North of Beautiful (14 page)

But Jacob didn’t probe, following up instead with a harder question, “Why does his opinion matter so much to you?”

That, I had never considered, and I flung back into my seat from the impact of his question. Why did all of us, my brothers included, run around in half-panic, trying to please Dad, especially when cajoling a single compliment out of him was harder than getting him to part with a dollar?

“For someone who’s not afraid of your dad’s opinion, you’re treading pretty damn close to his footsteps,” continued Jacob.

I frowned at him, offended. “God, why would you say that?”

“You’re both mapmakers.” Jacob waved his hand around my studio, at Mom’s collage, at the others on the floor. All littered with pieces of world maps. Reproductions of antique maps. Cross-country ski maps. Except for one: my Beauty Map. For that, I only included the inhabitants, the beautiful people.

Dad’s work was purely high-tech, coding the software for global positioning systems, first for the military back in the eighties and then spinning off to do consulting work for software mapping companies.

“I’m using maps, not making them,” I corrected him.

“I don’t know. Looks like you’re creating your own atlas. Except you don’t sign yours.”

My instinct was denial, but I was drawn to Mom’s collage again, the map of her life reduced to a floor plan of our kitchen, bounded by her four points of reference: the refrigerator, pantry, stovetop, oven. Hers, all the ones stacked on the floor, my Beauty Map — none of them were signed; none included a mapmaker’s cartouche, that highly embellished mark that contains the cartographer’s name, date, even the person who commissioned the piece.

Jacob cocked his head to the side. “The question is, where’s your map?”

I opened my mouth, closed it without a word. The studio, tiny to start with, hemmed in on me now. I was embarrassed, didn’t want him to see my map of beautiful hidden behind Mom’s collage. In our silence, I swear, I heard this conversation — his questions — reverberate with the perfect pitch of a hard truth I had no desire to hear. I pushed away from the desk hard and stood up, trembling.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

Jacob went silent, which surprised me. I figured him for a last word kind of guy. So I peered up at his unsmiling face. And then he did the unthinkable in my family: he apologized.

“Sorry,” he said, shaking his head ruefully. “Mom says if I don’t muzzle it, I’m going to be persona non grata with more than my school administration.”

“Let me guess. You were a pain in their ass, too.”

“Pretty much. They asked our multimedia teacher to censor our newspaper. So we started a blog and a manga column instead, which got shut down, too. And then I talked about censorship in my speech in competition.”

“Competition?”

“Speech and Debate. I do oratory. And Lincoln-Douglas debate.”

“Don’t you get scared?”

“About what?”

“Talking in public.” Being wrong. Exposing your beliefs. Pick your poison. Those were all mine.

“You get used to it. You’d be a great debater,” he said.

I shook my head. “Are you kidding? That’d be my nightmare.”

“Look at you.”

“What?”

Jacob gestured at Mom’s collage. “You’re not afraid of making statements either.”

But he was wrong. Making statements in the privacy of my studio was one thing; declaring them in public something else entirely.

Chapter thirteen

Boreas

MOM’S WREATH-MAKING EXTRAVAGANZA WITH NORAH must have inspired her. Just four days later, our house had officially become an oversized Chia Pet, sprouting bushy garlands around every door, window, and staircase. It was Christmas Eve, and I wasn’t sure where else Mom was planning to hang these new boughs now blocking the mudroom door. Perhaps around Claudius’s and Merc’s necks as Pacific Northwest leis. I nudged the greenery aside so I could push the door open, slightly annoyed, but I couldn’t blame Mom; I was excited for my brothers to come home, too, for our first family Christmas since Merc moved to China two years ago.

Once inside, I stamped my feet on the rag rug on the mudroom floor to dry my boots before kicking them off. Nothing irritated Dad more than stepping into a puddle of melting snow in his socks. The thick scent of evergreen forest, freshly baked bread, and garlic, lots of garlic, practically assailed my nose. Before I had left this morning for Nest & Egg, I popped eight oiled heads of garlic, carefully wrapped in an aluminum foil cocoon, into the oven, worrying that that wouldn’t be enough for all the dishes Mom had been planning. From its pungent scent, Mom had roasted more.

Even though my stomach was distended from my annual Christmas Eve breakfast with the Twisted Sisters at the gallery, I started anticipating Mom’s brunch spread. Which was sick. I made a mental note to eke some time before dinner for a hard, fast snowshoe.

