North of Beautiful (10 page)

THE EFFECT DAD WANTED WHEN he built our house ten years ago was ocean schooner, ironic considering he never went beyond a twenty-mile radius of the mountain-locked Methow Valley if he could help it. Still, it was a beautiful home, all wood and natural stone on the inside, small but without a square inch of wasted space. It was nothing like Karin’s house, sprawling all over their riverfront property.

Our landscape would have been the same austere desert as everywhere else in the Valley, all spiny sagebrush, dirt, and stones, if it weren’t for Mom. Honestly, the joke around here is that even the blackest thumb can grow rocks; you can’t stick a shovel anywhere without digging up rocks, rocks, and more rocks. But every spring, Mom tamed the arid land into a proper garden like the ones on the coast, transforming sandy soil into lush green lawn. Even a few flamboyant flowers will take root and sprout under her attentive watch. Those, she trapped behind wire fences to prevent deer from considering the garden their all-day, all-night free buffet.

Tonight, our dark house gave the appearance of a beached ship, marooned on our hill. With all the lights out, save for the ones in Dad’s office on top of the house, you’d think it had been abandoned.

I didn’t blame Norah for asking Mom, “Are you sure your husband’s home?”

“Oh, he’s waiting up for us,” murmured Mom.

The truck chugged up the unplowed driveway, clotted with new snow. The truck’s gears ground, our progress slow. The porch lights flicked on. Behind the door, I knew Dad was donning his good old boy face, the one that charmed strangers, acquaintances, and friends alike. The front door opened, and out he stepped, waving as though he always greeted us with good cheer and glad smiles.

Framed in the porch light, Dad hardly cut an imposing figure, not much taller than me or Mom. His hair used to be thick and blond, but had thinned out and darkened to a limp brown. Anyone who’s been under someone’s thumb can tell you that power, true power, is never about size or looks.

I sighed when Norah parked the truck. It lurched and then stopped like it didn’t want to be here any more than I did. I tossed the glove, gushy with melted ice, into my backpack.

“Hey,” said Jacob in a low voice while I unbuckled myself, “I’ll come with you.”

“That’s okay,” I said, all confidence, not so much to convince Jacob as it was to gear myself up. It was one thing for Mom to tell Dad that we had to go shopping in Seattle for Christmas since — miracles! — the boys were coming home for the holidays. And another when he saw me wearing my early Christmas present from Mom. Where she had gotten the money for the surgery, she wouldn’t say, only that she had the cash and I wasn’t to touch my savings. I hadn’t let myself think ahead to this part of the day, and from the way Mom wasn’t making any moves to get out of the truck, I was pretty sure she hadn’t either.

“Okay, Mom, let’s go,” I said finally.

Jacob followed me out of the truck. “I’ll help you unload your stuff.”

I kept Jacob’s introduction to Dad brief, especially when I saw the curl of distaste on Dad’s lips when Jacob set the box of groceries on the ground to shake his hand. If I weren’t so worried that Dad might get a good look at me, I would have laughed at the battle on his face, torn between keeping up his chivalrous good-guy act and his disgust at Jacob’s black lipstick! Eye shadow! Painted nails! Public performance won out over moral outrage, and Dad shook Jacob’s hand.

“Honey,” Mom explained to Dad, “we had a little car trouble.” As though she were timing her entrance perfectly, Mrs. Fremont chose that moment to slip out of her Range Rover and pick her way across the snow-covered gravel to us. Very quickly, Mom introduced her to Dad, including the fact that Norah was an executive vice president of coffee buying. “Wasn’t it nice of Norah to drive us home? They’re spending Christmas up at River Rock Lodge.”

With Norah before him, Dad had no option but to agree. “Very nice. Thank you, Norah.”

“My pleasure, Grant,” said Norah, shaking his hand in a firm grip. “Well, with any luck, you’ll have the car back in no time. Let me know if I can help out in any way.”

Dad bristled. “No, that won’t be necessary.” The cold night air grew colder, but I wasn’t sure if anyone else noticed the drop in temperature. And then Dad caught himself, softening his words with a self-deprecating laugh. “You’ve done more than enough bailing out my girls.”

My girls? That muffled sound would be me, gagging.

“By the way, where is our car?” Dad asked mildly.

“In a —,” Mom began.

