TWELVE Ox Eye Elizabeth took a picture for Rosie of Ichabod in the garden near a dead rosebush. Rain would come soon enough and bring water-color skies and riotous green to town, but in the meantime, everything was dry, bristly, sticklike, as if the garden itched. Ichabod was a good dog and a mellow companion, and Elizabeth liked talking to him, as he looked Hasidic and thoughtful. She told him to smile before she took his photo; someone should smile around here. James had found two cheap plane tickets to Utah for a family weekend, and they would fly there Friday afternoon. There was a lodge near the wilderness facilities in Davis, thirty miles from Salt Lake City, where the parents would stay and the group sessions would be held. Things could go well, or horribly, or be a mixed grill of progress and discouragement, whereas she and James needed something major to have happened to Rosie; they’d spent their last dime, and run out of options. After dinner the first night, the parents would meet the instructors and therapists in the big upstairs room at the lodge. The adults would have orientation, and then the kids would come in, do a presentation of their wilderness skills, and spend an hour with their parents. Saturday was breakfast together, all-day family therapy with all five kids and all ten parents. Sunday was breakfast, half a day’s family therapy, and then the kids would go to the next leg of their journey, called the Village, a month indoors at the longhouse and the hogan by the river. Elizabeth spent some time in the garden, where she usually found solace, but not today, not with Rosie gone. Today it was dry like someone who had cried too much. She moved through her plants slowly: since Rosie had left, four weeks ago, she and James had both slowed down. Maybe they now got to act their age, instead of trying to act more energetic around Rosie so she would not think they were decrepit. They both had much to do before leaving. They had to pack for the snow—it was only twelve degrees in Davis. James had a story to record, and an appointment with the dean at the College of Marin, where he would begin teaching English comp half-time after the first of the year. It was a real break: they needed the money, and it might be great material for his radio pieces. He was only medium bitter about having to take a real job. Elizabeth had to drive Ichabod up to Lank’s house for the weekend, and arrange for a neighbor to feed Rascal. She was to have one last talk with Bob on Thursday afternoon. That night she and James were going to a rally at the Parkade that Rae had helped organize with the people of Sixth Day Prez, to consecrate this piece of land on which so many of the town’s children had gotten so lost. It had been planned since Jack Herman’s death. And she had a date for tea with Jody and Alice on Friday morning. She reached Bob at his office at four. “How are you?” he asked gently. She thought about this for a moment. “I’m okay in a number of ways. Scared, worried, excited, desperate, flat. If that makes any sense at all.” “It makes perfect sense,” he said. He walked her through a few details of the weekend: “We’ll all meet upstairs. There will be a fire, and snacks. We will catch you up on your children and the program, and prepare you to see them. They are not the children you left with us a month ago. Then they’ll do a demonstration of what they have been learning. And then you get them to yourselves for an hour. Each family will stake out an area of the room. There will be lots of crying and laughing and blame, the kids will be angry and ecstatic, and they will binge on the snacks and get stomachaches. There will be anger and there will be extraordinary healing. There’s no way around it being one of the toughest things you’ll ever do. This is parenthood on steroids.” “What are the kids doing right now?” “Finishing up their truth letters to you parents. Have you written yours to Rosie?” Rosie sat on a log beside the rare afternoon campfire, bent over her journal, gripping her pencil; there was so much to say, but they could use only the front and back of one sheet of binder paper. She looked around at the boughs of the nearest trees, heavy with snow. Boy, were her mother and James in for a bad surprise—it was not cute Tahoe cold here, but cold cold, Outer Mongolia cold. She turned back to her paper and began. Dear Mama and James, I am still sick with anger that you sent me here. You stole something from me that I can never get back, my senior year in high school. I worked so hard and so long for this year, and there were other ways you could have reined me in when you got so freaked out by my behavior, which believe me was very typical of all the kids I know. At the same time, I know you honestly believed that sending me here was the only way you could save me. So I am trying to look forward. James, I want to say you made things really horrible for me this year, you were always on my case and riding my ass. I love you a lot, mostly, and overall you have been a great blessing to this family, but you spend way too much time on your work, to the neglect of my mother and myself. When you look back over your life, I think your memories of us will matter much more than your success as a writer. And mama, it really hurts me that you did not make more of your life. I