What's Worth Keeping

by Kaya McLaren

  On the downhill side, she wandered across the side of a hill into an aspen grove. There, she looked for a bench level enough on which to construct shelters but found none. Instead, she stopped where she was and lay down on the hill. After all, there was something sacred and cathedral-like about any aspen grove. Through the leaves that had fallen the year before, she dug her fingers all the way down to the earth and into it, as if she were clinging to it. As if she were holding on for her dear life.

  * * *

  As she had suspected, there was no camping to be found anywhere near Yellowstone and no vacancy in any hotels either. She had been willing to spring for a room. Exhausted, she drove on to Craters of the Moon National Monument, where she felt bad for driving through the campground so late and with her headlights on. Not even bothering to brush her teeth, she just crawled into the back of her car and fell fast asleep.

  * * *

  The next day, sunlight and the sound of the other campers woke her from a deep sleep. She rose and surveyed her otherworldly surroundings. Although it was black instead of white, the landscape did indeed look like the surface of the moon. While eating a granola bar and drinking her cup of herb tea, she walked an interpretive trail through pahoehoe lava fields, reading educational signs about the volcanoes that had once erupted there.

  It happened, and then it was over, and then it was safe for her to be here. She had to learn to believe that about her health … about cancer. It happened, and it was over, and she was safe.

  By tonight, she would be in the big trees. Excitement filled her. She stopped by the visitor center on her way out to stamp her book and learned there was a cave to explore, but eager to finally reach Mt. Rainier, she decided to skip it and press on.

  A little bit before Boise, she stopped at Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument and learned that there had been a horse ancestor right there on that land. Some of those horse ancestors had crossed over the Bering Land Bridge and become today’s modern horse in Asia, while others had migrated down into South America and become today’s llamas and alpacas. That very spot of earth had been closer to the equator long ago. Time had moved it that far. That struck Amy as hopeful. In time, she would surely shift and come a long way too.

  The next time she was ready for a stop, she was near Baker City, Oregon, home of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, which was also part of the National Park System. Perched on a hill, Amy surveyed the beautiful valley below and the Wallowa Mountains rising straight up beyond. Ruts from wagon wheels still scarred the land after all this time. Time and revegetation had faded them, but still they traversed the expanse before her, telling a story. She didn’t see these scars on the land as beautiful or ugly and hoped that in time she’d see her own scars in the same way.

  Inside, she stamped her book, examined bonnets in the gift shop, and then wandered through all the dioramas that walked her through the journey of coming west. In the past, the westward movement had always seemed like a difficult but grand adventure, but now she knew something about trauma and saw it everywhere. She imagined being a woman leaving her parents behind, highly unlikely ever to see them again … the grief people must have felt. She imagined losing a family member along the way … burying a child, perhaps, or finding herself a widow in a strange place on a horrible journey, grief-stricken and terrified. She imagined the moments the travelers regretted their decision but were in far too deep to go back, and she imagined finding herself in a new and unfamiliar land at the end of it all, figuring out how to survive.

  No one survived breast cancer then.

  Wandering back outside to the wagon display, she let that sink in. How strange it seemed to her sometimes to still be alive. It seemed obvious, but it wasn’t—maybe because she didn’t feel alive; she felt beat-up. She wondered how it all worked in the grand scheme … what the implications to still being alive were after a person was destined to die. Is that why she felt so disoriented … because she’d missed her flight home to heaven? Could medical intervention also be part of a person’s destiny?

  Regardless, here she was—alive. Alive, here near Baker City, with a car instead of a wagon. With every comfort and convenience. With every advantage. With an oncologist who would check on her every few months. She was alive. Her daughter was alive. Her husband was alive. And because of that, there was still the opportunity for change.

  Paul

  If only he could have used this week to work on the house in Chama, Paul had thought with each passing day. Such wasted time. He had cleaned and reorganized the garage during the first two mornings while it was still cool out, but on the third morning, he was called in to speak in front of an independent investigative panel in the conference room at the station. Lamar Green, the union rep, met him just outside and walked in with him, notepad and pen in hand. At this point, he was just a witness to the process.

  Even though Paul hadn’t done anything wrong, he felt embarrassed. It seemed to him that his colleague, Rich, had been particularly smug as Paul had passed him on the way to the conference room, perhaps knowing that when it came time for one of them to get promoted, this stain on Paul’s record could cost him and give Rich the edge he needed to outcompete Paul. That was tough to think about—how this lie could cost Paul actual money in that way, and in the five years before his retirement, the most important five years in determining pension payments for the rest of his life. But he did his best to have faith in the system.

  The panel reviewed his report and Mrs. Miller’s statement. All Paul could do was deny her account. These people didn’t know him, didn’t know his character, and suddenly he began to feel scared at being at the mercy of this process.

  “After he spit in your face, were you mad?” asked one member of the panel.

  “I didn’t really have much time to think about it. It surprised me, I suppose, and then he immediately headbutted me.” Paul pointed to the large goose egg on his forehead.

  “And did that make you mad?” the panel member asked, staying on that tangent.

