Imperfect Birds

by Anne Lamott

  She reached Bob at his office at four.

  “How are you?” he asked gently.

  She thought about this for a moment. “I’m okay in a number of ways. Scared, worried, excited, desperate, flat. If that makes any sense at all.”

  “It makes perfect sense,” he said. He walked her through a few details of the weekend: “We’ll all meet upstairs. There will be a fire, and snacks. We will catch you up on your children and the program, and prepare you to see them. They are not the children you left with us a month ago. Then they’ll do a demonstration of what they have been learning. And then you get them to yourselves for an hour. Each family will stake out an area of the room. There will be lots of crying and laughing and blame, the kids will be angry and ecstatic, and they will binge on the snacks and get stomachaches. There will be anger and there will be extraordinary healing. There’s no way around it being one of the toughest things you’ll ever do. This is parenthood on steroids.”

  “What are the kids doing right now?”

  “Finishing up their truth letters to you parents. Have you written yours to Rosie?”

  Rosie sat on a log beside the rare afternoon campfire, bent over her journal, gripping her pencil; there was so much to say, but they could use only the front and back of one sheet of binder paper. She looked around at the boughs of the nearest trees, heavy with snow. Boy, were her mother and James in for a bad surprise—it was not cute Tahoe cold here, but cold cold, Outer Mongolia cold. She turned back to her paper and began.

  Dear Mama and James, I am still sick with anger that you sent me here. You stole something from me that I can never get back, my senior year in high school. I worked so hard and so long for this year, and there were other ways you could have reined me in when you got so freaked out by my behavior, which believe me was very typical of all the kids I know. At the same time, I know you honestly believed that sending me here was the only way you could save me. So I am trying to look forward. James, I want to say you made things really horrible for me this year, you were always on my case and riding my ass. I love you a lot, mostly, and overall you have been a great blessing to this family, but you spend way too much time on your work, to the neglect of my mother and myself. When you look back over your life, I think your memories of us will matter much more than your success as a writer. And mama, it really hurts me that you did not make more of your life. I know you are shy and have had mental trials, but just being a mother and wife is not enough. This has not set a good example. I think your work with Rae as activists is very important and that you should stop using your fake fragile condition as an excuse to lie on the couch and read, or putter around in the garden. I love you so much, you could never in a million years imagine loving someone as much as I love you.

  That night, dozens of people came to be a part of Rae’s candlelight procession in the Parkade, mostly from Sixth Day Prez—old folks in their Sherpa caps, the youth group, parents, even the parents of one kid who had died. Lank and James had built a primitive wooden stage with a row of steps for the candle ceremony. It was cold and windy. People pressed in close to the stage, and some of the teenagers who had been huddling under the bus kiosk wandered over to listen. Everyone received a candle inside a paper cup. Rae’s co-organizer opened the event by saying simply, “Tonight we bring fresh air, light, and hope to the Parkade.” A guitarist played “Lost Children Street” by Malvina Reynolds. The newly formed church choir sang “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” and then “Blowin’ in the Wind,” completely off-key until the crowd joined in and straightened things out.

  Parents and relatives and friends who wanted to light a candle for a specific young person gathered to the right of the stage. Rae gave them red plastic party cups with candles inside. From where Elizabeth stood, they looked like a bread line, or people waiting for soup. It was a modest ceremony. The red plastic cups were supposed to guard the votives inside, but the wind was strong and the flames fizzled out, and had to be lit over and over. One person got his candle lit, walked to the center of the stage, said a girl’s name loudly, and placed the candle on one of the steps. Then he went to rejoin the line at the end, while people near the front of the line tried to light their candles. People from the crowd came over to whisper names to the people with red plastic cups, as if making requests, and more and more names were lifted up. The person at the front of the line would step forth like a bridesmaid after the person ahead placed a candle on the step. James took someone’s red party cup and went to the step to lift up Rosie’s name. Elizabeth had had a vision of the heat and light of flames moving the message of the rally into the world, a baby conflagration to stir the cold and unseeing parts of oneself, the cold and unseeing parts of the world, but the candlelit step looked like a beggar man’s war memorial.

