JUNE 30
Mia’s draped across me asleep on the flight to Vienna. I study her face like a specimen, a mutated species of daughter. I would give anything for a glimpse of my beautiful girl behind this ruined mask of leathery skin and sunken eyes. I inhale, eager even for a smell that’s familiar, but that’s gone, too. A user smells like drugs; her pores exude a wet copper stink.
Who is the girl in my arms I’m so desperately afraid of losing? This Mia who’s twitching from withdrawal while she sleeps could have grown up in the rural shacks with the rest of her Indiana pals, with their puke-stained, prison-visit, cow-tipping lives. I’m afraid Mia isn’t buried, but gone altogether.
I feel gone altogether myself. I hardly remember myself before all this began. They say our children raise us and it’s true; my circuitry’s been entirely rewired. Now, for example, when I see criminals on the news, I don’t think first of their poor victims, as I used to, I think of their mothers.
I also used to think that nothing, short of death, could be worse than my little girl molested, and that only angels worked miracles. Oh, what I have learned. Listen: a man takes a child in his hands and does things, rams their little life like a freight train. He casts a spell. But the devil’s miracles are both wondrous and sly, because he lies low, he bides his time. Far in her future, this child will defy physics, will herself become freight train, conductor, tracks, and target. She will lay her head on the tracks, keep one foot on the pedal and head straight for herself, laughing, calling it freedom. No mother can break that spell. Nothing but to lay my head down beside her, to be there when the end comes as I was there in the beginning and for every little sufferance in between.
After a few hours, Mia wakes up, takes my makeup bag, and heads for the bathroom. She returns made up like a whore. I glance through the makeup bag to be sure she hasn’t kept the tweezers.
“Afraid I kept the tweezers as a weapon?” she snorts, reading my mind. “I’m not stupid, I know they’re gonna confiscate sharps.”
“Sharps? Two days in the slammer and you’ve got the lingo down.”
She chuckles, yawns, and conks out again. Fury-laughter-sleep, in less than thirty seconds. “Mood highly labile.”
Still, one thing hasn’t changed, and it’s the only mercy granted me in this long night. She seeks me out in her sleep, finds her mommy’s lap. I should sleep, too, but I have so little time left with her. I stay up to let my eyes trace along her slender fingers, the tip of her nose, let my hands circle her tiny, bird wrists, feel her still-childish puff-breaths.
I’m memorizing her before I leave her.
The first thing I see coming off the plane are five soldiers with the biggest guns I’ve ever seen. Either Vienna gives everyone this warm a welcome or she’s hired them. She glances at me for a reaction, but I won’t give her the satisfaction. The whole United States is available and she picks the Czech Re-fucking-public.
She keeps looking around like she’s expecting the Messiah and holding my arm so tight I’m sure I’ll have permanent nail imprints to remember her by. When I feel her muscles relax I look up to see a tiny grinning lady with a live Ken doll beside her, dumb smile included. I stifle a laugh. My mom sent me all the way here to be disciplined by them?
I don’t know who I was expecting at the Vienna airport, but it wasn’t Peter and Zuza. Maybe people more official looking, certainly older. Not attractive young blonds in summer togs with soft Czech accents. And they’re the heads of the staff at Morava. If I was looking to avoid a typically therapeutic setting, so far so good.
Frankly, I don’t care if she never sees a therapist again. I don’t care if they use shamans and chants. I hope they bring in a Feng Shui master to rearrange her mental furniture, locate the seat of trauma, and reposition it to deflect the poison arrows Mia keeps aiming at herself.
What a group we must make, the two of them flanking the two of us, Mia looking like a scrawny, pubescent streetwalker, me gripping her hand as if she were a toddler. I feel bad for her, to have this humiliation added to the anger that simmers beneath her tough surface. But, beneath the anger, where she’s pretending she can’t feel it, is fear.