A wail erupted from Norah’s truck. Let me just say that I’d never been so happy to hear a kid howling in my life, because with Dad, information was power. The less everyone said about the accident, the better. I made a mental note to bring some of Mom’s homemade pastries to Trevor tomorrow. Staying in the shadows, I said, “I think Jacob’s little brother needs to go to bed.”

I could feel Jacob watching me curiously, but honestly, what he thought of me and my screwed-up family didn’t concern me at all, not when I had a whole night with Dad to contend with. Exhaustion sloughed off me. Contain the situation. That’s all that mattered now.

Jacob hefted the box easily in his arms and asked, “So where to?”

I could have kissed him for ending this land mine–filled conversation. I could have kissed him period. Flushing, I headed for the door. “Follow me,” I said.

Had Norah, Mom, and Dad helped, most everything could have been unloaded from the truck and placed in the kitchen in one trip. But Norah was waylaid by the enormous wreath on the front door. “You made this? You actually made this?” I could hear her say in astonishment.

So Jacob and I hauled the groceries in by ourselves. In the living room, Dad had stationed himself on his leather chair, ostensibly to flip through his usual academic journal. I knew better. He was in a prime location for data gathering, midway between me and Mom.

“Thanks for your help,” I told Jacob softly on the way to the kitchen so Dad couldn’t overhear. When Jacob didn’t answer, I found him standing, transfixed, before the antique maps that lined the hallway, Dad’s prized collection. All good collectors try to say something with their collections, make a statement, express a certain point of view. I could almost hear Dad’s pedantic patter: “The fundamental question all mapmakers have tried to answer — since the Cro-Magnons scratched hunting maps out on cave walls and animal skins — is this: just how big is the world? And how much do I own?” Dad’s viewpoint was clear: move a boundary, and what was yours yesterday is mine today.

Jacob readjusted the ten-pound bags of potatoes and yams in his arms, shifted his weight, and slowly walked the length of the hallway almost sideways so he could study the maps. He set the sacks onto the kitchen counter and said, “There’s one missing.”

“What?”

“You’ve got every continent up there except for Asia.”

“Shhh,” I whispered, and shook my head. I couldn’t help my reaction. No one ever breathed a word about the missing China map, the debunked one that was to blame for our exile here. I glanced nervously through the doorway to see if Dad had overheard. So far, there was no telltale angry rattling of the journal in his hands, no warning narrowing of his eyes. I turned back to Jacob, who was watching me, his face carefully blank.

In a louder voice, one meant to be heard, he said, “Okay, if that’s it, I better roll.”

I nodded.

He lowered his voice to tell me, “So I’ll be here until New Year’s.”

“Great.” I meant it. I remembered what he said about spending Christmas here — no friends, his parents just splitting. Before I knew what I was saying, the offer slipped out of my mouth like a fish from a bear’s jaw, inadvertently released: “If you want someone to show you around — not that there’s much to see, I’d be happy to.”

No answer.

God, what had I just done? Of course, he wouldn’t want to tour around town with me looking like this. I flushed and picked up the potato sack to store it in the pantry. To my surprise, Jacob took the bag from me, trading it for another napkin. He smirked. “It’s clean.”

“What?” Then I saw that he had written his number on the napkin.

I laughed out loud before I thought better of it and before I could tell Jacob that I had a boyfriend. All of my intentions disappeared when Jacob grinned back at me, his eyes bright with amusement. Reluctantly, I followed him outside, telling myself how stupid I was being. He just needed a way to kill time while he was stuck in the Valley.

Too soon, the Fremonts drove away, but not before Norah made plans with Mom for a crash course in Wreath-Making 101. I yearned to call them back. But Mom and I were stuck on the wrong side of our own Mason-Dixon Line, the free world vanishing along with Norah’s rearview lights.

Silently, Mom turned to face the closed front door. With a sigh, she told me, “Go do your homework.”

“Are you kidding?” What if this was the time when Dad lost his control and actually hit Mom? The possibility of that was never far from my mind. “I’m not leaving you, Mom.”

“Would you please listen to me for once?” Without thinking, Mom reached out to cup my face with both hands the way she did when I was little, but she stopped short just as I stepped out of her reach. Still, it stung where she would have touched my cheek, phantom pain same as a missing limb. I knew what she was saying: Dad would have a bigger fit about my face than the car. It’d be best for both of us if I just disappeared.