know you are shy and have had mental trials, but just being a mother and wife is not enough. This has not set a good example. I think your work with Rae as activists is very important and that you should stop using your fake fragile condition as an excuse to lie on the couch and read, or putter around in the garden. I love you so much, you could never in a million years imagine loving someone as much as I love you. That night, dozens of people came to be a part of Rae’s candlelight procession in the Parkade, mostly from Sixth Day Prez—old folks in their Sherpa caps, the youth group, parents, even the parents of one kid who had died. Lank and James had built a primitive wooden stage with a row of steps for the candle ceremony. It was cold and windy. People pressed in close to the stage, and some of the teenagers who had been huddling under the bus kiosk wandered over to listen. Everyone received a candle inside a paper cup. Rae’s co-organizer opened the event by saying simply, “Tonight we bring fresh air, light, and hope to the Parkade.” A guitarist played “Lost Children Street” by Malvina Reynolds. The newly formed church choir sang “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” and then “Blowin’ in the Wind,” completely off-key until the crowd joined in and straightened things out. Parents and relatives and friends who wanted to light a candle for a specific young person gathered to the right of the stage. Rae gave them red plastic party cups with candles inside. From where Elizabeth stood, they looked like a bread line, or people waiting for soup. It was a modest ceremony. The red plastic cups were supposed to guard the votives inside, but the wind was strong and the flames fizzled out, and had to be lit over and over. One person got his candle lit, walked to the center of the stage, said a girl’s name loudly, and placed the candle on one of the steps. Then he went to rejoin the line at the end, while people near the front of the line tried to light their candles. People from the crowd came over to whisper names to the people with red plastic cups, as if making requests, and more and more names were lifted up. The person at the front of the line would step forth like a bridesmaid after the person ahead placed a candle on the step. James took someone’s red party cup and went to the step to lift up Rosie’s name. Elizabeth had had a vision of the heat and light of flames moving the message of the rally into the world, a baby conflagration to stir the cold and unseeing parts of oneself, the cold and unseeing parts of the world, but the candlelit step looked like a beggar man’s war memorial. Rae also lit a candle for Rosie, and made a very short speech when all the parents were done. “Tonight, we lit something inside ourselves to be spread, lit a tiny flame to consecrate toxic ground, to consecrate our caring, our attention to this matter, our wish that there would be help for the parents of the dead. My belief is that their children did not die in vain and their children did not die alone. Tonight was about our huge desire to help, a few of us poor schlubs trying to light a little flame that almost no one was here to see, in red plastic cups.” She laughed at how impoverished an image this was, and continued, looking right at Elizabeth: “Each candle is so temporary, but it says that there is light and there are people who can help: it says the time is now.” Alice and Jody came at nine on Friday morning. Before answering the door, Elizabeth stopped at the mirror in the hall,
saw a tired, graying woman with curved and questioning shoulders. She straightened them up, sucked in her stomach, ran her fingers through her hair, practiced an upbeat smile, and checked once again in the mirror to see if she looked any more like her old self. She thought that she did, that it was pretty convincing. She made them both cocoa with white chocolate shavings, and said that James would be out to say hello as soon as he finished something he was working on. The girls sat on the rug in the living room and played with Ichabod like huge young children. For Rosie they had brought a picture of themselves dressed to the nines in vintage clothes for a party; a lavender, rose, and light blue cap that Alice had crocheted; and a bronze butterfly recovery medallion that Jody’s sponsor had given her. Jody looked dykier than before, with spiky maroon hair, and heavier, yet still with those long fingers and bony wrists. Alice was almost gamine now, with a short stylish pixie cut, fitted black capri pants, a silk scarf, a heart locket from a new boyfriend. But they were so much the same, their fingers always busy, constantly tracing on their palms and pulling on their ears, rubbing their knuckles, inspecting their cuticles. They had something terrible to tell Elizabeth—or at least Rosie would think it was terrible—which was that Fenn was going out seriously with two different girls, and Elizabeth cried out, “Thank you, Jesus,” so loudly that James came running from his office. “Are you going to tell her?” Alice asked. Elizabeth didn’t know. Her skin itched, her brain itched. She shrugged. “I don’t want to be cruel, but I want Rosie to know that Fenn isn’t back at home waiting for her like in the movies.” “You will intuitively know what to do,” said Jody, and Elizabeth smiled, because it was