Girl in the Woods: A Memoir Page 29

  Alone in my room, I lay for hours snug beneath clean sheets, melting into them. I felt how clean the comforter was, the pastel pillow case—my mom had made my bed, as she always had, and it felt heavenly now.

  I explored my room. My dresser was filled with sweatpants and loose basketball pants my mother bought me at Modell’s on sale, Sears bras, huge unopened packages of basic clothing, the same thing in multiple colors, blocks of white underwear and socks from Costco. I had never sought out clothing I might feel pretty in, just always wore what she brought me.

  I felt a chill, cold in my body, standing in the discomfort of having to prove myself to parents who still didn’t see me as a person, but rather forever as a child.

  I looked at myself in the mirror I’d had when I was a child.

  I was wearing a hideous powder blue pair of basketball pants with a metallic sheen, metal snap buttons along the side, though the metallic sheen embarrassed me, and I’d never played basketball. One or several of the buttons would sometimes unsnap unexpectedly, humiliating me.

  I was angry at my mother. It was the truth. I was angry at my mom. For treating me like an idiot. For continually putting me in the position of defending my competence. For insulting my intelligence, my autonomous self and happiness. For making me feel I needed her or I wouldn’t make it to school, I wouldn’t make it without her helping me. For constantly creating and reinforcing the idea in my young mind that I was unable, that there was something wrong with me, that I was unwell and needed her to nurture me or I wouldn’t be okay.

  I was angry at my mother, yes!—and suddenly everything was clearer. I could see now for the first time that the importance of this walk wasn’t only to help me move past my rape. I had wanted to hike the PCT before college, before I’d ever encountered Junior Mason. This walk was a reaction to a lifetime of having had all my needs and decisions preemptively accounted for by my mother. She’d taken care of me in all the ways my body needed, but the devastation of my rape had made me feel the weight of the essential way she had neglected me: she hadn’t nurtured the potential of my strong and healthy independence.

  It was known in our family that when she was forty-one and five months pregnant, my mother had suffered a miscarriage. The dead baby was a girl. She hadn’t planned on getting pregnant again, but in her loss she found she desperately wanted a daughter. She had to have me.

  She tried and tried and she turned forty-three and I was born. I was not a mistake. Kids at school would say I was an accident—they knew; they were sure—my mommy was too old. I would ask Mommy and she would say, no, “No! I tried and tried to have you,” she would say. She fought for me. She wanted me. I was her success. I was her doll girl, to be protected at all costs.

  Absolutely devout in her complete care of my body, she had only taught me to be weak and voiceless.

  But I had unlearned that lesson. Our enmeshment no longer felt to me like proof of love. I was no longer willing to permit this silencing. Helplessness didn’t have to be my identity, I wasn’t condemned to it. I was willing—able—to change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed her to help me, to take care of things for me—and to save me—but, back in the home where I’d learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it.

  I understood why I walked across deserts with rattlesnakes and very little water, climbed the slopes of snowy mountains and walked through soundless days in trees for hundreds of miles. I was dependent on my mom, I needed to become more independent. I had survived a thousand miles without Icecap, with no mother, mostly by my own strength and persistence, on my own. I had to show myself as strong and independent and capable of making decisions for myself, surviving. That was the task of my walk, most essentially.

  I was ravenous, constantly eating. Mom cooked throughout the day: lasagna, brisket, stuffed cabbage, chicken and rice with sautéed onions in tomato-ketchup sauce. All the dishes she had made for me when I was a child. I ate it all.

  My MRSA continued to produce strange heat, but the pain subsided. Soon I could sleep in any position. I was still allergic to the sun, wore long sleeves all the time. If I went outside without cover, I would get blisters all over my body. I pulled down my pants every day to show my mother that my infection was getting smaller all the time. Soon I would be able to leave again.

  Mom and I fought as we took walks. “Please don’t go back,” she told me over and over. I ignored her. I was adamant in a way I would never have been before I started my hike.

