My only solace as I traipsed back to my cabin with my gold medal was that it was finally, finally over.
It was not over. In fact, the worst was yet to come.
That night after dinner, we were all directed to the recreation hall, which had been converted to a temporary theatre. We were instructed to sit, and I took a seat in the back row. The room began to buzz with electric energy, and it soon became apparent what was going on. It started off with three counsellors selecting a girl each to bring onstage. Once there, they sat on folding chairs while the counsellors stood behind them, lightly gripping their shoulders. The counsellors spoke loudly above the campers’ heads, and after a while, each of the girls began to emit a bizarre stream of gibberish. The counsellor would then give a rapturous hoot and send the camper off the stage to tag one of her friends. I’d learned a lot about praying in the past seven days, and at this moment, I prayed harder than I ever had in my life that no one would call me onto that stage.
It was much too hot in there. I itched to escape from the room, but both exits were blocked by counsellors with crossed arms. I glanced at the girl beside me. She had her eyes closed and was slowly swaying from side to side on her seat. I recognized her from my cabin; she was one of the horsey girls who spent all their time in the stables. I hadn’t gone near the horses all week.
I glanced back at the stage in time to see a girl descending the stairs and coming straight for me. She weaved slightly as she walked, as if she were tipsy. I ducked down in my seat, but it was no use.
“I think you need this more than anyone here,” she said, pulling me up from my chair.
From the stage, the counsellor was beckoning to me, patting the back of her chair. Shit. Filled with dread, I pushed myself forward and took my seat onstage. I spotted Carleigh, who was seated in the audience with her cabin mates, and caught her eye. She gave me an encouraging smile.
The counsellor, a woman in her twenties, crouched in front of me. Her pupils were huge. “You know Jesus loves you. Right?”
I nodded, petrified.
“Say it.”
“Je—Jesus loves me,” I stammered, feeling like a complete moron.
Two chairs down from me, a girl stopped spewing gibberish and slumped off her chair onto the floor. Two counsellors swept in and carried her off the stage.
“And what do you want his forgiveness for tonight?”
“Forgiveness?”
“Yes. For what sins?”
“Sins?” I thought fast, trying to remember what they were. “Um, for, like, thinking unpure thoughts, I guess, and, like, maybe for disrespecting my mom and stuff, and wearing mascara and lip gloss?”
She nodded solemnly. “Very good. Now, just relax and let his love flow through you. You want to make the ultimate connection with Jesus here. So when you feel like you want to speak to him, just open your mouth and let it out.”
I gazed at her with dread, but she was already moving to the back of my chair and placing her hands on my shoulders. Around me the fervour continued, and everyone seemed so happy. Maybe the counsellor was right, I thought. I was unhappy too much of the time, and maybe Jesus’s love was just what I needed to change that.
I closed my eyes and tried to focus. I pictured Jesus on the cross and tried to get sad about it. When that didn’t work, I prayed to him in my head to help me start a modelling career. Then I remembered that modelling involved makeup and magazines, so as far as mortal sin went, I might as well ask him to drop a boulder on Sam’s head. My eyes popped open.
“Speak! Let it out! Speak!” the counsellor was urging over my head.
I closed my eyes again and started over. This time, I just asked to be happy.
“Speak! Speak now!” The counsellor was working herself into quite a lather.
What if I couldn’t do this? I switched tactics, asking Jesus to just please say something to me so I could give the counsellors what they wanted and get this over with. When a couple more minutes passed and I didn’t feel anything, I knew it was hopeless. Jesus and I apparently had nothing to say to each other, but that didn’t help my current situation. Not one girl in this room had gotten off the stage without first proving her connection with Christ.
I opened my mouth and, imitating the girls who’d gone before me, let a stream of nonsense escape. As soon as I heard the counsellor whoop behind me, I stood up and ran off the stage as if I were energized by Jesus’s love. Then I pushed my way past one of the exit guards to the bathroom. I was pretty sure I was going to throw up.
Carleigh and I were both quiet on the ride from Circle Square Ranch back to Calgary. We sat in the back of the RV, while her grandmother sang along to country songs up front.
“I still can’t believe we weren’t in the same cabin,” Carleigh said finally.
I nodded. I’d noticed that Carleigh had not suffered for friends as I had this week, but I also knew I couldn’t blame her for her popularity. I stared out the window at the passing fields of cows and horses. My already foul mood was plummeting. I hated where I was leaving, but I hated what I was going back to even more.
“So, do you . . . feel any better now?” Carleigh was asking me. “I mean, because of the, you know . . .”
“The rape.”
“Yeah.”
I looked her in the eye, suddenly emboldened. What did I have to lose? “It never happened.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“I mean it never happened. I lied. No one ever raped me.”
“Wow. Really? But . . . why?” Her eyes were huge.
