Come Back With a Bonus Excerpt: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

by Claire Fontaine

  A dozen turbaned SIKHS swim to a barge, put the tow ropes in their mouths, turn and swim back, pulling the barge in by their teeth. Beyond them, a huge golden spire towers over Rangoon, the Shwedagon Pagoda.

  ANGLE ON A STEAMSHIP—THE VICEROY OF INDIA

  A milky-skinned young woman with sea-colored eyes, CHARLOTTE LEWES, stands at the bow, entranced by all she sees. Her fingers rest on a small metal military kit balanced on the rails. The kit is stamped Lt. Harry Lewes. Without lowering her eyes, her fingers appear to move slightly. The kit slips down and sinks into the cloudy water below. It might have been an accident.

  She turns and walks around a group of wilted ENGLISHWOMEN in pale silk dresses already clinging with sweat. She continues toward the gangplank as it’s lowered.

  Charlotte walks unaided down the narrow plank. Into the sweating humanity, the shimmering heat, the unearthly sounds and colors. Into Burma.

  “That’s the moment, Claire. She wouldn’t turn back even if she knew, would she?”

  “She might walk faster,” I reply with a smile.

  Marshall is gregarious, witty, a perfect director for the screenplay. Jordana and I are sitting with him in our small rented flat in Sloane Square. I’m excited to be taking meetings in London, a city as delightful as Brno was depressing. A city where I’m not as depressed. For the first time in ages, I’m not an anxious, terrified mother—Mia’s on level four and she’s asked to see a therapist. What more could I ask for? I’m like any other professional woman doing what she’s passionate about—I’m writing again!

  Like the script I’d been writing last year, this is also a period drama about a woman who goes to a foreign land and is forever changed. However, Charlotte, a British WWI war widow, doesn’t lose a child, she gains one, and a lover, sailor John Dollar. The book is about a group of British colonials who are swept away in a tsunami off the coast of Burma in 1919. Only Charlotte’s students survive, a handful of schoolgirls who unwittingly create a microcosm of their parents’ imperialist world, at once touching and brutal, a bit like Lord of the Flies. John and Charlotte’s unexpected survival and appearance both destroys and saves them. The moral center of the story is a ten-year-old girl named, coincidentally, Monkey.

  Our goal is to expand John’s role to attract an A-list actor and intensify the love story, which means I must create histories for them that don’t currently exist.

  It strikes me that, again, my work and life are mirroring the same recurring themes: children, loss, a new life built in a new world after the destruction of the old.

  “Roxanne, come on! I need to shower!”

  Not having timed showers on the upper levels isn’t always a blessing. She’s been in there at least an hour. Still, living in the junior staff cabin is paradise. It’s like a real house—there’s no silence, we’re allowed to decorate, girls chase each other around with rollers in their hair.

  I wrote my parents asking for a razor for the Amazon that’s become my legs; the rest of my list consisted entirely of food, starting with Trader Joe’s chocolate raspberry sticks. Roxanne’s consisted almost entirely of cosmetics.

  She finally walks out of the bathroom with two rainbows of eye shadow and foundation caked on so thick you could carve a relief on her cheek.

  “I know you’re trying to make up for lost time, Roxanne, but you don’t have to do it all at once! They’re gonna think you’re trying to rub your level in their face.”

  She bends over, flips her hair back, and smiles.

  “That’s their problem.”

  Not entirely. Cameron comes into junior staff group, takes one look at Roxanne, and bursts out laughing.

  “Who thinks this calls for the pond?” he shouts with a grin.

  “The pond! Yeah, throw her in the pond!”

  The pond isn’t a pond, it’s a cesspool. Algae covers the top of it, and it’s more mud than water. Roxanne crosses her arms defiantly over her chest and gives Cameron a death look.

  He moves toward her and she tries to dodge, but he’s too quick. He throws her kicking and screaming over his shoulder, and we all follow him outside laughing and shouting as he races over to the pond.

  “Let me down, Cameron! I’m gonna sue your fat ass!” she screams.

