Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

by Danielle Younge-Ullman

  Finally we hit the center of the river where the water is moving faster. The bear seems to lose interest, and we leave it behind. Along with ten years of my life, I’m sure.

  Dear Mom,

  Canoeing has put me in a strange state. Almost like I’m having an out-of-body experience some of the time. Like I am floating along beside myself, or above myself, and thinking about things from a one-step-away position. Or I go wandering off in the forest, away from myself entirely. This, it occurs to me, could be “meditative”—i.e., a good thing—or it could be “dissociative”—i.e., I am going batshit crazy. I’m just spacey, maybe.

  I might be depressed. . . .

  Except I don’t feel sluggish or heavy, and when I need to wake the hell up and respond to something, I can do it. It’s like a switch is flipped, and I go back into my body and do what I need to do. And that feels good.

  But when I am back outside myself, I feel a little bit sad for the me that I’m watching, and yet I am cheering her on.

  I could have been eaten by a bear today.

  But I guess I also could have drowned or choked or had a freak accident.

  I built a decent lean-to tonight. I could stay in it and test my courage further. Or I could go sleep with a very warm ex-convict who always wants me to talk. A different kind of test. A different kind of courage.

  If that’s what it is.

  Five more days of this . . .

  Good night, diva mama,

  Ingrid

  Tavik’s light is flashing.

  Anyone could see me going over.

  But Ally and Seth are still talking by the fire, and there’s no rule about visiting each other, and anyway, Pat and Bonnie’s tent is down near the water.

  “Hey,” Tavik says when I arrive with my sleeping bag, and then ushers me inside.

  “Were you signaling me?”

  “Sort of.”

  I am in my body enough to know how cold and tired I am. In fact, it’s hard to connect to that detached feeling at all when I’m around Tavik. Something about him requires all hands on deck, mentally speaking.

  “You want to continue with our interview?” he says, a smile quirking at the corner of his mouth.

  All I really want is to curl up next to him again, battle my lust for him for a few minutes while I get warm, and then sleep. But maybe it would be rude to just say so. Still, I am supposed to be using my true voice.

  “Actually, I came to sleep with you,” I say, meeting his eyes straight on, daring him to take it the wrong way.

  “Again?”

  “Again. If you don’t mind.”

  He gazes at me for a moment, then shakes his head. “No, I don’t mind.”

  “We can talk if you want, first. If you’re not tired enough from the portaging and the near-death experiences and . . .”

  “No, get on the bed,” he says, patting his sleeping bag, “and let’s do it.”

  I have to admit, I giggle. But within a couple of minutes, we’re huddled together just like the other night, and as I warm up, the pain and soreness of the day seem to seep out of me.

  But Tavik is wide-awake, and despite my fatigue, I am too.

  “Know any bedtime stories?” I ask.

  “What, like ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’?”

  “Uh, that’s a song.”

  “You would know.”

  “Nobody sang ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ to me, trust me.”

  “But did she sing to you? Your mom?”

  “Of course. But it was Verdi. Puccini. Mozart.”

  “Classical shit. I don’t think you lost out.”

  “Well, I guess whatever you didn’t have, something was there in its place.”

  “Yeah. Like a kick in the ass,” he says.

  “Literally?”

  “Yeah, but that’s not a bedtime story.”

  “Mine isn’t either.”

  “Maybe not, but . . .” His squeezes me closer. “I saw it in jail; everybody needs to talk at some point. To get it out. They reach this point when it’s, like, oozing from them. You’re like that. Or we could fuck.”

  I sit up fast, this comment a good reminder that this isn’t a guy who’d just want to share a few dreamy kisses, if I were foolish enough to start something.

  “Kidding, kidding,” he says, dissolving into rude laughter, and covering his mouth to muffle the sound. “You should see your face.”

  “Tavik . . .”

  “I’m sorry. Lie down. I told you a bunch of times: you’re safe with me. I’m just trying to make you laugh. And, you know, get you to talk to me.”

