Imperfect Birds

by Anne Lamott

  “T. Trust!” intoned the black-haired boy on the end, the handsomest male, and the kids shouted together, “Trust!”

  Then they broke into smiles. All the mothers wept and began to rise, but the instructors shook their heads and gestured for them to sit down. The kids put down their branches, then picked up various packs that were leaning against the wall, and one at a time brought them out. Kath announced, “This is the pack we each carry on our shoulders every day,” and took apart the tight bundle, held together with what she called a p-cord: a tarp on the outside, a thin pad inside, a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, cooking gear. Once it was all laid out, one of the boys said, “Go,” and in minutes, she assembled it all into a tight, lumpy burrito, which she slipped onto her back.

  The parents cheered. Scowling, Kath stepped back. The mothers and James wiped at their eyes. The U boy demonstrated the water filtration system for the tribe, a banged-up steel water filter device with a red pump lever and plastic tubes, the ultimate symbol of sacred trust, because if you didn’t clean the filter perfectly when it was your turn, everyone ended up sick.

  Rosie gathered dried leaves and grasses from a pile on the floor, and shaped them into some sort of nest, which she set down on a granite square that one of the boys had placed at her feet. She got an Altoids box from another pile of gear, and extracted a bit of black flug. She laid it on the leaves, and from her pocket pulled a rock and a metal handle of some sort. Then she smashed the metal handle against the quartz, over and over, until a thin plume of smoke rose from deep inside the nest, which Rosie blew into a low flame.

  Finally the demonstration ended, and the kids looked over at Rick, who nodded. The room dissolved into pandemonium as the kids raced for their parents. Rosie plowed into her mother’s arms and then into James’s, tears pouring down her face. She pulled them into one corner of the alcove, then pushed them to the floor so they could all huddle together, cuddle and weep and exclaim over one another. “I know I only have you for an hour,” she implored. “I never thought I could forgive you, and I haven’t quite, but now I cannot stand that we can’t stay up all night together—I will go crazy between now and eight o’clock tomorrow.” She pawed Elizabeth’s weepy face with her sooty hand, and barreled up against James’s chest, handing him a horribly grimy olive-green kerchief on which to wipe himself up. Her face was bleary and scrunched with emotions, everything at once, all three of their faces showed ecstasy and pain, and they rolled into a mass, like bears, shoulders and chests, arms and legs. Rosie pulled off her foul-weather jacket. She was wearing the gray sweater she had worn when Lank and James had kidnapped her, over a black turtleneck. The hem of a pale blue undershirt peeked out below, and reaching to tuck it in, Elizabeth felt the bones of Rosie’s waist.

  Rosie’s heart burst with joy and anger and pain and homesickness, and she couldn’t possibly gather together all the thoughts and speeches she had rehearsed, her charges and excuses and her hopes. She wanted to tell them how angry she still was that they’d sent her here, but she got only as far as how desperately she missed them. She’d forgotten how beautiful her mother was, those high cheekbones and the perfect nose and the eyes as smart and soulful as a dog’s; there was more gray in her hair. Rosie had been waiting to see what the other kids’ parents looked like, and she’d caught glances of them during the demonstrations—Tyler’s parents looked rich and proper, with black hair like his and good bones, and Kath’s mother was a bleached-blonde anorexic and her father was fat—but Rosie really didn’t care now. Her mother had such great thick short hair.

  Behind them were cries and exultations and even fists pounding on the carpet—that was probably Kath having one of her episodes—and Rosie turned back to her parents. God, her mother had gotten more wrinkly and James was so pale and exhausted, with dark circles under those beautiful green green eyes, and his hairline had receded since she’d last seen him, and she cried again that she would see them only for another forty minutes tonight, it was cruel and inhumane, but her mother was saying they had all weekend. She loved these two people so much, they were by far the greatest-looking parents, and at the same time she was still mad and hated it here and hated that they’d done this to her. But clean, combed hair helped her spirits immensely, as did having her own clothes, and warm dry socks.

  Rosie told them everything she could in the forty minutes remaining—about wilderness life; about the emotional-rescue kids, who had lent them this batch of drums, which they had made, and Rosie and her tribe would make some, too, but they could already play these tonight, a welcome rhythm, duh, how dorky was that, since everyone would be saying good-bye. But they hadn’t learned the good-bye song yet. James was dispatched to bring a bowl of trail mix over, and Rosie ate two fistfuls without stopping. She dropped her voice to nearly a whisper as she pointed with her chin to the other families, and told them who each child was. Elizabeth caught Rosie up on Rae and Lank, Ichabod, Jody, and Alice, and told her she had all this stuff from the girls to give her—a cap Alice had made, and Jody’s butterfly recovery medal, and a card they’d made with photos. Jody had a foot-long strand of NA key tags now. Alice had a new boyfriend and a short pixie hair-cut. And Jody said that Fenn was seeing other girls.

  Rosie cried out an unintelligible sound. “Did he call to see where I was? And when I was coming home?”

