The Reclamation - Part III
In Part II, on the retreat’s second day, Pat grows increasingly annoyed with Celeste. That night, Brooke leads the women through The Letting Go, ceremoniously shaving everybody’s head. She calls Pat up to to go first.
DAY 3
The next morning, Pat tied her vintage silk Chanel scarf around her newly-bald head and went to the dining tent by herself. Celeste said she was going to skip, that she wasn’t feeling so great, but Pat knew she just wanted to sleep in. The blue smoothies were back, and this time there was a beauty about the uniformity of the shorn-headed women drinking the bright blue drinks. Pat felt something like community among them all, a sisterhood, a bond she hadn’t felt in a long while. It no longer had the middle-school cafeteria vibe, but instead felt like that of a neighborhood bar, or a party where she knew and liked everyone. A group of women at a picnic table made space for her and she sat down. They were talking about the Soul Walks, which were scheduled for the following morning.
“You get a smoothie and a bottle of water and a compass and they blindfold you and drop you somewhere out there for twelve hours,” said the gaunt Indian woman in an army green boiler suit sitting across from Pat, gesturing with her hand to the distance beyond the mess hall tent (Pooja? Priya? Pat was horrible with names). “My friend did it last year and said it changed her life.”
“Brooke is so daring,” said the sunburned girl with a nose ring (Jessie? Jess? Jessa?) who looked far too young to be involved in anything entrepreneurial. “Like, no one else would do something like that. Depletion 4 Creation actually works, you know? It’s just so inspiring to be here.” The others at the table nodded and Pat found herself nodding along with them.
Priya—she was almost sure that was her name—turned to Pat. “So, where’s your roommate?”
“I’m not her keeper,” Pat said with a shrug.
Priya nodded, a smirk on her face. “Did she end up surrendering her hair?”
Last night, Celeste had refused to have her head shaved—totally silly, in Pat’s opinion, since she didn’t have much to lose. Certainly not as much as some of the other women. Brooke had sat her down in the stool and firmly asked her Why? Why wasn’t she ready to let her hair go? And then, when Celeste had angrily stood, nearly knocking the stool into the fire, and run off into the dusk to the cabin, Brooke had used the experience as a “teachable moment” about the importance of knowing what your boundaries were in order to push through them.
“No,” sighed Pat. “I suppose she’s just figuring out her boundaries.” The table nodded approvingly.
“I just don’t understand why someone would invest in an opportunity like this if they weren’t completely ready for the challenge,” said Jess-Jessie-Jessa.
“We’re all on our own paths,” said Priya. “Some of us just have more brush to clear.”
“Season 3 Episode 5!” exclaimed JJJ, referring to the podcast that Priya had borrowed the idiom from.
“Did she give you guys samples of her fragrances?” the stout, olive-skinned woman wearing a Luminescence t-shirt sitting next to Pat whispered to the group.
Priya nodded and held her nose as the rest of the table descended into giggling fits.
That was when Pat saw Celeste entering the tent, sunglasses on, hair tousled with sleep. She saw Pat too, and came and sat down at the table. She smelled of a strange perfume, something sharp and almost rotten.
“So,” Celeste sneered, a fake smile on her face, “what have we all learned about leadership so far?”
Priya snorted. JJJ raised her eyebrows.
“Why are you here?” Priya spoke defensively, as if Celeste were an infiltrator, a fake Brookie.
Celeste was unfazed. “I’m here for the same reason we all are,” she said, and sullenly sipped her smoothie.
“It’s okay if you’re not ready,” said JJJ. “It’s an intense program.”
“I know Brooke is a little eccentric in her podcasts sometimes,” said Celeste, choosing her words carefully. “But this all feels a little like a—” she trailed off for a moment, though they all knew where she was going with her thought. “A little weird.”
Priya shook her head. “No offense, but you have no idea what you’re talking about.
The table was silent, until JJJ chimed in: “What Priya means is that you should trust the process,” she said.
“Pat, can we go for a walk?” said Celeste.
Pat didn’t want to go for a walk. She wanted to stay in the meal tent, talking about Brooke. Celeste was a dramatic person, and lately she’d been trying not to associate with dramatic people. Roman was always saying she cared too much about other people’s problems, that she should pay attention to her own life. Boundaries, he said. She needed better boundaries. She stood anyway, and followed Celeste out.