Mia has never liked feeling weak or afraid. Her profile now, the erect head, the forward chin, is the same one I saw when she was eight, on a visit to a friend’s farm in North Carolina. She hoisted Mia onto an old horse to mosey around the corral, but before she could get the reins on, he bolted toward the woods an acre away.
We watched helplessly as Mia ducked down tight into the horse’s mane as he disappeared into the trees. After several frantic minutes, a black speck appeared far down the opposite field. Mia, approaching at a gallop. The horse looked like he was going to trample us all, but Mia yanked up on his mane and stopped right in front of us. With her head erect and her chin stuck out, as if to say, “I meant to do that.”
When I was kissing her good night, I asked if she was scared. She pulled me close and whispered, “Ooooh, yes, Mommy, I was! And I knew he would run right to the trees so he could knock me off with the branches! So, I just ducked!” She shivered with excitement at the memory of it.
If the drugs have done one thing most of all, they have made her forget what she knew as a child—to duck. To recognize danger and protect herself.
After Peter locks Mia and Zuza into the back of the van, he says to me, “Only driver has door that can be opened from inside. We know that she is a runner, and very smart.”
Someone finally gets it. As he walks me to my rental car, Peter says, with genuine caring, that Mia will be happy and healthy again, that I will have my real daughter back.
It has been my fate to be comforted by young men in strange places this week.
The van doors shut with a thud that echoes in my bones. I feel clammy, nauseous. I try to memorize the names of towns we pass to orient myself for when I run, but the Czechs don’t fucking believe in vowels. The view out the window gives me no landmarks to help, it’s one vineyard or sunflower field after another.
The view begins to flicker and fade, I can’t tell if I’m watching a dream of this world or the real thing. I know the name of that big thing in the field out there is a cow, but I have to keep staring at it to remind myself. Cow. Spots plus udders equals cow, Mia. Fuck, I need a fix.
I follow Peter’s speeding van past Brno, a blur of Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Nouveau architecture. As we pass through the suburbs into a rural outlying area dense with summer foliage, I begin to feel a strange exhilaration. I feel buoyed and jittery with purpose. I’m speeding closer and closer to Mia’s salvation. A place that awaits us with a system! With levels, seminars, consequences! With groups with names like Purity, Innocence, Clarity! They’ll isolate, modify, confront, reveal, redirect! They’ll do whatever it was that I couldn’t do to help her.
We finally reach a lake ringed by low mountains and snake up into hills carpeted with sixty-foot fir trees so dense you can hardly see into them, Hansel and Gretel woods. Woods a girl could disappear into and never be found without a tracking dog.
Buried in them is a Soviet-era hotel, a faux chalet that’s now Morava Academy. The glass vestibule has two sets of bolted doors, a good sign. A man joins Peter before they open the van door. He’s wearing running shoes. I love it already.
And then Mia steps down from the van, dwarfed by the men, the building, the sky, her life. I’ve just been kicked in the heart. She looks so small and, for an instant, scared. I’m seized with panic and regret. She’ll be so far from anyone who loves her.
This is no relief, I don’t want this salvation, I’m choking on it. I want to go back, far back, I want to breathe her back into me, into my body again, the only place she was ever truly safe. Every mother knows this feeling. From the moment we let them go, we know they’re never safe again.
This place looks like a bad dream after seeing too many shagadelic seventies films. Orange-flecked sofas, corny-ass posters, a tripped-out carpet hung up as art, and a coffee table covered in wood-grain shelf paper. I hope she’s beginning to realize how lame this whole idea is.
No such luck. Zuza takes me to a room.
“This is where you will be sleeping.”
There’s nothing but two beds, a long empty shelf above each one and someone’s ratty teddy bear on one pillow. The walls are totally bare and hospital white, the only homey things are nylon lace curtains. Zuza starts going through my backpack.
“Hey! Leave my shit alone.”
She looks at me calmly. “Attitude is not tolerated here. If you want to do well, you will change it quickly.”
If I was doing what I wanted, I wouldn’t be here in the first place, bitch. I hold my tongue; if I show I’m mad they’ll start watching me more closely.
