Tara tucks my half-grown-out bangs behind my ears so she can see my eyes. “I think I might already know.”
I tense up at that. “What do you mean?”
She takes a beat, then answers. “When we shared the bunk bed, you would talk in your sleep a lot,” Tara says, her voice measured. “A lot of times you would be telling someone to get away, to stop touching you, to just let you play.” Tara’s jaw stiffens and I can tell there’s a lump in her throat. “You’re a survivor, EJ. Isn’t that right?”
I probably shouldn’t be shocked that Tara has seen me more clearly than I’ve seen myself, but I still am. “Why did you never bring it up?” I ask.
“I thought about it,” Tara says. “But I just felt like it was something you needed to process on your own timeline. Pushing things out isn’t really my style.”
“That’s not why you’re still living with me, is it?” I ask, half scared to hear the answer. “Because you feel sorry for me?”
“No, I’m here because you’re my platonic soulmate,” Tara says, which is exactly the answer I didn’t know I was craving. “And because you know how to bargain the prices down at Tony’s Pizza so we get two pies and garlic knots for $9.99.” She grins at me, her whole face alive with the same light I feel splashing onto my own.
“It really is one of my specialties, isn’t it?” I say proudly. Myeyes are damp. Everything is big and warm. Tara knows, or at least knows enough, and she’s not running away. Maybe other people won’t run away either. And more than that—maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll stay. Here in this body, with all its traumas and its tantrums, all its flaws and its fears, all its beauty and its bandages. Maybe the very definition of power is to not let the past define you. To write your own ending, or non-ending, to this crazy script called life.
The next time I’m at Mother Zion, I try to find the old lady who sent me into the woods so I can thank her and let her know what grand success I had.
She’s not there so I ask around. Someone informs me that she died last week, had a heart attack while tending to her vegetable patch. My eyes fill up because apparently I’m just a watering can these days now that all my valves are open. But I get the feeling the woman knows that she helped me, that she’s got some awareness of it. I can pretty much hear her talking to me, wagging her cane.I told you so.
My awakening doesn’t give me a whole new personality or anything. I’m still just as hilarious and endearingly obnoxious as ever. It’s just helped unearth the old me, the real me, and it grounds me in the roots that I tried to rip out for so many years.
I used to think that having roots meant you were tethered to the same spot forever, stuck there with no escape. But now I see that to grow tall and thrash your branches wherever they want to go, you have to grow deep too. Otherwise you’ll tip over or snap in the wind. I’ve done both.
The only real change to my appearance is that my eyes are grayall the time—no more colored contacts. It’s still uncomfortable to show myself like that, but there are these occasions that make me glad to be ocularly bare, like I’ll be whistling my way down Knickerbocker Avenue and then out of the blue, blue sky, someone at the crosswalk will meet my gaze straight on for a second or two. And suddenly we’re both inhabiting each other’s spirits and I’m feeling all their hopes and all their holes. There’s nothing like it. It’s vulnerable and achy but pure veneration and ascension too.
The high isn’t always fun and games. It hurts a lot. Every texture scrapes. I get scraped by the homeless man curled up on his cardboard bed. Scraped by a group of friends going out for the night hooting with laughter like the Redstockings used to. Scraped by an Australian shepherd tugging on his leash. Scraped by the new moon and scraped by the full moon and scraped by all the slivers of moon in between. Scraped by the sunrise and scraped by the sunset and scraped by the miracle of how the sun does it all over again the next day. Scraped by the past and scraped by the future. Scraped because I got to be born and scraped because I have to die. And scraped because maybe I won’t have made it all count.
I complain to the divine woman about how much the scraping hurts, and she says she didn’t promise this way of life was going to be easier; she just said it was going to be more beautiful. I can’t exactly argue with that because of this feeling of dancing inside my own body and not wanting to claw my way out. Well, it’s beautiful—that’s what it is. I wouldn’t trade it, not a chance.
“Shila has bronchitis,” Tara tells me the night before the opening performance for the Jarena Lee show. “She can’t sing, so I have to fill in.” She asks if this was my doing, if I cursed her.
“Of course I didn’t,” I say, though I wonder if I did subconsciously manipulate the energetics a bit. It’s not a serious illness—Shila willrecover just fine—so I don’t feel bad about my witchy talents. I just help Tara step into her confidence, let it wash over her like a monsoon.
Tara commands the stage, not with her volume or her movement so much as her tranquility, her stillness. It makes everyone hold on tightly, desperate not to miss a word. The audience starts off expecting it to be a parody of the church. This is New York City after all, and people seem to be hoping for that kind of comedy show; that’s why they bought the tickets. But as the play goes on, there’s this shift in the theater as it becomes clear that this isn’t a satire at all. It’s a redemption story that makes God look pretty good. At first it doesn’t seem to sit well with the audience. It’s like they feel duped. But by the end they’re on their feet hooting and hollering. They’ve had a taste and now they want more.
I throw Tara a dinner party in the garden the weekend after the show wraps. Hal and Jenni are there, and Peter and Astrid too. Niles the director comes too. He’s a last-minute invite from me because I can tell how obsessed Tara is with him. Now with the show over, I get the feeling they’d be dating if Tara wasn’t worried about disappointing me. But the idea of Tara getting into a relationship or even getting married one day doesn’t threaten me like it used to, and I feel myself wanting to let her know that. I hope that’s what inviting Niles does.
I serve vegan calzones. Everyone’s drinking except me. I’ve gone cold turkey on the drugs too. The clarity I got on substances was always rimmed with an artificial haze. I never really noticed it before but can’t unsee it now. And now that I’m not blocking out all the memories, blacking out isn’t needed. It’s not that I’m over the trauma—I might never be—it’s just that I no longer have to contort myself into broken shapes to prove that I’m okay. I know I’m whole even with all the holes.
I find myself wishing Chris were here at the dinner. It’s not just that I want another person at the table so I won’t be the awkwardninth wheel. I want Chris in particular. And I want Arnie too, tugging on the garden vines like rope. I’m not suppressing those feelings—they’re worthy of recognition—but I try not to linger on them. No point missing someone who doesn’t miss you.
The night wraps up early. It’s not even midnight by the time the married couples trot on home. Tara asks if I want to go out to the House of Yes with her and Niles, but just picturing all those strobe lights gives me a headache. I tell her I’m just going to stay in, get to bed.
“But are you sure you don’t mind if Niles and I go?” Tara asks, like she’s walking on eggshells. It’s statements like these that make me realize what an autocrat I was back in my pre-liberated or rather faux-liberated days.
“Do whatever you want,” I assure her, with none of the old passive-aggressiveness that I used to wield so well. “It’s all good, really.”
Toward the end of summer, I do the thing I’ve been putting off since the memories resurfaced. I google Mr. Hubert.
I haven’t been ready before, but I’m ready now, on a nondescript August day. Out in the back garden sitting on Hal’s egg chair that she left behind, I take three huge volcano breaths and type his name into the search bar, then press Enter.
It doesn’t take me long at all to filter through and find the correct person, a Robert Hubert of Plainwell, Michigan. The results make my stomach plummet.
He’s dead. He died. Mr. Hubert is a goner.
Four years ago he lost his battle to cancer, as the obituary says. The obituary is long and glowing, so much more adoring than the one for Chris’s brother, Luke, which just makes me ruminate on the injustice of it all.
In all the internet search results for Mr. Hubert, there are no mentions of anyone reporting him as a child abuser or sexual offender. No mentions of lawsuits, no evidence at all that he was anything more than “a larger-than-life, salt-of-the-earth man who was beloved by his whole community,” as the flowery language of the obituary says.