something you heard at every AA and NA meeting, the Ninth Step promises. Then she shook her finger menacingly at Jody. “You and your little NA friends better be right, or your ass is grass.” It was painful and sweet to be with the girls, Alice so stylin’ now, as Rosie would have said, so confident after having gotten early acceptance to three design schools, and Jody fingering the strand of plastic key tags that hung from her belt loops like a rosary, both of them peering at Elizabeth with concerned affection. “I’m so proud of you both,” she said, and she was—Alice was going to be a star, Jody was going to work at the KerryDas Café every morning, before heading to her daily meeting—but guilt squeezed her heart like fingers. Had she done the right thing, sending Rosie away? And would it even work? Alice broke off a corner of a chocolate chip cookie and nibbled at it thoughtfully. “I want to tell you one more terrible thing.” James and Elizabeth turned toward her. “I gave Rosie a lot of Adderall over the last year—I mean, I just shared my stash with her. You know, I take it for ADD.” Elizabeth felt something verging on hate. Then Alice dipped her head. “I actually take it ’cause I love speed, and I’m so sorry that it makes me sick.” She looked up tearfully and smacked herself hard on the head a few times. Elizabeth grabbed her wrist to make her stop, and held on as they collected themselves, Alice’s fingers clenching with the desire to keep hitting herself. “You’re not Rosie’s problem,” Elizabeth said. “Rosie is Rosie’s problem.” “Jesus, Alice,” James exclaimed. “Didn’t you ever hear that speed kills?” Alice rolled her eyes angrily, and muttered about what a jerk she used to be. “Stop, James,” said Elizabeth. “You girls are totally amazing. You’re Rosie’s two best friends, and you get to start writing to her pretty soon.” Then she narrowed her eyes at Alice. “It goes without saying that if you ever give Rosie drugs again, I will so rat you out. I will call every college that has taken you, and say you are a pusher—and I will hurt Ichabod,” she said, and both girls screamed in protest. “I mean it,” she said. “This is not an idle threat.” At the door, Jody took Elizabeth by the hands. “You did the right thing,” she told the older woman sternly. “You made the same messy decision my parents did, when I made such a mess of my life. They know now that they did the right thing, and I do, too, for sure. And Rosie will be too, someday.” A shard of Elizabeth believed her. Most of her was filled with worry, fear, and self-loathing. They all hugged, and the girls did the secret gang handshake with James, the roe-sham-beau and gibberish sign language. Elizabeth watched them walk away, Alice so fine and thin, Jody with a few inches of fleshy back showing, a sparrow in flight tattooed above her leather belt, orange, dark blue, rose, outlined in black. James did all the talking at the airport ticket counter, while Elizabeth stood beside him trying to calm herself. Her shoulders had rolled forward again. She felt like a mental patient being transferred by a federal marshal, or a drunken boater on the Seine, one foot in the rowboat, one foot onshore, her arms holding oars unsteadily above the water. Everything in her ached like the visible part of the garden, dry from crying, twiggy, scratchy, holding its breath until the rains came. You had to remind yourself of all that the soil held, or you’d lose all hope. She found a seat near the ticket counter, took three aspirin, held her hands over her roiling stomach like a pregnant woman, and got out her letter to Rosie. “Darling,” it began in her best penmanship on stationery. “This will be an inadequate attempt to tell you how devastating your drug use was to your family, your future, and especially to your health—mental, psychiatric, psychic, physical.” She looked up at James, still at the counter, tucking their boarding passes into the inside pocket of his ratty old jacket. His letter was so concise—you scared us to death, you treated your mother and me like shit, you were throwing away everything most precious to you, and to us—but hers meandered from mentions of Rosie’s lies and betrayal, to proclamations of love and respect and hope. James had helped her edit out the guilt-mongering, but insisted she not minimize the destruction they had lived through. How honest were you supposed to be with your kid, how honest was healthy for them to hear? Certainly not a cathartic spew. But in the jumble of terror, hatred, resentment, hope, rage, guilt, shame, and overwhelming love, what were the salient points? She’d written a heartbroken, lonely list of treachery and deceit—the drugs and alcohol, the money missing from Elizabeth’s purse, Rosie’s lies about where she was going, whom she would be with, the Adderall Alice confessed to, the raves Jody told Elizabeth about, a week after they sent Rosie away, the Ecstasy, the cough syrup, the bust on the hill, the sneaking out at night, driving stoned and drunk—good God almighty. As she read her list in the airport, it finally struck Elizabeth full-on in her gut—her kid had been totally out of control. She shared this with James when he came over from the counter. Leaning over, she rustled her letter at him and whispered in his ear, “It’s starting to occur to me that our child may have had a little