Temperance Creek. Pamela Royes

and succumbed to shag carpeting, ten o’clock Bloody Marys, hothouse petunias, and Lawrence (champagne bubble) Welk.

      After four years at the University of North Dakota, my brother Randy—formerly a self-absorbed adolescent who rarely opened his bedroom door, collected stamps and coins, and wished me dead—emerged from the halls of academia with a diploma and the startling news that he was moving to Oregon. Once there he wrote letters home from the born-again Christian commune he’d joined, announcing his conversion to Christianity, JESUS SAVES printed in bold black letters across the backs of the envelopes.

      North Dakota. Where Mom and two friends driving back to the lake cabin from the local watering hole had a head-on with a car full of teenagers. From the hospital, they would call the husbands.

       My best friend Rio and I are babysitting when Mr. Rummele pulls in at three in the morning. I know because I am awake and already worried. Everyone’s okay, he says, getting out sleeping bags. But Mom isn’t okay. Thrown through the passenger window into the woods, at first they couldn’t find her. Her neck, broken. From the small, rural, lake hospital they move her to the Deaconess in Grand Forks. When I creep into her room, we both start crying. She lies in traction there for a month, sometimes upside down. I write letters every day. Dad takes me to visit. I read aloud. Before coming home, they cast her in plaster. It starts high on her neck and ends at her hips. Her chin is tilted up. Without a pair of weird, pyramid-shaped glasses, she can’t see the floor. She jokes; she never complains. For a while, neighbors and friends bring food. I make tomato or chicken noodle soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.

      There were lawsuits and settlements, and the courts decided in favor of the carload of women, and I don’t remember hearing what injuries the teenagers suffered, though later I questioned the verdict. Knowing the women and their love for drinking.

      North Dakota. Where long before the gay liberation movement was fashionable, and long before the death of a movie star riveted America’s attention on an epidemic called AIDS, my older brother Mark struggled to conceal his homosexuality in a society both repressive and standards-driven. The result was multiple suicide attempts, a lifelong battle with alcoholism, and total estrangement from my father while my mother played the odds. And in my own adolescent fear, ignorance, and discomfort, in my own struggle for identity, I was unable to understand or help him.

      Who grows up in a house where no one ever yells? Or fights? Or confronts their discontent? Our collective silence became unbearable.

      At fifteen, after losing both Great-Aunt Regina and Grandpa to heart attacks, I crossed the tipping point and was no longer able to hold on to the reins. I sold my horse, bought a car, and began cultivating the dark seeds of rebellion while seeking enlightenment through literature. Siddhartha, The Great Gatsby, The Outsiders, To Kill a Mockingbird, the brave Odysseus and The Odyssey and the works of Anaïs Nin who wrote, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

      None of my friends talked about what was going on at their homes either. About their alcoholic parents, or their scandalous divorces. About mental illness. About homosexuality. In North Dakota we pulled the cloak of secrecy around us and bore the rumors, unable to rescue those we loved. Instead, we dreamed of far-flung places like California, the Rocky Mountains, and the saturated, postcard colors of Mexico. Roughshod cowboys, rock bands, hippies, salt water, and sand. Escaping the sheltered corners of our young lives, into the mythical and memory-free West.

       When I Ran Away

       Mother, Mother, I am ill, call the doctor over the hill.

       In came the doctor, in came the nurse,

       In came the lady with the alligator purse.

       Measles, said the doctor, mumps, said the nurse,

       Nothing, said the lady with the alligator purse.

      —JUMP ROPE RHYME

      The spring I turned seventeen, I ran away from home, bored with the Johnnies and Jimmies of my youth, and (despite the fun I was having) bored with school. How absurd and unnatural it now seemed. I was tired of hassling with my parents over the way I dressed, the music I played, and the kids I hung out with. The privileged kids, who shoplifted clothing and fat bottles of pink Mateus Rosé inside their thrift store ankle-length fur coats and smoked pot in the school parking lot until the buzzer rang. Or the slouching longhaired boys (whom I loved but who would not love me back) and bold-eyed girls from the east side of town. Sitting with their rough and loud families around crowded Formica tables in smoke-filled kitchens I would become embarrassed to be dropped off in front of my parents’ trimmed and immaculate home. I was part of a whole generation engaged in rebellion and looking to escape the confines of their parents’ pretension. Both extremes, privileged and poor, equally confused.

      The future for me was southbound on I-29. Somewhere beyond the last grain silo.

      I’d talked a girlfriend into hitching with me. Laura. Laura, who’d been first farmer to my second farmer in the fourth-grade production of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, when we’d sat on our hay bales and endured every practice together for the sake of delivering one line each. Since then, we’d become part of a revolving group of high school girls who hitched or caught rides to deafening rock concerts across the Midwest and Canada: The Who, Chicago, Leon Russell, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, and Alice Cooper (who unflinchingly beheaded a doll on stage).

      On the night before we left, I didn’t have the stomach to fabricate yet another story about a sleepover with someone outside my parents’ social circle to keep them off my trail. I said good night and lay in bed, searching for simple answers. Some kind of omen, one way or another. All my life I’d lived in the same town, lived on the same street, but I was a stranger to myself. I couldn’t let anyone near me, yet I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t want to think about myself, but I couldn’t forget or be content. Looking around my darkened room, I saw old family pieces, burnished by time. Matching curtains and bedspread—narrow-striped and bright, but tasteful. A shelf of Breyer horses, books, a stereo, and the heap of yesterday’s clothing on the floor. Little evidence of my occupation. The room of a boarder. Decorated by Mom to remain in compliance with the rest of the house.

      I thought of Dad, telling me of the time he jumped a freight car from Chicago to Grand Forks—possibly his single, glorious act of rebellion—when he was in college.

      I pictured him, running breathlessly beside the moving train, flinging his father’s leather suitcase through the open door of the railcar, his thudding heart keeping time with the whining wheels, the blasts of the engine’s whistle. Springing clumsily inside, scrambling to the back, alone. I pictured his boyish face, dark, curly hair, and winsome, irrepressible smile as he settled in for the long ride.

      I had Dad’s nose and probably his short temper, startling as a firecracker on the first of July. Who were his heroes? Why had I never asked him that question?

      In the morning I faced my parents’ neatly made bed, leaving a brief note propped against my mother’s pillow. No omen in sight.

       Dear Mom and Dad,

       I am leaving to do some traveling with a friend before school is out. Please don’t worry. I will call when I get to where I am going. These last days of school aren’t important. It isn’t anything you have done. I just need to go. There’s nothing to worry about. Dad, Becky will clean the office while I’m gone, I’ve given her a set of keys. Please don’t be hurt, it will be a good experience. Please try to understand.

       Love, Pam

       P.S. I know what I’m doing

      I turned and walked out the door.

      Standing beside the southbound freeway on-ramp, Laura gave me that same bucktoothed, thumbs-up grin from childhood, her small frame hunched inside an oversized army jacket scored at the local thrift store.