  Dad was home, but he was working; he was always working. He might as well have been in California. I still hadn’t been able to do anything to tell him about Junior—I couldn’t. I wanted to, my journal said that man is NOTHING and this is your father, I thought I needed to and I knew I was right, it was obvious—but I still couldn’t. He didn’t ask me anything.

  His avoidance maddened me. I wanted him to say that he wished he’d been there for me more, after, and before that, through my childhood. I wished my dad were here for me now.

  I felt belittled and reduced by him. I wanted him to feel the awkwardness and my frustration. I became cold. I was with him the way he was with me: aloof. No “I love you, I love you.” I wanted my dad to tell me he loved me because he couldn’t not tell me, he missed me loved me and thought about me so much. But he came home from work, went up to his home office, to write, and I wouldn’t see him. I tried to avoid everyone, too.

  On my third day home, I took my nephew, Tom, to the lake. We ran into two boys I’d gone to school with, Dan and Nate, smoking cigarettes. Nate was the guy in high school all the girls had a crush on. He’d sat behind me in tenth-grade Spanish class, and once when I’d worn a tight spaghetti-strap tank top he had flicked my exposed bra strap, and, weirdly, I’d been flattered. I’d twisted around to him and said, “Yeah?” but he hadn’t answered. He was looking blankly at his work sheet. He’d never done it again.

  Now we met eyes, assessed each other. “Nate, hey.”

  “Hey,” said Nate, taking a drag of his cigarette, exhaling.

  Little Tom said, “Smoke.” I bent slightly and took his hand, though he hadn’t reached for mine. I felt catastrophically out of place, seeing these kids I had never wanted to see again. I realized there was nothing I could say to explain to them exactly what I had been doing with my summer. When Nate asked, all I said was “Backpacking.”

  “Cool.” He nodded and kept smoking.

  He was doing the exact same thing he had in high school, but I had changed. I had been doing an incredibly intrepid, brave thing I had to be a bit of a maniac to do because it took so much perseverance. I was seeking something better for myself. I was trying to figure out where in the world I fit. But Nate wouldn’t care. All he would care about was that I, the honor roll student he’d known, had dropped out of college. I, the spawn of stable married Harvard lawyers, had come home raped and with no job, no internship, no boyfriend or degree, nothing. Only a dangerous, leaking infection. My failure branded my ass.

  I walked home holding Tom’s hand, not letting it go even as he tottered across a soccer field where there was nothing that could hurt him.

  I wouldn’t follow my mother’s plan for me. My mother wanted me to stay home in Newton to get better. Only this time, I knew that wasn’t the way for me to heal. This summer was my chance to finish what I’d wanted to do before the rape had even happened, before I left my euphoric walk in the woods to begin college because I wasn’t trusted to direct my own path. I had listened to her and abandoned my gap-year dream. On the trail once again, I’d found myself alone and regaining my strength, feeling invincible. But this year, it was after my entire world had crashed. I’d felt abandoned by everyone. And only because of this—because of the rape, seeing no one believed in me, needing to prove myself not only to others but more essentially to myself—I finally said what I couldn’t say the summer before: Fuck it. I’m doing what I want, proving I am capable, and walking from Mexico to fucking Canada
and try to stop me. I got to hear my mind without the clutter of what my mom thought of me, of what other people saw me as, of what I should be doing with myself.

  I would return to walk the whole PCT, as I’d wanted to before college but hadn’t trusted my gut enough to really do.

  Against my mother and my doctor’s wishes, I was going back.

  This time, I’d become the director of my life.

  Back home my mom was cooking. I told her I was going back to the trail, went online on her desktop and bought my return ticket with a credit card she’d given me for college, that my parents paid. She cried, but she didn’t protest. When I’d arrived at the airport she’d seen how I glowed despite my sickness. She had seen how in only just three days home I’d turned sad, depressed, and low. She had me show her my infection one final time, already only a splotch of paler skin on my rear, smooth again. I mooned her right there in the kitchen, a new lasagna baking, its smell of acidic tomato and wet cheese melting. In a way, it was like telling her to kiss my ass. Dylan’s “Mississippi” was playing upstairs, but I wasn’t staying.

