What I Carry

by Jennifer Longo

  I could not wait to see.

  “You guys, is Mr. Taxera here?” she asked the room. Everyone shook their heads. “I’m going to get a ladder.” She went searching in an adjacent supply room.

  “Muiriel!” Elliot backed in through the classroom door carrying a box of a dozen seedling plants, camera strapped to him as always, and right behind him (Why, Elliot, why?) was Jerky McUpSpeak.

  “Hey, Elliot.” I smiled, ignoring Tiana ignoring me. “Kira’s looking for a ladder, do you know—”

  “Kira?” He dropped the box of baby plants on a shelf near the window. “Where?”

  “Uh, back there?”

  He ran to the supply-room door.

  Tiana was pretending hard not to care about the whole exchange. But she saw me looking up and followed my gaze to the shelf.

  “What do you need?” she asked.

  “Not a thing,” I said brightly, and moved away to look out the windows and wait. I could hear Elliot and Kira chatting it up in the supply room, laughing about who knows what—private jokes about tempera paint and stippling. It made me happy to hear her happy.

  Then a sickening crash.

  “Oh my gosh,” Tiana said blandly. “Oh no.”

  The sculpture from the shelf was a pile of dust and shards of pottery clay. Tiana stood over the mess with a metal pole in her hand, the kind janitors use to open and close tall window blinds.

  “Tiana!” I screamed.

  Kira, Elliot on her heels, ran from the storage room before I could get to her sculpture, shattered into nothing.

  “Oh,” Kira said, and I could hear the tears in her voice. “Oh.” She picked up one round, curved piece. “What happened?”

  “I was trying to get it down for you,” Tiana sighed. “You shouldn’t leave things in here if you’re not enrolled; this isn’t your personal storage unit.” She leaned the pole back in the corner where she’d found it, strolled over to the teacher’s desk, and sat down to stare at her phone.

  “Tiana,” Elliot said. “What is wrong with you?”

  Elliot and I knelt to help Kira pick up the pieces.

  Tiana didn’t look up from her phone. “I was helping,” she drawled. “It was an accident. Jesus, calm down. I’m sure Michelangelo can whip up another dog tomorrow.”

  “It was a dog?” I asked.

  “Terry Johnson,” she whispered.

  I stood so fast I knocked a chair over.

  Everyone in the room looked silently from Kira to me to Tiana and back. Tiana didn’t seem to mind; she just sat and texted, laughing softly and probably scrolling through selfies.

  I stepped toward her.

  “Muir, don’t,” Kira begged. “It’s done, please, let’s just go.”

  The other kids just kept creepily watching the show.

  “Did any of you see Tiana smash Kira’s sculpture?” I asked. They all mumbled a group no.

  Tiana smirked.

  “Well, thanks,” I said. “You’ve all been super helpful.” And I stood at the teacher’s desk, inches from Tiana’s fake, smiling face, glaring down at her while Elliot helped Kira scoop the remains of the Terry Johnson sculpture in a plastic bag.

  “Muir,” Kira said. “Come on.” She and Elliot had their stuff and stood waiting for me by the classroom door. Tiana looked up from her phone.

  “Better go with your friends.” She smiled.

  On the front steps of the school I put my arms around Kira—backpack, bag of sculpture pieces, and all. “Why?” I begged. “Why can’t we go after her? We’ll tell Mr. Taxera, and she’ll be kicked out tomorrow.”

  “No one saw her do it,” she said. “Not even you. He’ll never believe me.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Elliot said miserably. “If a guy pulled that shit, I could punch him, but with a girl, I mean…what do you do with that?”

  “The age-old question, my friend,” I said. “You did the right thing.”

  “I didn’t do anything!”

  “Yeah, you didn’t punch a girl in the face. You’re on the right side of history. Come on, you guys, one of those kids had to have seen her do it.”

  Kira shook her head. “I’m tired. I just want to go h—”

  “I’ll take you,” Elliot said.