  I glare at him for a long moment, and then lie back down, this time facing him.

  “You’re an asshole,” I say.

  “Hey, gimme a break—I’ve been in jail.”

  “All the more reason for me to be worried.”

  “Ah, so you think I’m a sex-starved desperado.”

  I shrug.

  “I could be a sex-starved desperado just as a result of this trip,” he points out. “Depending on my needs. But I just meant that I’m a petty criminal—I’m supposed to be bad-mannered and occasionally shocking. But I’m also honest, and hospitable, and not a rapist, and don’t forget, warm and in possession of a large mosquito net.”

  “There’s that.”

  “Not that I wouldn’t fuck you under different circumstances.”

  “Thanks. I think.”

  “Under almost any different circumstances.”

  “Oh, like what?” I can’t stop myself from asking.

  “Like you saying yes?”

  This should appall me, but instead it makes me laugh. Hysterically, and into my sleeping bag because I need to muffle the sound.

  “See? You just think it’s funny.”

  “I can’t believe you said that.”

  “Doesn’t it break the tension, though? I say it out loud knowing it’s not happening, you confirm it’s not happening, we leave it behind.”

  “Oh, is that what you’re doing?” It reminds me of Juno and her “deal with the penis” lecture. I think we just dealt with the penis.

  “Sure,” he says. “Now, are you sleepy yet? I’m a really good listener.”

  “Actually,” I say with a yawn, “I really do want to go to sleep.”

  “All right,” he says. “Sweet dreams, Ingrid.”

  “Thank you for making me feel . . .”

  “What . . . ?” he says.

  “Safe . . . ?”

  In the morning we wake at the same time, and early.

  “Just build a piece of shit for your lean-to tonight,” he murmurs into my ear. “And stay with me.”

  I nod, and try to ignore the ache I’m starting to feel, lying crushed up against him.

  Day Seventeen is bear-less, but we have more rocks to contend with, plus another portage—two kilometers—and this time Seth, in the lead and walking just two people ahead of me with a canoe, almost steps on a rattlesnake . . . and screams bloody murder while backing up as fast as he can, which causes a backward avalanche on the path, and then a stampede.

  For once, neither Bonnie nor Pat equivocates about what we need to do.

  “We go around,” Pat says.

  “We bushwhack,” Bonnie confirms.

  And so we very carefully pick up the fallen and dropped canoes and gear, and do it.

  Bushwhacking is exactly what it sounds like—whacking and being whacked by bushes and tree branches as you forge your own path through the forest. It’s hard, time-consuming, and super awkward with a canoe. We’re heading for the first trip back when Seth has a total meltdown.

  “I can’t lead,” he says, his face covered in sweat.

  “What’s the problem, Seth?” Bonnie says.

  “A rattlesnake is
the problem!” he shouts.

  As he says this, I remember how he also wigged out when we were in the mud pit. If he has a phobia of snakes, this all makes sense.

  “If you face your fear, it will begin to diminish,” Pat says in his wisest voice.

  “I faced it already. I keep facing it every single day out here. I’m not going back there!”

  It takes the entire group to convince Seth not only to come back with us to get the next two loads of stuff, but also to lead.

  Remembering how I helped Isaac years ago, I offer to sing as we’re starting out, and sing a couple of soothing arias. Then Harvey takes over for comic relief, telling Seth a long, ridiculous story about a potato-gun contest he went to one time.

  When we get to the beach of tonight’s camp, which is on a very pretty little island, Seth turns to all of us and says, “Since I just survived the scariest day of my life, I may as well add to it and tell you all I’m gay. And if that didn’t scare the gayness out of me, I don’t think anything is going to.”

  I can tell he expects us to react like his über-religious parents, because he’s amazed to see all of us smiling, and people coming to hug him, pat him on the back, and congratulate him.

  “No one cares?” he says, looking around in amazement.

