North of Beautiful (19 page)

I had missed this, hanging out with Claudius, even though most of the time when we had holed up together in this room, it was to get away from Dad and his sharp-shooting comments. My ears pricked up like a guide dog’s now, trained to listen for that telltale edge in Dad’s voice. Right now, it was a mere murmur, hardly louder than the stereo set on low volume as background noise. The critical tone was incessant, but not overly vindictive. I didn’t need to intervene for Mom yet.

My stomach grumbled from missing breakfast, but I wasn’t about to risk a run-in with Dad. “Do you have anything to eat?” I asked Claudius when my stomach gurgled for the second time.

He nodded to his backpack leaning against his chair. “Granola bars. Hand me one, too, would you?”

I stretched, dragged the backpack to me, and poked gingerly inside. You never knew what microscopic — and not so microscopic — beings lived inside boy bags. What I found was a box of granola bars (thankfully, each cryogenically wrapped in plastic) and an envelope inscribed to Claudius from a girl whose handwriting was a charming hodgepodge of upper-and lowercase letters.

“So . . . who’s this from?” I asked, wiggling the card at him as I tossed him his granola bar.

“God, give me that!”

“Hmmm . . . touchy, aren’t we?”

Claudius ignored the granola bar that bounced onto his bed and lunged for the envelope instead. My reflexes were better; I leaned away and switched the envelope to my outside hand, farther out of his reach.

“Watch your hands,” I said. Sometimes — I have to admit it — there’s nothing more satisfying than being a little sister, the brattier the better. I grinned at him. “So spill and I’ll give it to you. Who is she?”

“No one.”

“No one . . . or no one you’re bringing home?”

Claudius shot me an answering smile before falling back onto his pillows. “No one I’m bringing home.”

Victory. A confession. I flicked the envelope at him. “God, what was Merc thinking? That was relationship suicide bringing Elisa here.”

“Maybe that’s what he wanted. How much do you want to make a bet he’s broken up with her already?”

“Pessimist.”

“Twenty bucks.”

I shook my head. “I liked Elisa.”

“Yeah, me, too. But that’s beside the point. Make that fifty bucks. They’re not together anymore.” He made a slashing gesture with his hand. “She’s been deaccessioned.”

That hurt, that reminder of how our family was so screwed up, we couldn’t even share the people we loved with each other. And when we did, Dad removed them from our lives, like fake maps plucked out of a collection. The ambivalent way I was feeling about Erik, he might be on the deaccession path, too, about to be excised from my love life. I had never broken up with a guy before, but I was pretty sure I could find it in a how-to book. Or ask Karin. She was coming home tomorrow, and I couldn’t wait to talk to her. I took the last bite of the granola bar. Claudius was back to his book. This — being incommunicative, feeling isolated even when we were in the same room — wasn’t how I wanted my family to be.

“I’d like to meet your no one,” I told him.

“For sure.”

“No, I mean it, Claudius.”

Nothing.

I kneeled so I could see his face, but he had just turned the page. I didn’t want to let go of our conversation yet, especially when I had so much to say. Like, how come you stopped calling? Like, how come you never answered my calls? Asking those questions was too hard, because I was afraid of his answer.

“Hey, I wanted to show you something,” I said instead. Carefully I removed the yellowing map fragment from my pocket. I hadn’t had a chance to inspect it, and as I handed it to Claudius, I noticed what looked like a snake’s body close to one of the stubbled edges.

Claudius set aside his book, handled the fragile piece delicately. His brow furrowed as he studied it. “Where did you find this?”

“In a geocache on our property.”

“No shit.”

“How do you know about geocaching?”

He shrugged, as if saying, how could you not know? I wondered that myself. Was I so focused on following Merc’s college-to-career path that I never looked around, never saw what was right here?

“So what is it? Do you know?” I sat so close to Claudius I could smell his aftershave (aftershave!). I would have teased him about it, but in a single fluid motion, Claudius swung his legs around me, bounded off his bed to his desk, and plunked himself in front of his notebook computer. As I watched, he Googled an image of the China map, the one I had only heard about but had never thought to seek for myself. He scanned the document until, unerringly as if he knew that map by heart, he found the same coiled snake body in the middle of the ocean. “See? There?”

