Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

“I was convinced my mom’s test would come back positive,” I said. “Did I tell you that?”

“Hey, but it didn’t!” Blake rolled up the windows and began to fiddle with the AC.

“Well, right, but I was positive . Isn’t that weird? Like, kind of fucked up?”

“You were preparing yourself for the worst. I’m pretty sure that’s normal.”

“No, no. I’ve prepared myself for the worst before. Remember that time we found those keys?”

“You’re kidding, right? That’s totally different! This is your mom dying .”

“I’m not talking about the seriousness of the thing you’re preparing for. I’m just talking about it reaching its superlative state of badness — whatever that is, you can mentally prepare for it, and it feels like…it still feels like it’s in the future. If you’re preparing, it’s in the future. It hasn’t happened, and because it hasn’t happened, you can be, like, okay if, if — actually, that’s just it. It’s still an if. An if can’t be an is. You prepare, but there’s time between you and whatever, the guy finding us in that closet. With this it was different. It didn’t feel like anything was in the future. It was that she had cancer, and we just hadn’t been told by the doctors yet.”

Blake hit the dashboard, trying to get the AC to come on, but it was broken so she rolled the windows back down.

“Blake, I’m really sorry you’re feeling bad, but you’re freaking out about this for no reason. You went through something that you couldn’t have prepared for, that there’s no precedent for that makes any sense as a precedent. Okay? Maybe I’m not explaining it very well, but you just can’t compare anything to your mom maybe dying. Unless I guess your dad has died. Or your mom has almost died before. That hasn’t happened, has it? Has Rose ever almost died?”

I shook my head.

“Blake?”

“Oh, sorry, no.”

“See, that’s what I’m saying.”

“Yeah, but I just—”

“Blake! Your mom is okay. You were scared, but it’s okay. She’s alive. She’s going to live.”

We were slowly passing a motorcycle carrying two people, and the passenger was a girl with a miniskirt hiked up around her waist. She was wearing a thong, so her butt cheeks were exposed and the vibrations of the road made them ripple.

“Besides,” Blake said, “you sound like a retard: if, isn’t, is, if, isn’t, is.”

The girl on the bike turned toward me, caught me looking at her ass, and flipped me off. I waved.

“So you’ve never been to this camp?” I asked.

“Retreat, and no. I’ve just been to classes. The retreat is expensive.”

“Have you met this Graves guy?”

“Seen him.”

We were silent for a while. The stretch of highway between Seattle and Tacoma was flanked by small rises home to trees that gave the impression of a forest, though I knew that behind them lay hidden the predictable exurbs of Tukwila, Des Moines, Federal Way — neighborhoods no doubt built with farmed wood from Weyerhaeuser, it occurred to me. It really was an enormous company, something I’d always considered a “Seattle company” in the way I considered Boeing a Seattle company, and Starbucks a Seattle company, and Microsoft a Seattle company, though it was less visible, somehow, lurking behind the scenes. Why risk it all with some kind of slave trade? It didn’t really make sense, but a thing doesn’t have to make sense to exist.

“I’m still not clear how you and Dale met.”

“We met at…”

I scanned the traffic in front of us to see what was distracting her, but cars were sparse, and everything seemed to be moving smoothly.

“At where?”

“I’m trying to remember.”

“Wasn’t very long ago, right?”

“Yeah, no. I mean, a few months?”

“Was it during one of those workshops?”

“Workshops?”

“Tidemark.”

“Hmm.”

“You don’t call them workshops?”

“I’m thinking.”

Signs for Tacoma began to appear, but we turned off I-5 and took 18 toward 167. I tried to give Blake time, but I wasn’t quite sure why she needed it. It was a simple question. Was she trying to think of a good lie? Had she expected me not to ask?

“Hey,” she said, pointing to a vehicle on the side of the road up ahead, smoke billowing from underneath the hood. “Isn’t that Kent’s truck?”

“Shit, don’t stop.”

“Don’t stop? What are you talking about?”

“Did you tell him where we were going? I’m pretty sure this is not a conversation we want to have.”

Blake nodded, braked, and swerved into the side lane, then tapped the brakes again as the car’s wheels met the gravel shoulder. A ghost of khaki dust overtook us when we finally came to a stop.

“Jesus,” I said, but Blake had already leapt from the car and was jogging back to my brother, who didn’t hide his surprise.

When I reached the truck, they were already arguing.

“What do you mean you’re okay?” Blake said.

“I mean, you know, I’ll figure it out. You don’t have to—”

“Where are you camping, anyway?”

“I’m…it’s like over by…”

Kent was up to something, but because we had our own secret I didn’t want to press it.

“Beautiful spot,” Blake said. “What the fuck are you really doing?”

Kent’s shoulders slumped. It was interesting to see him cave under the pressure of big-sister scolding. A Miata meeped as it went by and all three of us turned to flip it off, and it was that moment of camaraderie, I think, that did it. Kent closed his hood.

“I’m going to Tidemark,” he said.

The drive started out tense and ended up silent. Kent was clearly embarrassed at having been caught sneaking off to join a cult; Blake and I didn’t want to explain our situation and therefore didn’t want to press Kent about his. He said only that he’d been invited during the introduction seminar he’d gone to and had been planning on coming for weeks. Blake’s half-truth was that she’d wanted me to see what all the fuss was about. I explained to Kent that I was sorry he felt like he’d had to lie, but one look from him served as correction for this fatuous claim. With a judgmental, snarky brother like me, he clearly did. We focused on the road.

The Tidemark property snuggled up to the west slope of Rainier at the end of a long, unmarked dirt drive that passed alongside a forest in various stages of growth — some patches newly clear cut, others planted with saplings, still others covered in what I took to be juvenile trees, their needles a startling bright green, fairly glowing. An old man on a tractor waved us into a parking space, and we stood by the car for a bit, taking in the retreat’s collection of off-white yurts. They radiated outward from a single-story log-frame meetinghouse, all within a forest of tall pine that cast dappled sun down in moving, lifelike splotches as though the camp was just then in the process of appearing. Blake read from a pamphlet explaining that the first scheduled event would be a welcome and introduction by Graves, after which an early dinner would be served and the students would have time to mingle.

“Students?” I said.

We found our names on a board by the parking lot — we were all assigned to different yurts — and wandered off to claim our beds. The drive had made me sleepy, and as I walked through the grounds in the sharp piney smell of the woods, I watched with a kind of dull satisfaction as people roamed the grounds chummily in small groups or convened at the open flaps of their yurts. Everywhere was the happy chatter of reunion, and it reminded me of how I’d stay awake as a child during my parents’ parties, listening through the floor to the unintelligible adult conversations. Now, as then, I didn’t know what was being said, and I didn’t want to know; it seemed to me that it was exactly the not knowing that was important. It was comforting to know that people were saying things, leading lives that were in no way dependent on me. The barely distinguishable names, the calls across the camp, the bubbles of laughter rising to the top — all this made me more and more tired as I finally found my yurt, climbed the three steps to its open door flap, and entered the cool, canvas-smelling interior.