She tells me I have to be deloused and puts on rubber gloves before touching me, even with my clothes still on. I know it’s procedure, but still my cheeks burn.
“I showered before I got on the plane, you know.”
“This is to be on the safe side.”
The safe side of what? Me?
Mia’s led away from me quickly. The place is Spartan, Joan Crawford spotless, with handmade inspirational posters, very Phil McGraw, very Dale Carnegie. It is unnaturally quiet.
A man appears from a dim hallway. He’s extremely tall, handsome, fair, about thirty. I know immediately that he’s (a) American, (b) Mormon and (c) not the director, Glenn. Brendan is a codirector from another facility, in charge till Glenn returns from having back surgery.
“But, I need to talk to Glenn about Mia; there are some things she doesn’t know.”
“Mia’s behavior will tell us exactly where she’s at,” he says, unconcerned.
Like that’s supposed to be encouraging? I also wanted to meet the person I’m leaving my child with. I ask to see her husband, Steve, only to learn that he’s in Germany for two weeks, in special training with the famous sniff dog, who finished top of his class.
“You mean, the dog’s not here, either?” I blurt.
Who cares if it’s valedictorian as long as it can sniff out one fearless, foolish, fragrant girl? The honeymoon is definitely over. His whole demeanor says he’s used to scared, nervous parents, and he feels no need to explain or assure. This is either arrogance or confidence. He adds that Mia’s first two weeks will mainly be getting settled in, learning rules, getting her equilibrium. Equilibrium? It’s chaos Mia loves. I’m the one who needs equilibrium.
He must have figured as much because he gives me a security tour. All doors are locked and guarded 24/7 (I notice staff with walkie-talkies posted all over), meds and drugs are locked and guarded, windows open only about five inches (I check most of them). There’s no interaction between boys and girls. The dog will have no contact with kids to keep their scent fresh. They think his name is Ify—they don’t know that’s just short for I’ll Find You.
The Czech staff is young and university educated; many speak English. Like Zuza and Peter, they are soft-spoken, polite, more formal in manner than Americans their age. Fine with me. The less like American culture it is here, the better.
The bedrooms are like college dorms between semesters. The lack of décor is deliberate; they want the kids to miss home. Throughout the tour, I ask endless questions. How often is peer group, how long till she earns a visit, how long does it take to move up levels, what if she doesn’t pass seminars, and on and on. Most of it answered by a version of “It’s up to her.”
“If everything’s up to her, then she’s never getting off Level 1,” I say as I follow him back through the lobby into the cafeteria, a large, airy room with beautiful views and Mozart playing.
“Trust me, she’ll get sick of Level 1 quickly. No shoes, no dessert, no privileges,” Brendan says as I look out the window to a rec area just below.
A group of teen boys with crew cuts sits in a circle on a blacktop with a staff member. One starts crying and two others put their arms around him; others kneel in front of him and touch his knee, his hand. It’s odd to see teenage boys acting like this.
A very tall chain-link fence holds back the lush, towering woods pressing in on them from all sides. The setting’s both gorgeous and oppressive. There is no view to the outside world at all.
I turn back from the window. “Mia doesn’t care about dessert or shoes. She ran ten miles through the desert in flip-flops. Her feet are still swollen.”
“Does she know you have such great faith in her?” he says, not without sarcasm, looking directly at me.
They weren’t kidding about confronting attitude. Okay, so I’m faithless and cynical by now, you would be too, buddy, I want to say.
“I’m sorry, I’m just worried. She can fake her way through anything.”
I’m obviously still not getting something because he laughs.
“Sure, because she’s had a lot of folks she could manipulate, like her parents and therapists. Who’s she going to fool here? The other girls were as bad as your daughter or worse. Kids here can’t hide out emotionally; they’ve got to take themselves on or they don’t get voted up. You’ll understand the process better when you’ve taken the seminars.”