  “—ome,” Kira finished, smiling weakly.

  “Muir, can I give you a ride, too?”

  I inhaled the fall air, saw the street buried in autumn leaves. “Thanks,” I said. “I think I’ll walk. Take care of this one.” I hugged Kira once more, watched Elliot open the car door for her, and waved as they passed. One happy thing for the day.

  I walked to Salishwood, turning the Sean-and-Katrina mess over and over. Kira’s talent and confidence were so boldly on display at home, at Blackbird, everywhere but school, where Katiana were free to make her feel small. I directed some fury at the teachers and the school administration, grown-ass adults who let those yoga-pants-wearing, Lululemon-bag-carrying dumb-ass girls destroy Kira’s spirit again and again, right out in the open, with no consequences. I understood why Kira wouldn’t go to them for help; they never offered any.

  * * *

  I was told I carry with me a primal wound.

  The house when I was twelve years old was a remodeled Victorian in the Madrona neighborhood, a few streets away from the house where Kurt Cobain died. Five bedrooms and six kids. I was set to have a top bunk with one other girl in a room with a window facing the water and looking toward Medina, at Bill Gates’s house. Madrona is beautiful, tons of trees and walking distance to school. Cozy library right near a cupcake shop.

  The couple was a man and a woman, and the house was full of shelves and shelves of books. Which was exciting until I tipped my head sideways to read the titles and they turned out to be mostly nonfiction: psychology/meditation/how did my life turn out this way?/parenting/adult coloring mandala/self-help books. Every wall in the house featured art from a different country in Africa, every corner was full of drums and carved wooden masks, though the man and woman were white, the neighborhood was white, they invited their “dearest friends” to a party the night I arrived, and all those people were white. They wore sandals and batik clothing and served lentils and pita bread, and the other kids in the house were okay—bunch of hyper boys, but the girl sharing my room seemed good. I fell asleep after my traditional Joellen first-night phone call. “It’s going to be okay. I’m all right. I’ll call you next week.”

  The next afternoon I walked back from school, and the man and woman called me into the living room and invited me to sit on the sofa, while they knelt on the shag area rug before me.

  “Orlando and I want you to know,” the woman said in a cloying, floaty voice, “that we’ve read your file, and we understand with open hearts that you are wounded, and we will honor and respect that.”

  “I’m— You may have someone else’s paperwork,” I said. “I’m totally healthy.”

  She smiled the way a person might smile at a dog wearing an uncomfortable Halloween costume. “Oh, dear one,” she said. “Wounded. In here.” And she reached up, a million jangly bracelets sliding down to her elbow, to put her hand over my heart. I put my own hand on her wrist and gave her hand back to her.

  “Sorry,” I said. “What is this, now?”

  She put one of the books on my lap, a dog-eared paperback with a giant glossy author photo. White lady smiling. Not a scientist. Not a doctor. Lady with a bad haircut and some kind of “spiritual theory.”

  “You’re suffering from what is known as a primal wound.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes,” Orlando said, also very softly, which made my skin crawl. “This means you are not, nor will you ever be, a whole, complete person. The trauma of being separated, ripped from your mother, has altered your molecular structure and left a void in you that can never be filled, b
ut we can show you how to honor and nurture that void.”

  I sat and blinked stupidly. “I don’t understand. This is in my file?”

  “It’s not like you can’t have some kind of a fulfilling life someday,” the woman said. “Just that your relationships will suffer; you won’t be able to develop healthy attachments to those you may love. You will always be wounded. Primal—the wound is in the very fabric of your being, and will never heal. Due to the trauma.”

  “Wait, so which trauma is this?”

  “Of the separation. From your mother.”

  “Oh,” I said, relieved. “No, there was no separation, I never met her. I was never with her—in my file, didn’t you see? She left me at the hospital; I didn’t know her.”

