Гейл Форман - Where She Went

“Lady Liberty’s going commando,” I say. “That is so French!”

Mia cracks up at that. “Do you think she ever flashes the tourists?”

“No way! Why do you think she has that private little look on her face? All those red-state puritans coming by the boatload, never once suspecting that Old Libs hasn’t got panties on. She’s probably sporting a Brazilian.”

“Okay, I need to lose that visual,” Mia groans. “And might I remind you that we’re from a red statesort of.”

“Oregon’s a divided state,” I reply. “Rednecks to the east, hippies to the west.”

“Speaking of hippies, and going commando. .”

“Oh, no. Now that’s a visual I really don’t need.”

“Mammary Liberation Day!” Mia crows, referring to some sixties holdover in our town. Once a year a bunch of women spend the day topless to protest the inequity that it’s legal for men to go shirtless, but not women.

They do it in the summer, but Oregon being Oregon, half the time, it’s still freezing, so there was a lot of aging puckered flesh. Mia’s mom had always threatened to march; her dad had always bribed her with a dinner out at a fancy restaurant not to.

“Keep Your Class B Misdemeanor off My B Cups,” Mia says, quoting one of the movement’s more ridiculous slogans between gasps of laughter. “That makes no sense. If you’re baring your boobs, why a bra?”

“Sense? It was some stoner hippie idea. And you’re looking for logic?”

“Mammary Liberation Day,” Mia says, wiping away the tears. “Good old Oregon! That was a lifetime ago.”

And it was. So the remark shouldn’t feel like a slap.

But it does. “How come you never went back?” I ask.

It’s not really Oregon’s abandonment I want explained, but it seems safer to hide under the big green blanket of our state.

“Why should I?” Mia asks, keeping her gaze steady over the water.

“I don’t know. The people there.”

“The people there can come here.”

“To visit them. Your family. At the. .” Oh, shit, what am I saying?

“You mean the graves?”

I just nod.

“Actually, they’re the reason I don’t go back.”

I nod my head. “Too painful.”

Mia laughs. A real and genuine laugh, a sound about as expected as a car alarm in a rain forest. “No, it’s not like that at all.” She shakes her head. “Do you honestly think that where you’re buried has any bearing on where your spirit lives?”

Where your spirit lives?

“Do you want to know where my family’s spirits live?”

I suddenly feel like I’m talking to a spirit. The ghost of rational Mia.

“They’re here,” she says, tapping her chest. “And here,” she says, touching her temple. “I hear them all the time.”

I have no idea what to say. Were we not just making fun of all the New Agey hippie types in our town two minutes ago?

But Mia’s not kidding anymore. She frowns deeply, swivels away. “Never mind.”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“No, I get it. I sound like a Rainbow Warrior. A freak. A Looney Tune.”

“Actually, you sound like your gran.”

She stares at me. “If I tell you, you’ll call the guys with the straitjackets.”

“I left my phone at the hotel.”

“Right.”

“Also, we’re on a boat.”

“Good point.”

“And if by chance they do show up, I’ll just offer myself up. So, what, do they, like, haunt you?”

She takes a deep breath and her shoulders slump as if she’s setting down a heavy load. She beckons me over to one of the empty benches. I sit down next to her.

“‘Haunt’ is not the right word for it. Haunt makes it sound bad, unwelcome. But I do hear them. All the time.”

“Oh.”

“Not just hear their voices, like the memory of them,” she goes on. “I can hear them talk to me. Like now. In real time. About my life.”

I must give her a weird look, because she blushes.

“I know. I hear dead people. But it’s not like that. Like remember that crazy homeless woman who used to wander around the college campus claiming she heard voices broadcast to her shopping cart?” I nod. Mia stops for a minute.

“At least I don’t think it’s like that,” she says. “Maybe it is. Maybe I am nuts and just don’t think I am because crazy people never think they’re crazy, right? But I really do hear them. Whether it’s some kind of angel force like Gran believes, and they’re up in some heaven on a direct line to me, or whether it’s just the them I’ve stored inside me, I don’t know. And I don’t know if it even matters. What matters is that they’re with me. All the time. And I know I sound like a crazy person, mumbling to myself sometimes, but I’m just talking to Mom about what skirt to buy or to Dad about a recital I’m nervous about or to Teddy about a movie I’ve seen.

