Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

by Danielle Younge-Ullman

  “Wise choice,” he says.

  I wake early, the sky just lightening, with Tavik breathing into the back of my neck, arm still around me, and fast asleep. It’s a strange feeling, waking up with someone. It feels intimate, vulnerable, warm.

  But mornings are hard for me. Mornings are when I’m too sleepy to fend off images of Mom crumpled on the floor with the bottle of pills, and when I wake up sometimes, heart racing, looking for a window to kick in.

  I carefully slide out from under Tavik’s arm, stifling a groan as I start to feel how sore my muscles are from yesterday. I almost can’t move at all, and it isn’t just my arms, back, and shoulders, it’s my abs, sides, hip flexors . . . even my fingers. Still, I collect my hat, and duck out of the lean-to, staying close to the ground until I get to mine in case anyone does happen to be looking. Then I push my sleeping bag into my rickety structure and carefully climb inside .

  An hour later my eyes meet Tavik’s over our respective bowls of fried granola.

  “Morning, Ingrid,” he says, completely casual.

  “Morning,” I say, the same way.

  “Good sleep?”

  “Awesome,” I say.

  We both smile, then look away, and the warm buzz that gives me, deep in my chest, is hard to ignore.

  PAPER DOROTHY

  (Age Fifteen)

  Mom was still unconscious when the ambulance arrived.

  In the hospital they pumped her stomach, which would get rid of some of the alcohol, but wouldn’t help with any medication that was already in her bloodstream.

  All we could do was wait. The substances would work their way through, and she would be fine, or not. I had cuts on my legs and arms, and blood on my clothing, and one of the nurses was kind enough to bandage me up, but I hardly noticed it happening.

  The waiting gutted me.

  Those were some of the darkest, most frightening hours of my life to that point. I could not see there being life past her death. If she died, I would die too. I felt like I was dying already.

  And I ran through, over and over, what I could have done differently, and tortured myself with the idea that this was my fault for doing the play, for letting myself get so distracted with my own happiness that she’d walked to the edge and been standing there, and I hadn’t noticed.

  Finally, in the early hours of the morning, she woke.

  She woke like nothing had happened—sharp and waspish and insistent on getting up and out of bed. She literally pulled the IV out of her arm, and marched/hobbled out of her room. Andreas had to pick her up and carry her back. But they couldn’t legally keep her in the hospital now that she was lucid.

  “But you overdosed,” I said, almost shouting. “You almost died!”

  “Don’t be absurd,” she snapped. “You two are acting like drama queens.”

  I opened my mouth, then shut it again, at a loss for words.

  By ten in the morning we were back home, where she refused to go to bed and instead zoomed around, quarterbacking the cleanup of the mess in her room, even going so far as to scold me for damaging the door and breaking the window. We stripped the bed, and Andreas cleaned up the broken glass and put a temporary cover on the window.

  “Insurance is not going to cover that, you know,” she said.

  “Insurance wouldn’t have helped me much if you had died, either,” I said sullenly.

  “Enough with this subject,” she said, but then she started to tremble, and her face turned red, and a single tear made its way down her cheek.

  “Oh, Mom.” I melted instantly, and rushed to put my arms around her. “Mom, Mom . . . shhh . . . it’s okay . . .”

  She was shuddering, silently sobbing, clutching me close.

  “Margot-Sophia Lalonde should never be so foolish, so weak,” she said. “Promise me you will never tell.”

  “Sure, sure . . .”

  “No!” She pulled back to look me in the face, holding my shoulders. “Not ‘sure, sure.’ Never. Tell. You must promise.”

  “Fine, I promise. According to you there’s nothing to tell anyway.”

  It was late afternoon and we’d just ordered takeout when the landline rang. Only then, as it was ringing and I realized my phone had been dead for hours, did I see the time and realize . . .

  Oh noooooooooooooo . . .

  I was supposed to be onstage in twenty minutes.

  It was Isaac, of course, calling me in his official role as stage manager.