On my way to the kitchen, I nearly tripped, swearing under my breath until I spotted the culprits lying innocently on the floor: two battered hiking boots, each the size of a sleeping dog.

“Claudius!” I cried eagerly, sprinting down the hall, and collided head-on into what felt like a flannel-wrapped wall. Before I knew it, I was swept into my brother’s long arms, but his hug morphed so fluidly into a choke hold, it barely qualified as affection.

“Hey, I can’t breathe!” I protested, and batted his hands away, feeling the familiar ridgeline of scars from one accident or another. For someone who made a hobby of strangling, pummeling, or otherwise threatening me with death by mortification, Claudius was the biggest klutz on the planet. Masochistic, probably, but I missed his torture — and Merc’s. Still, I wasn’t their easy victim. With a deft move I had learned from watching countless wrestling matches, I almost elbowed Claudius in the gut, but he whirled me around at the last second. So all I got was air.

“Careful of her face,” Mom cautioned softly from the stovetop.

Instantly, Claudius released me, and I could have been in elementary school again, him terrorizing me until Mom berated him with that single hated phrase: careful of her face.

I wasn’t above taking advantage of our mom-made distraction and punched Claudius in the shoulder. My hand made contact with new muscle. “Ouch.” I shook out my stinging hand. “Since when do you work out?”

Claudius curled his bicep so it bulged beneath his flannel shirt. “Squeeze,” he said.

I wrinkled my nose. “No, thanks.”

“Come on, squeeze.”

“Really, no.”

My brother — The Klutz, Dad called him ever since he broke his ankle on a stationary bike — now shrugged, a careless lift of his shoulders that would have shook his entire bony body the couple of times I saw him last summer. He claimed the brutal hours at his internship in Seattle made it impossible to drive home on the weekends. Right. I’d seen his pictures on MySpace, and let’s just say, he wasn’t filing papers all day, every day. Apparently, he wasn’t just guzzling beer either. It was as if these last months away from Dad had breathed manhood into Claudius, filling him out in his sophomore year at college. Equal parts of envy and urgency flooded me: I had to get out of here, too.

“Yo, Raisinette —”

Can anyone blame me for aiming a punch at Claudius for using that nickname? Too bad he ducked my blow. When had he gotten so quick on his feet?

“I thought you were done with laser surgery?” he asked, frowning.

I turned to Mom, my getaway vehicle. “I’ll plate the food, okay?”

“That’d be great, honey,” she said.

Claudius followed me to the kitchen island, unrelenting: “You looked fine.” For all his teasing, he was the only one in the family who questioned my treatments. In fact, once when he found me sitting cross-legged in front of the one full-length mirror at home, he had dropped to the floor next to me.

“I’d miss your face if you changed it,” he had said, and probably added an insult in the next breath, though I can’t remember what exactly.

Whether I was six or sixteen, I wished I could believe him. But just as his namesake, Claudius Ptolemy, had seriously underestimated the size of Earth in his landmark atlas, Geographia, my brother seriously underestimated the magnitude of the port-wine stain on my life. And Mom’s.

“Hey, aren’t you going to say hi to me?” asked Merc, materializing from his old bedroom, his hair standing up like he had just awoken from a nap. Where Claudius and I took after Dad with our height and bony features, Merc was all Mom — huge puppy dog eyes with brown curls, now shot with gray. When had he gotten so old?

Anyway, Merc wasn’t supposed to get in until tomorrow, Christmas morning, and I had planned to move my clothes and makeup back to my old closet-sized room upstairs later today for his visit. I gasped, “What are you doing here?”

“Great to see you, too.” Merc rolled his eyes, but I caught the smile in them. “We hopped on an earlier flight. Claudius picked us up on his way here.”

“We?” I asked.

“What do you mean, on my way here? More like a three-hour detour.” Claudius snorted while popping a mini-muffin in his mouth. Without warning, he broke into his trademark victory dance, an odd mixture of turkey-head bobbing and gangly arm movements, thankfully unwitnessed since his middle school days. He crowed, “Who’s the favorite brother?”

“Please tell me you don’t do that in college,” I said. I couldn’t resist mimicking him, jerking my body convulsively, too. Even Mom took a break from her stirring to laugh.