“The process,” “voted up,” “take themselves on.” I see what Maddy meant about the vocabulary. He’s called away and I’m left standing alone in the lobby, feeling useless and anxious, like I’m onstage awaiting my cue in the play called The Bad Mother.
On impulse, I walk to a door and peek in. It’s a classroom full of girls working silently at their desks, fresh-faced, innocent looking. Oh, is Mia going to hate this place. One girl notices me, her eyes fly open and she gasps. The whole class notices me and they all start grinning and raising their hands excitedly. Uh-oh, I’ve done it now. The teacher introduces me, then says something I don’t catch.
In a flash I’m buried in squealing teenage girls, all fighting for “a mother hug! Can I have a mother hug!” They take turns hugging the breath out of me: I got Level 3 today, ma’am! Oh, I miss my mom so much! You gotta do the seminars, they’re awesome! You shoulda’ seen me, Miss Fontaine, I was a gutterpunk! Oh, hug me again, Miss Fontaine! Don’t cry, Miss Fontaine, she’s gonna be fine! Please don’t cry, Miss Fontaine, we’ll take good care of her, I promise!”
I come back from a shower to find my clothes gone and a uniform on my bed. If there’s a God, he hates me. Denim pants with an elastic waist and elastic cuffs, a red T-shirt I have to wear tucked in and Day-glo pink fuzzy slippers.
Zuza appears. “It’s time to say good-bye to your mother.”
“Just tell her I said bye and I hate her.”
It doesn’t work, she leads me back to the lobby. I see her waiting for me and already feel that cloud of expected intimacy. She knows there’s nothing to say but talks anyway, some bullshit about thanking her in the end. She ought to be thanking me that I’m not strangling her on the spot. Her lips are moving, she’s crying, but all I feel is a cold fascination at how little I feel for this woman I’m supposed to love. That and an anger I can hardly control.
I’m told I can’t come back tomorrow, it will “set Mia back.” I have to say good-bye now. I’m caught completely off guard, I thought I could visit the rest of the week.
Mia’s brought into the lobby and stands there with wet hair, a scrubbed face, her eyes glassy with hate. I approach her awkwardly and put my arms around her. I try to hold her tightly, but her anger has condensed her into something hard and cold. She has disappeared into herself and left me this statue to hold.
“I’m doing this because I love you too much to lose you,” I whisper to her. “You’re angry now but I know in my heart that you’ll thank us later.”
Without moving a muscle, my stone-child whispers back to me, “No, I won’t, because once I get out of here you will never see me again. Ever.”
I shut the car door and sobs burst out of me that shake the whole car. I cry like I haven’t cried since the Saturday night we found her. I thought the relief from knowing she was locked up safe would mitigate the pain, that it would finally yank out the spearpoint of fear that’s been jabbing so relentlessly in my back for so long.
But finding and losing her all these months, the constant vigil and pursuit, has been like dancing on a fire pit. Bearable only as long as you keep it up. Relief in this situation merely means being able to finally collapse onto hot coals.
“This is Lupe. She will be your buddy and teach you what you need to know.”
Buddy? They can’t be serious, I haven’t heard that word since kindergarten. When my “buddy,” a stocky Latina with bright, black eyes, walks in, chest out, arms swinging, with two fat, brown braids like Princess Leia, I nearly laugh in her face. This girl’s probably never even had a cigarette.
Lupe smiles and rattles off some rules in a thick New York accent.
“You can’t speak at any time unless the staff says so. You gotta line up heel-to-toe and do a head count before leaving any room. You can’t smoke or drink. Until you’re on the upper levels, you’ll never leave this building except for PE or fitness. Looking out the windows is considered run plans, so you can’t look outside. I don’t even remember what the moon looks like.”
The rules all drone into one big “you can’t, you must, you can’t, you must.” I could give a shit. So far, all the doors have been bolted and the fire exits are guarded, so the windows are the best way to go.