“I’m so embarrassed,” said Celeste. “Brooke has her own way of doing things, but I thought this would be teambuilding and networking. Tell me I’m not overreacting.”
“You’re probably just adjusting,” said Pat. “Give it time.”
“So none of this is weird to you?” The woman reeked of desperation.
“Well, yes, but not in a bad way,” said Pat. “I think I just needed to be shaken up a little bit.”
“I don’t know,” Celeste said, staring down at her hideous boots. “I’m just starting to feel not like myself anymore here. It’s strange.”
“That’s a good thing, right?” said Pat. What was the point of self-improvement if you left feeling the same?
“I’m not so sure,” said Celeste. “And you seem different too.”
“You don’t know me,” said Pat. It came out harsher than she’d meant it to, but it silenced Celeste for the rest of the walk to the morning Inspo Session.
*****
During sunset, the firepit had been majestic, but now, in the daylight, it was scorched and sad. The acrid smell of burning hair still hung around the area, and wisps of it were scattered around the blackened bits of firewood. Pat wondered if maybe Celeste had a point. Brooke was there already, her bald head glowing in the sun.
“Today we begin with an exercise called the Reclamation. This is a guided meditation, so get comfortable. Start by closing your eyes.”
Pat had tried meditation at the urging of Roman, who since he quit smoking swore by it, had a little pillow and everything. But she could never get past her own body, could never focus on her breath. Her brain always went elsewhere, to her to-do lists, to memories, all the other useless detritus that builds up in a mind over the years. But today she followed Brooke’s instructions with ease.
I want you to imagine a body of water. Pat pictured a generic tropical ocean. She was fairly certain it had been the default desktop wallpaper on an old computer of hers. The ocean swished in and out. The air was balmy. Now that you’ve spent some time in this place, I want you to begin to wander through your own memories. Flip through all the moments of guilt in your life the way you’d flip through an old photo album. You are seeking your Root Guilt, the earliest and strongest memory of guilt. There was a brief text flirtation with Jeff, Roman’s work buddy, that led to nothing but she thought about it for days. There was the fact that she hadn’t spoken with her elderly parents since the store closed, had ignored their calls and emails. There was the lot of Lilly Pulitzer dresses she’d bought off a grieving daughter at an estate sale for a fraction of what they were worth, there was the film studies paper she’d written in college after only reading synopses of the films. The general guilt that she felt for being a straight, white, able-bodied upper-middle-class woman when there were so many others who didn’t have the opportunities that she had, and what did she have to be glum about anyway? Further and further back.
And then the tropical air of the beach chilled, the ocean at her feet became a frothy suck. Pat was back on one of the annual camping trips to Big Sur with her family—that one trip, the one that Celeste’s perfume had brought back to her. They’d always drive through fog banks on their way up the coast, which made it feel as if Big Sur were in some alternate dimension, far from the heat and dust of Tujunga where she lived with her family.
On those trips, her parents and their friends would pitch tents and let the children run wild through beaches and redwoods while the adults got high and threw back beers, and essentially became teenagers again, shirking any responsibility foisted upon them by parenthood, society, et cetera.
The beaches were wild too—water frigid and choppy, with the constant threat of riptide sweeping you away. Despite this, the children shivered and shrieked in the waves, built sandcastles, scaled rocks, pelted each other with slimy kelp fronds, and collected shells from along the shore.
Pat would spend these beach days roaming with the girl closest in age to her: Judith, who lived in Oakland and who she only saw on these summer trips. The two wreaked havoc on the ecosystem of the ocean: smashing open mussels to feed to eager sea anemones in tide pools, building seagull traps out of buckets and driftwood, creating hermit crab obstacle courses: a cruel game that involved yanking an unlucky crustacean out of its chosen home and setting up a maze of small rocks between it and the shell.
Then, the summer when they were both twelve, a new girl appeared: Frankie, the daughter of some friend of Pat’s mother who’d joined the trip that year. Frankie was just a year younger than Judith and Pat but acted as if she was in kindergarten. She was timid and frail, always shivering in her swimsuit, and had a host of allergies that she liked to remind them of at random intervals. She believed in things like fairies and ghosts and Santa Claus. Pat and Judith resented her immediately but let her hang out with them to appease Pat’s mother who was blind to the injustice of saddling the two of them with someone so desperately uncool and immature.