  When my father hugged me goodbye I remained limp, not holding him back. He held me tighter, making me sad.

  Mom drove me to the airport. “Every night, call me,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how late.” She told me that nights I forgot to, she couldn’t sleep. “Just your coordinates and ‘I love you.’ ”

  Only after I was airborne did I feel grateful that she’d saved me.

  I don’t remember having one conversation with my dad in the three days I was home, but looking back at my journal, I see I wrote about him. I scrawled about how I heard him telling my mom that I needed to go back. I was unhappy; he thought the hiking was better for me.

  I wonder why he told these things to my mother, nothing to me. I wonder if overhearing his approval encouraged me to finally fly back to the trail. Maybe. Maybe my father’s faith in my walk—in me—made me feel strong enough to leave. His actual words, as I wrote them in my notebook, were, “She’s an adult now, she can do what she wants. It doesn’t mean she’s not selfish.” He almost understood.

  CHAPTER 17

  INSIDE FIRE

  AUGUST 12

  I stepped back onto the trail exactly where I’d stepped off. I was so relieved, but also felt out of shape now. In Ashland and then back home, for nine days total, I’d been mostly sedentary. I feared I was starting all over again, but at the same time I knew the miles I had walked were not erased.

  I was still taking the new antibiotic, still allergic to sunlight, again covered up. The mark was faint, a numb ghost of the pain it had been, pale like a birth scar. I was alone again. Tall quiet pines surrounded me. For the first time I felt lonely.

  I walked slowly, listened to Dylan’s ballads over and over. They never burned out. There was a lyric to explain and predict each impulse I felt. Dylan had felt it first. My father had felt it too, with Dylan, before I was born.

  Long before I was born, more than forty years into my father’s past, my dad bought land in the woods of central Maine, up near Mount Katahdin, and was going to build a house and try to live there, off of the land. He’d been the age I was now, young and in love with my mother. When I was small, Mommy would tell me all about it, the house my dad and his friends began to build, the prehistoric old-growth trees rising from boundless moss the color of dark water. Bedtime stories of our forest almost-home my father had imagined for the family he knew he wanted to make.

  “Maybe after that we were going to move to Alaska,” my mommy once whispered, my night-light glowing faint blue, the ceiling light still on. “He looked at land there, too.”

  She told me often of my daddy’s old wild plans. I was transfixed. I loved to think of it. I was a child. She never told me why it never happened, what woke them from the faraway woodland dream. I remember once I asked her.

  “Daddy’s a romantic,” my mom told me as she turned off the light above me, as if that were an answer.

  I walked without stopping. I had no more time to lose. Newton had slowed me enough. Going home had been strange, like a portal back, and there I was, still me. My parents still my parents.

  My dad hadn’t asked me one question. He had hardly looked at me. I wasn’t good enough. I had to be better.

  The trees’ wide trunks were a blur. I noticed I was running.

  “Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you,” I imagine my father once read, though he’s forgotten.

  But back then my daddy answered “Yes. I can, I will.”

  The trail was soft beneath my falling feet, cushioned, dead old pine needles over moss. The woods were soundless.

  I hated Newton. I tried to feel grateful. I thought about my very best memory of home, me with my dad, playing it out in my head to the old songs again, again. Again, I was five years old and we were watching a black-and-white movie, the living room was dark, he was on the couch with my mom and brother Jacob, who was ten, I was on the floor, drawing, not really understanding the movie, but liking it. It was called The Red House, or maybe Red Barn. My mom said we needed to pause the movie for a minute so she could make some more popcorn and run to pee; we did; she stood and flicked on the light.

  I had been drawing in the dark, lit only by the screen, its dim silver. I could still see. All my colors were very bright. My dad noticed the page. My drawing was of one of our Animal Ancestors, as I called them. The figure was cartoony and pastel blue, with buckteeth, a creature we’d descended from, I’d imagined. A few days before, my dad had told me about evolution, and I’d found it incredible. It astonished me. We hadn’t always lived in houses. We had been wildmen. Before that we had been animals.