As if reading my mind, Lupe says, “Don’t bother, you’re never left alone and even so, they only open a few inches.”
As she points to the window, I notice a large gang tattoo on her upper arm.
The Santon Hotel is a squat, white splat on a verdant hill sloping into the lake opposite Morava. Nirvana is playing in the lobby. American rock is ubiquitous in this country. My room comes with a lake view and Aretha Franklin. Playing from a radio inside the wall with the knobs sticking out of two crudely made holes. Talk about theft prevention. It won’t turn off and my head is splitting from crying.
English and Czech share no common word roots, not Latin, Greek, Romance, Germanic, nada. Yes = an, ice cream = zmrzlina, there you have it. Which renders the phone useless. Back downstairs I go, where I’m reduced to making knob motions and humming “Love in a Pink Cadillac” to the desk clerk, a stunning young woman who knows all about us, we shell-shocked Morava parents. She nods sympathetically and comes with me to do whatever it is one does to turn off a Czech wall.
Normally, I’d be amused by this, but I’m so cracked and fragile now it’s just aggravating, it feels like a punishment, a further indictment. My life as a Santon Hotel room, nothing works. For some reason, I think of Anne Lamott, the “cranky Christian” whose books have been pressed on me by a friend who thinks her spiritual wisdom and humor will help. The things she endured, the accoutrements of addiction—vomit, snot, fear, poverty—would have made me a pagan, a witch, an atheist at least. I can hear Annie now, exhorting me in her best church voice to do what she always does when troubled, “Pray, child!”
What, I have to tell Him? Like it isn’t obvious even for the non-omnipotent? Some deity.
Well, now I’ve done it, I’ve snapped at God.
“Dear God, forget I said that, but more important could you watch over Mia, please knock some sense into her before she—”
Stop, this is stupid, disrespectful. I have no idea how to pray properly, but I’m pretty sure it’s not in the epistolary manner. Once again, Claire, and this time at least bow your head and use proper language: Lord, cleanseth my child of evil substances. Maketh her thoughts of me not vile, that she may gaze upon my countenance with gladness, for it is not right nor holy that a little lamb should desire to killeth the ewe that hath nursed her.
I hateth this. I sound like Latka’s half-wit sister auditioning Shakespeare. Religion’s supposed to be a comfort; instead, it’s turning out to be a skilled profession for which I am singularly unqualified.
I feel so throbby and irritable, I leave to take a walk around the lake. Fifteen minutes later, I realize my mother was right. Czechs really don’t smile much and they don’t have a taboo against staring the way Americans do. My sisters and I always thought it was just her. Growing up, we’d be embarrassed when she’d stare at someone. “What do you people have against looking at someone?” she’d huff. “You people” being Americans, like her children, for example. She also smiles less than most. “You Americans are always smiling. Only a fool smiles all the time.”
Well, I’m sure as hell not smiling today, and I don’t dress like a typical American tourist, so why is everyone rudely staring at me? I stop by a woman my age to make restaurant gestures, but she quickly shakes her head and hurries away like I have the plague. This happens two more times. I’ve never experienced anything like it. Is misery like drugs, exuded from the pores? Do they think it’s contagious?
Then it hits me that, yes, I have experienced this. Every time I’ve skirted a smelly homeless person and avoided their gaze. As if their misery were contagious. Surely, they felt my unease and rejection, just as surely as I now feel the Czech’s. Do I have to get this lesson now, TODAY?
Another realization makes me feel even worse. The beggars I avoided could have been how Mia ended up had I not found her. How she still could end up being if she escapes or if this place doesn’t help her. Hustling for drug money, sleeping in hovels, dying young or getting old before her time. It never entered my mind that all those desperate vagrants, the dead-eyed women with rotted feet and scorched, peeling faces, were once someone’s laughing, bright-eyed children. Like my child.
The setting sun has made the lake glitter and I have such an urge to wade in, to feel the cold water on my legs and the warm sun on my face. To short-circuit my emotions with physical sensation.