  “You knew her,” the woman said, her eyes closed, head nodding. “You knew her for nine months; you bonded; you were together—one soul, one heart—and now that part of your soul is missing. Muiriel, I am so sorry to have to tell you this, but we want you to know we care for you—” And she broke down, sobbing on the floor.

  The man rubbed the woman’s back through her patterned tunic top.

  “What about the dad?” I asked. “Do I have a wound from him, too?”

  The man put his hands together in prayer position and touched them to his forehead.

  “Not relevant,” he said. “Your mother, your real mother, is gone. No one else can ever take her place, and that’s why Daphne and I will never adopt. We are not in the business of stealing other mothers’ babies. So if you were hoping—I’m afraid you aren’t going to find that false solution here with us.”

  “Okay.”

  “What we can offer,” Daphne sniffed, “is the opportunity to help you nurture the vivid memories you have from living in your mother’s womb, to try and recover the time when you had a real family, and together we can try to revive your heart.” Her face was pink, shiny with tears and sympathy.

  The house was dark, eleven-thirty and everyone was asleep when I snuck down to the kitchen to use the cordless phone they kept there.

  Joellen answered on the second ring.

  “Come get me, please,” I said. “Now.”

  * * *

  “Well, blessed afternoon to you, too, Happy!” Natan said when I walked at last, still confused and frustrated, through the lodge and into the field to my respite, my Salishwood. This day had been crap, and I was not here for Natan making it worse; I made a beeline away from him. Glad to be early, I filled my water bottle and went to the quiet of the trees to get a minute of calm. A quick recon walk, as Sean called it, to the trail slated for the day’s classes. Perfect time to find new birds’ nests to point out to the kids later, check for trail debris. And get away from Natan.

  The birds were noisy in the late-afternoon chill, maybe already sick of the cold, too, and complaining about it. I love seeing nests, hidden the rest of the year among the leaves, now exposed but safely tucked in the crooks of the bare branches. Trees are baby-bird nurseries.

  “Muiriel.” Natan came loping up the trail, bun bobbing, shattering my calm. “I keep forgetting to ask you something.”

  If there’s one thing living in a city had instilled in me, it was iron-clad personal-space boundaries and an acute and trusting ear for my own inner voice. That voice screamed that I did not want to be alone in the woods with Natan.

  I stood, feet firmly planted in a wide stance, arms crossed and not even a half-assed attempt to hide my annoyance. “What is it, Natan?”

  He bent forward and caught his breath. For a self-professed “explorer of our home, Mother Earth,” he was in pretty crappy shape. Skinny and pale and always dragging behind, even after the kids. “Your name,” he said. “You know it’s spelled an unusual way.”

  I stared at him.

  “It’s not the way you normally spell Muriel,” he explained.

  “Natan,” I said, “I am aware. It’s my fucking name.”

  He smiled his lesson-giving smile. “Yes, of course, but let me share with you the gift of your name that you don’t know. There was a man, a lover of nature, in fact, whose surname is spelled the way your given name is.”

  “Nope.” I moved to pass him and walk back to the field, but he widened his own stance, and trees and boulders on the trail edge trapped me.

  “Two words: John. Muir.”

  I was going to need surgery to get my eyes unlodged from the back of my head.

  Joellen’s job involves driving to places she’s never been on almost a daily basis, so she loves the GPS navigation thing on her dashboard. But sometimes she’ll accidentally turn it on when she’s leaving her house to drive to her office, a route she’s driven for twenty years, and the GPS lady starts directing her how to leave her parking spot and drive down the driveway to the street she’s lived on forever, and she can’t turn it off and she just starts yelling at it, things like, “Oh my God, yes, turn right at the stop sign; I am going to kill this thing. Shut up shut up shut up!”

  Natan was a GPS navigation system with a patchy goatee telling me how to get out of my parking space, and I wanted to kill him. Blood thundered in my ears, I moved to step around him, a good ten inches taller than me and he would not budge. My heart raced. I scanned the ground around me.