  “Some kind of genius made that,” he said. “You didn’t make that.”

  “I did,” I told him, “really.” I was grinning. My dad thought my drawing was too good to possibly be made by just a kid, but I had to convince him.

  “You didn’t! You’d have to be some kind of genius.”

  I showed him my hands, they were marked by the same Magic Marker colors as in the picture, as evidence. “I am,” I said, suddenly confident that I was, knowing I really had made it. But then my mom came back and the lights went off, and the movie again played, to the ending, which I think was on a field of wildflowers, very sunny, silver and white, a sad ending, and I never felt that I’d convinced him. I never got to hear him say, “God! Look, everyone! My daughter is the genius.”

  The next day I told my mom that I needed poster-board, and she took me to Walgreens, where she bought me a big blank white sheet as tall as I was and a new huge set of Magic Markers that had every color I’d ever wanted, even the half-shades. I was high I was so happy. I couldn’t wait to draw. That night as my parents and Jacob sat in the kitchen eating dinner, I sat cross-legged on the living room’s wood floor, drawing the Animal Ancestors, the Bunny Rabbit Ancestor, the Beatnik Ancestor, the Rooky Clouds, all the things I believed we’d descended from. I thought I understood something big and ancient, felt swelling pride, filled in and expanded our animal ancestors’ line of grinning faces.

  When I was done, I gave the huge poster-board drawing to my dad. I explained to him what it was, our animal ancestors, the things we’d evolved from, as he’d taught me, told him “My masterpiece.” I was serious. It had been days since the weekend movie and yet the pride I’d felt when he’d said “genius” hadn’t dissolved, and now, at last, he would know the genius was me.

  And he did. He told me it was incredible, wonderful, and that he would teach me about anthropology.

  I was passing through a woodland of gray trees the dark color of slate stone, yellowed moss hanging off them like wool; a simple wooden sign was nailed to a pine tree, just two words on it: Oregon/California. I had walked from Mexico to Oregon. I paused for a minute, feeling my quiet power, amazed. I didn’t rest, I passed without ceremony into the Oregon woods.

  That first night back on the trail, warm in my tent in Oregon, lonely, I studied the D
ata Book to figure out where exactly I’d made it to. I found I’d walked thirty-seven miles without once stopping.

  When I called my mother to give her my global place that night, my father picked up. I read him the long decimals, “My latitude is,” “longitude,” and hung up. I did not tell him that this had been my biggest day. I turned on Blood on the Tracks as I fell asleep and heard my dad when I was five, when he was proud his little girl was an artist. When I woke, the music was quiet, my whole week’s battery dead. For the next seventy-one miles, I would have to walk in silence.

  I walked alone over broad wooded ridges, lonely, singing loudly, the trees all the same, pine and fir, pine and fir. I was trapped in a repetitive storybook scene on a trail to unknown places. Marching, marching north through shadowed woods, persistently blindly seeking my prophesized, long-fated final home, still marching, marching still. The sky was surreal blue, the forest dark and blurred, dappled with yellow light, the scene familiar, from an old faded dream. Green tree, green piney bush, red bark, gray trunks like elephant legs, elephant legs. Buds of yellow light playing on pale dirt trail. I choked on the cool, clean air. I’d fought my mother to get back, yet suddenly now I didn’t even want to be here; I wasn’t feeling wild thrill any longer. I felt hollow, still as soft dead wood, still walking all these miles.

  Yet I wasn’t numb, anymore. I wanted things. I felt the absence of a companion. I felt desire. I wanted badly a man’s hands on my spine, my neck and cheeks, lifting me, pressing me down. I’d never pictured a man’s ridge of knuckles so vividly. I wanted a man who loved me. I was tired of walking alone.

  Deep in me, not leaked like black dots on cotton underpants but planted deep inside my chest, I felt a tiny sprouting seed of longing.