Fortunately by late spring Mom seemed her normal self, and in the summer, Andreas, Mom, and I flew to Vancouver, and then Andreas flew back home while Mom and I crossed the country by train, getting off to see a bit of each province. We read books aloud, pasted maps and postcards into a bound journal, and took photos and sent them to Andreas.
It felt like old times.
It felt like healing.
In the autumn of eleventh grade, Andreas’s adoption of me was finalized, and we flew to New York for the weekend to celebrate.
I had a dad. It was the best.
One day at school I was walking by the theater and found the stage door open, with everything I missed wafting out, calling to me. I stepped cautiously inside. Seeing no one, I went up onto the stage. The lights were dim and there was nothing but the piano on it, and I ached, standing there. I ached for myself, for Mom, and I saw the years and heard the music and felt the performances, hers, mine, all that I’d seen, tumbling one over the other, and knew . . . that of course she was right: that life could not guarantee happiness of the steady variety.
And yet.
I went to the piano, sat down, placed my fingers over the keys. I’d done all that singing for the play, but I’d barely touched a piano since I was little. I didn’t know if I could even play anymore.
I chose an old classic—Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”—and played the opening notes. This was a piece I’d been able to play in my sleep, almost, at age ten. Now it was a mess, my fingers stumbling. Still I continued, trying again. It went better the second time, but more important, something finally clicked. It felt like falling into a warm bed, like home, like solace.
I was midway through my third attempt when I felt someone watching, and looked up to see Rhea.
“Don’t stop,” she said.
But I had.
“I . . . sorry. I just . . .” Damn, I was crying.
“I’ll leave you alone. Go back to it,” she said.
“No, I—shit, I’m a mess.” Then I flushed. “And now I’m swearing in front of you! I’m so—”
“What sort of tears—good or bad?” she asked, coming to lean on the lid of the piano.
“I have no idea. I’m a teenager—aren’t we supposed to be overly emotional?” I said, attempting a chuckle.
She leaned closer. “Two things, and then I’ll leave you. One: I am going to give you a key to one of the practice rooms on the third floor.”
“I don’t—”
“As a hobby, as an outlet, as a space to yourself.”
I swallowed hard. “Thank you.”
“Two: I’ve been thinking about this, and now that I see you here, playing . . . I know the headmaster at a very special music school in London, England. It’s called Ayerton. They take students in their final year of high school with the goal of helping each student zero in on their strengths. Most go on to be accepted either at their own college conservatory program, or at other top-notch music schools. They take only the best, auditions are by invitation only, and they accept three North American students per year. I can get you an audition,” Rhea said.
“I . . .” London? Music school? It was like she’d uncovered my deepest and most secret longing—secret even to myself, until now. My throat was dry, and I was sure if I tried to stand up, my legs wouldn’t work. London. Music.
“I can help you talk to your parents,” she said.
My parents. Right.
“I can’t,” I said, swallowing hard. “Thank you so much. It sounds like . . . a dream come true, if it were to happen. But I can’t audition, because even if I were to be accepted, I can’t go. Besides . . .”
“Yes?”
“I was just thinking only five minutes ago, they don’t lead to happiness, those careers. Usually not, I mean.”
“So you are not a starry-eyed fool,” Rhea said with a solemn shrug. “Nothing guarantees happiness. I’m not certain happiness should be the goal. Satisfaction, maybe. A sense of purpose. Contribution. Authenticity. Happiness? It’s a lightweight goal. And meanwhile, I suspect that turning away from yourself will guarantee the opposite of happiness.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“You could just audition . . . .” she said, looking into my eyes as if she could see how breathlessly, painfully, badly I wanted this. “Otherwise you’ll never know.”
“I’ll have to live with never knowing.”
I couldn’t, though. Mom was so much better, and I wanted it. I wanted to at least try.
I got the key for the practice room and spent hours preparing.
I told no one.
I auditioned.
As usual, in these high-pressure performance situations, I nearly died of nerves, then afterward had no real idea how I’d done.
And so I put it out of my mind as much as possible, until the day in early December when Rhea called me to a meeting in her office, and I found Mom and Andreas there, and Rhea told all of us that I had been accepted.
“Ayerton is a top-notch school,” Rhea said. “And unique.”
“I know of it.” Mom swiveled to look at me, eyes many fathoms deep. “I don’t want this for you.”
“I know,” I said. “But, Mom . . . I do.”
“Why don’t you take the information home, and discuss it?” Rhea suggested smoothly, and before I knew it, we were all back on our feet, and she was handing me the acceptance letter and program description.
Mom rounded on me as soon as we were in the front door of the coach house.
“Why did you lie to me?” She always seemed taller when angry.
“I didn’t lie; I just didn’t tell you,” I said with a calmness I didn’t feel. “Because I didn’t want to have to argue about it before we even knew if I’d get in. I didn’t think I would get in. But I did, Mom. I got in! Please, please. You have to let me go.”
