Lakewood(68)
Everywhere taught me to think about things in the simplest ways. School told me that anything could be summed up and have conclusions drawn from it in five paragraphs. This = good. That = bad. But now I think a lot about context. I think about what I owe the people in my life and what I owe people I will never see, never speak to. Can I make anything better? And if I did break my NDA, would anyone listen?
It’s been six weeks since I’ve been in Lakewood. Deziree refuses to let me talk to any reporters. She says that I have done enough. Every time this comes up, it’s the closest we come to fighting. She says if one of us has to take risks, giving things up, going to jail, it will be her. She says I have somehow forgotten—and the way she says it is so passive-aggressive it makes my teeth clench—that she is the mother. That she is the person who makes decisions for herself, our family.
What we know and don’t say is that reporters might have an easier time thinking I’m more credible than her. She’s reached out and talked to a few. Each one made scans of her invitation letter. They told her what she has to say is interesting. But she’s come back grumpy and defeated from each meeting. There’s no hard evidence. And Deziree says there are so many red flags that she doubts they take her seriously. Her health problems including her unreliable memory, her limp, her high-school-level education, her dark skin. She thinks they see her as someone trying to cash in. Or worse, someone who has read the papers and tricked herself into thinking this was the answer to why she was sick. I went to a good college, I speak confidently, but the times my mother has told me not to do something I can count on one hand. For now, the right thing feels like listening to her.
I think a lot about everyone else in the experiments, especially Charlie. Where was he? Was he okay? Sometimes, late at night, I wonder if there was ever a Charlie. Maybe he was just an actor pretending to be my friend, taking notes to report back to them. There’s now no proof on the internet that a Charlie Graham from Lakewood ever existed.
Deziree says it takes time, but one day, you’ll get used to living without certainty. You’ll accept here are times you’ll never get a clear answer to. Instead of it being the center of your life, eventually it’ll be something you rarely think about. It’ll be in the margins of your life. I want to believe her. I watch as she sips her tea, as she makes soft kind-mom eyes at me, a gaze that makes her look the most like Grandma, and hope she’s right.
I want to tell Mariah’s family what happened to her, that she was trying to repay them when she died, but I never knew her last name.
The other day, you asked me why I hadn’t re-enrolled for winter semester. I said maybe I will and tried to change the subject. Here’s the real answer. My mom and I haven’t been sleeping well. Every sound could be them coming to take one or both of us back. Coming—and I wish this felt melodramatic to me, that I was able to laugh—to kill us. Miss Cassandra’s nephew is staying with her. She broke her hip a few weeks ago and he’s helping out. When I see his shadow at night, when I smell his cigarettes but don’t see him, all my organs feel like they’re congealing, becoming a heavy mass inside of me. My feet are desperate to run. My mom’s new nickname for me is Squirrel. She is trying to tease me back into feeling okay.
There are hours where I am not scared. I talk to you on the phone. I try to think about my future. There are times when someone asks me how I’m feeling, I don’t think about every glass of water I drank in Lakewood or the scar on my chest.
On Monday, my mom got a new job. She now has health insurance. Every orange, red, and yellow leaf felt like applause as she nodded and smiled while talking to them on the phone. Her eyes were so big. She was tearing up a little when she hung up. Deziree yelled, I got the job. Did it again. We danced like she had just won $500 playing slots.
Every day, she tells me I need to go back to school. Not just because I need an education, but because I need to feel like I’m moving in a different direction. And I want to. But then there are days where I can’t leave the house at all. I try, but I can’t get myself to put on shoes. Or I can’t turn the knob and go out there. They could be anywhere. Anyone could be one of them. Or at night when I’m in the space between awake and rest, I feel hands on my throat again. I scream and I thrash and my mom has to tell me things will be fine. She scratches my scalp, smooths my hair. I’m not ready.
Back in early September, there had been talks about lawsuits, congressional hearings, damages, further inquiries into the research studies. Then there was Lakewood’s water. It was so photographable! And I don’t mean just Long Lake. There was the large flock of Canada geese that died from landing on its surface. Old white men—men I was used to seeing stuffing cake donuts in their mouths, their cheeks dusted with powdered sugar, chocolate frosting on their teeth—had been transformed into a combination of regal and broken in black-and-white portraits.
On major news websites, Lakewood is withered crops and rotten pumpkins. A small town with lots of big trees and empty old houses that seemed to inspire people on TV to rhapsodize about the past, the middle class. And what was going to happen to all these little white kids who had been drinking the water? Their lives would be shorter, they would probably have lingering health issues. And how long had the water been on the verge of this? Why didn’t the state notice? What had pushed it to the tipping point? Look, look, look at all these sad farmers. It is the kind of disaster people love to look at.