I remember Mia’s laughing third-grade face on a lake like this one, canoeing at Mammoth. She was paddling and flinging her oar from one side of the canoe to the other, giggling hysterically, soaking us both. My God, that girl loved to laugh.
Happy memories are almost worse. I feel like my screenplay’s protagonist, who found herself in a strange, unwelcoming land, where nothing held promise or tenderness, where everything, even the land itself, sang to her of her lost child.
Dinner is a bowl of something so oily I can see my reflection in it, served with six long, thin rolls. If my mother saw this she would die—“You call this food? Where are the dark, leafy greens?”
This is the first time I get to see who I’m stuck in here with. A dozen pimple-faced, silent girls in the same ugly uniform. They’re my age, a few Asians, no blacks, one Latina, Lupe, the rest Anglo. A lot of them are pretty, even with no makeup and awful haircuts. One girl catches my eye and smiles at me. I stare back—what the fuck is there to smile about?
Suddenly, a loud Southern drawl fills the room. “Well, hello there! I’m Zig Ziglar!” Where Zig is coming from, I don’t know, but his booming voice informs us that we “have the seeds of greatness!” The girls just keep on eating in silence as if nothing happened—some of them actually start taking notes! Whatever wrong my mother thinks I’ve done her is nothing compared to this.
When no one’s looking the girl next to me points to my untouched rolls and looks at me questioningly. I slip her all six. I have no appetite anyway.
The lakeside restaurant is a Heidi-like affair nestled in the trees. A chorus of birds chirps back up to Barry Manilow and everyone stares at me when I enter. Big surprise. “Excuse me,” I say politely, for lack of a better greeting. A surprised waiter hurries over. “You are American! Hallo! I speak English, leetle.” I will learn two things tonight. One, an American here is always a Morava parent; the exchange rate and a broken heart means a tip equal to a night’s pay. They’ll trip over me the rest of the week. Two, when they say English a leetle, it is, in reality, far leetler.
Carp is a national dish, so I draw a fish. “Kapr, yes, good very!” He assures me no fried! Fresh yes total never fried! He bows and vanishes. He returns quickly with my fish, beaming. It’s been fussed over, beautifully garnished. And very deeply fried.
After so long without food, the smell of the grease makes me queasy. I ask for a bag to take it back to my room.
A handsome young man at the next table who’s been observing me leans over. He looks at me like I’m the Antichrist and sneers at me, actually curls his lip at me. At this point, I’m not offended, I’m actually interested, in an anthropological kind of way.
“American culture is sheet.” As in “shit.” He leans back, crossing his arms, quite satisfied with himself, rolling his eyes as Madonna’s “Vogue” plays. He’s wearing torn Levis, Nike knock-offs, and a black Metallica T-shirt.
You picked the wrong night, kid.
“Well, that’s true,” I say, politely, “my country does make a lot of shit. You seem to like eating it.”
I leave a great, big American tip and feed my fresh yes kapr to the stray dog in the parking lot of the Santon Hotel.
“It’s your complexion.”
“My what?”
“They probably think you’re a Gypsy,” my mother tells me in her I-told-you-so voice, except she never told me. “They think all Gypsies steal.”
“What, so they think I’m going to pick their pocket?”
“Well,” replies my mother the communist, “Czechs avoid giving them jobs or apartments, what do they expect, serves them right. They couldn’t get away with that when the Russians were there.”
“They couldn’t do a lot of things when the Russians were here, Ma. Like leave.”
“Don’t start with me. It’s after midnight there. Go to sleep. Wear a hat. And don’t smile so much, they’ll think you’re an idiot.”
I haven’t been in bed this early since I was ten. My leg is shaking and even though I’m shivering, the sheets are soaking with my sweat. I feel like a colony of ants is crawling around under my skin. I have to get OUT OF HERE!
Oh, for fuck’s sake, Mia, calm down. There’s always someone who can get stuff and you’ll find them tomorrow. Just stay calm like you did at that hellhole in Utah until the right moment. I start taking deep breaths, like my mom told me to do before tests.
