Chasing Sunrise

Ten

"Group" referred to group therapy in the counselor's office. It was me, Amy, and four other students, two of whom were pregnant. Another wore an ankle monitor that I stared at. This person was on parole from prison? It was a guy who was probably younger than I was.

We sat in chairs set out in a circle that included Mrs. Q, who gave everyone a warm smile. "All right, so this is Liana Linacre. Liana, you don't need to share any details. We'll just say that you're mourning a family member."

"My father," I said.

Everyone in the circle nodded.

"Ashley and Darcy, here, are in their third trimesters. Darcy's trying to decide whether to give her baby up for adoption. Carlos here has his hearing date coming up. He's been in the country for four years."

So he wasn't a criminal? He was an immigrant of some kind? What kind of immigrants wore ankle monitors?

"Lex, here, has an eating disorder."

Lex shrugged. "My family can't afford much food."

"They could if your father wasn't a drunk," said one of the pregnant girls.

"Hey, now," said the councillor. "No judgment."

"I'm not judging him. Just his dad."

And the discussion was off. As out of my element as I felt sitting with this group, I felt even more so talking to them. Lex's family was so deep in poverty that they were about to become homeless. Ashley was pregnant after being raped by her older sister's ex-boyfriend while she was visiting her in college. Darcy was thinking about putting her baby up for adoption because she was only fourteen, and her mother was thirty, so this was a cycle in her family.

And their stories were only the tip of the iceberg. They talked about cousins who were in prison, parents who'd died in drug overdoses, and a shockingly high number of suicides among their friends and extended families.

A week ago, I would have admitted I was a sheltered person. I knew that, but I also thought I knew the extent of my shelteredness. I thought I understood, at least intellectually, what it was like for the rest of the country.

Now I felt ripped from the shelter and thrust into the storm, and even as I felt this, I knew I was still sheltered. I was here in New Mexico for a few months, for an extended field trip into the rural southwest before I went back to New England for more fancy schooling on another wealth-endowed campus. These students would stay here, in this place, dealing with real life.

When I got home that afternoon after school, I got onto the internet and began reading, and a short time later I had my head down, body shaking with a mix of shock, horror, disbelief, and I hope a little compassion. It was hard to tell with all the shock, horror, and disbelief pulsing through me.

I'd made the mistake of looking up New Mexico's suicide and homicide statistics. My new home state had a slightly higher murder rate than my old home state—and I'd always thought of New York as a violent place. Its downward trend in homicides mirrored what I thought was a national trend. Taos looked so idyllic and removed from all that.

It was just a look, though. New Mexico was in the top five states for suicides, while New York was forty-ninth. Here in the isolated high desert, people were ending their lives at a rate that beggared belief. My friends and the other members of group therapy weren't alone when it came to the carnage of human suffering.

That also made it extra strange that the high school had little to no drug use and a history of no fights.

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