Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

by Danielle Younge-Ullman

  Ally gasps.

  Jin stumbles away and vomits.

  I squeeze my eyes shut.

  Jin rejoins us, and we march on. There are tears streaming down my face now, along with the sweat. They’re from the physical pain. They’re from all the pain. Sometime since we started across, every last shred of my inner fortification has burned away and I feel everything; all the memories, all of my pushed-down, blocked-out joys and sorrows and regrets lick up and down my insides, matching the searing of my muscles, the agony of a forest burned to the ground, the awfulness of the mother and baby raccoons. I weep and walk and climb and stumble, and my arms and shoulders and abs and back and legs and feet scream.

  To the left of us, I see Tavik actually throw his canoe over a fallen tree, walk under the tree, and catch the canoe on the other side.

  I have a moment to appreciate how cool that is before I take a bad step and my leg buckles. I go down, landing on hands and knees as the canoe falls on top of me, the front bench cracking over my mid-back and knocking the wind out of me.

  My breath is returning as Ally and Jin lift the canoe off me, but instead of getting up, I pound both my fists into the mud and howl with frustration.

  “I can take the canoe,” Ally says.

  “Or I can,” Jin says.

  I pound on the ground one more time, swearing, then push myself up to my feet.

  “We’re almost there,” I say, swiping at the sweat and tears and only managing to smear mud across my face. “I’ll carry it. I want to.”

  “But—”

  “Let her,” Jin says, cutting Ally off.

  They don’t ask me whether I’m okay, because whether or not I am is irrelevant. We have to get across. And then we have to go back two more times for the rest of the gear.

  The three of us emerge from the final crossing with our arms around each other’s waists to keep from face-planting, and then fall into a messy, muddy hug.

  When everyone has had a short time to recover, we get everything together and head the short distance to the top of a nearby hill to find out where we are. Luckily, the river we’re aiming for is on the other side, bubbling along below us. Unluckily, the way down is essentially a cliff.

  “Of course,” Jin mutters, and Ally and I laugh hysterically.

  This time Pat does leave us to figure it out ourselves, and the final result is that we basically drop the canoes, and then the gear, onto the beach twenty feet below us, and cross our fingers.

  The collective logic of a group of people this tired is obviously suspect, but it works, and everything plops down to the sand without breaking.

  Jin says she is tempted to do the same thing with herself.

  But instead, one at a time, and wearing our canoeing helmets and using rope as backup, we pick and scramble our way down the steep rock face, to the beach.

  Dear Mom,

  I get it now. Peak Wilderness is geared to breaking down your barriers—physical, psychological, mental. Bringing you face-to-face with the best and worst of yourself, teaching you things you didn’t know about yourself, facing your demons.

  My demon is you.

  My best and worst is about you: how I need you and fear for you, how I fear for myself if I lose you, how I have let myself be defined by you.

  The demon . . . is also what you lost, and the thing that took you down, over and over. Every time it happened, you stopped living, Mom. Stopped wanting to. I wish I could make you feel what that did to me, see how it changed the way I take every single breath.

  I tried to live so lightly, so carefully. I tried to be someone you would love enough to stop letting yourself spiral down. I lost my voice, too, trying to keep you alive. But living like that is death, Mom.

  And I want to live.

  I felt it when Peace shoved me underwater. I felt it in the mud pit, on the trail, in the face of the bear, and in the devastated forest today.

  I want to live. I want to sing, and tell stories and be connected with something larger than myself. I want to give everything I have, even if it hurts, even if it leaves me beaten down and hollowed out. I want it.

  But I cannot make you want the same things for me, or for yourself. I cannot help you let go of your pain, or tether you to me, or keep you here.

  If I continue to choose you over me, I don’t live either, not truly.

  So we both die, Mom.

  How does that make sense?

  I kept my promise to do this trip. I chose that. And now I choose to live.