“And I can hear them answer me. Like they’re right there in the room with me. Like they never really went away. And here’s what’s really weird: I couldn’t hear them back in Oregon. After the accident, it was like their voices were receding. I thought I was going to totally lose the ability to remember what they even sounded like. But once I got away, I could hear them all the time. That’s why I don’t want to go back. Well, one of the reasons. I’m scared I’ll lose the connection, so to speak.”

“Can you hear them now?”

She pauses, listens, nods.

“What are they saying?”

“They’re saying it’s so good to see you, Adam.”

I know she’s sort of joking, but the thought that they can see me, keep tabs on me, know what I’ve done these last three years, it makes me actually shudder in the warm night.

Mia sees me shudder, looks down. “I know, it’s crazy.

It’s why I’ve never told anyone this. Not Ernesto. Not even Kim.”

No, I want to tell her. You got it wrong. It’s not crazy at all. I think of all the voices that clatter around in my head, voices that I’m pretty sure are just some older, or younger, or just better versions of me. There have been times — when things have been really bleak — that I’ve tried to summon her, to have her answer me back, but it never works. I just get me. If I want her voice, I have to rely on memories. At least I have plenty of those.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to have had her company in my head — the comfort that would’ve brought. To know that she’s had them with her all this time, it makes me glad. It also makes me understand why, of the two of us, she seems like the sane one.

I’m pretty sure that when babies are born in Oregon, they leave the hospital with birth certificates — and teeny-tiny sleeping bags. Everyone in the state camps.

The hippies and the rednecks. The hunters and the tree huggers. Rich people. Poor people. Even rock musicians.

Especially rock musicians. Our band had perfected the art of punk-rock camping, throwing a bunch of crap into the van with, like, an hour’s notice and just driving out into the mountains, where we’d drink beer, burn food, jam on our instruments around the campfire, and sack out under the open sky. Sometimes, on tour, back in the early hardscrabble days, we’d even camp as an alternative to crashing in another crowded, roachinfested rock ’n’ roll house.

I don’t know if it’s because no matter where you live, the wilderness is never that far off, but it just seemed like everyone in Oregon camped.

Everyone, that was, except for Mia Hall.

“I sleep in beds,” was what Mia told me the first time I invited her to go camping for a weekend. To which I’d offered to bring one of those blow-up air mattresses, but she’d still refused. Kat had overheard me trying to persuade Mia and had laughed.

“Good luck with that, Adam,” she’d said. “Denny and I took Mia camping when she was a baby. We planned to spend a week at the coast, but she screamed for two days straight and we had to come home. She’s allergic to camping.”

“It’s true,” Mia had said.

“I’ll go,” Teddy had offered. “I only ever get to go camp in the backyard.”

“Gramps takes you out every month,” Denny had replied. “And I take you. You just don’t get to go camping with all of us as a family.” He’d given Mia a look.

She’d just rolled her eyes back at him.

So it shocked me when Mia agreed to go camping.

It was the summer before her senior year of high school and my first year of college, and we’d hardly seen each other. Things with the band had really started heating up, so I’d been touring for a lot of that summer, and Mia had been away at her band camp and then visiting relatives. She must’ve been really missing me. It was the only explanation I could imagine for her relenting.

I knew better than to rely on the punk-rock mode of camping. So I borrowed a tent. And one of those foam things to sleep on. And I packed a cooler full of food. I wanted to make everything okay, though to be honest, I wasn’t really clear on why Mia was so averse to camping in the first place — she was not a prissy chick, not by a long shot; this was a girl who liked to play midnight basketball — so I had no idea if the creature comforts would help.

When I went to pick her up, her whole family came down to see us off, like we were heading off on a crosscountry road trip instead of a twenty-four-hour jaunt.

Kat waved me over.

“What’d you pack, for food?” she asked.

“Sandwiches. Fruit. For tonight, hamburgers, baked beans, s’mores. I’m trying for the authentic camping experience.”

Kat nodded, all serious. “Good, though you might want to feed her the s’mores first if she gets cranky.

Also, I packed you some provisions.” She handed me a half-gallon Ziploc. “In case of emergency, break glass.”