I did. My piece was part of the sea monster whose head emerged from the water, whiskered like a catfish, cute in an ugly kind of way.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Claudius said, holding up one of his bandaged hands. “I cut my hands on the glass back then, too, when Dad tore the map off the wall. That stopped Dad. He, Mom, and I went to the hospital.”

Did Claudius even hear himself? I stared at his hands, thought about the scar on his right knee from falling off his skateboard when Dad started in on Mom for misplacing his screwdriver. The healed gash on his left arm from the time he fell down the stairs while Dad was grumping about Mom not washing his favorite running shirt before the Cutthroat Classic half marathon. All those cuts, bumps, bruises. Claudius wasn’t clumsy, except on purpose when he had a father to distract. How come none of us had noticed that?

“God, Claudius.” I leaned toward him, willing him to listen. “You don’t need to protect Mom. I’m here.”

“I know.” He looked at me, a glance where guilt mingled with regret, and I knew what he was getting at. It was as close to an apology as I would receive for him pulling back this autumn, retreating from me, cutting us off from each other. But as I stared at those bandages wound around his hands, I didn’t want Claudius to apologize for taking a break and looking out for himself for once.

“You needed time off,” I said.

He shrugged, not admitting the motives behind his self-imposed silence. And then changed the subject fast. “I bet this is part of the China map. It’s got to be.”

“So what happened to the rest of the map? How’d this piece get into that geocache? On our property?” I asked.

“No idea. You could ask Dad.”

“Yeah, right.”

We both rolled our eyes. Neither of us mentioned Merc. He’d just blow off our question; any e-mail we sent would be lost in his overflowing dam of an inbox. And Mom? As usual, she’d be clueless.

“Well,” said Claudius at last. “Good thing Dad doesn’t know about the geocache. He’d hate knowing that people were trooping around the property.”

“That might have been the point.”

Just then, Mom called from the kitchen: “Terra, could you come here for a second?”

As I left Claudius’s room, he said, “Cassie. Her name is Cassie.”

I smiled at him. “Thank you.”

Two days after Christmas, Mom and I were putting away all the decorations while Dad was working out at the club. Claudius had just left to go snowshoeing with some of his friends, his hands too sore to plant the poles for skate skiing. Mom had a specific order for removing and storing each ornament, and I was getting a headache trying to remember which nutcrackers went in which box. Packing had none of the joy and excitement of unpacking. It was pure chore, this sad epilogue to Christmas.

I was relieved when Mom sent me to the kitchen for more packing tape. While I was there, I decided to check my e-mail on the kitchen computer. And there, unexpectedly, was a response from Merc. I bit my bottom lip, forced myself to click on his message with mounting dread. I needn’t have worried. There was no answering emotion, no betraying anger, just a succinct order, signed with his initials: bring mom. mc.

Bring Mom where? I was going to close the e-mail, but I scrolled down and found a confirmation letter from United Airlines for two electronic tickets to China, one for me and the other for Mom.

“Did you find the tape, honey?” Mom asked, coming right up behind me.

I turned to her. “Merc wants us to visit him.”

“Visit him?”

“In China.” I pointed to the e-ticket on the computer screen.

But Mom was already shaking her head. “Oh, I don’t know.”

Her doubt echoed mine. God, the thought of going to China was intimidating. First, I didn’t know the language, not a single word of Chinese. I’d never been on an airplane farther than California, when we went to my Aunt Susannah’s memorial service after her freak bus accident in Guatemala. No one was able to explain adequately what had happened, only that the bus she was traveling in had lost control in the winding mountain road and careened off the cliff. Every person inside had been killed. After that, travel became too precarious for us, uncontained danger lurking at every turn; and for Mom, driving itself transformed into a death wish.

Merc may have sent us those tickets to China, but the chances of his work intervening so he couldn’t show us around were a given. Which meant I would be the one figuring out the routes, the restaurants, the stores, the sites, the train stations, the cabs, the buses. And what would happen if something went wrong? Like getting lost? That, too, was a given.