  Love,

  Ingrid

  Everyone jumps in the river, and I stay in until I am practically blue, somehow enjoying the ice-cold water on the heat of my sore muscles, and the many cuts and bruises I acquired today.

  The nights are getting cold, the sun is setting earlier, and this is our second-to-last night. Hard to believe.

  I put lots of layers on once I’m out, and sit cozily between Ally and Jin for dinner and circle.

  Later, I watch Tavik saunter down to the narrow sandy area beside the river that’s too narrow to be called a beach . . . and find myself following him.

  He turns, dark eyes glittering in the bright moonlight.

  “You look . . . better,” he says.

  “Ha! I’ve never been so beat-up and bedraggled in my life.”

  “It’s your eyes. In your eyes you look better. Fast rivers and slow forests seem to agree with you.”

  “I heard you whooping and cheering like a maniac on the rapids.”

  He grins. “I like to go fast.”

  “That’s obvious.”

  “Maybe you look better from talking to me every night. . . .”

  “Maybe. I’m almost all talked out, I think.”

  “Too bad.”

  “There is one more thing you might find interesting. A couple of months ago I took an ax to my garage.”

  “What?” His shock is so extreme that I actually start laughing.

  “Oh my God, it was worth telling you just to see your face!”

  “Wait. What . . . an ax? Are you serious?”

  “Dead serious,” I say, and my laughter stops as abruptly as it started. “The garage was really old, built more like a shed. Big enough for a car, but barely. Anyway, I was upset. It was still light out—a little after dinner. I was . . . on a break from school at the time . . . but my best friend had convinced me I should go to the spring dance. Be social. Have fun. So. I had a dress and everything—I’d even put it on— but when it came to it, I couldn’t make myself go. If I went, I was just going to stand there hating everybody and feeling like a freak. I was messed up.”

  “Because of your mom.”

  “That, and I heard Isaac was bringing some girl to the dance, and . . . somehow it all became too much. I just felt this . . . incredible force driving me to do something. Anything. So there I was in this fancy dress and fuzzy slippers, and I went and got the ax. It sounds crazy but it made perfect sense in my head. Chop down the garage. I just picked up the ax and started whaling on those old boards, and it felt incredible. Pretty soon I was covered in sweat and probably crying. I had a stepladder out there so I could hack at the roof, too. I wanted to take the whole thing down and I didn’t care how much trouble I was going to get into.”

  “No one came to stop you?”

  “Spring in the city,” I say with a shrug. “People mow their lawns in the evening, and there’s constant renovation—digging basements, building and fixing stuff over the weekends.”

  “So you just chopped away, no one saying boo to you.”

  “Yep. It was hard work, actually. Of course I’d never used an ax before, so I lost my balance mid-swing on the stepladder and chopped myself in the leg.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I know. In hindsight, it’s almost funny.”

  “Not re
ally,” Tavik says.

  “No, you’re right. Not really. Anyway, I screamed, and my stepdad—my dad, that is—came running out of the house. It wasn’t as bad an injury as we thought at first, but of course we left the garage—it was half down at that point—and went to the emergency room and I got stitches.”

  “Did your parents freak? About the garage?”

  I swallow, shake my head. “Andreas bought a second ax the next morning and helped me finish the job. We did it together.”

  “Your mom must have thought you were both nuts.”

  “She’s half the reason we’re nuts.”

  “Sure, but—”

  “We didn’t give her any say in the matter,” I say with a sudden harshness.

  “Wow.” Tavik backs up a step. “All right.”

  “So. Now you know—I’m a delinquent too.”

  “This was just a couple of months ago?”

  I nod.

  “How’s your leg?” he asks.

  “Wanna see?” Without waiting for his response, I sit on the sand and pull up the leg of my pants. Tavik kneels, peering at the scar in the moonlight.

  “Still looks kinda angry,” he says, and gently runs his fingertips over it.

  My breath catches in my throat.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Only when I’m upset. Which makes zero sense.”

  “Huh.” He places his whole hand over the scar, and warmth seems to radiate from it, into my leg and up through the rest of me. “What about right now?”

