my one-way ticket home at the hostel’s old common-room computer, I saw that my seat cost my parents hundreds of dollars. She had found for me the soonest flight out. I felt curled rage like rising smoke in my throat. I had tried to minimize what was wrong with me, she maximized it. To her I was poised on the brink of dying, and she would save me.

  I wished I could ditch, stay a final night at the Shakespeare hostel, get better on my own, but of course I couldn’t. I couldn’t ignore my spreading sickness anymore.

  I hitchhiked from Ashland to the airport in Medford with two super-new-age religious boys who tried to convince me the evidence of God was in fire. I had no idea what they were talking about. But they bought me pizza. On the silent roads, toward home, I let myself remember the drive out of Ashland last summer, leaving the trail behind me to fly to college after having walked here all the way from Mount Whitney. I realized: The one thousand miles I’d just walked alone had been the exact same miles I’d walked alone last summer. Without thinking about what I was doing, I’d left Icecap at the exact point where I began walking when I was eighteen, and now I was being forced to end at the exact same point at which I’d had to then. It was the same one thousand miles of solitude.

  The sign for Medford’s airport reappeared, I felt my miles of solitude receding. I felt panic; what if this disease meant I wouldn’t ever finish? My mother might dissuade me. I had to return. I couldn’t let my mother derail my desire again this year.

  At the Medford airport, a tiny flat sad lot, my plane to Boston sat, parked and waiting, and the fire-boys left me.

  At Logan International Airport my mother embraced me, held me, kissed me and drove me straight from Boston to our verdant suburbia, to my childhood, home. I hadn’t seen her in three months. All she could say was how much she’d missed me, how relieved she was to get to see me, how thin I looked—how good. We slipped together into the modest old Colonial, a traditional white house, and there was not much light inside, the plain white vinyl blinds were drawn, it was claustrophobic. I felt suffocated by the dim smallness, the familiar smell of the plants and cherry-stained wood. I felt ten years old. In her home office, the walls were taped floor to ceiling with the faces of baby-me. Bigger baby me. Through middle school I paced this office as I dictated to her my papers, and didn’t learn to type myself, even though I wished to be a writer.

  Dad was still at work. Mom demanded to see the infection. I climbed upstairs to the bedroom of my teen years, my brother’s before it was mine, with baby blue walls and framed watercolor paintings I’d made as a child. My curtains just the same, lavender linen, the little pastel ballerinas dancing. My sheets, comforter, and oval throw rug matching them. The only incongruous thing
in the room was a big inflated photo-collage of Jacob playing professional baseball, the central image him caught jumping high above the field’s checker-mowed grass, reaching to catch the ball. It was dusk but he was lit. His baseball card was taped to the wall beside it. I pulled down my pants in front of my mother.

  She cried out. “My God, my God. Sweetheart! We need to go to the emergency room.”

  I groaned at her. “Can’t we just go to the doctor in the morning?”

  “Come, we have to go. They close at five,” she said.

  I said, “Mom. No.” I pushed her out of my room and slammed the door. I went to sleep.

  The next morning my mother drove me to my pediatrician, Dr. Greenspan, who’d been my doctor since I was born. He was still my only doctor. My mom insisted he’d be better for me than an adult internist, as he knew my history. My history, I had argued, was nothing. But she insisted—“he already knows your low iron levels”—and finally I complied. I followed her into the colorful office’s waiting area. My face was hot with shame. My mother told the receptionist, “Hi. My daughter has an emergency. Deborah Parker.” It was jarring to be yanked so suddenly back into Debby. It felt foreign to me now, no longer the correct word for who I was. It was a name tied to the fragility my mother imposed. I slipped away from the check-in desk, to the bathroom, humiliated. There were no walk-ins, I knew. I felt I should disappear.

  Through the waiting room bathroom’s blond wood door, I could still hear them, the receptionist saying, “You need an appointment,” my mother, frantic, yelling to a nurse, “Bring out a doctor.” I stood in the children’s bathroom before a mirror so low it cut off at my chest. It reflected sun-blistered arms. I had to hunch over to see my face. I was still wearing my prescription sunglasses.

