Nature of Jade (6 page)

The Abe homework is harder than it seems. I narrow it down to the west coast (no way I want to go farther), choose only sunny climates (I like Abe's palm tree idea, and besides, I'm one of those people who are cold all the time). I narrow it further to colleges with animal studies programs.

It's all getting complicated and overwhelming. University of California Dauis, I write down, though it looks huge and busy and crowded. Uniuersity of Arizona, smaller, thank God, and because I love the desert. Uniuersity of New Mexico. Same reasons, smaller yet. Animal studies and cool adobe architecture. And I write down Uniuersity of Hawaii, just because it sounds warm and daring, though it's a bit like those posters in hair salons--hip, unusual styles that look possible in the hair spray scented, pop music

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fortified moment of why-not, but that you know have nothing to do with your real life.

By the time I'm done, my head hurts and my nose has gotten so clogged my sinuses feel like the human body equivalent of a sofa cushion. I think I might have a fever. I go downstairs to find Mom, who has ingredients for tacos spread across the counter. She's grating cheese onto a paper towel, the shredded orange growing into a pyramid.

"Am I hot?" I ask.

"Not you, too. Just when Oliver's feeling okay . . . Boy, I thought he'd never get better."

Oliver had used the alibi as long as he could, but now he was back at practice. Maybe that's what you get for faking someone's illness--a real one. Mom sets down the grater, wipes her hand on a kitchen towel. She sets her hand to my head. "Nope. You feel fine."

I have the small, backstage thought, If I'm sick, it might be the flu, and if it's the flu, am I nauseous? Just this small thought, which begins as a spiral somewhere inside, a wide circle, which will grow ever smaller. Smaller and tighter. Tighter and faster.

"Are you sure I'm not hot?" See, my chest. Got tight. Like I was running. Out of air. Like I'd just.

Run up. This huge hill. In the cold.

"You're fine, Jade. You've got a cold," Mom says. "An annoying but harmless cold." "I've got to . . ." "Are you all right?" "Lie down."

I head back up to my room, knock three times, sit on my bed. See, you come to understand this thing, come to notice it when

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the circle of thought is still wide. You catch it, before it starts spiraling so fast, so fast upward to where it clutches your heart and grabs your throat so you can't breathe and you're sweating and about to pass out. I find the quiet place in my mind that Abe taught me about. For me it is the desert, empty and calm. No sea, no tidal waves that sometimes visit my dreams. Just the desert, and cacti, and other plants and animals that have adapted to a harsh environment, hardy and long living, from the time of the dinosaurs. I breathe in, and out. Picture red and rolling forever desert.

I knock out of my thoughts the huge cement campuses and pictures of shiny glass buildings and enormous libraries. Enrollment forms, campus tours--out. I knock out the secret thoughts that still visit, even if I know they're illogical. That I really am about to die. That I've been right all along, only no one's discovered what's wrong yet. Desert. Just the dry desert, sprawling and timeless. Creatures evolving and surviving throughout thousands and thousands of years.

Breathe in and out, and the shakiness subsides, and the sense that I can feel and hear my own heartbeat diminishes. In and out, now is all that matters, and now, this minute, everything is okay.

I decide not to have dinner, and then decide to eat a little. If I don't eat, I will certainly feel more nauseous. So, dinner and then my homework while I watch for the boy. I'm guessing this will be a night-visit day, as it was last week.

"You know, you need to be more aggressive out there, Oliver," Dad says at the table. His head is tilted sideways as he bites his taco. Oliver still has his football shoulders on. "You've got to hustle if you want to stay open."

"Bruce," my mom says.

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"What? I don't see the point in us going out there to practice and play if he's going to hang back and not give it everything he's got," Dad says. He eats his taco in twenty seconds flat, which is the way you've got to do it. Still, he ends up with a plate littered with bits of meat and lettuce.

Milo's under the table, wearing his wishing-and-hoping eyes.

"Maybe football's not his thing," Mom says.

"Football's not my thing," Oliver says.

"I don't think basketball's his thing either. Or soccer," I say.

"I'm not going to have my son be one of those kids who sits in front of the TV or computer all day," Dad says. "You guys really have no idea of the importance of athletics." He holds up a finger. "Social skills." A second finger. "Mental well-being." A third. "Physical health."

I take my Kleenex out of my sweatshirt pocket and blow my nose loudly.

"God," Dad says. "You guys don't have a clue."

"Uh-oh. You said 'God,'" I say.

Dad looks at me like I'm nuts.

"I certainly must need some basketball myself, since right now my mental well-being is suffering," Mom says. Her mouth is cinched upward in a sarcastic smile, but her eyes look hurt at the way he included her in the clueless camp. I feel a pang of sadness for her. Sports Dad can be such an asshole. I pet Milo with my foot. Drop him a bit of meat, though I know I shouldn't. I blow my nose again, meanly wishing the germs toward Dad's perfect, athletic, physically and mentally healthy self.

"Sis, you need the Flask of Healing," Oliver says.

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I help Oliver with the dishes and listen to him explain how Asian means lion in Turkish, and how Lucy spends more time in Narnia than any of the other human characters, four hours longer than Edmund. I hear the shi-shu, shi-shu of Dad sawing something downstairs. Mom leaves for a PTA meeting, leaving dueling puffs of perfume and mint in the air. Milo is turning in circles, waiting for the right view before he plops down.

I do my homework, then lie on my bed with the light out, watching the computer. I think about the day, about Jenna and Michael and Hannah, about Mom and Dad and Oliver and anxiety and palm trees and deserts. It seems right then that my world is very small. Small enough to fit inside a cage, small enough that it's as if it has a lock that I cannot see.