  “No, it feels . . . fine right now.”

  He takes his hand from my leg, and without thinking about it, I catch it in mine and put it back.

  “It feels good there,” I say, seeing a shift in his eyes and feeling a shift in myself as I move from the edge of one precipice to another.

  “Careful,” he says.

  “Of what?” I say, eyes locked on his.

  “You love that boy . . .” he says, his hand nevertheless slipping around to the back of my calf.

  “He’s not here. He might be with someone else. I might never see him again. Meanwhile, you . . .”

  “I what . . . ?”

  “You are something beautiful,” I say, on my knees now, face-to-face with him.

  He exhales a laugh.

  “What?”

  “No one’s ever said that about me,” he says.

  “I’m saying it.” I place my hands lightly on his shoulders, then drop them to his chest. His hands are at my waist, fingers on my skin.

  “You want me to help you forget,” he says, tugging me close, so close that I am up against him, hip to hip, chest to chest.

  “I want you to help me feel something good,” I say.

  “Ah. I might be able to do that,” he says, one hand traveling smoothly up my back and expertly unhooking my bra, at the same time as his lips lock onto mine.

  He smells like soap and fire, and he tastes like chocolate, like firesmoke, like the river. My hands can’t get enough of his bare skin, my body can’t pull him close enough, and mother-of-god, he knows what to do with his mouth and hands.

  Tavik is not sweet and warm and careful like Isaac.

  He likes to go fast, knows where he’s going and how to get there, and soon we are no-holds-barred, on each other, shirts up, zippers down, hands everywhere, hot gasps exploding into the night air.

  We stop short of complete nudity and actual sex, but it goes way past “feeling something good” all the way to feeling something very deliciously bad, to feeling ridiculously, explosively, desperately good.

  Eventually we tiptoe/stumble our way back into camp, and I sneak into his lean-to with him and fall into a deep and heavy sleep.

  LIVE

  (Peak Wilderness, Day Twenty)

  I dream of London, of Tavik, of Isaac standing on a stage, waiting for me. I dream of Mom standing on a ridge of crystal-lined granite. She’s in my hiking boots, but they’re covered in red glitter, and she’s wearing one of her draped velvet dresses, which is whipping in the wind. She has a walking stick raised toward the heavens like she’s some kind of unhinged Gandalf telling me I shall not pass. I rage at her from below, but she can’t hear me. I have to climb the damned rock and somehow get past her, and on the other side is a stage door, and in it is a theater and I’m due there any second. My cue is coming. But I don’t even know, have somehow forgotten, what the play is.

  Tavik is still sound asleep when I wake. I extricate myself carefully, pull my sleeping bag around my shoulders for warmth, and go to sit on a rock by the river.

  The birds are awake, and the sky is a thick, glimmering, ever-lightening silver.

  The river rushes forth, filling every space it needs, stopping for nothing.

  Like life, like love, like despair, like time.

  Not like fear, though. Fear, I realize, can be pressed smaller, pushed out of the way, lived with most of the time without it taking over everything. On the one hand, you can live with it. On the other, it’s hard to banish. It lurks. But fear can be battled with love, with strength, with hope. Can be overcome, overruled, by truth sometimes, I tell myself.

  One more day and I will be home.

  On our final day of canoeing, Day Twenty, the sky opens up and it pours.

  Of course it does.

  By now, as a group, we are practically the definition of stoic, but still, it’s a wretched day. It’s cold and wet. Paddling is hell. We eat lunch with our canoes on our heads, and stay onshore like that for another frightening hour when there’s lightning and thunder in the sky.

  Getting back on the river just in time for another rapids, still in the rain, sucks and is scary as hell even without lightning. Past the rapids, the paddling is hard going, the water choppy as we head back out onto the lake in order to cross to our final campsite.

  Jin throws up over the side. Ally, though she has developed into a kick-ass canoe girl, is sweating, and her arms are shaking, and I feel like garbage too. Alongside us, the other teams are struggling just as much. Even Tavik looks done in.