  Rae also lit a candle for Rosie, and made a very short speech when all the parents were done. “Tonight, we lit something inside ourselves to be spread, lit a tiny flame to consecrate toxic ground, to consecrate our caring, our attention to this matter, our wish that there would be help for the parents of the dead. My belief is that their children did not die in vain and their children did not die alone. Tonight was about our huge desire to help, a few of us poor schlubs trying to light a little flame that almost no one was here to see, in red plastic cups.” She laughed at how impoverished an image this was, and continued, looking right at Elizabeth: “Each candle is so temporary, but it says that there is light and there are people who can help: it says the time is now.”

  Alice and Jody came at nine on Friday morning. Before answering the door, Elizabeth stopped at the mirror in the hall, saw a tired, graying woman with curved and questioning shoulders. She straightened them up, sucked in her stomach, ran her fingers through her hair, practiced an upbeat smile, and checked once again in the mirror to see if she looked any more like her old self. She thought that she did, that it was pretty convincing.

  She made them both cocoa with white chocolate shavings, and said that James would be out to say hello as soon as he finished something he was working on. The girls sat on the rug in the living room and played with Ichabod like huge young children. For Rosie they had brought a picture of themselves dressed to the nines in vintage clothes for a party; a lavender, rose, and light blue cap that Alice had crocheted; and a bronze butterfly recovery medallion that Jody’s sponsor had given her. Jody looked dykier than before, with spiky maroon hair, and heavier, yet still with those long fingers and bony wrists. Alice was almost gamine now, with a short stylish pixie cut, fitted black capri pants, a silk scarf, a heart locket from a new boyfriend. But they were so much the same, their fingers always busy, constantly tracing on their palms and pulling on their ears, rubbing their knuckles, inspecting their cuticles. They had something terrible to tell Elizabeth—or at least Rosie would think it was terrible—which was that Fenn was going out seriously with two different girls, and Elizabeth cried out, “Thank you, Jesus,” so loudly that James came running from his office.

  “Are you going to tell her?” Alice asked.

  Elizabeth didn’t know. Her skin itched, her brain itched. She shrugged. “I don’t want to be cruel, but I want Rosie to know that Fenn isn’t back at home waiting for her like in the movies.”

  “You will intuitively know what to do,” said Jody, and Elizabeth smiled, because it was something you heard at every AA and NA meeting, the Ninth Step promises. Then she shook her finger menacingly at Jody.

  “You and your little NA friends better be right, or your ass is grass.” It was painful and sweet to be with the girls, Alice so stylin’ now, as Rosie would have said, so confident after having gotten early acceptance to three design schools, and Jody fingering the strand of plastic key tags that hung from her belt loops like a rosary, both of them peering at Elizabeth with concerned affection. “I’m so proud of you both,” she said, and she was—Alice was going to be a star, Jody was going to work at the KerryDas Café every morning, before heading to her daily meeting—but guilt squee
zed her heart like fingers. Had she done the right thing, sending Rosie away? And would it even work?

  Alice broke off a corner of a chocolate chip cookie and nibbled at it thoughtfully. “I want to tell you one more terrible thing.” James and Elizabeth turned toward her. “I gave Rosie a lot of Adderall over the last year—I mean, I just shared my stash with her. You know, I take it for ADD.” Elizabeth felt something verging on hate. Then Alice dipped her head. “I actually take it ’cause I love speed, and I’m so sorry that it makes me sick.” She looked up tearfully and smacked herself hard on the head a few times. Elizabeth grabbed her wrist to make her stop, and held on as they collected themselves, Alice’s fingers clenching with the desire to keep hitting herself.

  “You’re not Rosie’s problem,” Elizabeth said. “Rosie is Rosie’s problem.”

