Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

by Danielle Younge-Ullman

  After a long, soulful, hilarious, tearful talk and the exchanging of contact info, we add more wood to the fire and sing and talk late into the night.

  Bonnie pulls me aside to ask whether I’m planning to have Peace charged with assault, and I sigh.

  “I’d like to just forget about him altogether.”

  “I know,” she says. “A lot of people make that same choice. And the truth is, it wouldn’t be an easy process. You’d have to go through it all again, emotionally, and it would take time and energy, and the court system . . .”

  “Isn’t set up to be kind or even necessarily fair to girls and women who come forward about this kind of thing,” I finish for her.

  She nods. Waits.

  “And yet, if I don’t, he gets away with it. And does it again, or something worse, to someone else. Which means I have . . . a responsibility,” I say, the weight of this settling on me.

  “There’s that,” Bonnie says.

  “So . . . no big deal, but I have to choose between my own personal happiness and, like, the good of humankind.”

  “You wouldn’t be alone,” she says. “You have witnesses, and Peak Wilderness would support you. Pat and I would support you.”

  I nod, she gives me some details about who to talk to at the Peak Wilderness head office if I decide to go ahead, and then we both head back to the fire.

  Tavik makes his way to my side, then, and stays connected to me by hand or thigh or shoulder until the group finally breaks up and it’s time for bed. He and I are the last people still sitting at the fire.

  “Come sleep over,” he says quietly.

  I look at him, smiling, eyes narrowed.

  “I’ll be good,” he says.

  “No, you won’t.”

  “No, I won’t. But come on—it’s the last chance. And I made my lean-to nice and big.”

  “Why do I suddenly feel like you’re the big bad wolf?”

  He grins, exactly like the big bad wolf.

  “Anyway, it’s not the last chance,” I protest. “You have my number in the city.”

  “I don’t live in the city.”

  “Yeah, but we could . . .”

  He gazes at me, shakes his head. “Let’s not be full of shit,” he says, eyes a little sad, but honest.

  I wasn’t, but he’s right. This is something, but it isn’t love. Not that kind of love. It doesn’t mean it’s shallow or purely physical, but it’s hard to imagine how it would ever work, outside this very specific time and place. It’s a “stays in Vegas” situation.

  “Okay,” I say. “I need a few minutes to myself, but I’ll see you in a bit.”

  He goes off to his lean-to. I extinguish the dying fire, then walk down to the shore, take off my shoes and socks, and stand with my feet in the icy water.

  Dear Mom . . . I compose, in my head, and then stop.

  I know why she sent me. She did it so I would see hardship and experience it. She sent me here to have my strength tested, knowing it would fail. She sent me to be knocked down and get back up again, so that I would know I could. She sent me to learn about survival and be forced to own my choices and be ready to fight for them. She sent me to grieve what’s past, and for a special tough-love variety of healing. She sent me to help me get clear—clear of her. It makes a certain, bizarre sense.

  Still, there’s more I need to resolve before I go to London. There will always be more.

  But there’s time for that tomorrow.

  Instead I stand under the giant sky, counting stars, feeling scared and raw, but at the same time full, fierce, open.

  And then I go to Vegas.

  HOME

  (Peak Wilderness, Day Twenty-One)

  In the early morning, we break camp and make the short trip across the bay to the Peak Wilderness outpost/office where Duncan stays, holding all the confiscated luggage hostage, and waiting to come harass/rescue/instruct while programs are running. We take showers—hot showers! with soap, shampoo, and conditioner!—then change into clean clothing, and head back to the original landing field where we board the same tiny airplane and fly back to civilization.

  As arranged before the trip, there’s money in my wallet, and I use it to take a taxi home from the airport.

  Then I stand in front of the coach house, key in hand.

  Despite my fresh clothing and glorious-smelling hair, I feel wild and grubby and surreal.

  And I feel suddenly afraid again because nothing has changed here from when I left.

  I have changed, I remind myself. If I can survive what I just survived, I can handle going inside my own house. Still, I do so in a breathless, almost slow-motion way.

  Key in the lock . . .

  Turning . . .

  Click.

  Push.

  Feet on terra-cotta tile of threshold. Smell of home all around me . . .

  I close the door gently, set down the duffel bag.

  Loud silence. God, there’s that silence.

  “Hello?” I call out, voice like an echo.

  A voice calls back from upstairs, “Hello?”

  There are footsteps above and then on the stairs, and someone appears. . . .

  Not Mom.

  Andreas.

  He stops halfway down at the sight of me, beams.

  “Ingrid!”

  My heart sings to see him, and I want to run forward, leap up, and hug him. But instead we’re both frozen in place, and though he’s beaming, his love always steady, he looks at me with caution, with uncertainty, with concern.

  “Yep, it’s me,” I say, and clear my throat. “You know anyone else who can just . . . let themselves in here with a key?”

  I try to smile like this is one of those everyday jokes between people, funny ha-ha, but the joke doesn’t exactly fly.