  “No, but Alice and Jo told him.” Her mother held her, and James stared mournfully at his wooden bowl of trail mix and picked out M&M’s to offer as communion after Rosie was able to stop crying.

  In her last letter, Rosie had said that her nails were pitch-black and she smelled like monkey island at the zoo, but she and the others had gotten to take hot showers at the SAR base camp, and wash their hair. Elizabeth burrowed now into the warm, delicious long curls. The parents were permitted to give their kids brushes and combs in the morning—they’d all had to share one last night at the base camp. Rosie pulled up her foul-weather pants to show them that the hair on her legs was almost as thick and black as James’s, but there would be no shaving allowed until the Academics phase at the old house in town, in another month.

  And it seemed like only minutes had passed, but Rick was standing and telling everyone it was time to go. The three of them clung together, and then all the kids returned to the alcove, and each took one of the drums against the wall, and a folding chair, and they sat in the same order in which they had spelled out “TRUST” and began to play their song.

  The drums drew the kids together into the beat of itself, into its rhythmic tribal heart, steady and firm. They looked up at one another as they played, or down at their hands and drum skins. Their playing was like a community pacemaker, and when they stopped, the silence was profound.

  Then the parents burst into wild applause and whistles. The kids looked sheepish, vaguely contemptuous, and totally at home.

  Rosie glanced over her shoulder on the way out the door, one last look for the road. God, her parents were so cute, like little rabbits, staring back at her, waving like she was getting on a school bus. She had presents to give them tomorrow, rings she had made from bark fibers of a tulip poplar. All the kids had made rings for their parents. It had been a whole day’s work, which left their hands sliced with paper cuts. She had fashioned thin cord and it had taken forever to break it down between her palms, twist and plait two almost invisible strands. One of the boys had started twisting dogbane into cord until Bob had discovered this and told him it could be deadly, at least to dogs, and could cause heart problems in humans. There were actually more ways for kids to die out in the woods than there’d ever been at home. Her parents were crazy. But she had come through. She had shown everyone that she could survive in the snow with almost nothing, make cord from the skinniest fibers, play an ancient rhythm on a drum. And she could make fire.

  James and Elizabeth milled around their room in the lodge like dogs at the pound. Only one bedside lamp was lit. Elizabeth looked mournfully at the cold smelly French fries she had barely t
ouched.

  “All of a sudden I’m starving to death,” she said. “I feel faint.”

  “Do you want me to see if the kitchen is still open? I could get us some of that pie.”

  “In a minute. Will you come sit on the floor with me?” He came over and sat down beside her on the worn rug, against the wall. They both sighed.

  “How did she look to you?” he asked finally.

  “Beautiful. Full of breath. I love it here. I love Bob, Rick, I love them all.”

  “Something with big healthy teeth has broken through her polluted cocoon. Broken had to happen. Otherwise, there would have always been another inch of wiggle room, and Rosie had become a wiggle artist.”

  The air in their room smelled faintly of mold, dust, and evergreen trees.

  “What about that drumming, James! Was that wild, or what?”

  “Wild,” he agreed. “It overwhelmed me at first. But it seems to take all the inner jangle and work it through their bodies, so it came out as power. It turned it into one loud heartbeat for a few minutes.”

  They sat in the near dark, shoulder to shoulder. She looked up at the thin moonlight through the porthole, divided into quarters, and felt another hunger pang. Her stomach growled, but over the rumble she heard the sound of footsteps crunching against the snowy gravel below. “Listen.” The kids were talking in the night. She strained to hear but could not distinguish Rosie’s voice from the others’. A car door opened, and then another, probably belonging to the van that would take them to the hogan and the longhouse for their first night inside. Life would be easier there. The fire in the hogan was always lit, and they could prepare all kinds of hot food. There was candlelight to read by. They’d make their own drums the first days there, then do drum circles daily, practice community living, continue with therapy. Still, not senior year in Landsdale. The doors slammed one by one, and the engine started up, but Elizabeth and James did not see the lights of the van up here, only the dim reading lamp by the bedside and the thin quartered light of the moon through the ox-eye window, and they listened to the van pull away in the night.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Jake Morrissey is a great editor. Plus, we have so much fun. I have found a wonderful home at Riverhead Books—thank you, Geoff Kloske, Susan Petersen Kennedy, Mih-Ho Cha, Craig Burke, and Sarah Bowlin. Anna Jardine is such a tough and profound copy editor: thank God no civilians get to see my material until she has had a chance to help me get it right.

  Sarah Chalfant and Edward Orloff of the Wylie Agency are just great. I love you, Sarah.

  Tom Weston, I can’t believe I get to be so close to someone with such a brilliant, beautiful, and deeply disturbed mind. I’d be lost without you.

  Many people contributed so much to this book, and I can’t ever thank them enough: Sam Lamott, Amy Tobias, Veronica Erick, Rachel Sullivan, Brooke, Nicole Guerrera, Steven Barclay, Karen Carlson and her marvelous children James and Eliza, Ellen Blakely, Mary Carabell, the profound Alldredge community, and my beloved uncle, Millard Morgen.