AUGUSTA, GONE by Martha Tod Dudman

Author:Martha Tod Dudman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Self-Help/Psychology
Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Published: 2001-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The drive over to Lyle and beyond is longer than they warned me. I pass through long stretches of dry farmland. Cows and irrigation systems, low flat houses, open, scalding sky. I’ve got the air conditioner ranting and the radio on but I don’t know the stations out here so I scan aimlessly until I come upon the weird hip Oregon Public Radio, where my sister used to work long ago.

Lyle looks like a town that might house a prison. The streets shuffle off to either side in uninteresting strips peopled with low houses. There is a shopping center, a couple of dingy restaurants with dusty parking lots, one fine tall old-fashioned town-hall kind of building, a little park. I try to think how this will seem to me if it becomes a familiar town. Then on through the Estacada National Forest, past the long lake with its hot glare in the morning light, along the endless road. The air is different out here and the sides of the road are different and it’s a long long way to the small wooden sign with the name of the school on it and the cluster of neat log cabins and the lodge with tall wooden steps leading up that all look smaller than the picture in the brochure they sent.

I pull in.

Rebecca Mintz, whom I’ve talked to on the phone, is the admissions director and one of the founding mothers of Forest Ridge. She is smaller than I expected, but just as warm and smart. I think she’s like me. And in another life, in another time, I think we could be friends. She’s smart and forty-five and Jewish and she has her own crazy history, which she hints at in our conversations.

“Oh yes, I was wild,” she says with a laugh and I laugh, too, relieved that I can like her and the school, that I can send my daughter here.

Everybody seems nice, in that folksy hippie Oregon woodsy way but with a touch of businesslike determination. The buildings are neat and inviting. In the main lodge there’s a big room with a beautiful rug and great big pillows where you take your shoes off, where you can have “group” and “work on your stuff,” and a long dining hall where Rebecca puts me with some girls who all look clean and nice and neat and all are curious about my daughter: When’s she getting here? What did she do? They tell me a little bit about themselves. No, they didn’t like it here at first. Yes, they need to be here. They tell me they’re from California, New Mexico, outside Chicago. They got in trouble, they say vaguely, and their parents sent them here. They’ve been here two months, seven months, a year. They went to Wilderness. It’s okay, they tell me. I try to see if they have something else to say, something that they’re not saying, but I can’t read their eyes. I just don’t know. But they do seem like girls that my girl could be friends with.

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