  “I can’t come,” I told him.

  “What?”

  “Look, Autumn probably knows my part. You’ll have to work it out.”

  “Ingrid, are you kidding me? We can’t do this without you. And half the audience is already here. What’s going on?”

  “I can’t do the show. Please . . .” Tears were streaming down my face now, but I swallowed, trying to sound normal. “Please apologize for me. . . .”

  And then suddenly Margot-Sophia grabbed the phone.

  “This is Ingrid’s mother,” she said. “Please forgive my daughter for frightening you. Of course she will be there . . . Yes. No, this was simply a misunderstanding. Ingrid will be there. Thank you. Good-bye, young man.”

  She hit End and put down the phone.

  “Mom, I can’t leave you. And I can’t go out there and . . . sing about rainbows right now.”

  “Are you such a coward?”

  “What?”

  “You have a bond of trust with your audience. No matter what pain you’re in, no matter what is happening in your life, you must not break that trust, ever. The golden rule is that you show up. Always.”

  “Mom, you just—”

  “I just nothing! When you are performing, you show up. Unless you are dead, you show up. You are not free to indulge in cowardly emotional weakness when you make a commitment like this. You must be strong. I certainly don’t want you here, sniveling and watching my every move. I am fine. I will not be fine, though, if you don’t go.”

  “Ingrid has had a very difficult time,” Andreas said. “She may well be in shock . . . .”

  Margot-Sophia waved him off, her gaze both fiery and empathetic, somehow. Because she could do both at once, even less than twenty-four hours after overdosing.

  Then she pulled away, marched up to her bedroom, and came back in a fabulous electric-blue dress, flats, and lipstick.

  “I for one have paid for a ticket, and I expect to get my money’s worth,” she announced, a slight quaver evident in her voice, but with her chin up. “And I want to see my talented daughter perform. Andreas, my love, get the car.”

  Somehow I did it. I couldn’t tell if it was good or bad, and I don’t know what I did differently, but people cried during “Over the Rainbow.”

  Not me, though. Inside me was an ocean and I had to funnel it through a straw. This took everything I had—it took even what I didn’t have. Margot-Sophia was out there, and she expected me to do it, and so I got it done.

  At the final curtain call, there were flowers, tears, congratulations all around. Backstage, after, was gleeful pandemonium. People wanted me to celebrate, but I was not who I’d been yesterday, or the day before that.

  It felt like that girl had died. Like Dorothy before and after the tornado, but worse. So much worse, because I didn’t feel plucky and brave and certain and strong. I couldn’t go back to Kansas, either.

  I was like a paper doll, or a bullet-riddled target practice figure, on my feet, standing at the closing-night party only because I didn’t know what else to do.

  Andreas and Mom were waiting for me—together at least—and so I didn’t stay long.

  Isaac intercepted me at the dressing room door, on my way out.

  “You’re going?”

  “Yup.” I had an armload of flowers.

  “Not staying?”
<
br />   “Going means not staying last I checked.”

  “Ingrid, please . . .”

  “If I want a ride home, I have to go now.”

  “What happened to your hands?” (My hands were discreetly bandaged, and Isaac was the only person to mention it.) “And . . . what happened? Something happened.”

  I stared at him, then shook my head.

  “Ingrid . . . we need to talk. I need to explain to you . . . about Autumn and—”

  “I don’t care about Autumn right now,” I said, my self-control almost at an end. “And I don’t want to talk to you. I can’t.”

  I was about to start bawling right there in the dressing room, and everyone was going to think it was about him, but really I just didn’t have one more iota of energy to give to Isaac at that moment, or to anything else. Maybe I’d overreacted about Autumn, though I didn’t think so, and in normal circumstances we’d have been able to work it out. But not now. Even if I loved him, which maybe I had. In fact, in that moment, I knew I had. That only made everything worse, and more impossible.

  I was Paper Dorothy. Flimsy, and full of holes, barely standing.