  Something to use, a heavy thing I can hold.

  “I can tell you all about the man whose name you share, anytime. I notice you’re not with Sean the way you once were,” he said, performing concern, his voice a husky whisper. “I’m so sorry to see your bond has lost strength. Tell me, was your relationship with him one of a sexual nature?”

  I was panting, shallow, like riding out an asthma attack. Maybe I was. My racing brain paused for a moment to consider.

  All that city night-walking, all those years riding public transportation, foster houses galore, but it has to happen in the forest, the place where I’m safest and that I love best?

  Not today.

  Fallen branch. I stared at it, gnarled and big, partly buried in dead leaves and moss, I could get it with both hands—

  Stupid to take my eyes off him.

  “Muiriel.” So close I felt his hot breath, and I screamed, my body twisted, my bent knee moved straight up, strong, hard.

  Contact.

  He howled, curled over himself but still standing on the trail in my way. I leaped to the branch and pulled it loose, bigger and heavier than I anticipated, and I brought it down, hard, against his knees. Now he screamed. The crack may have been the branch or his bone—either way, he dropped to the dirt. I flung the branch and ran, furious tears making my vision sharper, to the lodge where Jane ran out to meet me.

  She took me to the kitchen and sent a grad student and an office clerk to bring Natan from the trail while I washed my hands and face, then sank down in a chair.

  “But he didn’t touch you?” she asked again and again.

  “No,” I said. “Because I got to him first. He was too close, I didn’t like it, and he is always awful. He is inappropriate and terrible with kids, and I don’t care if he…” I nearly called her on the family mess. But I loved this job. I wanted so badly to stay. Jane wasn’t a bad person. She was just one more adult who could not figure her shit out.

  She nodded. “Do you want to call the police?”

  “No.” Louder than I intended.

  Never. Never police. He’ll say I attacked him; they’ll arrest me. I am so close to freedom—NO.

  “No police,” I said again. “But I’m not coming back if he’s still here tomorrow,” I said. “Or ever.”

  “Okay,” she said, relieved. “All right.”

  There was shouting outside.

  “Oh no…” Jane went to the window. “Oh, Sean.” She went to the door.

  I stood and grabbed my bag. “I’m going out the back,” I said. “Okay?”

  “Muirie
l—”

  “Please, just no police, okay? Tell Sean I went home; make sure he’s okay? Please?”

  She nodded and stepped out the door. “It’s not Sean I’m worried about,” she sighed.

  * * *

  —

  I rode the bus home, my head bouncing against the window. Two texts from Sean. Three, four. I responded, I’m fine just went home sorry talk later, and then I texted Kira.

  Are you okay?

  In a while she wrote back.

  Yes, I think so. I’m sorry.

  FOR WHAT?

  I’m embarrassed.

  NO. You have nothing to be embarrassed about. We will figure this out they are not in charge of your life and by the way how was Elliot

  You know you can just say BTW for by the way

  Whatever. You sure you’re okay

  I am. Thank you. Elliot is…I can’t type it but he is good. See you tomorrow.

  You know you can just type tmrw.

  I half smiled and turned off the phone.

  At Francine’s I walked up the porch steps, and she called from the henhouse in the backyard, “You’re home early—how was Salishwood?”

  “Good.”

  “You okay?”

  “Tired.”

  “Dinner at six.”

  I took a shower, long and hot, I washed my hair twice and used up all my soap. I needed to go shopping soon anyway. I was almost out of floss.

  I walked into the kitchen and there was dinner: a green salad, macaroni and cheese, and baked potatoes with all kinds of stuff to put on them. I looked at the table, at my plate with the potato still wrapped in foil to keep it hot, and I sat down and cried.

  “Muiriel.” Francine came rushing from the sink where she was filling a water pitcher with ice and lemon slices. “What’s the matter?” She pulled her chair close to mine and sat beside me, her hand on my back. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and tried to breathe. I took a sip of water.