problem.” He drew back to study her, incredulous, until they both smiled. “Ya think?” he said. He read the letter again. “You hit all the right notes.” She folded it and tucked it into her purse. He got up to get them some water—she had not seen him sit still once today—while she closed her eyes and pretended the snug plastic armrests were a straitjacket. She clung to what Jody had said, and to the candles lit the night before, for the kids who had died. All she could think to do was turn the whole shebang over, without knowing to whom or what she was turning it over. She imagined sliding it into the in-box of some lowercase god. She held one palm close to her face, and said in silence, as a supplicant, I’ll be responsible for everything on this side of my palm. You be in charge of the outcome of everything else. Today I turn over the waves. I turn over the shore, and the oars, and will sit in the boat quietly with my hands in my lap, as we prepare for whatever is to come. Nothing I do, think, say, insist upon, or withhold will affect the course of events this weekend, only the course of me. That was so depressing to think about, although James would probably say, Maybe not. Four hours later, at the lodge in Utah, they got food to go from the restaurant downstairs and took it up to their plain, cozy room. There was a down quilt, worn Oriental rugs, an antique chest of drawers, and a round ox-eye window near the ceiling. There had been one just like it in her grandmother’s house, no bigger than a porthole, with a vertical molding bisecting a horizontal one so it looked like the sniper sight on a giant’s rifle. Thin
moonlight showed from the other side. She didn’t know how James could eat so much of his spaghetti: he had a lot at stake, too. He must have assumed that she would partly blame him if it didn’t work out, and maybe she would at first. He had been strict with Rosie all year, so hard on her sometimes. Elizabeth picked at a salad and fries. At quarter of seven, he went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. “It’s time to get going,” he said, pulling her to her feet. “I just brushed my one remaining tooth. Your turn.” A dozen adults were sitting in a circle of chairs in the center of the conference room when Elizabeth and James stepped inside. People introduced themselves, and the parents announced which child was theirs. Rosie had described Bob to a tee in one of her letters—the hedgehog hair, the wide brown eyes, his quiet voice. Rick was the therapy leader, a fireplug of dark hair and eyes, maybe Italian-American, who bristled with gregarious authority. Bob and the instructors would be there only the first night. Rick took the parents through the story of the past weeks, telling how far the kids had come from the first grim days, describing the willfulness and insolence the instructors still encountered, the anger the kids still felt toward their parents, their deep desire to come home, their impressive wilderness skills, their Search and Rescue techniques, and then outlined what this night would be like. Finally he looked up and smiled. “I know you are not desperate for me to keep talking. Let me get your kids.” Elizabeth felt James holding his breath, too, as Rick signaled for the big instructor Hank to open the door. The shuffle of boots on the ground broke the silence, and one by one teenagers in bright orange outdoor gear came in, not making eye contact, and trudged over to an alcove at the far end of the room, which held some gear, drums, a pile of twigs and sticks. Rosie, second in line, was the tallest of the five, and Elizabeth stared at the apparition: Rosie, broad in the shoulders, especially in foul-weather gear, her face thin and focused, pale as a soul, black tendrils spilling from her cap. Hank closed the door. The kids stood side by side like soldiers, holding branches in their hands, like ancient twig configurations, or rune sticks, and after a moment Elizabeth saw that the letters formed the gnarled word “trust.” Rosie, second from the right, had a letter S, twigs bent, curved, and held together with thin green vines. “Trust,” the lead male said loudly at the far left. “T. Trust in our selves, trust in our teachers, trust in the land. T.” “R. Respect that you and our teachers had for us once, that we had for ourselves, that we lost, that we threw away getting high,” said the girl holding the R. “R.” Rosie had written about Kath’s tantrums and episodes, but not about how pretty she was, black-haired, fair-skinned, with gigantic round brown eyes. “U,” said the boy with the goofy expression. He looked sort of stoned. “You being here for us, you having the courage to be here. And us—the courage we have tonight, to face the past, to face the future. You, and us. U.” “S. Sacred trust,” said Rosie, looking straight at Elizabeth, solemn, tired, older, but younger, too, without makeup, lost here, in the weirdness of the drill, but also found in a dark, deep confidence, and in her tribe. Their shoulders helped hold her up, as hers held them. “The sacred trust between parent and child, to try and do the best we can, to grow. The sacred trust of our instructors, to teach us the ways of survival, to teach us the ways of the elders. And sacred trust in ourselves, finally. S.” “T. Trust!” intoned the black-haired boy on the end, the