Mom. I see her as clearly as if she were in front of me. How she looked when she said good-bye, my iron-willed goddess of a mother, bent over, shaky and small. I want to console this woman, so unlike the mother I’ve always known, tell her to give up. I want to tell her to move on with her own life and maybe I’ll eventually come back. She looked so pitiful today, so desperately hopeful. I feel a pang when I picture those big sad eyes swimming in the hollows I’ve carved. I did this to her.
But fuck her for doing this to me.
It’s after midnight, but I’m too antsy to sleep and I’ve already called Morava twice to make sure she hasn’t escaped. Around 2 a.m., my brain launches into its new favorite game—obsessing over the moment our fates changed. Finding the exact second in time, the One Thing. Do I think that finding the tip of our history’s funnel will narrow the focus of my guilt?
An event of such magnitude should be obvious, but it’s tricky, the choices are many. Such things are always and only visible in hindsight. Which means that all of our choices are carried out ignorant of their true significance, their final, lasting impact.
The exact second in time my hindsight focuses on tonight is this—that my child is imprisoned here because I stood in a doorway thirteen years ago and didn’t understand the questions of a sad, puzzled monster who wanted some explanation, some reason why decent people found sex with children a problem. Because I didn’t see his transformation any more than I saw hers, till too late.
We carve our destinies blindfolded, with sharp knives.
I wake up and see the ugly brown carpet and Lupe sleeping across from me. Shit. I’m still here. Then I hear Mariah Carey being sung in the hall.
“Dream lover come rescue me…”
“Sunny, SHUT UP,” a sleepy voice yells.
A Czech voice calls out, “Who is talking, no talking, you have Cat 2. Self-correct?”
Damn, they’re serious about this silence thing.
“Good morning, girls!” Great, it’s that bitch, “Miss” Zuza. “Everybody up!”
At this, Lupe leaps out of bed. I turn to go back to sleep but she rolls me back over and tells me that we have thirty minutes to shower, dress, and clean the rooms and bathrooms, spotless, daily.
“I’ll do the bathroom, you clean the carpet. We only get the vacuum on Sundays, so you have to use your hands.”
Twenty minutes later, I’m dressed and on my hands and knees picking up lint. In the Czech Republic.
“Line up!”
I step out of the room to line up but Lupe yanks me back.
“We have to ask permission to cross.”
What? If they’re the ones telling us to line up, why the hell do we have to ask to do it? I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous. Except for not being able to talk, walk, eat, sleep, or pee without permission. Except for this whole fucking place.
I get in line in front of Lupe. I feel her chest brush up against my back.
“Get off me!”
Zuza explains that your toes must touch the person’s heels in front of you. Okay, right, play along some more. We count off and walk to the lobby. Zuza peeks inside a door as if checking for enemy gunfire. Sure enough, danger lurks within.
“Girls! Face the wall, the boys are crossing out!”
I saw them do this yesterday but I didn’t know it was because the opposite sex was about to pass!
“Mia, your nose must touch the wall so I know you’re not peeking.”
I roll my eyes and do it. My nose bumps the wall and I feel a chalky substance rub off onto it. I touch it and realize it’s paint. Paint soft enough to scratch off. Snortably soft.
Just before I head out for breakfast, Paul calls to tell me my American Express card number was stolen at the airport in Atlanta, I can’t use it. I call Morava to make sure she’s still there and then head for downtown Brno to find an ATM. Wearing a hat.
Brno hasn’t been spiffed up the way Prague has, but it’s charming nonetheless, with old fountains and outdoor cafés. All of which play American sheet. There’s even live sheet. On a platform in the main plaza, a band in cowboy gear plays Willie Nelson’s “You Were Always on My Mind.” In Czech, with a twang.