“I don’t have to do anything. How many times do I have to tell you that I want you to have an easier life? I don’t want you to go through even the smallest bit of the pain I’ve been through.”
“But I’m not you, Mom! What happened to you isn’t going to happen to me.”
“Why do you think I settled us here and worked so hard to give you stability, an education, a chance at a future doing something you can hold on to?” she said, earnest and sincere now, almost begging me. “Don’t you see? You’re good at more than one thing. You don’t have to enslave yourself the way I did. Music isn’t the only thing that could make you happy.”
“How do you know? I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this life you’re planning on my behalf? Sounds totally boring and unsatisfying to me.”
“Ingrid, I understand you have . . . a strong feeling about music. But that feeling is fleeting. It’s like an infatuation; eventually you come down from it and discover a world of nitpicking, backbreaking work that is mostly thankless. It’s not just the loss of my voice; I gave up everything else to do what I did. I gave up everything except you. Perhaps you remember those years as romantic, but you were a child. You were shielded. You have no idea how hard it was. The rejection, the criticism, the people who want to rip you down . . . You have to be very strong.”
“I am strong.”
“The answer is no.”
I felt like I was going to crack open and boiling lava was going to flow out.
“No?”
“That’s correct. You are still a minor, and I am still the parent. When you turn eighteen and want to make your own way, you can do what you want. Until then, it’s my way.”
I glanced at Andreas, who’d been hovering in the background of all this—he was, after all, my other official parent now. But he had become wiser about jumping in too fast to try to fix things, and he gave a subtle shake of his head, a calming motion with his hand, and mouthed, Wait.
Wait? The ent
ire course of my life was being decided here.
“Fine,” I spat out. I’d reasoned, I’d laid my heart on the line, all for nothing. “But why don’t you be honest? Why don’t you just admit that you can’t stand me having the thing you lost, the thing you’re too much of a coward to try to recover? You want to spend your life playing out your little victim drama and taking no responsibility for your part—yes, your part—in losing your voice. And I have to suffer. I have to spend my entire life tiptoeing around you and trying to become something other than what I actually am. I have to be the victim with you, and not hope for anything, and not want any of the things I actually want, for fear that my having them will hurt you. How is that fair?”
“How dare you—”
“What happened to the mother who used to tell me if I worked hard enough, I could have anything I wanted? Be anything I wanted? Where is she? She’s the one I believe, not you. Let me just be really clear. I will never forgive you if you don’t let me do this. Never.”
And with that, of course, I stomped upstairs to my room, and slammed the door, and screamed into the pillows of my bed, and cried for five thousand million hours, before finally falling asleep.
We had a week to accept placement at the school.
We didn’t speak for six days.
Andreas quietly told me he was working on her, and that he could make it happen, money-wise. Still, she looked pretty unrelenting to me.
On the seventh morning, she stalked into my room before I was even out of bed, and stood over me. In her hand she had a piece of paper and a pen.
“I will not always be here to help you,” she said.
“Well, that’s morbid,” I said groggily, and rolled my eyes.
“I want you to have wide-ranging life skills.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“You’ve never been away from home, been away from me.”
“I know, but—”
“And I cannot come to London.”
“They have dorms.”
“My point is that you would be alone there, for the first time in your life.”
“I know.”
“But you may go—” She held a hand up to stop me from responding yet. “On one condition.”
I sat up fast, heart leaping. “Anything. Yes. What?”
And here is the memory I’ve been replaying, trying to recall what was said, exactly. . . .
Mom held out a Peak Wilderness brochure—the one with sporty-looking kids standing in front of rustic timber-frame cabins.
“You will complete three weeks at this wilderness camp over the summer,” she said.
I snatched the brochure from her, took a quick look.
“This is the one Ella did?”
Mom nodded. And it might be that she said something to the effect of, “Yes, or something similar.”
“But . . . what does wilderness camp have to do with music school? What’s the point?”
“You get something, I get something,” she said.
“But why?”
“To toughen you up,” she said, with an almost devilish grin. “What else?”
I didn’t like it, I didn’t get it, but whatever—it was just three weeks of my life. It wouldn’t change anything.
“Fine,” I said, too thrilled about Ayerton to bother with investigating further in that moment. “I’ll do it. Where do I sign?”
Margot-Sophia might have sent me a link to the Peak Wilderness website sometime in the weeks after that. Might have. I have a vague memory of it, but an equal feeling that I might have manufactured the memory. And if it’s real . . . I might not have clicked on that link, because I was too busy Googling London, and dreaming about Ayerton. And so she might have purposely tricked me, or she might have been trying to warn me, or even to let me in on the process of choosing which program to sign up for.
I can spend my time wondering about “if” and “why” . . . but as the days pass, I wonder whether those are even the right questions to be asking. I can blame her forever, for everything, if I want to. But then it means that she is the person creating me, responsible for me, that I have no ability to make my own choices. If that’s true, then what the hell have I been fighting for?