So they made an unspoken pact to make her time in Big Sur as miserable as possible, in the hopes that Frankie never came on another one of these trips again. They stole her diary from out of her tent and performed dramatic readings of the parts about her crush on her classmate Thomas Mahoney. They pretended to speak a secret language that only the other one knew, while Frankie looked on, helpless (“C’mon, guys, stop playing!” she’d whine.) They told her fibs of all sorts: that Judith was dating a high school boy, that Pat’s cousin was Scott Baio, that they’d seen a sasquatch stalking the campground at night. But Frankie stayed easygoing, never complained. Just laughed, as if she hadn’t the faintest idea that these pranks and fibs were happening at her expense.
One day, while digging a moat system, Judith began spinning one of her tales to Frankie, this one about how if you dug in the sand deep enough, you’d come out in China.
“Liar!” Frankie accused, but Pat and Judith insisted, holding back their giggles as Frankie’s eyes widened at their tales of all the many species of giant snakes, monster worms, and crabs the size of VW Bugs you’d find on your way down there.
Finally it was decided that to prove it, they would dig. They armed themselves with the best of the plastic shovels, sweating and grunting as they worked, baling out the water that filled the hole so that the sand wouldn’t cave in (as any experienced sandcastle maker knows to do).
It was Frankie who announced that she wanted to be buried, Frankie who, despite the misgivings of the two older girls, climbed into the hole and demanded that they fill it back up with sand. So they did, until Frankie was nothing but a tiny, wet-haired disembodied head on the beach.
Pat couldn’t remember what excuse Judith came up with, but for whatever cruel reason they left Frankie there, screaming in protest, to go back to the tidepools.
When the shadows began to change, Pat asked Judith if maybe they’d better check on Frankie. Judith sighed and consented, and they left the pools and the anemones behind. The beach looked different when they rounded the cliff’s edge. Something was off. The tide had come in.
Judith splashed across the shallow water, screaming Frankie’s name. Pat stood there, suddenly chilled, realizing what they’d done. She imagined jail doors slamming, her parents refusing to speak to her ever again, the look of horror on Frankie’s mom’s face. She ran into the water after Judith, who was crying now, and dove under, feeling around for any evidence but only grabbing fistfuls of sand and shells.
Eventually they made the solemn decision to tell parents, and the campsite descended into panic. At some point the coast guard was called. To Pat this was all a swirl of horror and guilt, as she sat clutching a sobbing Judith’s hand.
Then who should saunter up to the campsite but Frankie who, as it turned out, had wrested herself free from the hole moments after the two of them had abandoned her and gone to search for fairies in the nearby forest.
For hours, Pat had lived with the knowledge that she was a killer. It weighed on her. It still weighed on her, in fact, after all these years. The beach trips were never the same after that. Pat cocooned herself into the tent with her paperbacks while Judith roamed the campground with the older girls, looking for boys. Of course, Frankie and her mother never returned to the camping trip.
Now I want you to see this Root Guilt from another angle. See it in a positive light. See it in an empowering light. How can you turn it into something useful?
Pat reviewed the scene she’d imagined, relived. The moment she’d realized the tide had rolled in, that dark feeling that she’d done something irreversible and permanent. She stuck with the dark feeling for a moment, turning it over in her head. The power that came with doing something permanent to someone else. She stayed with that feeling, the feeling of power and control, something she’d felt so little of in her life. Open your eyes.
All of the women wore complacent smiles except for Celeste, who glared at Brooke.
“Beautiful,” said Brooke. “I could really sense all your energy. I want you to take that energy and carry it with you into all aspects of your life. Guilt is a natural feeling, but once we learn to overcome it, anything is possible. This power is what I want you to keep hold in your Soul Well for our next journey: the Soul Walk.” There was a palpable excitement among the group as Brooke explained the rules. They would be driven to a remote part of the desert, blindfolded. Then it was their job to wander—just wander—for 12 hours, eventually finding their way back to the drop-off point where they would be picked up and treated to a celebratory farewell dinner and fireside Inspo Session. “I want you to think about all you’ve learned so far about sacrifice and reclamation. It will be a challenge, but I know that you are up to it, warriors. The goal is self-actualization. Know yourself, Love yourself, Be yourself. Repeat it for me.” The group did as they were told.
