North of Beautiful (22 page)

But here I was, on the way to the airport, hemmed in by Mom’s anxiety, Dad’s guilt treatment, and my own concern: how was it going to be between me and Jacob? I made the mistake of glancing into the rearview mirror. Rather than Dad’s cold glare — I knew he blamed me for taking Mom away — I caught a glimpse of myself. Back in full camouflage, my face looked as heavy as it felt with all my layers of makeup on. My birthmark, despite Mom’s protests otherwise, hadn’t lightened. I wondered what Jacob would make of me covered. Whatever he thought, it couldn’t be worse than him seeing me without any makeup.

We hadn’t talked much when he first left Colville, mostly our moms corresponding with each other, and then me working out the details of our China trip with Norah. But as soon as I made it clear that Mom and I weren’t interested in visiting his orphanage, Jacob began warming to the idea of us touring China together and actually started to offer ideas about what we could do in Shanghai first, then Beijing. The plan was to split up for the last part of the trip, the Fremonts splintering off to Huangzhou to locate Jacob’s orphanage while Mom, Merc, and I went by ourselves to Xi’an to see the terracotta warriors and the starting point of the Silk Road. Then we’d fly home together from Shanghai.

“I labeled all your lunches and dinners in the freezer for you,” Mom murmured from the front seat. “All you have to do is remember to take them out to defrost them.”

“I just hope they won’t get freezer burn.” Dad hacked again, the slight cough that started (conveniently) two days ago had metastasized into volcanic eruptions of his lungs. What Dad needed was a good pounding, not coddling. Clearly, Mom’s nursing gene had skipped me.

Mom cast him yet another worried look. “Are you doing okay?”

“How do I sound” — cough! — “Lois?”

“Maybe you should have another cough drop?” She had already retrieved and proffered the soothing drop before Dad could muster another dramatic death rattle. To his credit, those shoulder shuddering coughs were quite impressive.

I choked down a snicker. Dad overheard. He glowered at me in the rearview mirror, never mind it was Merc who had given us our passage to freedom. I looked resolutely out the window to the Cascade Scenic Highway, newly reopened just two weeks ago. Enough snow had finally melted.

“The steering doesn’t work the way it used to,” Dad grumbled. Another accusatory cough. Another accusatory look.

It was really too bad I couldn’t enjoy the drive, considering that my personal college savings paid for the car’s repair.

Dad went back to sniping at Mom: “Why didn’t you pack the cherry Ricola? You know I hate lemon.” It was as if he finally realized that there was only so much nagging and criticizing you could do from halfway around the planet. So he was making up for it in the here and now.

“Oh, Grant,” Mom sighed, and I willed her to remain silent, not to relent and tell Dad she had reconsidered the trip and would stay at home instead, nurse him back to health.

The upper reaches of the mountains were still thick with snow and the sides of the road were crowded with boulders, evidence of the winter’s crop of avalanches. This early in the morning, there were only a few cars cruising the wending path, mostly obese RVs chugging past us in the opposite direction of the two-lane highway, heading toward our Valley. I wondered briefly if we were making a mistake, Mom and I, taking this trip.

Now Dad was telling Mom, “I just hope you don’t get lost.”

Mom had Dad’s doubt shadowing her. I had Karin’s.

“Is it that Goth guy again?” Karin had demanded a couple of nights ago while we were studying for midterms and my cell phone rang. Jacob was always “that Goth guy” to her — as if her brain, which had instant and accurate recall of every potential Hollywood contact she made, couldn’t retain his name. “God, what is this? The second time you guys talked today?”

“We’re just friends,” I told her, even though my heart sped when I recognized his number. I would have taken the call outside, but it was raining hard. So despite her watchful, disapproving stare, I answered the phone. “Hey.”

“So help me out here,” Jacob said by way of hello. Once he started calling me regularly, our conversations had fallen into a routine; we dispensed with identifying ourselves and opened with a question. Today, his was: “What are you supposed to give your own dad for his wedding present?”

“You got me on that one.”

“I should have commissioned you to make the happy couple a collage.”

“What? Out of a broken dollhouse framed in coffee grounds?”

He chuckled, and I pressed the phone to my ear, wishing I could see him, the way his eyes crinkled at the edges and his entire body bounced when he got laughing hard enough.