handsomest male, and the kids shouted together, “Trust!” Then they broke into smiles. All the mothers wept and began to rise, but the instructors shook their heads and gestured for them to sit down. The kids put down their branches, then picked up various packs that were leaning against the wall, and one at a time brought them out. Kath announced, “This is the pack we each carry on our shoulders every day,” and took apart the tight bundle, held together with what she called a p-cord: a tarp on the outside, a thin pad inside, a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, cooking gear. Once it was all laid out, one of the boys said, “Go,” and in minutes, she assembled it all into a tight, lumpy burrito, which she slipped onto her back. The parents cheered. Scowling, Kath stepped back. The mothers and James wiped at their eyes. The U boy demonstrated the water filtration system for the tribe, a banged-up steel water filter device with a red pump lever and plastic tubes, the ultimate symbol of sacred trust, because if you didn’t clean the filter perfectly when it was your turn, everyone ended up sick. Rosie gathered dried leaves and grasses from a pile on the floor, and shaped them into some sort of nest, which she set down on a granite square that one of the boys had placed at her feet. She got an Altoids box from another pile of gear, and extracted a bit of black flug. She laid it on the leaves, and from her pocket pulled a rock and a metal handle of some sort. Then she smashed the metal handle against the quartz, over and over, until a thin plume of smoke rose from deep inside the nest, which Rosie blew into a low flame. Finally the demonstration ended, and the kids looked over at Rick, who nodded. The room dissolved into pandemonium as the kids raced for their parents. Rosie plowed into her mother’s arms and then into James’s, tears pouring down her face. She pulled them into one corner of the alcove, then pushed them to the floor so they could all huddle together, cuddle and weep and exclaim over one another. “I know I only have you for an hour,” she implored. “I never thought I could forgive you, and I haven’t quite, but now I cannot stand that we can’t stay up all night together—I will go crazy between now and eight o’clock tomorrow.” She pawed Elizabeth’s weepy face with her sooty hand, and barreled up against James’s chest, handing him a horribly grimy olive-green kerchief on which to wipe himself up. Her face was bleary and scrunched with emotions, everything at once, all three of their faces showed ecstasy and pain, and they rolled into a mass, like bears, shoulders and chests, arms and legs. Rosie pulled off her foul-weather jacket. She was wearing the gray sweater she had worn when Lank and James had kidnapped her, over a black turtleneck. The hem of a pale blue undershirt peeked out below, and reaching to tuck it in, Elizabeth felt the bones of Rosie’s waist. Rosie’s heart burst with joy and anger and pain and homesickness, and she couldn’t possibly gather together all the thoughts and speeches she had rehearsed, her charges and excuses and her hopes. She wanted to tell them how angry she still was that they’d sent her here, but she got only as far as how desperately she missed them. She’d forgotten how beautiful her mother was, those high cheekbones and the perfect nose and the eyes as smart and soulful as a dog’s; there was more gray in her hair. Rosie had been waiting to see what the other kids’ parents looked like, and she’d caught glances of them during the demonstrations—Tyler’s parents looked rich and proper, with black hair like his and good bones, and Kath’s mother was a bleached-blonde anorexic and her father was fat—but Rosie really didn’t care now. Her mother had such great thick short hair. Behind them were cries and exultations and even fists pounding on the carpet—that was probably Kath having one of her episodes—and Rosie turned back to her parents. God, her mother had gotten more wrinkly and James was so pale and exhausted, with dark circles under those beautiful green green eyes, and his hairline had receded since she’d last seen him, and she cried again that she would see them only for another forty minutes tonight, it was cruel and inhumane, but her mother was saying they had all weekend. She loved these two people so much, they were by far the greatest-looking parents, and at the same time she was still mad and hated it here and hated that they’d done this to her. But clean, combed hair helped her spirits immensely, as did having her own clothes, and warm dry socks. Rosie told them everything she could in the forty minutes remaining—about wilderness life; about the emotional-rescue kids, who had lent them this batch of drums, which they had made, and Rosie and her tribe would make some, too, but they could already play these tonight, a welcome rhythm, duh, how dorky was that, since everyone would be saying good-bye. But they hadn’t learned the good-bye song yet. James was dispatched to bring a bowl of trail mix over, and Rosie ate two fistfuls without stopping. She dropped her voice to nearly a whisper as she pointed with her chin to the