  “No one is surprised,” Jin clarifies. “But all of us care.”

  We stand around chatting, and I feel a wonderful sense of connection from having gone through this day, and then this revelation, with Seth. Then Bonnie and Pat take him for a walk and talk, leaving the rest of us to set up.

  All at once I’m alone again.

  And I’m so tired, I just want to fall on my face.

  In my lean-to.

  That I still have to build, just to keep up appearances, even though I’m not planning on sleeping in it.

  Tonight’s circle conversation is all about facing fears and about surrounding yourself with people who support you—finding your tribe.

  Seth is still terrified. His family might kick him out, and he would then be homeless, or forced to live with other, equally disapproving relatives. Henry and Harvey tell him he can take the bus to the city and come to their house if that happens.

  “Our mom likes to take in strays,” Henry says. “Uh, not to call you a stray.”

  “My folks aren’t fit to host anybody,” Ally says. “But in a couple of years when I’m eighteen, me and you could get an apartment. If you can handle being around a baby—well, a toddler by then. And if I can find a job, and if I have her back.”

  “You could come to my house too,” I say, and then turn to Jin. “And that goes for you as well, if things go badly with your aunt. Even if I’m in London, my parents . . . It would be fine. My room will be empty anyway. And Andreas, my dad, is great in a crisis.”

  “We can be your people,” Melissa says to Seth.

  I wait in my flimsy lean-to until the camp is quiet, then tiptoe over to Tavik’s.

  “I almost thought you weren’t coming,” he says, as I duck inside.

  “After my second performance of The Wizard of Oz, my mom overdosed, and almost died,” I blurt out. “Supposedly by accident.”

  “Whoa,” he says.

  “Sorry, I’m out of practice talking about these kinds of things. Well, I was never in practice. Should I have built up to it?”

  “No . . . you do it how you want. I’ll roll with it.”

  “Okay, so the thing is, I spend a lot of time thinking that it might have been my fault.”

  “For singing, and doing the play?” he says.

  I nod.

  “Bullshit,” he says.

  “Thinking that and believing it are two different things,” I say.

  He nods slowly.

  “I promised her I would never tell anyone. She made me promise.”

  “So why did you just tell me?”

  “Because sometimes I am so messed up, and I feel so . . . I feel like breaking things.”

  “Promises?”

  “Yes. And actual things,” I say, my hand going to my shin.

  He’s very still, and watching me with deep, steady eyes.

  “Sometimes I feel too much,” I continue, eyes locked on his, everything slow-motion, loaded. “Other times I can’t feel anything.”

  “What are you feeling right now?”

  I am feeling like I want to break down and tell him the whole sad story, and like the whole sad story is too much to tell. I am feeling like his eyes on my eyes are sustenance. I am feeling like if I could put my hand on his jawline and then trail it down his neck to his chest, then I would know if I was making his heart beat faster, and that would be better than all the talking in the world. I am feeling like I could sleep a thousand years, feeling like crying, like singing, like touching my lips to his, like crawling into a hole and hiding there for the rest of my life. I am feeling like lying on my back and looking up at the sky and letting the stars fall into my eyes and change me, drown me, light me up.

  “Are you cold?” he asks finally when I don’t answer.

  “I should be able to move on,” I say, ignoring his question.

  “From?”

  “All of it. The overdose. The boy I liked dating someone else after I rejected him. Losing our first life, and Mom’s voice, and . . . all of it. Sure, I was left to deal with lots of things on my own, but I managed. So many worse things happen to people. Here in this group, much worse things have happened to people. I just . . . Where is it all supposed to go when you move on from it?”

  “I don’t know,” Tavik says.

  “But it’s also . . . I am afraid of what I’ll become, going to London, studying music. Afraid to fail, afraid to succeed, afraid of being too much like my mom, afraid of not being enough like her. Afraid of my motivations, because . . . I want to surpass her. Why do I want that? Am I allowed to want that? What am I doing . . . if I succeed at that? What does that make me?”