My ATM card won’t work anywhere and no one in the banks I’ve tried speaks English. I can’t find anyone that does. So far, the best thing about this place is that there are churches on every street I can duck into when I start to cry about leaving Mia or get too light-headed from hunger.
Growing up, I’d been to church with my paternal aunts far more than temple. Latin mass was enthralling and fantastic to a girl who lived in books—the ritual and incense, the graceful, cryptic gestures of priests in sparkling robes. I never tired of watching the sad, drooping Jesus on the cross, amazed and impressed that someone in such bad shape could have such a big following. I wanted to hold his hand, be a comfort.
All I want to do in these churches now is drink from the holy water basin when no one’s looking. I can’t believe this is happening to me. It’s the twentieth century and I’m about to plotz in the gutter from thirst and starvation like some medieval peasant. I don’t even have Czech coins to call Morava and beg for a spare potato to be left at the end of the driveway, where Mia can’t see me and be set back.
Group therapy is the first time we can legally speak. A Czech lady named Tyna joins the circle.
“Hi, girls. Who wants to talk today?”
Unfuckingbelievable! Something here is voluntary. Four hands go up and she chooses a tense, pug-nosed girl. Even though she raised her hand to talk, she’s silent.
“Last time in group you did the same thing, it’s very nonworking,” Tyna says.
Non-what?
The girl sighs. “I’ve had stuff come up about my rape this week.”
Christ, I don’t want to hear this, I just found out this girl’s name a day ago. I go over to Zuza and ask if I can go to the bathroom.
“We just came from there. There’s another bathroom break in an hour.”
Bitch. I distract myself by checking out the rest of the girls. It’s hard to know who might have stuff because we’re not allowed to talk and I can’t tell by looks because they all look like matching nerds. They act like it, too, that’s the scary thing. Because, either these girls weren’t that bad to begin with, or they were and this brainwashing crap works. The girl finally stops talking.
“Feedback?” Tyna asks the group.
“I experience you as playing the victim, which still just gives your power away to him.”
“My experience of you is that you use your rape to stay stuck, so you don’t have to take on anything that scares you or is challenging.”
This is so messed up. She opens up and her friends shove everything she said down her throat! Of course she’s a victim, dumbasses, she got raped. One thing’s for sure, I won’t have any trouble maintaining the silence rule here.
When I stagger back to the Santon, I find that Paul’s arranged for me to get some cash and I have my first meal in almost two days. I call Morava, and Zuza reports that Mia is quiet and cooperative, which makes me regret eating dinner because my stomach pitches. Fortunately, before I can say anything, Zuza continues, half amused.
“But I see her studying the windows and doors. I saw her studying the signs on the way here, too. Girls who are runners all do the same thing.”
Brendan was right, they’ve seen it all. But, I still want that genius of a tracking dog there, ASAP.
I decide to spend my remaining few days sightseeing the area. As I dress in the morning, I find myself chatting with God about Mia, about my day, nonchalantly, without thinking. And it feels good.
I have no idea if it is theologically correct, but God’s just going to have to settle for me chattering at Him like we’ve met for coffee in Starbucks.
Yesterday’s grief and tears seem to have settled into a kind of numb peace, an acceptance perhaps. I know that somewhere I’m sad, still stricken I think, but in yesterday’s body, the one that cried. Today, my body feels hushed and tender.
As I walk along the ancient ramparts of a ruined castle overlooking the city, my body feels memories as well. It remembers you now, Mia, as a vague ache across my arms, my chest and throat. The places you pressed against as I held you. Something done so often leaves a trace, an imprint that remains forever. Your cells rubbed off into mine and throb now like a phantom limb pain.
My prayer tonight, my last night near my daughter, is that Glenn will find the precious Mia that lies curled inside the dark cocoon she’s spun around herself. That she will carve away from this stony Mia all that is not really her, the way Michelangelo released David from the marble by taking away all that was not David.
I still think that she is mine to fix, to save, by sheer force of will or by proxy. I still can’t see that it isn’t possible, that our paths have already been separated forever.