28

Sometimes a red-tailed hawk drifted over Camp Modoc. Its feathers played over the layers in the air, as though it stroked something solid but invisible. Sometimes a hawk would cry, its voice twisting and bright.

I worked in the kitchen, and I enjoyed the dumb muscular labor of it, lifting huge pots slathered with dried gravy. I rinsed dishes with a spray so strong each dish was clean in a flash. The garbage disposal was a huge trough, and the hole there growled, eating whatever we gave it.

The hearing, the psychological tests, the interviews with people in suits or uniforms, were all behind me, and my life was simple. The counselors listened to me, and we listened to each other. There were times when I wept so hard I could not speak, and yet I did not feel the world around me judging me, or watching me.

I felt myself growing stronger. The muddy puddles in me were evaporating. Camp Modoc was a place of great mammoth pine trees and, sometimes late at night, the snuffling sound of a bear. The sun was supposed to be both punishment and cure, hard beauty as medicine.

Sometimes my father visited. He wore lumberjack shirts, as though trying to fit into the surroundings, and he wore the new wedding ring.

“You’re looking good,” he would say.

“I feel good,” I would reply, or something ordinary in just about those words. It was true. I felt stronger.

He almost always commented that I was putting on weight—good weight, muscle. And that I was getting a tan, and that I looked like a different person.

I was the same person, and my looks had not changed that much.

There was a lake at Camp Modoc, a reedy, green pond, really, and a turtle lived in it. My father and I would walk around the lake, and when the turtle appeared, just once, I pointed. “The turtle!” I exclaimed, and my father was excited to have seen it, more excited than was really necessary, because he was glad to see me happy.

One day just after my dad left, I realized that I had not tasted alcohol in months.

Sometimes I was very hungry for something sweet, and a counselor told me that my body was used to raw calories. I looked forward to a Snickers bar at night, when the stars were so bright they nearly made a sound.

My mother’s visits were so potentially disastrous that we acted like friendly strangers. “I brought you some more books,” she would say. Our silent agreement seemed to be to pretend that I was in a kind of army, stationed in a scenic, rugged place where I could work hard and read, but also a place I would be glad to leave.

Even on the drive home after months of thin air and circling hawks, I felt sure of myself. My mother drove carefully, changing lanes rarely, all the way past Sacramento and Vacaville, staying under the speed limit as though I had been through surgery and might feel pain at the slightest crack in the road.

I believed that everything would be fine. And it was fine. I believed everything I had been told. Life was really not that complicated. It was simple, really.

I was wrong.