Or maybe the project had me.
In the following weeks, I got consumed. I took over the dining table. I drew plans for buildings and consulted an architect. I made lists of ideas, resources, people to work with. I did real estate searches online—looking for land that was far enough out to be cheap but close enough to be accessible. I looked at other, nonprofit camps online to see how they did things and what they offered. I brainstormed names and investigated graphics. I made plans for a nature trail, a library, a ceramics studio, a yarn café, a bake shop, a butterfly garden. Everything would be wheelchair accessible—and everything would be architecturally beautiful. I had rolled my eyes so much at my mother decorating my hospital room—but after we’d taken it all down, I’d seen her point. The feeling of the room changed. Without her quilts and curtains and table lamps and splashes of color, it felt like the saddest place in the world.
I wanted this place to feel like sunshine. I wanted it to feel like hope. Warm, but cool. Bright, but shady. Alert, but calm. I wanted it to feel like magic.
“You could call it Hell on Wheels,” my mom suggested one night at dinner.
“‘Hell’ might give the wrong vibe.”
“What about Camp Magic?”
I gave a shrug. “Might sound like an academy for young magicians.”
“Not a bad idea,” she pointed out.
I pointed at her. “Yes. We should offer magic classes.” Then back to the name: “It needs to sound fun enough for kids, but serious enough for grown-ups.”
My mom grinned. “So the Margaret Jacobsen Center for Spinal Cord Recovery is out.”
I gave her a look. “Too cutesy.”
“What about Camp Hope?” she asked.
We let that idea simmer while we sketched out ideas for a camp T-shirt with the slogan THAT’S HOW WE ROLL.
It was both a lucky and a slightly unlucky thing that my mom was a contractor.
It meant that she knew a million workmen, plumbers, electricians, surveyors, real estate agents, bricklayers, painters, distributors, suppliers, A/C guys, and demolition experts. They knew the dirt on everybody and knew how to get the best deals. That was all in the “pro” column.
Under “con”: If I really did this, I was about to spend a truckload of time with my mom.
And it did look like I was going to do this. I couldn’t seem to make myself think about anything else, for one thing. I can’t tell you what a pleasure it was to use my brain again—to use all my business training, and skills, and design sense, and creativity. The project brought together almost everything I loved to do.
More than that, it got me out of the house.
At a certain point, I had to start looking for land, and meeting with people, and talking with them about ideas and strategies, having lunches and coffees with potential contributors and partners. Leaving the house just for the sake of leaving the house had never interested me. But leaving the house to get a donation pledge of five thousand dollars? That I could do.
I dusted off my old pantsuits and my pearl earrings, and I gutted up and went to lunch.
Kit even made me set up a Kickstarter campaign, and then she posted about it to her now sixty-six thousand followers. Donations flowed in. Money piled up. The whole thing started to look like it might actually happen.
“They love you!” Kit said on the phone. “Send me a picture of you in that pinstripe Ann Taylor suit!”
Was everything suddenly all fixed and perfect? No. Did I get pitying stares in restaurants? Constantly. Did I still have profound moments—hours, days—of hopelessness, anger, bitterness, frustration, despair, self-hatred, and grief? You could say that. And did I one day run into Neil Putnam from Simtex HR, the guy who had hired-me-but-not-officially for my dream job before the accident and then nixed the whole thing afterward? And did he not recognize me at all? And when I finally explained who I was, did he say, “You changed your hair!”?
Yes. That happened.
But the tone of my life was different now. I had a purpose. I had a reason to take a shower every morning. I had a reason to take care of myself. More than that, I was figuring out how doing something for other people could—in fact—be doing something for yourself. Amazing.
It felt good to feel better, and so I started looking for other ways to amp it up. I got addicted to audiobooks. I joined a choir. I kept knitting, even though I never got any better. I taught myself how to make pastries from scratch. I let my mom sell my old condo.
By the time I put the three hundredth X on my suicide calendar, I had signed an earnest-money contract on a hundred-acre plot of land outside of town with a two-hundred-year-old oak tree, three hills, and a catfish pond. I used the money from the condo as a down payment. That night, even though my dad still had not come home after all this time, and even though my mom might well have been X-ing off her own set of impossibly strange and altered days, we celebrated with champagne.
Despite everything, I decided at last to bet on hope—and I stuffed my suicide calendar in the recycling.
If this is the rest of my life, I found myself thinking one day, it’s okay.
It really was.
Twenty-six
THEN CHIP DECIDED to get married.
Married.
To that sneaky, soup-making ex-girlfriend, Tara, a.k.a. the Whiner.
In Europe, of all places. In a famously charming town in Belgium called Bruges.
The invitation arrived on Valentine’s Day, of all days. Which forced me to notice three things: One, it was Valentine’s Day. Two, it had been exactly a year since the crash. And three, I had completely forgotten about Chip.
I also noticed something else: My mom, my dad, and Kit were the only names on the invitation.
My mother knew about the engagement, though. She was still friends with Evelyn. She just couldn’t give her up. Although Evelyn never came to the house once I moved home. For a long time, my mother snuck out to meet her, saying she was “running errands,” but I knew what they were up to.
“You can be friends with Evelyn,” I told her one night after dinner. “It’s okay.”
“I’m not!”
“It’s not disloyal to me. I’m fine.”
“He cheated on you! He gave up on you.”
“It was a messy time.”
She didn’t need to be mad for me. She really didn’t. Hadn’t we all lost enough?
I got it. I did. Best friends are not easy to come by. The two stayed friends, and they avoided talking about either one of us, until one day Evelyn just had to tell her about the upcoming nuptials.
My mom got the scoop: Chip had been promoted not once, but twice, and had risen through the ranks of his investment bank in exactly the way you’d expect a guy as handsome and WASPy and confident as Chip to rise. He was highly promotable. In fact, they’d transferred him to their Brussels office.
“Chip is living in Belgium?”
My mom nodded.
“He doesn’t even speak French!”
I felt a flash of resentment—quick but distinct. Chip got promoted? To Europe? The crash sure hadn’t slowed him down. Was his life really going to be that easy? I got that sour feeling that comes when you make the mistake of thinking someone else is beating you at life.
But then I took a mental breath.
So what? Chip was in Brussels. But I was genuinely okay in Texas. We had both moved on. We could both be okay at the same time. We weren’t on a seesaw, for Pete’s sake! There was plenty of okay to go around.
Just because Chip had gotten what he’d wanted so easily, without ever having to question it, without ever having to struggle—that didn’t necessarily mean that what he got was better.
“I’ve known about the wedding for a while,” my mother confessed. “Evelyn warned me.”
“You didn’t tell me?”
“I thought it would fall through,” my mom said. “Apparently, that girl followed him to Brussels. She showed up at the airport with all her bags and announced she was coming along.”