“Dunno. I guess I just . . . really wanted the attention.” I crossed my arms defiantly. It was the best answer I could come up with on short notice, but it was nowhere near the truth. What I felt was that I was caught in the middle of a massive tangle of questions to which I had no answers. One of these questions involved Carleigh herself, who had every right to be angry at me but wasn’t. I should have been relieved or grateful, but for some reason, even though I was the one who had lied, I felt betrayed. I didn’t want people to accept where I came from without question. I desperately wanted someone to know the truth about me, and yet I was so afraid of exposing it that I could only reveal my pain through lies. I wanted someone to dig and insist and demand that I tell them the truth, but I knew this was way too much to ask of a twelve-year-old friend.
I slipped my hand into my jeans pocket and touched my gold archery medal. The darkness was pushing in on me hard, trying to take over, and right now, this little reward was the only thing that assured me I wasn’t a total loser. I should have been grateful to have something, at least, but all I could think about was the irony of where this validation had come from: an environment far removed from everything I knew and yet similar in its extremity. I thought about my own childhood, the over-the-top freedom and insistence by my family that nothing existed outside of what we could see with our own eyes. So opposite to the world of anyone who’d grown up God-fearing, rigid, forever trying to please an intangible being by preparing for a time and place in another realm.
Why did people need to go to such extremes? Did a happy medium even exist, or was everyone’s life marred by some extreme or another, even if it were only extreme ordinariness? I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that if that normal place existed, I was still an unbearable distance from finding it.
Chapter 12
2007
Vancouver
Like a stuck record, the date ran around and around in my head. December seventeenth, 2007, December seventeenth, 2007. Please get out of here. Please just open the door and leave.
I sat on the edge of the hotel room bed, watching as James tied Avery’s shoes, put on his own coat, patted his pocket for his wallet. My need to be alone right now felt like a physical force. My mother had been dead for five hours, and I’d been holding it together for just as long.
Just two days ago, I’d seen her at the hospice after flying in from Vancouver to Calgary to say my last goodbye. Ever since,
I’d been waiting for the phone to ring with the news. It had finally been delivered this afternoon.
And, of course, as befitted the story of my life, it couldn’t have happened on a normal day. James, Avery and I had been living with James’s mother since our return to Vancouver, during which time she also happened to be renovating her house. This morning workers had shown up to lay new flooring, forcing all of us to decamp to a hotel for the night. On any other day it wouldn’t have mattered a bit, but today it did. As I looked around at the cheap Holiday Inn furnishings, I thought of the many unusual shelters my mother and I had occupied in my childhood and found it sadly fitting that I would grieve her passing here. After all, right now I was almost as far removed from my childhood dream of a normal life as I had been then.
James had the door open now. “I’ll take him for as long as you need,” he said. “And, hey . . . I’m sorry,” he added gently.
I nodded my thanks, and the door finally closed behind them. I picked up the wine bottle at my side and poured myself a full glass. All I hoped was that I could get my tears out before Avery came toddling through the door again with his eyes in big questioning circles, asking why Mommy was crying.
I collapsed back on the bed. The last time I saw Mom, she’d been so far gone she could barely speak; I’d laid my favourite childhood book beside her and thanked her for being my mother. So why did the memory of that do nothing to stir my emotions? She’s gone, I thought. She’s gone forever. I knew I held a hundred things inside—devastation and relief, forgiveness and blame, anger and love—but I couldn’t actually feel any of them. My eyes remained as dry as the deep, empty well of my heart.
Of course, I thought as I stared up at the spackled ceiling. It’s survival. If I started crying now, I might never stop, and I had way too much to get through to afford such a luxury.
Christmas Day of 2007 was, for me, one of a horrible in-between. My mother’s death was a week behind me, her memorial two weeks ahead. My marriage lay in ruins that both James and I pretended not to notice because of the season and circumstances. James’s mother poured me wine and tried not to look pitying. Random friends of James’s family dropped in throughout the day, oblivious to my pain as they cracked off-colour jokes. Everyone laughed, even me.
“A fireman jacket!” Avery squealed delightedly, lifting it from a pile of shredded paper.
I forced my lips into a smile. More than anything about today, it was the sight of my young son that pained me. At this point, his life revolved around his parents, and he had no idea his world was going to be ripped apart when they separated. I pulled him into my lap and hugged him too hard. He squirmed away, wanting to play. As I watched him, I imagined myself in a hospital, surrounded by friends and what was left of my family. They would finally see that I was not okay and wonder how they’d missed that I had been on the verge of an emotional breakdown. For the first time I could ever remember, I didn’t give a flying fuck about being strong.
I knew of people whose worlds had fallen apart for various reasons, but my situation was different, because in order for a life to fall apart, it must once have been together. I could see clearly that mine never had been. Sure, I’d pretended—spent years exuding a persona of success and competence, making myself pretty and surrounding myself with pretty things, filling in the husband slot to complete the happy picture, and smiling, smiling, always smiling. But the contrast to my inner world—depression, restlessness, uncertainty of my boundaries or even my right to have them—was like a single black storm cloud in a clear blue sky. And the thing was, I couldn’t remember a time I hadn’t felt that way. Rather than starting out whole and unravelling, my unprocessed past had slowly closed around me until I was left with nowhere to run. Now, immobilized, I was forced to look at myself and see the truth.
