OZ, ET CETERA

(Ages Fifteen to Sixteen)

Oz became a category of memory—Oz, et cetera—the et cetera part encompassing all the ensuing pain, confusion, drama.

After Oz, et cetera, things got slowly better—in the sense that they weren’t total crap, not in the sense of my overall happiness, which was at an all-time low.

I’d been brave, broken out, detached from the pattern of worrying about Margot-Sophia before worrying about myself, and I had been happy. But I couldn’t help feeling the universe had decided to smite me for it. I had learned a lesson, and the lesson was that the price was too high, too painful, and always would be.

There would be no more singing or acting or music. Not when I was all the time carrying this hot, spiky ball of fear and fury inside me. Not when I woke bathed in sweat in the middle of most nights from vivid dreams in which Mom was lost, or dead, and I was running, always running, trying to find her or save her.

Andreas moved back in, and there was no more talk of breakups. He bought her a light-therapy lamp, and read up on depression, quietly passing along his findings and conclusions to me. It wasn’t about finding a cure, Andreas said; it was a matter of management.

She was back on medication, and she used the lamp every morning while drinking her coffee, and she didn’t consume any alcohol for six months. Andreas got her a gym membership, based on research that exercise is a natural antidepressant, but she didn’t take to the gym. She did, on the other hand, sign up for weekly group therapy, and seemed to find it helpful.

I kept my head down, studied, finished tenth grade.

Isaac kept trying to talk to me until nearly the end of the school year, texting me, e-mailing, showing up at my locker with puppy-dog eyes, or angry, frustrated eyes. I missed him, and I nearly broke a hundred times, but I was too messed up, and hurting too much to risk it.

Fortunately by late spring Mom seemed her normal self, and in the summer, Andreas, Mom, and I flew to Vancouver, and then Andreas flew back home while Mom and I crossed the country by train, getting off to see a bit of each province. We read books aloud, pasted maps and postcards into a bound journal, and took photos and sent them to Andreas.

It felt like old times.

It felt like healing.

In the autumn of eleventh grade, Andreas’s adoption of me was finalized, and we flew to New York for the weekend to celebrate.

I had a dad. It was the best.

One day at school I was walking by the theater and found the stage door open, with everything I missed wafting out, calling to me. I stepped cautiously inside. Seeing no one, I went up onto the stage. The lights were dim and there was nothing but the piano on it, and I ached, standing there. I ached for myself, for Mom, and I saw the years and heard the music and felt the performances, hers, mine, all that I’d seen, tumbling one over the other, and knew . . . that of course she was right: that life could not guarantee happiness of the steady variety.

And yet.

I went to the piano, sat down, placed my fingers over the keys. I’d done all that singing for the play, but I’d barely touched a piano since I was little. I didn’t know if I could even play anymore.

I chose an old classic—Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”—and played the opening notes. This was a piece I’d been able to play in my sleep, almost, at age ten. Now it was a mess, my fingers stumbling. Still I continued, trying again. It went better the second time, but more important, something finally clicked. It felt like falling into a warm bed, like home, like solace.

I was midway through my third attempt when I felt someone watching, and looked up to see Rhea.

“Don’t stop,” she said.

But I had.

“I . . . sorry. I just . . .” Damn, I was crying.

“I’ll leave you alone. Go back to it,” she said.

“No, I—shit, I’m a mess.” Then I flushed. “And now I’m swearing in front of you! I’m so—”

“What sort of tears—good or bad?” she asked, coming to lean on the lid of the piano.

“I have no idea. I’m a teenager—aren’t we supposed to be overly emotional?” I said, attempting a chuckle.

She leaned closer. “Two things, and then I’ll leave you. One: I am going to give you a key to one of the practice rooms on the third floor.”

“I don’t—”

“As a hobby, as an outlet, as a space to yourself.”

I swallowed hard. “Thank you.”

“Two: I’ve been thinking about this, and now that I see you here, playing . . . I know the headmaster at a very special music school in London, England. It’s called Ayerton. They take students in their final year of high school with the goal of helping each student zero in on their strengths. Most go on to be accepted either at their own college conservatory program, or at other top-notch music schools. They take only the best, auditions are by invitation only, and they accept three North American students per year. I can get you an audition,” Rhea said.

“I . . .” London? Music school? It was like she’d uncovered my deepest and most secret longing—secret even to myself, until now. My throat was dry, and I was sure if I tried to stand up, my legs wouldn’t work. London. Music.

“I can help you talk to your parents,” she said.

My parents. Right.

“I can’t,” I said, swallowing hard. “Thank you so much. It sounds like . . . a dream come true, if it were to happen. But I can’t audition, because even if I were to be accepted, I can’t go. Besides . . .”

“Yes?”

“I was just thinking only five minutes ago, they don’t lead to happiness, those careers. Usually not, I mean.”

“So you are not a starry-eyed fool,” Rhea said with a solemn shrug. “Nothing guarantees happiness. I’m not certain happiness should be the goal. Satisfaction, maybe. A sense of purpose. Contribution. Authenticity. Happiness? It’s a lightweight goal. And meanwhile, I suspect that turning away from yourself will guarantee the opposite of happiness.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

“You could just audition . . . .” she said, looking into my eyes as if she could see how breathlessly, painfully, badly I wanted this. “Otherwise you’ll never know.”

“I’ll have to live with never knowing.”

I couldn’t, though. Mom was so much better, and I wanted it. I wanted to at least try.

I got the key for the practice room and spent hours preparing.

I told no one.

I auditioned.

As usual, in these high-pressure performance situations, I nearly died of nerves, then afterward had no real idea how I’d done.

And so I put it out of my mind as much as possible, until the day in early December when Rhea called me to a meeting in her office, and I found Mom and Andreas there, and Rhea told all of us that I had been accepted.