  “Do you?” Andreas asks, watching me.

  Truth.

  “No,” I whisper, and shake my head.

  He waits.

  “No, I don’t,” I say with more force, holding his gaze even though my voice is breaking and I am breaking from finally saying it out loud. “Not anymore.”

  “Ingrid . . . sweetheart . . .”

  He comes slowly down two more steps, like he thinks I’ll bolt if he moves too fast.

  “It’s just us,” I say. “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not,” he says. “And it doesn’t have to be. It shouldn’t be.”

  “Well, no, but . . . I . . . I will be. I’m not, but I will be. I’m sorry. I know I’ve made it so much harder. . . .”

  “Shhh . . .”

  “Thank you for not having me committed or whatever, because I know sometimes you must have thought I was completely bananas. . . .”

  “Never,” he says.

  I press my lips together, but it doesn’t stop my face from crumpling, my hands going to clutch my chest, the avalanche from coming. Doesn’t stop Andreas from flying to me and wrapping his arms around me and holding me tight . . .

  As I finally let the truth all the way in.

  My mom . . . is gone.

  Gone since New Year’s Day.

  And I will not be talking to her or showing her the letters I wrote, or ever seeing her again.

  She must have realized she meant to overdose. She must have found herself wishing she’d succeeded. She held on as long as she could, I suppose. Waited for the adoption papers, waited for us to have one last summer, one fall, one Christmas.

  And then she made a very thorough and tidy job of dying via carbon monoxide in the garage. We found her together, Andreas and I.

  Back inside the coach house, she’d left a letter on the sunroom chaise, along with the registration confirmations for both Peak Wilderness and London.

  I did not read them or even really look at them.

>   There was also a pile of thirty sweaters and hoodies in various colors and fabrics, packets of socks and underwear, pajamas, a collection of classical literature in hardcover, including War and Peace, five books on how to choose a career, another three on time management and work habits, and the journals—one hundred of them. Some had silk-screen covers, some were leather-bound, one was an old-fashioned diary with a key, all were beautiful and interesting-looking. One hundred. Like she knew that after she did what she was going to do, I would have something to say about it, would need to write about it, possibly for a lifetime.

  There were multiple homemade frozen dinners with dates and descriptions on them in the basement freezer, and for Andreas there were twenty pairs of indoor/outdoor slippers, a beautiful leather jacket, photo albums from trips they took together, and ten pairs of reading glasses—he’s always losing or breaking them.

  She also left many pages of instructions about what she wanted done, and how.

  It is my wish for you to honor our deal, she had written under her signature on the Peak Wilderness registration. You must be stronger than me, not to mention better.

  I couldn’t even comprehend the gall of this, couldn’t process it, or the pain, or the fact of what she’d done.

  So . . .

  I spent the next few months . . . not exactly pretending she was alive, but fiercely, determinedly ignoring the fact that she was dead. I thought of the garage door and put one in my mind, pulled it shut, the fact of her death firmly behind that door.

  We didn’t do a public obituary, and I refused to attend the cremation or the small service she had organized and paid for in advance. I ignored the existence of the beautiful cloisonné vase Andreas brought home and set inside the dining-room cabinet among the formal dishes.

  In fact, I stopped going into the dining room at all.

  I stopped going to school, too, and only managed to pass the rest of the year because Andreas let me homeschool. I don’t know whether my classmates knew or whether they didn’t, because the only person I saw was Juno, who came over a couple of times a week to tell me the latest gossip. Andreas had talked to her—I could tell because she didn’t say a word to me about Mom, or about anything serious at all, but instead seemed to think it was her duty to entertain me.

  At home we simply went forward, Andreas and I, one day to the next.

  We tried to choke down one of the frozen dinners, a lasagna, but neither of us could do it.

  Neither of us really wanted to eat at all.

  Andreas gave the dinners to a women’s shelter and then he made our meals, sat down to eat with me every night, had breakfast with me every morning, set aside time to try to help me with physics, or anything else I needed.

  And, without exactly encouraging or engaging in it, he let me pretend.

  And when I lost it completely and did what I did to the garage, he understood. And helped me finish the job, and didn’t say a word.

  “You don’t have to go,” Andreas said as he watched me pack for Peak Wilderness.

  “Mom wants me to,” I said, jaw tight. It was almost like I was going to spite her at that point. And to keep her alive, somehow. It didn’t make logical sense, but it made emotional sense, at least to me. It gave me something to fight about, to fight for. “So, I’ll go.”

  “Ingrid . . . it might be too much for you.”

  “No. It’ll be fine.”

  “I’ll be here,” he said. “When you get back, and always.”

  Normal people probably don’t need these kinds of assurances, but Andreas knew I did.

  And here he is today, as promised, catching me as I fall, catching my delayed grief.

  Looking at him, I notice for the first time how the pain has stained him, bruised him—dark circles under his eyes, a new shock of white from his temples, the tired set of his shoulders. . . .