As the women were leaving the firepit, Gina put a hand on Pat’s shoulder and told her that Brooke wanted to see her. Pat followed her, casting a glance back at Celeste, who stood, hand on hip, that same pissed-off expression on her face.
“Pat,” said Brooke, taking Pat’s hands in her own and clasping them. Pat felt a stir, something deep within her awakened. “Will you join me for a quick check-in?”
They walked away from the firepit, into the desert, Pat matching Brooke’s relaxed gait. Gina followed several yards behind. “I want you to know that I’ve really valued our time together here, and I think you’re a very special person,” Brooke finally said. Pat’s feet tingled with nerves. Her palms clammed up. Had she done something wrong? Was she being kicked out?
“Thanks,” she said, carefully.
Brooke stopped and turned to face her. Her beatific glow seemed to darken, her expression fell and hardened into something cold. “What I’m about to tell you is very serious. This is a small group, and one person’s negative energy is contagious. Your bunkmate, Celeste, how well do you know her?”
“I don’t,” said Pat. “Not really.” The relief!
“Well, there was the incident at the Letting Go, which you saw. That alerted me that something was off in this individual. Then Gina caught her following me back to my campervan. This happens sometimes, at these intense sessions. People lose their path. Sometimes, they lose it entirely and they give up. Sometimes they even talk to journalists, spin lies meant to discredit Luminescence’s mission.” At the mention of journalists, her face twisted into a look of disgust. Then she looked into Pat’s eyes, and her glow returned. “But I’m hoping you, Pat, can guide her back. We’re so close to the end of our time together and the last thing I’d want is for Celeste to come away with a negative Retreat experience. Can you do that for me?”
“Of course,” said Pat, returning Brooke’s gentle smile.
“Thank you,” Brooke said, and squeezed Pat’s hands again. “I can see your Soul Well is deep and full. I’m so grateful the universe brought the two of us together. I can tell I have much to learn from you.”
Then Gina tapped Pat on the shoulder and signaled to her that it was time to go.
In their cabin that night, after Mindful Silent Service, Celeste was morose, curled on her cot like a petulant teen. The Santa Anas were blowing through, and the canvas tent bucked and creaked in the wind.
“My mother called the Santa Anas the Devil Winds,” Pat said, hoping to break the toxic silence.
Celeste only sighed in reply.
“What is it?” said Pat.
Celeste sat up on her bed and turned to face Pat. “I can’t anymore. The shaved heads? The smoothies? Let’s ditch and get some real food. Maybe these kids can handle them but they’re doing a number on my stomach.”
Pat wrinkled her nose at the mention of stomach issues, which she preferred not to talk or think about. Celeste was still looking at her with that pleading desperation in her eyes. It grossed her out, in all honesty. The codependence of it all. The Retreat was not a place for codependent women. It was the same disgust she’d felt for whiny, sniveling Frankie all those years ago. She summoned up the power she’d felt at the Reclamation and seized the opportunity to direct Celeste back to the path.
“You really should just trust the process,” Pat said. “I mean, we all ended up here for a reason, right?”
“You would say that,” said Celeste, chilly now. “She’s chosen you, god knows why, but she has.”
“You shouldn’t have followed her,” said Pat. “It’s creepy.”
“I don’t think she lives in her van,” said Celeste, ignoring Pat’s accusation. “How does she shower?”
Pat rolled her eyes. “Probably in the bathhouse, same as us.”
“But have you seen the van? I mean besides in pictures on her Instagram? If you were in a campervan, wouldn’t you park walking distance from the bathrooms?” Celeste went on like this. It was as if Pat wasn’t even there. There was no persuading this woman. She let her prattle on with her half-baked conspiracy theories. Pat’s annoyance turned to anger. Her face and hands grew hot. Celeste needed to shut up. The wind howled outside, snapping the canvas. Something clanged in the distance. Pat imagined the tent collapsing on them both, a rod impaling Celeste. That would solve this problem. “Maybe we’ll all just blow away,” Celeste finally said and was quiet.
To be continued…
Lena Valencia’s debut short story collection, Mystery Lights, is forthcoming from Tin House Books in 2024. Her fiction has appeared in Ninth Letter, Epiphany, Electric Literature, the anthology Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2019 Elizabeth George Foundation grant and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. Originally from Los Angeles, she lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is the managing editor and director of educational programming at One Story and the co-host of the reading series Ditmas Lit
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