Naturally, that had to be the moment when the reason behind the “we” in Merc’s usual “me” stepped out of the bedroom. The short woman tucked her pixie-cut hair behind one ear and blinked groggily for a better look at our antics.

“You must be Terra,” she said.

Embarrassed, I dropped my arms, straightened my body. Not Claudius. He seizure-danced his way to her. I didn’t mean to stare — I’m sure anyone would have — and this is saying something: it wasn’t his “dancing” that had me gawking, openmouthed. It was the woman who was laughing — now hiding behind Merc to stay out of Claudius’s reach. First off, she wasn’t Merc’s usual type, the extreme athlete who played varsity sports year-round. You know the girls: the ones with messy ponytails who always looked like they’d either just finished working out or were on their way to the gym, the soccer field, the ski slopes. The ones who actually considered a field hockey stick or tennis racquet their favorite accessory. The ones who enjoyed shopping for swimsuits.

This woman was soft. Round. She exuded style from her orange glasses to her brown suede boots. Her brown hair was coiffed, for God’s sake. Her orangey minidress was decidedly edgy, one that would wear the wearer if she weren’t confident. But she wore it easily, not minding that her stomach pooched out or that her thighs were a mite wide for such a short dress.

“Elisa, this clown is my kid sister,” said Merc, and my brother, who I’ve never seen so much as brush shoulders with any of his girlfriends, actually held her hand. Uncomfortable because I felt like I was intruding on an intimate moment, I strode hastily over to Mom, where she was removing a pungent casserole from the oven.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Elisa push her glasses higher on her thin nose, assessing me as frankly as I had her. I couldn’t help it. I wrenched around, headed for the refrigerator, wishing I was armored in full makeup. It had been a week since my laser surgery, and while my cheek had calmed down to a claret red instead of figgy purple, there was still only so much makeup could hide. And trust me, I had tried.

But then Elisa disarmed me: “The way Merc talks about you, I have to confess, I’m nervous.”

“You have nothing to be nervous about,” I said.

“You can say that again,” muttered Claudius.

I would have punched him, but he darted well out of my range, now at the table, waiting for food like an oversized Great Dane.

“I hope everyone’s hungry,” Mom said, handing two plates to me, each heaped with a large wedge of spinach strata, weeping with melted blue cheese. As she waddled back to the stovetop, Mom said, “So Elisa is from Quebec. She’s a lawyer, too.”

“Was a lawyer,” Elisa corrected.

“Who could swear at her clients fluently in English, French, and Mandarin,” said Merc.

Elisa laughed, bumped her hip against Merc’s. My normally reserved brother — ex-girlfriends’ claimed corpses were less stiff than him — pulled her close, tucking her under his chin. I exchanged a look with Mom: what alien was inhabiting his body? She smiled back at me, obviously approving of the takeover. I did, too.

“I have my curriculum vitae, too,” said Elisa, “if anyone needs to reference-check.”

“Dad will,” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t. Mom checked the clock nervously.

“Where is he, anyway?” asked Merc as he dropped Elisa’s hand.

For Merc to have to ask, he obviously had been away from home too long. I wanted the luxury of forgetting, too.

“Working out,” Mom, Claudius, and I answered at the same time, trained clockwatchers, all of us.

“On Christmas Eve?” Elisa grabbed the next set of plates from Mom. “That’s dedication.”

No, it was stubborn determination, nothing less. Same thing that got me out of bed every morning.

My cell phone rang loudly; I had forgotten I had turned it to full volume so I would hear it above the loud crunching of snow beneath my running snowshoes.

“Someone doesn’t want to miss a call,” said Claudius.

Actually, someone wanted to miss a call, even if I wanted the satisfaction of receiving it. I wasn’t sure who I was avoiding more — Erik for not knowing me at all, or Jacob for knowing me too well. What he’d said, how he’d challenged me in my studio scared me. In either case, I hadn’t answered their calls in the last couple of days. Gingerly, I pulled my phone out of the kangaroo pocket in front of my polar fleece pullover. Erik. I hastily set the phone on the table. But I had forgotten how fast Claudius could be; he snatched it from beside my plate before I even reached for it.

“Why are you still going out with that bonehead?” he asked, disapprovingly, eyeballing the caller ID.

“Which bonehead?” jumped in Merc. “You’re dating someone?”