other families, and told them who each child was. Elizabeth caught Rosie up on Rae and Lank, Ichabod, Jody, and Alice, and told her she had all this stuff from the girls to give her—a cap Alice had made, and Jody’s butterfly recovery medal, and a card they’d made with photos. Jody had a foot-long strand of NA key tags now. Alice had a new boyfriend and a short pixie hair-cut. And Jody said that Fenn was seeing other girls. Rosie cried out an unintelligible sound. “Did he call to see where I was? And when I was coming home?” “No, but Alice and Jo told him.” Her mother held her, and James stared mournfully at his wooden bowl of trail mix and picked out M&M’s to offer as communion after Rosie was able to stop crying. In her last letter, Rosie had said that her nails were pitch-black and she smelled like monkey island at the zoo, but she and the others had gotten to take hot showers at the SAR base camp, and wash their hair. Elizabeth burrowed now into the warm, delicious long curls. The parents were permitted to give their kids brushes and combs in the morning—they’d all had to share one last night at the base camp. Rosie pulled up her foul-weather pants to show them that the hair on her legs was almost as thick and black as James’s, but there would be no shaving allowed until the Academics phase at the old house in town, in another month. And it seemed like only minutes had passed, but Rick was standing and telling everyone it was time to go. The three of them clung together, and then all the kids returned to the alcove, and each took one of the drums against the wall, and a folding chair, and they sat in the same order in which they had spelled out “TRUST” and began to play their song. The drums drew the kids together into the beat of itself, into its rhythmic tribal heart, steady and firm. They looked up at one another as they played, or down at their hands and drum skins. Their playing was like a community pacemaker, and when they stopped, the silence was profound. Then the parents burst into wild applause and whistles. The kids looked sheepish, vaguely contemptuous, and totally at home. Rosie glanced over her shoulder on the way out the door, one last look for the road. God, her parents were so cute, like little rabbits, staring back at her, waving like she was getting on a school bus. She had presents to give them tomorrow, rings she had made from bark fibers of a tulip poplar. All the kids had made rings for their parents. It had been a whole day’s work, which left their hands sliced with paper cuts. She had fashioned thin cord and it had taken forever to break it down between her palms, twist and plait two almost invisible strands. One of the boys had started twisting dogbane into cord until Bob had discovered this and told him it could be deadly, at least to dogs, and could cause heart problems in humans. There were actually more ways for kids to die out in the woods than there’d ever been at home. Her parents were crazy. But she had come through. She had shown everyone that she could survive in the snow with almost nothing, make cord from the skinniest fibers, play an ancient rhythm on a drum. And she could make fire. James and Elizabeth milled around their room in the lodge like dogs at the pound. Only one bedside lamp was lit. Elizabeth looked mournfully at the cold smelly French fries she had barely touched. “All of a sudden I’m starving to death,” she said. “I feel faint.” “Do you want me to see if the kitchen is still open? I could get us some of that pie.” “In a minute. Will you come sit on the floor with me?” He came over and sat down beside her on the worn rug, against the wall. They both sighed. “How did she look to you?” he asked finally. “Beautiful. Full of breath. I love it here. I love Bob, Rick, I love them all.” “Something with big healthy teeth has broken through her polluted cocoon. Broken had to happen. Otherwise, there would have always been another inch of wiggle room, and Rosie had become a wiggle artist.” The air in their room smelled faintly of mold, dust, and evergreen trees. “What about that drumming, James! Was that wild, or what?” “Wild,” he agreed. “It overwhelmed me at first. But it seems to take all the inner jangle and work it through their bodies, so it came out as power. It turned it into one loud heartbeat for a few minutes.” They sat in the near dark, shoulder to shoulder. She looked up at the thin moonlight through the porthole, divided into quarters, and felt another hunger pang. Her stomach growled, but over the rumble she heard the sound of footsteps crunching against the snowy gravel below. “Listen.” The kids were talking in the night. She strained to hear but could not distinguish Rosie’s voice from the others’. A car door opened, and then another, probably belonging to the van that would take them to the hogan and the longhouse for their first night inside. Life would be easier there. The fire in the hogan was always lit, and they could prepare all kinds of hot food. There was candlelight to read by. They’d make their own drums the first days there, then do drum circles daily, practice community living, continue with therapy. Still, not senior year in Landsdale. The doors slammed one by one, and the engine started up, but Elizabeth and James did not see the lights of the van up here, only the dim reading lamp by the bedside and the thin quartered light of the moon through the ox-eye window, and they listened to the van pull away in the night.
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