  “I was scared, actually. I thought I might go down, and I wanted to make sure he was in the car before I did if I did. He was clearly violent, and not safe to be left unattended even if he was cuffed. So, I was rushing, and I was seeing stars. With my vision temporarily impaired, I didn’t have my normal coordination.”

  “Did you use the standard technique for putting someone in a car?”

  “I’m guessing I did not because of the result, but again, I was seeing stars and disoriented, so I don’t really know what I did.”

  “If you don’t really know what you did, is it possible that you said, ‘Take that!’?”

  “No,” Paul said, “because I didn’t even think that. I was only thinking about whether I was going to lose consciousness.”

  “Mrs. Miller is the only witness.”

  “Mrs. Miller also said she fell when Mr. Miller had clearly been assaulting her, so I would argue she’s not known for her truth telling,” said Paul.

  The five members of the panel looked neither convinced nor unconvinced. They only looked concerned.

  “Lieutenant Bergstrom,” another member of the panel began, “do you use any drugs or alcohol?”

  “Sometimes on a day off, I have a beer with a buddy or two,” he answered.

  “Just one beer?”

  “Just one.”

  “You never have more than one.”

  “I never have more than one.”

  “Is that because you’ve had a problem with alcohol in the past?”

  “No.” He could tell they wanted to know more about that, but he didn’t think they needed to know that his dad was an alcoholic so he did not offer a reason.

  “Do any other members of the panel have further questions for Lieutenant Bergstrom?”

  After a pause, Paul was dismissed. He thanked the union rep and walked stone-faced through the maze of cubicles back to the door. He told himself he didn’t need to be worried because the truth was on his side, but st
ill, as he left the building, he was.

  * * *

  A year after the bombing, ninety of them had received a Medal of Valor at a banquet at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center. Just that morning he had been at the funeral for Sergeant Terrance Yeakey, only thirty years old, who had chosen to end his life three days before. On the day of the blast, he had worked beside Paul. None of the ninety officers knew how to begin to deal with the trauma of every single minute of those days and nights. Some had just been willing and able to wait a little longer to see whether the intensity would die down to something more manageable. Yeakey hadn’t been able to, possibly because in addition to this experience, he had served in Iraq, where one of his duties had been the mass burial of civilians. Once, he shared with Paul that he was haunted by images of dead children and afraid to sleep because his nightmares were so horrific. Paul understood. Every single one of them receiving the medal understood.

  As they sat in their chairs and listened to a letter from President Clinton be read, all of them simply wondered how to go on, how to live with all of these images etched in their minds forever, how to live with the possibility that if they had only done something differently, stepped there instead of there, gone to that spot sooner, if lightning hadn’t stopped work with the large cranes on that fourth day after the blast, maybe they could have saved one more person or a few more people. President Clinton said they “set the standard for perseverance,” but they knew they were not that special. Any other officers would have done the same thing. They weren’t doing their job; they were simply being human. They did what humans do for one another. That was all. And now, because they were human, they were not okay. The chaplain of the Oklahoma City Fire Department had eighty suicide interventions for first responders of the blast under his belt. Eighty. And there were ninety of them receiving the medal.

  Eager for the obligatory ceremony to be over, Paul, along with the others, watched a video from Reba McEntire, Vince Gill, Jay Leno, and Chuck Norris congratulating the department—congratulating them … as if they had won, as if they hadn’t in fact lost—lost everything by being unlucky enough to have been part of this horror … lost their innocence, sanity, their ability to sleep or to ever feel normal again, lost their ability to connect with other people, with their spouses and children, with everybody, lost their capacity for happiness and joy, and, for many, lost their very will to live.

  Everyone called them heroes, but those who did hadn’t heard all the muffled moans that grew silent under their feet as they tried their best. Sure, they were heroes to those they pulled out and to their families, but their successes seemed dwarfed by their failures. They were so aware of all the people they hadn’t been able to save, so aware of the devastation of so many families.

  Yeakey had saved four people, and Paul knew that just like him, he never returned phone calls from any of them. And like Paul, he never wore his gold memorial pin either. People wanted to believe they were special, that they were superheroes, but Paul, Terrance Yeakey, and others wanted people to see that they were just humans. Humans that break. Because humans can’t cope with that level and scale of tragedy. Listening to Chuck Norris, Paul thought about that—about how Yeakey was just a human, one who felt that if he had been the superhero everyone thought he was and wanted him to be, he would not have fallen two floors and injured his back, halting his ability to keep saving lives. If only. If only he had been a superhero. He would have saved so many more lives. They all would have loved to be the superhero that everyone thought they were and wanted them to be. They would have flown around in their capes and hovered over the wreckage, searching out still-living people with their X-ray vision instead of walking on the rubble that covered those buried below.… They would have vaporized the bricks with laser beams that shot out of their fingertips instead of digging blindly brick by brick, hoping, just hoping, for one more miracle.

  Paul sat there in his formal uniform, willing himself to be still, willing himself to just stay there in his seat and wait until it was over, willing himself to act like the hero for the people to whom he was a hero, willing himself to act normal. Somewhere in the audience was his wife and two-year-old daughter. He had to keep it together. Affixed to the podium was the Oklahoma City seal, and in the center of that was a cross. He stared at the place where the two lines intersected. If all the other parts of the seal were taken away, this part would look like the crosshairs of a gun.

