My Abandonment (22 page)

A bird shouldn't be able to fly backward but I see this. Clouds come apart and pull themselves back together if I am patient enough. A red fox leaps forward three times then bounds back to where she started, her feet hitting the ground in just the same places and then coming forward again and bounding past where I can see. I sit still. A deer rattles past with its white tail coming first and its antlers dragging the air behind before it suddenly leaps forward on the same tracks. A leaf falls off the tree then raises up and reattaches itself. The sun jerks up a few inches before easing down again toward the evening.

I feel like myself with the sage and pine in my nose and all the little scratches on my bare arms. I wander across the slopes of the Black and Belknap craters, those old volcanoes, or north, crossing the highway near the Cold Springs campground where sometimes there are bright domed tents and the smell of bacon frying.

I know where the Cold Springs come up, and the Four Mile Springs, I cross Bluegrass Butte and Graham Butte, Five Mile and Six Mile. I know the names but I know buttes and springs that have no names. I follow the paths of animals, I recognize broken trees and burnt out stretches, rock formations that I give my own names. I pause above Black Butte Ranch, the bright green of the golf course and the carts scuttling across it. Out on their little lake the canoes and paddleboats drift and slide.

I come down this slope, not far from the fancy condos, the hot tubs and tennis courts and everything else. I can double back the way I came or come out on the Santiam Highway and walk back to Sisters this way, where the work crews in their orange suits are always stacking the firewood cut from the fallen trees and the burnt ones that have been cut so they won't fall on passing cars. I wave, I wonder if it's possible that some of these criminals could be the same men from the forest park, even if they got out in Portland and committed another crime and were caught again and put to work in another orange outfit.

It's miles to walk to Sisters from here. That's no problem. I cut across north of town to get over to the McKenzie Highway, near the junior high school where if there's a carnival or a softball game I slow down.

Along the dugout I like to watch the gangly girls, the ones who are fast but not quite coordinated. I can dress young, I can talk to these girls, I lean against the chainlink fence. The parents sit up high in the bleachers to cheer and shout and they think I am a friend or a sister.

There's a girl or two who seem curious, who listen and don't turn away. They pick at their cleats, they pull up their baseball socks to their knees. Lately it's the third baseman, the girl with braces and a sharp face and her brown hair in two thick braids. She's yelling at the batter to swing and the girls in the dugout are chanting about the belly-itcher.

"I played third base," I say with my fingers hooked around the sharp fence. I keep my voice low. "I was the only one who could throw it to first in time," I say. "How are you? Happy? Do you think differently than most people? Do you wonder if there's another way to live? I was a girl like you and I can tell you, I can show you."

These girls are always moving: to warm up, to bat, to field, to cheer the other team, to get in their parents' cars and drive away with their ponytails and baseball caps visible through the windows. I see my third baseman heading home with her father, his hairy arm over her shoulder, his gold watch on his wrist and sometimes I don't know if I'll have another father, another family beyond those I've had. Sometimes people ask about boyfriends or if I will ever have children and perhaps that is possible, children are. When I think of boys or men I think of Father and I don't see anyone like him around.

I do see these girls and still I wonder if any of them would understand, if one would come with me and wander and would sleep on the mattress in the shelter out in the wilderness. I don't know what a girl would think if she were sitting here with me inside my yurt where there's no windows except the round one in the roof full of sky and stars and birds slipping past, here where it takes your eyes a while to adjust. The blue square of fabric with its own birds hangs on the seventh wall and most days it seems like another window even if it is only cloth. Here the flames in the woodstove reflect in the gold letters on my encyclopedias, lined up all around the walls.

The yurt has eight walls so it is a small octagon fourteen feet across and not really a yurt at all since a proper yurt is round. I call it that to remind me of Father and how I lost him, where.

What would a girl think of all my piles of paper and artifacts from all the times, how I have broken it down to organize my story and be able to tell it? All the loose pages of my journal, my homework, pieces of Father's journal. Some piles of paper are shorter and then there's others like the first one, the pages in the forest park when I had more time and a place to write and things I wanted to say. I was happiest then, I am always trying to get back to how I felt then. It's funny how my handwriting has actually gotten worse. My spelling's always been pretty dependable.

Everything in here reminds me of something else. I have broken all the pages into eight piles, one for every wall. They go clockwise: the happy days in the forest park, getting caught and put in the building, living on the farm, living on the streets of the city, escaping down through the snow, losing Father in the cave, Boise, and finally the eighth wall where I am now, where there is not much to say except how I am putting it together and where I am doing this.

"Valor consists in the power of self-recovery," Father writes, even if really he has copied this out of another book. I know now that some of the things he said he took from books, and so much of his writing is copying and writing back at what he copied. The three-named men are his favorites: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I am reading my way through some of these books now.