Unable to watch Mom shake her head and ashamed of my own relief at her automatic, emphatic no, I returned to the computer screen, to the e-tickets reserved for us. I had an inkling what those British P.O.W.s in Germany must have felt back in World War II when escape maps were smuggled to them, sandwiched inside playing cards. How they’d carefully soak the cards in water to get to the precious cargo, those maps made of silk. How they must have been thrilled and terrified, knowing they were holding freedom in their hands. And how daunting their escape into the unknown must have seemed after being cooped in their tiny prisons for so long.

Chapter seventeen

Aphrodite Terra

THE BEST CHRISTMAS PRESENT I received arrived three days late and came wrapped in funereal black. Jacob unfurled out of the dark morning, a bat flying from its roost.

I barely contained my scream as he materialized before me, his footfalls pattering on our graveled driveway. “God, what are you doing here?” And then anticipating his answer, I held up a mittened hand. “Don’t tell me I’m predictable and you knew I’d be out now.”

“Then I won’t, creature of habit.”

“Creature of habit!” I breathed out, mock offended. “For your information, I was going . . .”

I stopped, embarrassed to tell him that I was going geocaching. As I had started out this morning, dissatisfaction wormed itself into me like a beetle attacking the hard heartwood of a tree. I was sick of staying on my normal path, following my regular routine. I was sick of seeing the same things. I yearned for something different. So I had backtracked quietly into the house, checked the geocaching Web site on our kitchen computer, and found more than forty caches in Colville alone. Who knew? Dad kept his battalion of GPS devices around the house, so I pocketed the one from the kitchen junk drawer.

Jacob grinned at me now, so knowingly that my erratic heartbeat had nothing to do with being surprised and everything to do with bubbling anticipation, a distinctly and uncomfortably girlfriend-y feeling that Erik’s presence never elicited. Jacob had come here for me. He had waited for me. And I had him all to myself this morning.

Then I saw his hiking boots. Brown, sturdy, waterproof. And his Gore-Tex jacket. “What is this? Goth goes granola? You almost look . . .”

“Normal?” He batted his eyes, thickly made up.

“Thank God, no.”

“Good, normal is so overrated.”

I laughed, my first real laugh this Christmas season.

“Ready to shake up your routine?” He lowered his own headlamp, flicked it on.

I reached up, flicked it off. “I’m doing that just fine on my own.”

“No one is fine by themselves, Control Freak.” A pause. “So there’s a geocache in town. . . .”

“I’m in.”

The look he gave me . . . My stomach quivered in that exact same way when I watched Before Sunset, yearning for a guy to know me so deeply and truly, we were only really complete when we were together. That I could talk, go on wild tangents, make obtuse references, and he would divine my meaning before I knew what I was trying to say myself. Erik had fallen asleep next to me on the couch, complaining later that the movie was “just people talking.” He had no idea that this movie could have been a love letter written for me.

With that, Jacob placed his hand on the small of my back and led me to his Range Rover. The pressure of his touch through my jacket and my sweater was more assurance than any promise ever made to me. It was a touch that said, I have your back and I am here for you. If a girl wasn’t careful, she could fall in love with a touch like that.

“Memento mori . . . ,” I said as Jacob was poised to log our find onto the mouse-sized paper in the microcache we had just discovered, an old mint tin with a magnet that stuck to the underside of an old thresher. I could still picture the MM he had scrawled at our first find, dark and bold, almost an etching.

His head jerked up, so startled the pencil scarred the paper with a jagged line.

“So, remember that you must die, huh? Morbid.” I sighed, feigning boredom. “A little clichéd, no? I mean, you being Goth and all.”

“Hey, if it’s a good philosophy, it works. Death is imminent. Live every day like it’s your last.”

“Well, yeah, the Romans should have taken that to heart, what with their lead poisoning and all. But did they have to sign all their sculptures with MM?”

“Alright, Control Freak,” he said, “then we need a new name for our team.”

Our team.

“So what do you want to call ourselves?” he asked.

“The reformed Goths?”

“Speak for yourself.” He glanced heavenward, captivated by whatever he saw. He pointed overhead. “You know, Venus was out last night. Did you see it?”

I followed his gaze to the sky, now lightening to a vivid pink. “No. To tell you the truth, stars and planets look the same to me.”