  We laugh hysterically as Roxanne flounders, splashing and swearing up a storm. She makes her way to the edge and emerges like the swamp creature, hair dripping and black eye makeup streaking her face. Needless to say, the next day mascara and lip gloss seemed adequate.

  My first shift as junior staff is in the library. I dust and catalog books, making mental notes of must-reads, and as the clock hits the hour, I walk over to let the girls lining up outside the door cross in.

  It’s Harmony family, and they all raise their hands, excited to see me. I’m excited to see them, too, and it’s a few seconds before it sinks in that they can’t speak until I call on them.

  I look around at all the faces, at Katrina’s crooked smile, at Brooke’s aggressively questioning eyes, at Sunny’s half-moons. Then I notice three brand-new faces in the family, and it hits me how assimilated the Morava girls have become.

  Our first few months here, all we heard was how we needed to integrate, but it was impossible then. But now, with our old ugly uniforms long gone; two of us on the upper levels; Samantha, Katrina, and Sunny soon to follow; and three unfamiliar girls who’ve probably never heard of Brno, it saddens me to see how deeply Morava’s getting buried.

  I’ve always been fascinated with war. Few things could make me happier than sitting under the cupola of the Imperial War Museum, waiting for a bespectacled librarian to haul up dusty boxes of documents from the bowels of the building.

  I spend two days reading the copious and touching correspondence of a British soldier on the frontlines in World War I France and his young wife in London. I’m so engrossed in their lives that by the time I untie the faded ribbon on the last bundle, the red K.I.A. stamped on the envelopes catches me completely off guard. Killed In Action. A dozen of them arrived in her mailbox after he died.

  Having gained a deeper understanding of the world Charlotte left behind, I hit the British Library to conjure up John’s past. Edwardian England, the Raj, smuggling, colonial opium dens. I’m ecstatic as only a nerd in the stacks can be. Even if for no other reason than I’m not in L.A. thinking about Mia, points and levels, and what to make for dinner.

  “So how’s it feel?” Mike asks at our next session.

  “Awesome! I really didn’t think I was gonna get it, Mike.”

  “Oh, I know how that feels. I meant how’s it feel getting called on your shit?”

  I stop smiling and stare at him.

  “Are you talking about Max?” I demand.

  “Girl, you about shot fire from your eyes at him!”

  “Cuz he’s an arrogant asshole! It’s fine for him not to support me, but he didn’t have to imply that other people are idiots by voting me up!”

  “See, that’s funny,” he says, “because I agreed with just about everything he said.”

  I glare at him. What the hell was I thinking voluntarily entering therapy?

  “And I think you do, too.”

  “What!” I explode. “That’s bullshit, Mike. You know I deserve this!”

  “Do you, Mia? You’re a great leader in some ways, but how honest have you been with your family? You know everything about them, but do they even know you were raped?”

  He might as well have shot a cannon at me. Last week, he asked me to write him a letter about issues I wanted to cover. I, stupidly, included Derek.

  “You asked me for those papers so we could work through things, not so you could use them against me!”

  “Mia,” he says, unruffled, “this can’t work if you’re not honest or if you hide out emotionally. I asked for those so we could build a relationship, and you knew that. I’ve observed you for a while and you’re so used to using yourself as leverage against other people, rewarding and punishing others by how m
uch you share with them, you probably can’t remember what an even-footed relationship feels like.”

  He sits, waiting for my response. I cross my arms and slouch down into my chair. He can try to pry information out of me until his precious cows come home—I’m never talking to him again.

  A minute passes in silence. He sits patiently, his growing annoyance barely perceptible. Another minute. Swinging his feet down from his desk, Mike walks to his door and opens it.

  “Get out.”

  “What?”

  “Get the hell out.”

  “Fine!” I say, storming past him and slamming the door.

  Fucking shrinks.

  “She got what?”

  I’ve called Paul from London.

  “You heard me, thrown out,” Paul says.

  “Great,” I sigh, “here we go again. She probably had it coming.”

  “I’m sure she did. Kim also said that Mia just happened to mention in passing that she sniffed paint dust to get high in Morava.”