Here's another thing he copied out: "The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." To this Father writes his own thought: "To be great is to keep sweetness."

Sometimes I add what I think too, like a kind of conversation. Below that I write: "How about the girl who doesn't feel alone when she is alone?"

I remember the conversations as best as I can. If I make up words he says at least they're close or taken from his notebook. I stitch it together and I only add what I have to. If I don't remember something I skip over it and leave it out. There's times like the second part where the police or Miss Jean Bauer could have taken some of my journal but even then I can't remember anything more so I don't worry too much. I take one wall at a time into my backpack and I type it into the computer at the library. I save it on a disk and erase it from the computer. Now I am near the end.

For so long I carried everything I owned around with me from place to place. Now I do have a radio, one that plays cassette tapes. And at the second wall I have the cassette tape that Miss Jean Bauer gave me of the two of us talking. She's explaining the test and then I am telling the stories of the pictures on the cards. It is strange to listen now to my little voice. I can hear how she is nervous even when back then I didn't hear that at all. She is worried about me. I am telling about the strange house in the storm and the people inside or out, the glowing windows, the story that is some of the possibilities that I came to pass through.

Father: I'm no longer angry with him for the mistake he made. He was afraid and he lost his sweetness and I could have helped him more to advance confidently in the direction of his dreams and to not confuse a misunderstanding with an understanding so he would not believe people are like us when they are not. I forgive him, I understand him. I learn mostly from how he lived his life and also from how he stopped living it.

Father and I are a family of writers. My sister Della I don't know about or about my mother even if I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they wrote too. I have always, I have sometimes imagined that I have written all this to my mother, just to show her what's happened to me and that I've turned out all right. If she were alive I would track her down and read it to her, but since she's dead maybe she's watched it all or can think what I'm thinking as I write it down. She's watched it happen and then she's seen each letter and word scratched on a page and now this final typing.

When I look back through all these times, all the girls I've been, I just laugh. Only Randy really knows, has seen it all. Randy, he moves from wall to wall, wherever he wants to go. The pebble from the forest park and the scrap of paper with the name I'll never use, they rattle inside his body. He's beat up, dirt ground into him so his organs are all one color. The 114 numbers are worn away, only slight marks where the red dots were. I remember the numbers, where they went, all the counting and mathematics I did on them, all the things I thought they meant. They did mean those things, if I thought so. Still, since then I found a book and learned that what Randy is about is acupuncture, from Chinese medicine, the places to stick needles into a horse to treat an injury or illness. For overexertion or congestion of the lungs, the point is called Hsieh-tang and is number 16, two needles stuck into each side of the nose. Number 114 is named Wei-chien, one needle only at the tip of the tail to fight heatstroke and the common cold.

How nice it would be to stick a needle in your neck or hand or elbow to treat a sadness or to bring back a memory, to be able to run faster, to make people recognize you as a friend and to understand what kind of person you are.

Here's something else Father copied into his notebook: "Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was never opened."

There is no one to report Father missing except me. I miss him but he is not exactly missing. Out walking I search and search and I find caves and go inside them. I ask around even at school if people know about parties in caves and they say, "Caroline, we don't need a cave." Still I am out there in the hot summer and in the cold months when the snakes wait half-numb and stiff in the paths for the sun to thaw them. I range and wander. I find caves and take ropes to them, lanterns and flashlights to walk through the damp lava tubes as wide as a hallway in a shopping mall that then tighten down to where I can hardly squeeze through. Then they open up again, wide and echoing. I hear water. Bats hang leathery, complain as I pass. I don't call his name, I'll know when he's close.

Winds blow underground. They lead you to new openings, they show you the sky, suddenly bluer and brighter than you remembered.

I know my way around this wilderness. I know the landmarks on a map and I know my own landmarks. Still so often I will find the dark slot of a cave one morning and go home for water and rope only to return in the afternoon to find the cave gone, no longer where I left it.

I believe that there is movement always beneath the surface of the ground. The hollow spaces that are caves drift beneath us, carrying with them whatever they hold. A cave will sometimes meet another cave and merge with it for a time and then pass on through. The burrows of snakes and moles are taken in, their walls gone to air, the little animals dropping surprised to the cave floor. Trees' roots grasp at nothing, anxious until the dirt returns.

Caves drift smoothly beneath us without any sound. Father is missing, he is not missing. He is beyond the reach of snow and sunlight. He stays close to me, following where I cannot see but can only sense him in that darkness below. In the soles of my bare feet I can feel him say my name.

The author wishes to thank Adrienne Brodeur over and over again. Jim Rutman, emphatically. Tina Pohlman, then and now. Everyone at Harcourt, for the risk and the work. Deep thanks for time and space to Caldera and to Reed College. A debt to the amazing girls who made this story possible: Opal Whiteley, Elizabeth Smart, Caroline X. And Ella Vining, always.