  * * *

  Apparently, his Medal of Valor wasn’t going to buy him any credibility from this independent panel. The very service that President Clinton and others praised was now a liability. The statistics were in, giving basis for some to suggest with their questions that he might be unfit for duty.

  Several of them had gone off the rails. He couldn’t deny that. It would be easy to think he was just one more, he supposed. Except that he wasn’t. He had worked so hard not to go off the rails.

  In the weeks that followed the search-and-rescue effort, he and the others had attended mandatory small-group sessions. Maybe they helped. Maybe they didn’t. Paul didn’t know for sure. But he had kept an open mind and he had tried. Sometimes it had been helpful to remember that he wasn’t in it alone. But he also knew talking wasn’t enough. He didn’t know what else there was, but he knew it wasn’t enough.

  More help was offered, a term he found ambiguous and likely based more on intent than on effect. He was desperate enough to accept any help offered, but some of the officers who had asked for this “more help” felt stigmatized by their supervisors and found their fitness for duty questioned. It may have been appropriate, because it was possible that none of them were fit for duty after that—that they were all too traumatized. But that job was their livelihood, their security, and the central part of their identity, so very few of them were ready to give it up. As a result, most of them had done their best to slip under the radar, and most of them, fit or unfit, had functioned. They had. He had. And for that, he would have liked a little more respect.

  Back at home, he felt both tired and restless at the same time. He went back to bed, hoping to calm himself enough to nap so that he could have the sense of restarting the day when he woke, but lying there with his eyes shut, he realized he wasn’t tired—he was weary, and they were two different things.

  So, he got up and deadheaded all the flowering shrubs that Amy had always taken care of up until this year—the lilacs, hydrangeas, camellias, and roses. One after another, he removed what had run its course, what had blossomed and then died. When he got to the roses, he felt far more comfortable because he had complete confidence in their resilience. The more a person let go of what was done blooming, the more he was rewarded with new blooms. He hoped Amy was like the roses … that letting go of her now would lead to a rebirth of their love before summer was over.

  Amy

  Sometimes things seem so much larger to a child than an adult, and as Amy drove away from the U.S. Forest Service campground where she had pulled over the night before, she wondered whether that would be true of Mt. Rainier. However, as she drove over the summit of Chinook Pass and under the log arbor welcoming her to Mt. Rainier National Park, the giant dormant volcano consumed the southwestern sky over Tipsoo Lake. It was every bit as enormous as she had remembered. Patches of snow several feet deep still clung to the north sides of the hills and mountains and blanketed the basin in which the lake sat, giving Amy the strong suspicion that Sunrise wouldn’t even be open yet. Snow. How long had it been since she had seen deep snow like this? Decades. Her younger self would have jumped right out of the car and made a snow angel. Her older self would have cared what people thought. Pulling over, she tried to figure out what her postcancer self wanted, and didn’t know. She stepped out of the car and took a picture with her phone. Up and down the road, other tourists had pulled over and now took the same photo. Studying them for a moment, she determined that she did not care one tiny bit what any of them thought. With that, she l
ay down on the snow with the intention of making a snow angel, but once she was there, she didn’t feel like moving her arms and legs. She just didn’t have the heart. Instead, she wondered what life would be like if a person could just lie on ice and freeze moments of life like meat in the freezer, freeze them before they spoiled, freeze themselves before their own bodies turned on them. She found herself wanting to be very still like that, wanting to pause without the world still turning all around her. And then she had this little thought—that she could. She could find a quieter place to lie down in the snow and just go to sleep and not wake up. Instantly, her eyes bulged with horror at her own thought and she sat up. No. No permanent decisions until she was sane. That was the rule. And if she was even thinking these things, she was not completely sane.

  Just stick to the plan, she told herself. Just stick to the plan and you’ll pull out of this.

  * * *

  Knowing she needed help, Amy had tried going to a support group for cancer survivors less than two weeks after her last surgery. Most of the women were a generation older than her, and as they went around the circle, each of the dozen or so shared her cancer story and the challenges she was facing now. One woman had been cancer-free for eighteen years, but she needed a knee replacement and her husband had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, so he could no longer drive. The woman next to her had survived pancreatic cancer, and then breast cancer, and then a weeklong coma after surgery for that because of the tamoxifen, and now she had just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. She was mad and trying to make spiritual sense of her misfortune. The woman next to her spoke about choosing to be a victor instead of a victim, which seemed to Amy perhaps not so much an ignorant scolding of the woman who had just spoken as simply what the woman told herself to stay sane. Someone else had had nine rounds of chemo. Amy could not imagine. Another woman said she was a five-time member of the cancer club. Most recently, she had had a lung removed. The final woman who spoke, Mary, seemed to try to give the group some tough love about how whining and crying would not lead to happiness. She showed off the Christmas present her husband had given her—a T-shirt that said, “This girl doesn’t retreat—she reloads.”