  “It makes you the person who succeeds, I think. It makes you your mother’s daughter. And she’s an adult. Can’t she take care of her own reactions?”

  I let out a pained gasp of breath and look away.

  “This ‘being responsible for her’ business is dumb,” Tavik continues. “But what do I know? I know zip about classical music, or any of this. I’m just a guy who’s probably going to end up fixing people’s toilets or cars, and that’s if I think big.”

  “Oh, Tavik, I’m sorry, I—”

  “I don’t mean it like that. I don’t have high aspirations. I’m just hoping for a normal life. I’m good with it. Just, Ingrid . . . don’t be afraid. That’s all I can say. Or be afraid, but do it anyway.”

  “I think . . . I feel like I’m looking for a sign. You know? Something that lets me know, or gives me the feeling of knowing . . . that I’m going in the right direction, that everything is going to be all right.”

  “No point worrying or looking for signs,” he says. “It is or it isn’t.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to lie to me and tell me that it is?”

  “You’re already here to sleep with me,” he says with a hilarious wink. “I don’t need to tell you any lies.”

  I smile, while my mind gets busy peeling his clothing off one piece at a time, running my fingertips over his many beautiful muscles, but my body simply does what it has done every night I’ve spent with him, and curls up, humming, and eventually goes to sleep, exhaustion and caution winning over lust.

  Day Eighteen. There are three more days until Day Twenty-One, when we all go home. The canoeing is better and worse now—we are better, but the terrain is worse. We’re on a new river system, which widens and narrows with no warning. We don’t have to paddle as hard, because there’s a current. On the other hand, we have to steer like crazy. There are more rocks and multiple close calls and everybody gets stuck at least
once. Melissa, Seth, and Henry bail when they take too sharp a turn, and the rescue and recovery is epic, but luckily sans bears. We stay in our canoe, but barely.

  The eighteenth night is cold again, and I stay late beside the fire, shivering from my evening swim—aka stubborn exercise in self-torture—and wishing my hopelessly tangled mop of hair would dry before I go to bed.

  The journal is on my lap, but though I planned to write, I find myself just holding it, still waiting for a sign.

  OZ, ET CETERA

  (Ages Fifteen to Sixteen)

  Oz became a category of memory—Oz, et cetera—the et cetera part encompassing all the ensuing pain, confusion, drama.

  After Oz, et cetera, things got slowly better—in the sense that they weren’t total crap, not in the sense of my overall happiness, which was at an all-time low.

  I’d been brave, broken out, detached from the pattern of worrying about Margot-Sophia before worrying about myself, and I had been happy. But I couldn’t help feeling the universe had decided to smite me for it. I had learned a lesson, and the lesson was that the price was too high, too painful, and always would be.

  There would be no more singing or acting or music. Not when I was all the time carrying this hot, spiky ball of fear and fury inside me. Not when I woke bathed in sweat in the middle of most nights from vivid dreams in which Mom was lost, or dead, and I was running, always running, trying to find her or save her.

  Andreas moved back in, and there was no more talk of breakups. He bought her a light-therapy lamp, and read up on depression, quietly passing along his findings and conclusions to me. It wasn’t about finding a cure, Andreas said; it was a matter of management.

  She was back on medication, and she used the lamp every morning while drinking her coffee, and she didn’t consume any alcohol for six months. Andreas got her a gym membership, based on research that exercise is a natural antidepressant, but she didn’t take to the gym. She did, on the other hand, sign up for weekly group therapy, and seemed to find it helpful.

  I kept my head down, studied, finished tenth grade.

  Isaac kept trying to talk to me until nearly the end of the school year, texting me, e-mailing, showing up at my locker with puppy-dog eyes, or angry, frustrated eyes. I missed him, and I nearly broke a hundred times, but I was too messed up, and hurting too much to risk it.