  “Jesus, Alice,” James exclaimed. “Didn’t you ever hear that speed kills?”

  Alice rolled her eyes angrily, and muttered about what a jerk she used to be.

  “Stop, James,” said Elizabeth. “You girls are totally amazing. You’re Rosie’s two best friends, and you get to start writing to her pretty soon.” Then she narrowed her eyes at Alice. “It goes without saying that if you ever give Rosie drugs again, I will so rat you out. I will call every college that has taken you, and say you are a pusher—and I will hurt Ichabod,” she said, and both girls screamed in protest. “I mean it,” she said. “This is not an idle threat.”

  At the door, Jody took Elizabeth by the hands. “You did the right thing,” she told the older woman sternly. “You made the same messy decision my parents did, when I made such a mess of my life. They know now that they did the right thing, and I do, too, for sure. And Rosie will be too, someday.” A shard of Elizabeth believed her. Most of her was filled with worry, fear, and self-loathing. They all hugged, and the girls did the secret gang handshake with James, the roe-sham-beau and gibberish sign language. Elizabeth watched them walk away, Alice so fine and thin, Jody with a few inches of fleshy back showing, a sparrow in flight tattooed above her leather belt, orange, dark blue, rose, outlined in black.

  James did all the talking at the airport ticket counter, while Elizabeth stood beside him trying to calm herself. Her shoulders had rolled forward again. She felt like a mental patient being transferred by a federal marshal, or a drunken boater on the Seine, one foot in the rowboat, one foot onshore, her arms holding oars unsteadily above the water.

  Everything in her ached like the visible part of the garden, dry from crying, twiggy, scratchy, holding its breath until the rains came. You had to remind yourself of all that the soil held, or you’d lose all hope. She found a seat near the ticket counter, took three aspirin, held her hands over her roiling stomach like a pregnant woman, and got out her letter to Rosie.

  “Darling,” it began in her best penmanship on stationery. “This will be an inadequate attempt to tell you how devastating your drug use was to your family, your future, and especially to your health—mental, psychiatric, psychic, physical.” She looked up at James, still at the counter, tucking their boarding passes into the inside pocket of his ratty old jacket. His letter was so concise—you scared us to death, you treated your mother and me like shit, you were throwing away everything most precious to you, and to us—but hers meandered from mentions of Rosie’s lies and betrayal, to proclamations of love and respect and hope. James had helped her edit out the guilt-mongering, but insisted she not minimize the destruction they had lived through. How honest were you supposed to be with your kid, how honest was healthy for them to hear? Certainly not a cathartic spew. But in the jumble of terror, hatred, resentment, hope, rage, guilt, shame, and overwhelming love, what were the salient points? She’d written a heartbroken, lonely list of treachery and deceit—the drugs and alcohol, the money missing from Elizabeth’s purse, Rosie’s lies about where she was going, whom she would be with, the Adderall Alice confessed to, the raves Jody told Elizabeth about, a week after they sent Rosie away, the Ecstasy, the cough syrup, the bust on the hill, the sneaking out at night, driving stoned and drunk—good God almighty. As she read her list in the airport, it finally struck Elizabeth full-on in her gut—her kid had been totally out of control.

  She shared this with James when he came over from the counter. Leaning over, she rustled her letter at him and whispered in his ear, “It’s starting to occur to me that our child may have had a little problem.”

  He drew back to study her, incredulous, until they both smiled. “Ya think?” he said. He read the letter again. “You hit all the right notes.” She folded it and tucked it into her purse. He got up to get them some water—she had not seen him sit still once today—while she closed her eyes and pretended the snug plastic armrests were a straitjacket. She clung to what Jody had said, and to the candles lit the night before, for the kids who had died. All she could think to do was turn the whole shebang over, without knowing to whom or what she was turning it over. She imagined sliding it into the in-box of some lowercase god. She held one palm close to her face, and said in silence, as a supplicant, I’ll be responsible for everything on this side of my palm. You be in charge of the outcome of everything else. Today I turn over the waves. I turn over the shore, and the oars, and will sit in the boat quietly with my hands in my lap, as we prepare for whatever is to come. Nothing I do, think, say, insist upon, or withhold will affect the course of events this weekend, only the course of me. That was so depressing to think about, although James would probably say, Maybe not.