  “Forget it, Isaac,” I said, and pushed past him, jaws tight and lips pressed together to keep me from crying. “Good-bye.”

  OPTIONS

  (Peak Wilderness, Days Fifteen to Eighteen)

  The canoeing days are long. Six or seven hours of paddling under the hot sun with aching shoulders, back, arms, and obliques. Lots of time to ponder how much longer this pain is going to last, hour by hour, day by day. It’s agony. Long agony. We take turns at the bow and stern positions, and in our canoe one person has to be the “princess,” which is the person who sits in the middle on their pack because there isn’t a seat.

  It turns out paddling and steering a canoe takes coordination not just of oneself, but with others. And we are a group of people at odds with ourselves and others. There are long periods of determined silence in our canoe, broken by bursts of grumbling and bickering when one of us gets out of sync, or our paddles whack each other, or the front person sends a big splash of water onto the people at the back, or the canoe is suddenly going the wrong direction. Ally does more apologizing than bitching, but Jin and I bitch.

  In fact, Jin is noticeably out of sorts, and I soon realize she doesn’t like being on the water, not that she’d admit it.

  “Good thing we didn’t try this before the hiking,” I mutter at one point.

  “We’d have drowned,” Jin agrees grimly.

  This is one of our more positive exchanges.

  When everything goes smoothly, though, which happens more often as we get the hang of things, canoeing is almost soothing. Well, it’s soothing in the sense that your body starts to be able to do its thing, and your mind can wander.

  I’m not that keen on where my mind wanders, though.

  Talking about Isaac and Oz to Tavik has had the effect of stirring up those memories for me, and I find my mind looping back through the horrific ups and downs, through the hours I spent not knowing if my mom would live, and over and over to her making me promise I would never tell anyone.

  I am very close, with Tavik, to breaking that promise—close in the story itself, which I know he’s not going to let go of, and close also because I’m angry she asked me to keep it secret. Keeping her secrets never did me any good, and didn’t help her either, I don’t think. And being out here in the wilderness, I’ve started to realize how tightly, how tensely, I have to hold myself all the time, how tightly to myself I have held everything about me for so long. I do it now by instinct. I do it because I don’t know how not to, because I’m afraid not to, because it has become the way I am. I thought it was strength, this solitary absorption of all things, good and bad. But it has left me very alone, and maybe that is part of what freaks me out, here in the wild. I feel my aloneness, and my inability to easily cross the bridge to another person.

  Other people, over the past few weeks, have opened up—some of them to all of us, some to just one or two others. Melissa, since Peace left, has talked about everything to everyone, and she is transformed.

  Ally has been quieter about it, but she is changing too, spending hours with Seth, but also talking in circle, and there is a quiet competence growing in her. Almost everyone else, with the exceptions of Jin and me, has relaxed into a comfortable rapport with the rest of the group. Everyone else is friends by now, whereas we are only friendly.

  My body is stronger, and I have fantastic wilderness skills, compared to when this started fifteen days ago, and even some unexpected leadership skills. And I can speak my mind about something that pisses me off. All of that is good, I guess. But I am still trying to build up and reinforce the walls I use to keep myself strong.

  Supposedly strong.

  But definitely alone.

  Maybe that’s why talking to Tavik is so tempting.

  Maybe that’s why I spend so much of Day Fifteen thinking about whether I’ll sneak over to his lean-to again tonight, and sleep with him curled up around me, and whether or not it’s actually sleep I’m looking for.

  Maybe that’s why I don’t go.

  On Day Sixteen we pause for a breathless half hour to watch a moose near the side of the river. We’ve been seeing a lot more wildlife while canoeing than we did hiking, partly due to the higher speed of travel, but also Pat says hikers are so incredibly noisy that they scare the animals off, especially this far north, where there are so few humans. From the canoes, though, we’ve seen foxes, a couple of beavers, a few deer, and a ton of toads, in addition to the moose.