  Without thinking about it, I start to sing. I start with some Gilbert and Sullivan from The Pirates of Penzance because it’s rousing and has a good rhythm. Immediately the paddling feels easier, and people chime in with hoots and echoes. I follow up with some Mozart, then some Wagner. This is my music. Mom’s music—well, not the G&S, so much, but the rest of it. I fill the lake and sky with it. I sing the “Anvil Chorus” from Verdi’s Trovatore, then “Libiamo” from Traviata, then circle back to more Gilbert and Sullivan, this time from The Gondoliers. I sing first to help, and then for fun, and then because, there in the middle of the rainy lake, even freezing cold and tired and miserable, it gives me joy. I sing all the way into the campsite, and finish to cheers and claps on the shoulder, and hugs from Jin and Ally and Seth.

  Miraculously it’s not dark yet—in fact, as we’re pulling the canoes up the beach, the sun comes bursting through, giving us a final two hours of light and much-needed warmth. We set about gathering firewood and lean-to materials as fast as we can, and before long we’re sitting around the admittedly anemic fire, having our last dinner together.

  “Not gonna miss the rice and beans,” Jin says, and everyone nods and/or groans.

  “What’s the first thing you’re going to eat when you get home?” Henry asks her.

  “A cheeseburger,” she says, grinning. “And then some brownies—the two-bite kind.”

  “I’m going for sushi!” Seth says. “And then cinnamon buns.”

  “Indian food,” Ally says, her bright, un-made-up eyes alight and full of so much confidence. “And then a chocolate sundae. Or maybe an all-day breakfast—sausages, eggs, pancakes . . .”

  “Steak and eggs,” Harvey says, and Henry nods vigorously. “What about you, Tavik?”

  “Na
chos, or maybe a giant burrito, some beer, apple pie with vanilla ice cream,” Tavik responds without hesitation. “You know, we talked like this in jail. That was my meal then, too.”

  “Did you have it?” I ask.

  “You bet your ass I did.”

  “There’s an Italian restaurant down the street from my house,” Melissa says. “They make everything fresh. I’d have their pumpkin agnolotti with cream sauce, the bruschetta, followed by tiramisu and tartuffo—the kind with the dark chocolate and raspberry at the center.”

  “Mmm,” I say, bowled over with delirious anticipation.

  “And you?” Melissa says.

  “I’d come to your meal,” I said. “But I’ll take a pizza.”

  “With what on it?” Ally asks, almost lustfully.

  “Sun-dried tomatoes, green olives, prosciutto . . . and then ice cream, something creamy with caramel . . . But before that, a shower followed by a long, hot bath. In fact, if I could have the food in the bath, that would be perfection. That’s it—I’m going to spend, like, four days in the bath, gorging myself. I just need someone to keep bringing the food so I don’t have to get out of the water.”

  “I volunteer for that job,” Tavik says. “Especially if you sing in the bath.”

  We all go on like that—about food and showers and other things we’ve missed. And then the talk shifts to what we’ll miss about Peak Wilderness, which turns out to be rather a lot, considering.

  Pat and Bonnie join us, and as we have so many nights, we move naturally into circle time.

  We go around to each person again, like we did the first night, and everyone gets a chance to reflect on where they’re at with the goals they set, what their challenges were, what they’re taking away from it all. Unlike on that first night, I’m not freaked out by these people, not under the impression that I’m separate from them, stuck here by accident. I’m here for just as good a reason as anyone else.

  I’ve seen each and every person here hit their own walls. I’ve seen them fight, I’ve seen them give up, I’ve seen them persevere even after they said they were giving up. For some it’s been dramatic, for others more subtle. But the rigors of the trip, the interpersonal as well as the physical challenges, and nature itself, have all helped heal us, change us, make us stronger. Even some of the Peak Wilderness psychological garbage might have helped a couple of people. Might.