  Four hours later, at the lodge in Utah, they got food to go from the restaurant downstairs and took it up to their plain, cozy room. There was a down quilt, worn Oriental rugs, an antique chest of drawers, and a round ox-eye window near the ceiling. There had been one just like it in her grandmother’s house, no bigger than a porthole, with a vertical molding bisecting a horizontal one so it looked like the sniper sight on a giant’s rifle. Thin moonlight showed from the other side. She didn’t know how James could eat so much of his spaghetti: he had a lot at stake, too. He must have assumed that she would partly blame him if it didn’t work out, and maybe she would at first. He had been strict with Rosie all year, so hard on her sometimes. Elizabeth picked at a salad and fries.

  At quarter of seven, he went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. “It’s time to get going,” he said, pulling her to her feet. “I just brushed my one remaining tooth. Your turn.”

  A dozen adults were sitting in a circle of chairs in the center of the conference room when Elizabeth and James stepped inside. People introduced themselves, and the parents announced which child was theirs. Rosie had described Bob to a tee in one of her letters—the hedgehog hair, the wide brown eyes, his quiet voice.

  Rick was the therapy leader, a fireplug of dark hair and eyes, maybe Italian-American, who bristled with gregarious authority. Bob and the instructors would be there only the first night. Rick took the parents through the story of the past weeks, telling how far the kids had come from the first grim days, describing the willfulness and insolence the instructors still encountered, the anger the kids still felt toward their parents, their deep desire to come home, their impressive wilderness skills, their Search and Rescue techniques, and then outlined what this night would be like. Finally he looked up and smiled. “I know you are not desperate for me to keep talking. Let me get your kids.”

  Elizabeth felt James holding his breath, too, as Rick signaled for the big instructor Hank to open the door. The shuffle of boots on the ground broke the silence, and one by one teenagers in bright orange outdoor gear came in, not making eye contact, and trudged over to an alcove at the far end of the room, which held some gear, drums, a pile of twigs and sticks. Rosie, second in line, was the tallest of the five, and Elizabeth stared at the apparition: Rosie, broad in the shoulders, especially in foul-weather gear, her face thin and focused, pale as a soul, black tendrils spilling from her cap.

  Hank closed the door.

  The kids stood side by side like soldiers,
holding branches in their hands, like ancient twig configurations, or rune sticks, and after a moment Elizabeth saw that the letters formed the gnarled word “trust.” Rosie, second from the right, had a letter S, twigs bent, curved, and held together with thin green vines.

  “Trust,” the lead male said loudly at the far left. “T. Trust in our selves, trust in our teachers, trust in the land. T.”

  “R. Respect that you and our teachers had for us once, that we had for ourselves, that we lost, that we threw away getting high,” said the girl holding the R. “R.” Rosie had written about Kath’s tantrums and episodes, but not about how pretty she was, black-haired, fair-skinned, with gigantic round brown eyes.

  “U,” said the boy with the goofy expression. He looked sort of stoned. “You being here for us, you having the courage to be here. And us—the courage we have tonight, to face the past, to face the future. You, and us. U.”

  “S. Sacred trust,” said Rosie, looking straight at Elizabeth, solemn, tired, older, but younger, too, without makeup, lost here, in the weirdness of the drill, but also found in a dark, deep confidence, and in her tribe. Their shoulders helped hold her up, as hers held them. “The sacred trust between parent and child, to try and do the best we can, to grow. The sacred trust of our instructors, to teach us the ways of survival, to teach us the ways of the elders. And sacred trust in ourselves, finally. S.”