Karin or no Karin, I laughed, too.

“God, Trouble Magnet, you’re terrible,” he said, teasing, approving.

“Me? I’m never terrible.”

But the way Karin stared at me from her bed, I was. I turned my body totally away from her.

“As if we’re not going to have Chinese food for the next week and a half,” he said, “Mom’s friends are taking us for a bon voyage meal at a Chinese restaurant tonight.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Nah. Afterward, Mom will have a page-long list of complaints about how Americanized the food was and all that. Don’t let her blond hair fool you. She prides herself on being more Chinese than the Chinese. Just wait until we get to China.”

“I can’t wait.” From the corner of my eye, I caught Karin’s frown. Disgruntled, she abandoned the math book to check her teeth compulsively in the mirror. She had been white stripping them on and off since Christmas. “Everyone had gleaming white smiles in LA!” I was surprised she had any enamel left.

“So,” said Jacob, “what’re you doing tonight — other than unpacking and repacking?”

“I knew I shouldn’t have told you that!” I protested, but I was smiling. That is, I was until Erik honked from the driveway. I could lie, ply myself with excuses why there never was the perfect opportunity to tell Jacob about Erik. But here it was; a chance that couldn’t have been better scripted. Even Karin sensed the moment, narrowing her eyes at me meaningfully then, instead of at her reflection.

Tell him, I thought to myself. Tell Jacob that I have a boyfriend. That Erik is leaving for Montana with his family tomorrow morning to get an early start on spring break and we are saying goodbye to each other tonight.

But I didn’t. The truth was hard to admit: I hadn’t broken up with Erik because I was afraid that no one else could possibly want me. If Erik was my “stretch” boyfriend — the one Karin and everyone thought was a stretch for me — then Jacob was well beyond my reach, residing as he was in the realm of impossibility. He was urbane, jet-setting, wealthy (for God’s sake, he stayed at the River Rock Lodge for a week and a half!). What would he want with me? In all of our conversations, he had never once stepped over the line to hint at even being attracted to me.

Another honk outside; I could read Erik’s impatience in it. “Look,” I said hastily, “I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later.”

As soon as I hung up, Karin was shaking her head while leading the way downstairs. “Erik is here. Right here. That Goth guy” — she spun around on the landing to point accusingly at my cell phone as if it was the culprit himself — “was a tourist. He’s in Seattle. Five hours away.”

“I know that.”

“Five hours,” she repeated, as though I didn’t know. As though I wouldn’t ever be worth a minute of anyone’s commute. “Okay, so forget Erik for a second. Why would you start something now with a guy who’s still going to be in high school when you’re off in college? It doesn’t make any sense. And how can you be going all the way to China with him? You don’t even know him.”

The small details of Jacob’s life — who his friends were, what his favorite movie was — those may have been unknown to me still. But they were topographical features I could fill in later. We knew each other — or at least, he knew me — in all the ways that truly mattered, the shape of my fears, the contours of my dreams. Everything, I thought guiltily, except for one thing: I had a boyfriend who was waiting for me in the driveway.

As usual, Erik didn’t notice me until I was inside his truck, his loud music crowding me to the door. Our regular routine. I wanted to jump out of my skin, I felt so stifled. Between the music that I didn’t even like to all of my false assurances — “I’ll break up with Erik tomorrow” — and all the lame excuses for why today wasn’t the day to end our relationship, I was suffocating. And shocked that he was still my boyfriend just as Mom was stunned that she hasn’t lost an ounce since Christmas and Karin that she hasn’t toned her thighs. Inertia is so easy — don’t fix what’s not broken. Leave well enough alone. So we end up accepting what is broken, mistaking complaining for action, procrastinating for deliberation.

So what if Karin was right? What if distance had only made my heart grow fonder? I now stared unseeing at the long line of cars stretched in front of us on the highway while Dad barked out his coughs, each one making Mom flinch in the front seat. Maybe my conversations with Jacob were nothing but spiderwebs, sparkling with the fresh dew of newness, stringing us together, but gaping with holes? Karin had a point. Five hours away was still five hours away. We hadn’t seen each other once since Christmas. And he still had a year left in high school; I was heading to college.

I didn’t have to wonder for much longer how it would be when Jacob and I were finally together again.