  Because we’re a little behind, Bonnie suggests we have what she calls a “floating lunch,” which saves us the time it would take to get onshore, unpack the canoes, and so on. At the top of a long straight part of the river, we paddle close to one another and then hang our legs into each other’s canoes, thereby creating a haphazard flotilla. Then Melissa, Henry, and Seth make us wraps from their food barrel, and we pass them along from canoe to canoe until everyone has one, and we drift down the river, happily eating.

  We’re just finishing this rather fantastic lunch when the river takes a turn, merges with another river, and widens out. Suddenly we’re moving fast—really fast. We all scramble to disentangle the canoes, and quickly grab our paddles.

  “Yo, Pat, is this a rapids?” Henry shouts.

  “Nope, not a rapids,” Pat calls back calmly. “Just a fast part of the river.”

  “Rapid is another word for fast,” I point out.

  “Don’t panic.”

  Panic or not, Harvey and Tavik’s canoe is soon stuck on a rock, and they’re in trouble. Pat and Bonnie start to paddle back upriver to help, while we pass them, barely in control.

  “Get to the shore,” Bonnie says, jerking her head toward it. “And grab on to one of those branches. And be ready to catch their food barrel!”

  I guess this is what they meant by “situation.”

  We somehow get to the side, and Jin and I half stand to grab on to the low-hanging branches, while Ally paddles to keep us steady.

  Upriver, Bonnie and Pat send the food barrel our way.

  “If I let go to catch it, can you hang on?” Jin asks.

  I’m not sure I can, but I say, “Go for it,” and brace myself to hold on once Jin lets go—hands tight, legs half wrapped around the seat below me.

  She lets go, and my whole body jerks, but I manage to hang on, and keep the canoe under me too, as the barrel comes closer.

  I tighten my grip again, trying to ignore my shaking arms. . . .

  And that’s when I see the freaking bear, standing not more than ten feet away from us, under the shade of the same tree I’m hanging on to. It’s dark brown, and massive, and it’s looking right at me. Ohmyfuckinggod.

  Out of the corner of my eye I can see Jin leaning out as far as she
can without tipping the canoe, and she almost has the barrel. We need that barrel—the food is planned meticulously, down to the last meal. Of course we might be about to become a meal. Facts race through my mind: Bears rarely attack humans. Bears mostly eat berries. Bears are not so hungry in summer compared to spring. Bears mostly attack only if you threaten their young and I don’t see any young. Bears are as scared of us as we are of them.

  Sure.

  Please, Jin . . .

  “Got it!” Jin cries, and then pulls the barrel close and heaves it into the canoe.

  “Good job!” Ally shouts. “Great job!”

  “Guys!” I say from my precarious position. “Not to freak you out, but we have to go. Now. I’m going to let go, and both of you start paddling away from the shore as soon as I’m down. Okay?”

  Neither of them knows what the problem is, but by the way they move—quickly—they believe me. I let go of the tree and drop down in one as-smooth-as-possible motion, trying not to cause us to tip in the process, and they start paddling like crazy. I haul myself onto my seat, pick up my paddle, and do the same.

  With the weight of the extra barrel in our canoe, we sit low in the water, the paddling is more difficult, and the result is slower. Too slow.

  “Holy mother of shit,” Jin says from behind me.

  “What is it?” Ally says, her voice high with panic.

  “Just paddle,” I say.

  “Bear,” Jin says. “There on the shore.”

  Ally gives a squeak and paddles faster.

  “It’s not going to attack us,” I say, trying to sound sure.

  “But . . . they . . . can swim . . .” Ally gasps.

  “Yep,” Jin says.

  “I think the response we’re supposed to be having is how beautiful and majestic it is, and how lucky we are to have spotted it,” I say, tight-voiced.

  On the shore the bear is still watching us, and then it gets down on all fours and lopes along the rock and sand, almost keeping pace with our canoe.

  “I’ll be filled with wonder later on,” Jin says. “Right now I might barf.”