“Ayerton is a top-notch school,” Rhea said. “And unique.”

“I know of it.” Mom swiveled to look at me, eyes many fathoms deep. “I don’t want this for you.”

“I know,” I said. “But, Mom . . . I do.”

“Why don’t you take the information home, and discuss it?” Rhea suggested smoothly, and before I knew it, we were all back on our feet, and she was handing me the acceptance letter and program description.

Mom rounded on me as soon as we were in the front door of the coach house.

“Why did you lie to me?” She always seemed taller when angry.

“I didn’t lie; I just didn’t tell you,” I said with a calmness I didn’t feel. “Because I didn’t want to have to argue about it before we even knew if I’d get in. I didn’t think I would get in. But I did, Mom. I got in! Please, please. You have to let me go.”

“I don’t have to do anything. How many times do I have to tell you that I want you to have an easier life? I don’t want you to go through even the smallest bit of the pain I’ve been through.”

“But I’m not you, Mom! What happened to you isn’t going to happen to me.”

“Why do you think I settled us here and worked so hard to give you stability, an education, a chance at a future doing something you can hold on to?” she said, earnest and sincere now, almost begging me. “Don’t you see? You’re good at more than one thing. You don’t have to enslave yourself the way I did. Music isn’t the only thing that could make you happy.”

“How do you know? I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this life you’re planning on my behalf? Sounds totally boring and unsatisfying to me.”

“Ingrid, I understand you have . . . a strong feeling about music. But that feeling is fleeting. It’s like an infatuation; eventually you come down from it and discover a world of nitpicking, backbreaking work that is mostly thankless. It’s not just the loss of my voice; I gave up everything else to do what I did. I gave up everything except you. Perhaps you remember those years as romantic, but you were a child. You were shielded. You have no idea how hard it was. The rejection, the criticism, the people who want to rip you down . . . You have to be very strong.”

“I am strong.”

“The answer is no.”

I felt like I was going to crack open and boiling lava was going to flow out.

“No?”

“That’s correct. You are still a minor, and I am still the parent. When you turn eighteen and want to make your own way, you can do what you want. Until then, it’s my way.”

I glanced at Andreas, who’d been hovering in the background of all this—he was, after all, my other official parent now. But he had become wiser about jumping in too fast to try to fix things, and he gave a subtle shake of his head, a calming motion with his hand, and mouthed, Wait.

Wait? The entire course of my life was being decided here.

“Fine,” I spat out. I’d reasoned, I’d laid my heart on the line, all for nothing. “But why don’t you be honest? Why don’t you just admit that you can’t stand me having the thing you lost, the thing you’re too much of a coward to try to recover? You want to spend your life playing out your little victim drama and taking no responsibility for your part—yes, your part—in losing your voice. And I have to suffer. I have to spend my entire life tiptoeing around you and trying to become something other than what I actually am. I have to be the victim with you, and not hope for anything, and not want any of the things I actually want, for fear that my having them will hurt you. How is that fair?”

“How dare you—”

“What happened to the mother who used to tell me if I worked hard enough, I could have anything I wanted? Be anything I wanted? Where is she? She’s the one I believe, not you. Let me just be really clear. I will never forgive you if you don’t let me do this. Never.”

And with that, of course, I stomped upstairs to my room, and slammed the door, and screamed into the pillows of my bed, and cried for five thousand million hours, before finally falling asleep.

We had a week to accept placement at the school.

We didn’t speak for six days.

Andreas quietly told me he was working on her, and that he could make it happen, money-wise. Still, she looked pretty unrelenting to me.

On the seventh morning, she stalked into my room before I was even out of bed, and stood over me. In her hand she had a piece of paper and a pen.

“I will not always be here to help you,” she said.

“Well, that’s morbid,” I said groggily, and rolled my eyes.

“I want you to have wide-ranging life skills.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

“You’ve never been away from home, been away from me.”

“I know, but—”

“And I cannot come to London.”

“They have dorms.”

“My point is that you would be alone there, for the first time in your life.”

“I know.”

“But you may go—” She held a hand up to stop me from responding yet. “On one condition.”

I sat up fast, heart leaping. “Anything. Yes. What?”

And here is the memory I’ve been replaying, trying to recall what was said, exactly. . . .

Mom held out a Peak Wilderness brochure—the one with sporty-looking kids standing in front of rustic timber-frame cabins.

“You will complete three weeks at this wilderness camp over the summer,” she said.

I snatched the brochure from her, took a quick look.

“This is the one Ella did?”

Mom nodded. And it might be that she said something to the effect of, “Yes, or something similar.”

“But . . . what does wilderness camp have to do with music school? What’s the point?”

“You get something, I get something,” she said.

“But why?”

“To toughen you up,” she said, with an almost devilish grin. “What else?”

I didn’t like it, I didn’t get it, but whatever—it was just three weeks of my life. It wouldn’t change anything.

“Fine,” I said, too thrilled about Ayerton to bother with investigating further in that moment. “I’ll do it. Where do I sign?”

Margot-Sophia might have sent me a link to the Peak Wilderness website sometime in the weeks after that. Might have. I have a vague memory of it, but an equal feeling that I might have manufactured the memory. And if it’s real . . . I might not have clicked on that link, because I was too busy Googling London, and dreaming about Ayerton. And so she might have purposely tricked me, or she might have been trying to warn me, or even to let me in on the process of choosing which program to sign up for.

I can spend my time wondering about “if” and “why” . . . but as the days pass, I wonder whether those are even the right questions to be asking. I can blame her forever, for everything, if I want to. But then it means that she is the person creating me, responsible for me, that I have no ability to make my own choices. If that’s true, then what the hell have I been fighting for?