We arrived at the SeaTac airport.

Dad maneuvered cautiously across three lanes, so slowly he lost our place at the curb, not once but twice. Through the gap between his seat and Mom’s, I could see how he gripped the steering wheel, the sinews of his hands ridge lines of impotent furor. That’s how his temper worked. It pushed out of him like newly formed mountains.

“It’s okay, Grant. We’ve got plenty of time,” soothed Mom.

Dad made an impatient, silent gesture at her to shush. Berating Mom should have been second nature, but apparently thinking up all those precisely aimed insults commanded more brain power than I had assumed. He had lost his cough, too, I noticed.

Once parked, Dad shot out of the car. I followed him more slowly to the trunk, where he was efficiently hauling out Mom’s tote bag and my backpack, our two other pieces of wheeled luggage, and throwing them like so much garbage onto the ground. Dad didn’t breathe hard from the effort of ejecting us.

I lugged the bags to the curb, feeling every ounce of our jackets, extra medication, and back-up shoes. Norah had cautioned us to pack light. But how do you do that when you need to be prepared for all the emergencies and tragedies Dad had so generously shared with us?

“All right, everyone, move on!” the traffic cop shouted, blowing his whistle. He pointed at us. Dad waved I know at him before hissing at Mom, who was checking her purse: “Hurry up, Lois.”

What she was looking for, I don’t know. I myself had triple-checked that both of us had our passports, tickets, and boarding passes.

“People are waiting.” Dad aimed a sycophantic smile at the traffic cop, who was now glaring at us.

“Oh! Sorry!” Mom apologized automatically. Her forehead and nose glistened with sweat and oil.

“Wipe your face.” Dad mimed the motion roughly. She could have been a toddler, incapable of focusing on a simple set of verbal directions.

Mom pulled out a Kleenex, dabbed her face as she was told. Still, she made no move to vacate the car, a panic attack away from calling this trip off, I could tell. I abandoned the luggage at the curb and held out my hand to Mom, waited for her to take it. For a moment, she hesitated. Then, relieved, I felt her smooth palm, her soft fingers that were too wide for her wedding ring, slip into mine. I eased her out to me.

As soon as I shut the passenger door, Dad ducked his head so I couldn’t read his face.

“You have everything,” he said, not quite command, not quite question.

“Everything that we need,” said Mom.

The cop’s whistle blew again. Dad jogged to the driver’s side, but not before I saw an odd shifting in his face. Under his shellacked irritation was something else. Not quite regret. More like loneliness. I hadn’t seen that expression before. Or maybe, I thought as Dad gazed out the window at Mom for one brief moment, it was just that I had never allowed myself to notice it.

The car engine started with a burst of burnt smoke. The way Dad drove off, you would have thought he was making a quick getaway with a couple of hot maps, newly stolen, in the backseat.

Mom stared after Dad’s car like she had misplaced something.

“He’s not good at goodbyes,” she explained to me softly.

“I know,” I chimed in the wake of Mom’s excuse. I was just as guilty of burnishing our family’s outward perfection as she was. “Ready?”

She crossed her arms, chilled more from Dad’s abrupt departure than the pleasant spring breeze. I swung my backpack onto my shoulders and rolled the two suitcases behind me, one in each hand. That left Mom with the lightest tote bag and her purse. As we were swept into the airport filled with people who knew where they were going, I kept close to Mom, my hot map that I refused to lose.

Chapter nineteen

Orienteering for girls

ONCE THROUGH THE SECURITY LINE, I bent down to retie my sneakers, making a note to travel in slip-on shoes the next time. Next time? Swaddled in my thick sweatshirt and wool socks (Lydia had warned me that airplanes were always cold), I was sweating. Profusely. Focused on collecting all our bits, I couldn’t have cared less if my makeup was streaking. Travel was so overrated.

Naturally, our gate had to be the farthest possible point from where we stood. I waited for Mom, who had plopped herself down on a bench, legs splayed, to put on her shoes. Almost without realizing it, I scanned the crowd for a Goth guy and his mom, even though we had agreed to meet at the gate. When Mom straightened, she was huffing, proving that traveling was heavy exertion. Up ahead, an upscale food court gleamed, an oasis after the security detail. Grayish light filtered in through the windowed wall, spanning three stories of sheer glass.