  The receptionist’s muted voice, “She’s nineteen. She doesn’t have an internist?”

  Mom much louder, yelling and crying.

  “Where is she?” A man’s voice. It was Dr. Greenspan.

  Mommy rapping on the bathroom door, eager, me ducking out, face flushed, wanting to dissipate into the bar of silver light slashing through the window, spotlighting a blue train on the yellow rug, dust spinning in it. Mom came into the office with us.

  I said, “’Bye.” I couldn’t believe her. “You can go.”

  She ignored me, sat and put her huge purse down on the checkered linoleum floor, pale blue and green. The childish, cheery colors made me dizzy. “I need to stay to hear what’s wrong,” she told me.

  I felt faint and angry. I had been without her and okay through desert and snow. Now that I finally was really ill, it was her chance to be my savior. I stared directly at her.

  At last Dr. Greenspan spoke. “Debby’s an adult.” He opened the door she’d closed. “She can tell you what I say.” I knew he knew how overbearing she could be, all the times she’d taken me to him when I was a kid and she used to try to convince me that I was sick. This was the office where I’d taken forty-one negative strep tests.

  At last my mother walked out the open door, but left her big black leather purse. It sat on a chair beside us as he handed me an examination gown. Then he left, too. I put on the paper dress that felt more like wearing a tissue. I lay down on my stomach. I’d been sleeping on my stomach for weeks, any contact burned me.

  I exposed my backside to Dr. Greenspan. He’d been my pediatrician since I was born, had always been smart and kind. But now he was uncomfortable. I was uncomfortable. I had a woman’s body. Together we had just kicked my mother out into a waiting room of two-year-olds. Neither of us spoke. He put on latex gloves.

  I imagined what he must have been thinking: Walking from Mexico to Canada, insane, feral girl. Crazy mother, bringing her adult daughter to come see her baby doctor.

  “Oh God,” he muttered. He was leaning in toward my behind, the paper dress crinkling, examining the pink raised gleaming surface, it was raw, flaking away. I was emaciated, so tired, all my ribs visible.

  He pulled back and tossed his gloves and scrubbed his hands. “You got here just in time,” he said. He told me the rash was MRSA, a flesh-eating bacteria, the wrestlers’ disease, they call it, and if it had spread inside an orifice of my body it could have become systemic—and fatal.

  “Have you recently had close contact, sweat-on-sweat, with a lot of people?” Dr. Greenspan asked slowly and carefully. “Or intercourse with strangers?”

  “I haven’t touched anyone in a thousand miles,” I told him.

  It seemed impossible that after one thousand miles of walking strong, alone, I had contracted the wrestlers’ disease. The brutal bacterium spread when an infected person’s sweat permeates your pores. It was filthy, and how ironic: most infected people pick up the aggressive bacterium in jail.

  Dr. Greenspan told me he was going to put me on a new antibiotic, “Something strong.”

  “Is it a pill?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  I looked up at him. “I don’t—because,” I said. I stopped and gulped. My mouth was very dry. I knew he wouldn’t understand my trepidation; he’d think I was a baby. He looked at me blankly. “I have never actually swallowed a pill,” I finally said.

  I had always cracked open the capsules, put them in water and drunk them. My anatomy was normal, but my psychology made it impossible to swallow even a Tic Tac. Dr. Greenspan had to Google and finally told me I could chew them. That would be fine. I felt shamefully humiliated, like a loser who had made no progress at nineteen, at my pediatrician, needing my mommy, still not able to even take a pill normally.

  MRSA can go away and then return. If it becomes systemic, the way to halt its growth is to go on a crazy cocktail of antibiotics that basically kill everything else inside you. Once symptoms were at last gone, Dr. Greenspan explained, the disease would continue living, dormant, on the inside of my nose.