SPEED
(Peak Wilderness, Day Nineteen)
With only two days left before this trip is over, I should be feeling better.
I am feeling different, but not better.
In some ways I am feeling worse, because when I go home, the rest of my life starts. Peak Wilderness has created a transition, a before and after. And so the next thing is after. This makes me anxious.
But I don’t have much time to dwell on my anxiety, or anything else, because on Day Nineteen we run our first “official” rapids.
We know they’re official, because Bonnie makes us put on the helmets.
From a distance the rapids look pretty, and not particularly worrisome. But once we’re in them, it becomes a crazy, rocket-speed, death-defying experience. We have only the smallest amount of control over our canoe, over our panic, and the wrong move, or the wrong rock jutting up in front of us, could be disastrous.
Ally is brave and strong and decisive. But Jin gets motion sickness and wigs out completely, curling into the bottom of the canoe, leaving Ally and me to do all the paddling and navigating.
“Remember this!” I shout to Ally as we go through it, her in the front, guiding us. “Remember when you get back, how you kicked ass at this!”
She raises her fist for a moment, between strokes, and pumps it.
Tavik and Harvey capsize, soaking everything that’s not in a dry bag, and nearly losing one of the packs. Our canoe is the only one close enough to help them, and we somehow manage to do it—rallying Jin, then rescuing the sinking pack with a paddle, helping them to right their canoe.
We get wrapped around a rock immediately after, but luckily Ally is able to get purchase with one of her feet, and manages to push us off.
It’s intense, fast, breathtaking, terrifying, full-on. And when it all goes right, and we make it through a tough patch and live to tell the tale, it’s . . . a little bit amazing.
Terror mixed with amazing is, of course, followed by yet another portage. Jin and I have the gear, and Ally has the canoe.
I trudge along, my rapids-induced high fading, and hum of going-home anxiety ramping up. I’m wishing for the out-of-body feeling to come back, but it seems it can’t be summoned at will.
Whatever. I just have to get through this day, and then the next, and the same for every day after that, once I’m home. I am settling into this train of thought when I realize everyone in front of me has slowed down, and then stopped.
We’ve only just set out, but the path has disappeared.
Ended.
And it has ended because the forest we were walking through is completely burned down from where we are, forward.
What’s left is a charred field, littered with blackened stumps and root systems, leafless trees toppled onto one another in a gruesome tangle of death, and ghostly trunks—the few that are still upright—standing bare, blackened, and pointing toward the sky like needles. The ground is charcoal-colored mud with nothing growing out of it. The smell is foul and sharp—ash mixed with rot.
It’s shocking, sickening, stark. It hurts to look at.
“Forest fire,” Bonnie offers into our silence.
“Uh, yeah,” Jin says, but she’s not even trying to be sarcastic.
“Probably happened in the spring, or we’d already see vegetation coming through,” Pat adds. “They just let them burn up here—nature taking its course.”
“So no one even reports it? Puts it on the map to warn travelers?” Seth asks.
“This area’s not traveled that often,” Pat explains. “We’ll report it when we get back.”
> “How . . . do we get across?” asks Ally, eyes wide.
“Very carefully and with difficulty,” Pat says, but not in his fridge-magnet voice this time.
Together we study the map, trying to guess where the trail should be. Then Pat pulls a compass out of one of his many pockets, and he and Bonnie attempt to give us a general trajectory.
“Watch your step,” Pat says, and then picks up his and Bonnie’s canoe and takes the lead. I find this both alarming and reassuring, given his usual insistence on our figuring everything out on our own.
Ally’s nervous, so I offer to take the canoe.
I hoist it up over my head and walk out into ankle-deep charred mud and discover quickly that there is no sure step to be found. Ally and Jin stay close, packs on their backs, one in front, one behind, and reach up to help balance the canoe multiple times.
Dark clouds blow in, making the already bleak scene even bleaker. My every muscle is tensed, and soon sweat is dripping from my face and down my back from the effort of balancing the canoe with such unsteady footing.
We climb over multiple stumps, huge trees. Jin’s in the lead and therefore trips and ends up on her knees in the mud a few times, and on her face once too, but she does not complain. We’re silent except to warn one another of obstacles ahead. It takes ten minutes to progress ten feet.
I am thinking of nothing except what my body has to do in the immediate future and whether I can keep doing it, which seems doubtful.
I said I was looking for a sign. . . .
If this is the sign I was looking for, it contains a dismal message—something about the necessity of going through hell, obviously. It’s not even a sign with rays of hope—tiny shoots of new vegetation poking through, a single flower, or a pretty bird chirping in the middle of it. Nothing. Probably there’ll be a pit of fire at the end.
And it gets worse.
As we approach the approximate halfway point, we see a pair of antlers rising up out of a pile of ash, and a little further along, what looks to have been a family of raccoons trapped under a fallen tree and burned into blackened statues.
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