  “Paint from the wall?”

  “Yep, when she was in worksheets. Can you believe she’d be that stupid?”

  “Would be? You mean will be. That paint’s full of lead.”

  I try to put this out of my mind as Jordana and I get ready to meet the director for dinner. Over dessert, he proudly shares the accomplishments of his older kids, who are in college or apprenticing in creative fields. Your kid’s interning with a curator, how impressive! Mine? Oh, she’s busy finding new and exciting uses for pulverized paint.

  I look up at the clock on the library wall.

  “Girls, start putting your things away, please,” I say. “You have one minute to be in line.”

  The room becomes noisy as papers rustle and books are slid onto shelves. The girls I’m in charge of walk past me, eyeing me warily.

  Being disciplined by someone your own age is hard enough. Being disciplined by someone your own age who has privileges you can only dream of, and who is a lot closer to home than you are, plain sucks, and lower levels spare no expense demonstrating this to us.

  One girl shuffles into line late. Sonia’s one of those people you never forget. She’s so aggravating and endearing she seems more like a caricature than a human being. A petite, doll-faced Amerasian bombshell, nobody was surprised to learn she used to be a stripper. You can tell by the way she moves, slow, deliberate, almost snakelike, that she revels in the attention her body commands. Even after being raped by a customer.

  She’s had one of the more sordid pasts in here and is perfectly comfortable talking about it. In our first conversation, she told me about having to use her feet and toes to shoot up once other veins collapsed. She and her boyfriend dealt heroin and had several near-death encounters with dealers for not paying up on time, the money no doubt already in their veins. She’s so forthcoming you’d think she’d be a program poster child, until you notice she talks about it a little too eagerly.

  “Sonia, do you wanna self-correct?”

  “I know you’re just dying to dish out the consequences, but isn’t it typical to explain what it’s for before handing it out?”

  Like you don’t know, you dumb bitch, almost slips out of my mouth. Profanities seem to be doing that a lot lately.

  “It’s also typical to remember the rules after you’ve been here over a year.”

  She glares at me with a disdain as blatant as mine must have been toward my mother. As an authority figure, I find myself wavering between callousness and caring. Half the time they throw attitude, I remember being in their shoes and try to be patient with them.

  Then there are days like today when I’m homesick and don’t feel like putting up with some little shit’s attitude over a rule she deliberately broke. Days I feel like laughing at this pathetic girl who’s too stupid to realize she’s just keeping herself here longer while I can go off-shift, shave my legs, and eat chocolate-covered raspberry sticks.

  My new scenes are a jumble in my head, and it’s so damp in the flat that my scene cards won’t stick to the wall. I’m in a lousy mood anyway, so I bundle up to take a walk. It begins to rain and I think of my foolish daughter as I dodge puddles. Hello, up there—not to trouble You or anything, but I couldn’t have gotten a regular teenager with regular teenage problems?

  I’ve been walking so fast and furious, I suddenly realize I’m completely lost, I’m soaked through and freezing, and my neck is so tense from anger, my scalp’s pulled two sizes tighter than my skull.

  I duck out of a downpour into St. Paul’s Cathedral, and while I’m dripping in the vestibule, it hits me. I’m not angry at Mia. I’m angry at Nick. Thirteen years later, he’s still making my life hell. And I’m not just angry for what he did to Mia. He didn’t just steal her innocence, her psychological well-being, he damaged me, too. He stole my youth. Years I’ll never have back. My twenties, my thirties. With Mia’s problems, now my forties.

  And what if this isn’t just a phase, what if she’s always a screw-up, because his filthy hands have made her hate herself into that identity? What if the rest of my life I’ll feel bad whenever I think of my daughter?

  I’m in the right place to pray, but this anger feels much more powerful than faith. Certainly more logical. I must have been crazy—one answer to a prayer to find Mia and suddenly I believe? If that’s the case, then losing Mia means losing faith. Which means that belief is nothing more than a willful delusion born of either desperation or gratitude.