  The antibiotic the doctor in Yreka had put me on was useless against the disease. MRSA was resistant to it. MRSA was resistant to most antibiotics, I would soon learn.

  Dr. Greenspan and my mother only agreed on one thing: that I should not under any circumstances return to the PCT.

  “Your hike is over,” Mom said. She looked thrilled.

  “I’m going back,” I told her.

  “You shouldn’t go back,” Dr. Greenspan said.

  We went to the Cheesecake Factory in the Atrium Mall as a family. My dad was coming straight from work to meet us there—it would be the first time I’d see him since he’d left me at the dusty border. There I’d been so freshly hurting, 1,700 miles ago, a state ago, the last time he’d hugged me. I hoped that in the months since, in his mind, that road trip with his muted chubby daughter had faded from his vision. I hoped I wasn’t locked in that image of me, weak—returned. I was nervous. I imagined he would be excited, curious, warm—at least at first.

  My brother Robert and his wife, Jenny, asked me question upon question about the trail while we waited; they were excited. My little two-year-old nephew, Tom, leaned into me, curious, too. For the first time in my life, I felt like an authority. I loved it. My dad arrived, we hugged; he held me closely until I released him.

  I felt wonderfully loved—but I was tense. I felt my father potently. He sat quietly across from me, his eyes evasive. I didn’t know how he was feeling, or if he was feeling anything about me. I didn’t want to have to ask to know. In the mountains he seemed to support me. Remotely helping me navigate snow, he was excellent, but together, feeling nothing from him, we were farther away. I longed for him to reveal his amazement at me: his daughter had come so far, she was strong and impressive, independent—she was blossoming. I craved these words.

  Instead, he sat quiet and avoided looking at me. Our time together was thick with unsaid things.

  My second night back home, I placed myself in the kitchen, in an old wooden chair at the wooden table, to wait for him to get home from work. The door creaked; I hopped up. “Dad.” We hadn’t even spoken about the rape or how I was dealing with it.
r />   He said, “Hello.” Then he went upstairs. He hadn’t even looked at me, his indifference still hurt.

  I went out for a walk. Yellow streetlamps cast stunted black shadows across suburban sidewalks. It was last light in Newton—the Oregon forest was shimmering in my mind, dusted with a powder of fresh snow, the air sapphire and cold. I felt expelled from Utopia. I had my earphones in, listening hard. I’d heard each song a thousand times, a forever times, through my life, when I was in Mom’s womb, forever ago. I knew them by heart, every word, “You’re a Big Girl Now,” “Idiot Wind,” playing me. How he let me off at the Mexican border and let me go, I kissed goodbye the howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me—

  You’ll never know the hurt I suffered nor the pain I rise above / And I’ll never know the same about you, your holiness or your kind of love, and how I wouldn’t.

  The two thousand miles I’d walked did not impress him. Nothing I could ever do would be impressive to him. He’d never love me like he loved Jacob. There was nothing I could do to make him. There was nothing I could do, nothing grander, And it makes me feel so sorry. Idiot. Idiot wind. All this walking, all these years, and he still was not impressed, and I still felt rejected. I was hungry for his love. I was dying for it.

  I imagined actually seducing a man—any man—how I could get him to take me to L.A., to anywhere, he’d want me so terribly. Tattoo Al—he had been intrigued, impressed by me. If he were here in Newton, with me now, I imagined I’d do anything with him—and he would want me terribly, he’d want my love.

  Debby has bad judgment, my mother’s words returned to me.

  I wanted attention, to be seen—to be heard.

  In those days, back home, I didn’t see any of my friends in Newton, not once. There was no one, though it was the summer after our freshman year of college. No one knew I was back and I didn’t try to contact anyone. I didn’t feel like I belonged, a sun-blistered infected dropout, disgusting; didn’t want to be seen. My best friend Elle still lived in the area, but she’d begun drinking heavily and had stopped talking to me. I knew she’d been raped, too, also eighteen.