  “I haven’t been here for you.” My voice is raw, and the tears are threatening to return.

  “Ingrid,” he says, shaking his head, “I’m the parent. It’s my job to be here for you, not the other way around.”

  “Who’s there for you, then?”

  He shrugs.

  “That’s not fair.”

  “I’m okay,” he says. “I’m better now that you’re better.”

  This strikes me as funny, and I let out a ragged chuckle. “I seem better to you?”

  He chuckles too, then gives me a beautiful smile.

  FOREVER

  Dear Mom,

  I’m going to keep writing to you for a while. Maybe forever. Maybe that was your plan. But I must say, for someone who wanted to die, you were awfully invested in controlling everything that happened after you left. You could have just stayed and made sure we kept doing what you wanted. Now we might not.

  But I will write, because I’m not ready to be without you. I’m angry and wrecked and I’ll never fully understand. But I really miss you. I’ll miss you forever.

  About Peak Wilderness: I know you did it to make me strong for the future, and also to keep me from falling down and dying of grief. To give me something to fight with, to rage against, to focus on. In some way, if not in exactly the way you intended, it worked.

  Although that program . . . I don’t think I deserved it. But you know that already from the other letters. Or you don’t. I’m going to pretend you do.

  So, it worked, sort of, but it could have scarred me for life. Scarred me more, that is.

  And I wish, for karmic and practical purposes, that before you left me, you’d had to spend a few days collecting your dirty toilet paper in a Ziploc and sleeping on the wet ground with a smelly, snoring pervert. At the same time I wish you had seen one of the sunsets, swum in the freezing lake under the stars, sat around a campfire (roasting your undies), and grappled with your weaknesses and found your strengths and eaten bugs for dinner and learned to put up a tent, build a fire and a lean-to, tip a canoe, follow a path in the wilderness.

  It just occurred to me: if purgatory is a real thing, it might be just like Peak Wilderness.

  Where are you . . . ?

  I hope you are somewhere. Somewhere better—with the happy little bluebirds, maybe.

  Anyway.

  I nearly lost my virginity to an ex-convict, which was really fun.

  And when I got home, Andreas told me that a boy named Isaac had stopped by. My heart lurched, hearing this. I thought he’d moved on, was ready to give up for good.

  “I invited him in,” Andreas said.

  “You what?”

  “I wanted to take his measure. We had coffee.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “I could tell he likes you, so I made very strong espresso,” he said with a mischievous grin. “He drank it.”

  “This is your testing method for young men?” I said.

  “One of them, yes. I’ll develop more as needed.”

  I laughed.

  “I believe he is . . . good. So if you like him . . .”

  At this I gave another laugh, but a less comfortable one. “Like” is such a simple word.

  “It’s been so long since I’ve even spoken to him,” I said. “What did you say?”

  “Beyond pleasantries? Only that perhaps you would be ready to talk with him when you got back, and that I would . . . encourage you to. He left his number.”

  “I have his number.”

  “And his summer workplace information . . .”

  I smiled. Tried to breathe.

  “But I believe Juno is in Paris?” he said. “You could go there, and then I could meet you and take you to London to check out your school. Maybe this boy can wait . . . ?”

  I laughed again. Cried again. Imagined myself at the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, in the cafés and shops and hostels, laughing with Juno, using our terrible French to chat up dashing Parisian
men.

  But in the end I needed to be here with Andreas for the rest of the summer, helping him tend the garden he’s planted where the garage used to be, here in our house with all my memories of you, with what’s left of you, with what I have to build the rest of my life on.

  Andreas has rented a flat in London, and he’s going to base himself there so I won’t have to be alone. I know I will be seeing you—remembering you there, feeling like you’re around every corner, which I guess you are. You are around every corner of me.

  You told me once I could be anything, and I believed you.

  I’m choosing to continue believing it, even if you stopped.

  Forever,

  Ingrid

  Isaac is working at a drama camp run out of an independent theater company.

  I put on a jean skirt, my favorite ice-blue tank top, and my newly washed boots from Peak Wilderness because although they’re ugly, by now they feel both earned and symbolic.

  I don’t think about it too much in advance, and I don’t warn him I’m coming.

  I am nervous, but I am not a scared little girl anymore.

  And I am done with having regrets when it comes to Isaac.

  I arrive just as the doors are opening, and wait off to the side at the bottom of the steps as Isaac emerges with a gaggle of children and checks off each name on a clipboard as they’re picked up by parents and caregivers.

  He has too much going on to notice me, which is good news because the sight of him, actually looking at him after months of looking past/around/over him, has momentarily paralyzed me.

  He is taller and scruffier-looking, and the hair on his arms has lightened with the sun. He’s wearing jean shorts, and a black T-shirt with Mickey Mouse on it, and sandals. He’s cute as hell with the kids, totally dialed in. As he waves to the last one—a little brunette who gazes up at him with giant, adoring blue eyes—my insides lurch.