  “Ready to try this again, bucko?”

  I jump. It’s Mike whispering in my ear in the middle of class. Where the hell did he come from?

  “Shouldn’t you be asking yourself that?” I hiss back. “You’re the one that kicked me out. Bucko.”

  He looks at me calmly, waiting for a real answer. I roll my eyes, grab my jacket, and wordlessly follow him outside.

  “Boy, have I missed your attitude, girl!” he says once we’re outside. “After a week of peace, I just couldn’t take it anymore and had to come getcha.”

  I trudge behind him in silence, scowling every time he cheerily waves to passing students. He stops on his porch before going in.

  “Mia, look at me.”

  I look up.

  “I’m glad you got Level 4, dear, I really am.”

  I breeze past him and sit down. He follows me in and sits in his chair, facing me with his elbows on his knees.

  “I’m also still glad Max gave you that feedback. We both know you’re operating at a fraction of your potential. How are people supposed to help you grow if you withhold from them? Oh…wait, that’s right, they can’t!”

  He leans in toward me and I press back against my chair.

  “Mia, when I look at you, I see a beautiful, bright young woman who’s too scared and stubborn to admit she’s stuck.”

  He pauses, lowers his voice, “You think you’ve dealt with your rape, with your old dad…then why do you freeze whenever a male comes within a foot of you?”

  The faces of past students on his wall seem to be pressing in toward me, too. I put my feet on the chair with my knees under my chin and stare out the window with my jaw clenched tight.

  “I want to see you happy, Mia. I want to see you put on a dress without worrying about the attention it’s going to bring. You’re still so run by what happened thirteen years ago that you don’t even feel comfortable in your own skin,” he says softly.

  Then he doesn’t say anything. He watches me watching the trees. I’m so frustrated—doesn’t he think I want those things, too? That I wouldn’t give anything to enjoy hugs without feeling claustrophobic and squeamish? To wear makeup without feeling like looking pretty is asking for trouble? I want that more than anything, but I just can’t, so what does he want from me? I hate this, I hate Mike, I hate my old dad. I hate that every other memory has a me in it that he touched. I hate that some days I wish I wasn’t me.

  They come of their own accord, big rolling drops down my cheeks. I wipe them away silently, but th
ey keep coming.

  “Do you want me to help you, Mia?”

  I nod. I’ve never cried in front of a man before. I hardly cry, period. I’m terrified of intimacy, of vulnerability.

  “Then let me in. I can’t help you if it’s always on your terms. You’re going to have to get a little vulnerable, feel a little out of control sometimes. That’s why I kicked you out of my office. You weren’t being emotionally honest.”

  I still can’t bring myself to look at Mike. I look up to reach for a tissue on the filing cabinet and catch his eye as he watches me from his desk. He smiles at me. His eyes are moist.

  “Mia,” he says gently, “I know how hard that was for you. I’m real proud of ya’, girl.”

  I nod as I wipe my eyes. It caught me off guard, seeing his eyes like that.

  Cat 2, major horseplay. One overly rough tussle and it’s back to Level 3. I don’t fucking believe this. I was on sickbed with another girl and by afternoon we were feeling better and started horsing around. I tossed her a rock, but she missed it and it nailed her near her eye.

  “But, she wasn’t hurt and I’m really sorry, Chaffin,” I protest on the way back to Harmony cabin with my arms full of my stuff.

  “If a lower level did that, wouldn’t you consequent them? Here, give me some things,” he says, helping me. “Half an inch lower and you could have blinded her.”

  “I know. But, I worked so hard to get to Level 4 and it was an accident!”

  “That’s life. You break a rule, you pay the consequence. You were in a position of authority, a role model for others, and it’s time you started acting like the young lady you are and not some hooligan.”

  I suppose he has a point, though if I hear about how I need to start acting ladylike one more time, I’ll scream.

  “That’s a good size buck,” Mike says, pointing to a big horned deer nibbling grass on the trail ahead of us. There’s a boy on a parent call in his office, so we’re doing my session while walking a fire road above the facility. The buck chews and watches us.