I got up from the sofa and descended the stairs to the bedroom I was sharing with James and Avery. I was quite certain the adults wouldn’t miss me, but I probably didn’t have long before Avery would come searching. I sat down on the bed, then I took out my laptop and started to type.
I endure. I persevere and I take it on and I chomp through problems like Ms. Pac-Man, because my life isn’t that bad compared to others’. I have never given myself licence to complain, because complaining would make me a victim. I am defined by my ability to endure and my will to survive. It doesn’t matter what you pile on to me physically, mentally or emotionally, because I don’t know how to set boundaries or define acceptable behaviour. No one ever taught me how. I had a mother who loved me, and that’s more than a lot of kids had, so I had no right to expect anything more. So bring on the stress, the issues, the problems, the shit. I will take it and say nothing at all, because I am gagged and muzzled by my own unfailing and insistent smile.
I closed my laptop and collapsed onto my side in a sobbing heap. Deep within, I recognized that though I hadn’t been able to cry for my mother, I could cry for myself. It was a little shameful but also revealing. My history may not have been a happy one, but at least I’d always tried. I’d truly believed that if I tried hard enough, I could create the happiness and the reality I craved. But it hadn’t worked, so somewhere along the line, I’d stopped taking control of my life and become a spectator in it. And though I’d always promised myself it wouldn’t happen, a victim mentality had slowly squeezed its way into my mindset. If I had any chance of surviving, I would have to change that, and fast. I knew very well that self-pity and courage could not co-exist.
1986
Calgary
I sat at my desk, tapping my pencil and glancing up at the clock every few seconds. My teacher gave me a sidelong glance. Normally eleventh-grade English class was the highlight of my school day, but today I couldn’t wait to make my break. I had a modelling job for a local mall after school, and it was going to pay me enough to help Mom make rent this month with money left over for a new pair of jeans.
Maybe I’d been wrong about Jesus, because one year after the holy-roller camp, where I prayed to him to make me a model, my request had been granted in the form of a modelling competition. That was three years ago, when I was thirteen. I’d walked into an agency after spotting an ad in the newspaper, and as soon as the photographer saw me, things happened quickly. Within a few months, I moved to New York, and I spent the following two summers working in Paris. As it turned out, I had found a way to escape my mother, even if it was only within the parameters of school breaks. The downside of my career was that it was an isolating choice. I spent every school holiday away and most weekends working, which didn’t give me much in common, or anything really to talk about, with my schoolmates. And then there were the misconceptions. My few true friends had cheered for me and treated me no differently when I’d started modelling, but I’d noticed changes in others. I saw judgment—groups of girls I hardly knew who suddenly found reason to giggle or comment snidely, eyes averted, when I walked past. I saw appraisal—boys who looked at my makeup-free face and flat chest and likely wondered what the big deal was. I saw envy in some, not so much for my career but for my independence. I knew it was pointless to tell them that they were the lucky ones, because they didn’t have anything at home they needed to escape from. And forget the parents who, when they found out I conducted my career without adult supervision, looked at me like I was some wild child. “What about your mother?” were always the first words out of their mouths, to which I’d learned a simple “What about her?” to be a more effective response than any explanation. But of course it was all worth it, because I’d turned my long-held dream into a career, and in doing so I’d realized that my life was within my control.
I gazed out the window as the wind blew up a swirl of leaves on the cracked sidewalk. Just a few weeks ago, I’d been clicking my way through photo shoots in Paris, all the while navigating the tricky game of refusing invitations to party with the crew and still getting a second or third booking out of them. Sometimes I wondered what was wrong with me—all the other girls were happy enough
to party, and most of them seemed to live for it, but even the idea of it made me squirm. On the few occasions I’d consented to being dragged out, I’d sat alone at my VIP table with a bottle of Perrier, while my friends drank, danced, flirted and sometimes snorted coke or left with a photographer or client. I saw accusation in the other girls’ eyes when I didn’t join in—there goes Little Miss Boring, home to bed early again. What I didn’t want to explain to them was that while I understood their unbridled antics, freedom wasn’t exactly new to me. And even more than that, their behaviour was too close to my mother’s for my comfort. In a way, these nightclub outings were just another version of the parties she used to drag me to when I was ten.
The bell finally rang, and I snapped my book closed and made a dash for my locker. As I was scooting down the hall, I spotted my friend Tiffany waving at me frantically through the crowd. I pointed at my watch and kept going. I’d actually been furtively dodging her since my return from Paris. Tiffany loved to party, shoplift and make out with random guys, none of which were top priorities for me—at least not anymore.
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