“Okay,” I said reluctantly.

Mom nodded, fussed with her sweater, yanking it down over her stomach, and walked into the house. I headed for the stairs, but still caught Dad’s grim expression as I hurried past the great room.

“What happened to the car?” he asked Mom.

At the staircase, I couldn’t make myself move the way Mom wanted me to, out of danger’s way. I sat on the bottom step, a cowardly watchdog who knew her duty but was too scared to perform it. On the last night Claudius spent at home before he left for college, he came into my bedroom and told me, “Look out for Mom,” probably the same way Merc had told him five years before that.

“We had to leave the car in Leavenworth,” Mom said so softly I could barely make out her words.

“Why would you do that?”

“We got in an accident. The important thing is we’re okay.”

“So it was Terra’s fault.”

“There was a lot of ice —”

“God, can’t she do one thing right? Either of you?” demanded Dad. “I told you there was no reason to go all the way to Seattle. You could have gone to Wal-Mart in Chelan. But no . . .”

“At least it was just the car.”

“Just the car? Just the car, Lois?”

That was Mom’s tactical error; it always was. Saying too much when she should have stayed quiet, apologizing one time too many, which only magnified the problem. Teachers wondered why I didn’t speak up more in class. Why would I when I knew how precarious words could be, how betraying they were, how vulnerable they made you?

“I didn’t realize we had so much money that we could dismiss the cost of repair so easily. But you wouldn’t know about that, would you, Lois? You get to stay home, eat all day, and do what, exactly, aside from getting fatter? Just the car,” Dad repeated. We had had to economize since Dad quit his last job and was now doing freelance work for a few mapping companies. And now, at last, he called for me, “Terra!”

I shivered as I stood up. Once, when I tried to tell Karin about how scared I was of Dad, she had frowned, asking me: “But he never hits you, right?”

I shook my head. And her face cleared: “So he just yells at you? I know, it freaks me out when my dad yells.”

“Well, he doesn’t actually yell either,” I tried to clarify.

“Then what’s so scary about him?” From her dubious tone alone, I could see how Karin had no idea how terrifying words spoken quietly could be. How words chosen precisely to wreak the maximum damage ticked like a bomb in your head, but exploded in your heart hours later, leaving you scarred and changed.

My stomach churned so badly I felt like throwing up. But I forced myself to round the corner, forced myself to look at Dad. He was still too busy picking at the last fragments of Mom to pay attention to me, but then he turned, his mouth half open like he couldn’t get his barbs out fast enough. Dad flinched when he saw my face, my dark purple face twinned with his quietly enraged one.

He backed into his chair, a rich distressed leather that I remembered Mom agonizing over, it was so ridiculously expensive. But he was “worth it” — Mom’s words.

I waited for Dad to say something, but he didn’t. Silence, too, can be torture.

And finally, he asked, “Did I or did I not expressly forbid any more money to be wasted on your face? Did I or did I not say that nothing would ever change your face? Funny, but I thought I had made myself very clear.” A pause and then very quietly: “Who paid for that?”

There was no way I was about to tell Dad that Mom had found the funds for my surgery somewhere.

“I asked, who paid for that?”

I glanced over at Mom, willing her for once not to say anything. Mistake. Dad intercepted my look.

“Please, God, tell me that you didn’t waste my hard-earned money on that,” Dad said, rolling his magazine and slapping it in his open hand. “Please, God, tell me that I haven’t been scrimping” — thwack! — “and saving” — thwack! — “to put all you kids through college and you flush my money down the drain on” — he waved at my face with his police baton of a magazine — “that.” His face was reddening with every word. “When are you going to accept that nothing you do will make you look normal?”

I sucked in my breath, kept my face immobile. Don’t listen, don’t listen.

“It wasn’t your money,” Mom said finally.

No, Mom. Don’t.

Dad misinterpreted Mom’s statement and glowered accusingly at me. “I see.” A pause, long enough for me to wipe the sweat off my forehead before it trickled onto my sore cheek. “Clearly, you’re stupider” — thwack! thwack! — “than I thought you were to waste your money. Clearly” — thwack! — “you have too much discretionary income. You can pay for the car.”