The boy finally comes into view on the screen, that known/unknown figure, wrestling with his own questions. I close my eyes, so it feels like we are just two people in a room, thinking quietly together. The sea boy and the desert girl. We both have decisions to make, it seems.

And so I decide something. I decide that I don't want to live in a cage. I decide my world should be bigger than that. That's when I know that after school tomorrow I am going to the elephant house. I am going to go and see what happens if we meet, because I can handle it. I can take any step I want and be okay.

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CHAPTER FOUR

In captivity, an animal will sometimes create unnecessary problems or challenges for himself to solve. A lion will pretend to "chase" its food by throwing it in the air. A raccoon will search for food in a stream, even if he lacks a stream. He'll drop his food in his water bowl, hunt for it as if it is not right there in front of him. Then he'll pummel it, "kill" it, and finally fish it out . . .

--Dr. Jerome R. Clade, The Fundamentals of Animal Behavior

When I get home from school, I whip my shirt off and change. It's a cold, rainy day, and they'd had the heat turned up too high in the building and I feel sweaty and damp. I'm thinking maybe I should just wait and go to the zoo another day. One, it's raining, and by the time I walk over there my hair will look like shit. Two, I still have my cold, and my eyes are hot and tired and I have to blow my nose every two seconds. Three, I have a lot of homework, which isn't unusual, but still. Four, the shirt I just put on looks bad and is wrinkled, and figuring out what else to wear suddenly seems as monumental as a death in the family.

So, I plunk on my bed and take my shoes off, and this little feeling of self-disgust starts to creep up my insides. I try to ignore it by popping a few of those miniature Halloween chocolate bars that my Mom has bought early. I'd seen them on the counter and wouldn't have had any without asking,

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except I'd noticed that she'd already poked a hole through the bag herself.

I'm opening up my third baby Snickers and the self-disgust is not drowning out as it's supposed to, but getting worse. It makes me more restless, and damn it, I get my shoes back on. Oh, man, I get up and look in my closet again and try to find something that I don't hate myself in, because I guess I'm going to the zoo after all. Me and myself try to talk I into not going, but uh-uh. Black sweater. Armpits smell fresh. No wrinkles. I look pretty good in it. To the bathroom, brush the chocolate out of my teeth reluctantly. It's tough to go from all of that gooey, chewy comfort to the businesslike sharpness of toothpaste. Comb out my long hair. Pull it back? Keep it down.

Ponytail? I look at myself as if I've never seen me before, or else I try to. Black hair, dark eyes, narrow face. I keep my hair down, as I look older that way. He's got a baby. He might have a wife. Wife is a word that means that all of this dress-up is just teenage playacting. I feel the difference between teen and adult, a difference that usually just seems like an annoying technicality. But now it feels real enough that I get this jolt of stupid-and-ashamed at the fact that I'm putting on lip gloss.

Actually, this is stupid, I'm sure. He's got a baby. What does this mean for his life that he has a baby at his age? And what if he's not as young as he looks? What kind of fool would I be then?

What if he asks me to babysit, like the old Brady Bunch episode where Marsha gets a crush on the dentist?

Mom's downstairs, looking for something in the coat closet. She's got that pissy, can't-find-it distraction.

"Where're you going?" she asks.

"Just the zoo. Fresh air."

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"Drive carefully," she says.

"I'm walking. The zoo." It's two blocks away. I don't know if she wasn't really listening, or if she's doing the suburban thing again. Where we used to live, Sering Island (a suburb of Seattle), people drive their cars everywhere they go. If they have to mail a letter a block away, they drive.

In the city, you walk. In the time it takes to find a parking space, you can go on foot, do whatever you're planning to do, and get home.

I'm not sure my mother has ever forgiven my father for the move from Sering Island, and I'm not sure he's ever forgiven her for not forgiving him. We moved to the city when my father got a new job with Eddie Bauer. It's not like Sering Island is far enough from Seattle to make commuting an issue (it's only a twenty-minute drive in good traffic), but my dad had always wanted to live in the city. He had this idea of us broadening our cultural scope (being buddies with people who have henna tattoos), seeing films (instead of just going to the movies), eating fine food (not fast food). This was a way to build a healthy intellect along with our healthy bodies. He wanted it so badly that he pushed the issue hard, and so we moved.

My mother had a full-blown passive-aggressive episode about us going--Sering Island has the best schools in the area, and the only serious crime occurred in 1983, when the ex-Mrs.

Drummond brought home a young drifter she'd met in a bar and ended up getting murdered.

Several decades later, people still talked about it. The only other crime news to gossip about was the two hundred dollars that got stolen from Janey Edwards's BMW, and everyone knew her son Zenith did it anyway. Sering Island was safe. Besides that, Mom had channeled the energy and organizational skills from her left-behind business

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degree and had become PTA vice president at my middle school. A move meant she'd have to build up her reputation from the bottom, the CEO going back to the mailroom, as she put it.

She'd have to attend every poster-making meeting and chaperone every field trip, even the inevitable one to the Puyallup Fair, which she hated. Her friends at school didn't like going in to the city. Besides that, she'd have to find a new post office and craft store. Figure out which grocery store had the best produce. Leave the comfort and reassurance of the suburbs.

Funny thing is, three years after our move, Mom is busier with school projects than ever, and Dad only comes out of the basement for his own or Oliver's sporting events. I don't think he really likes the city. We went to one foreign film, got there late, and had to sit in the back. Dad forgot his glasses, so he couldn't read the subtitles. We went to one Ethiopian restaurant, and Dad seemed vaguely uncomfortable eating with his hands, using up more napkins than the rest of us combined. The food was actually good, even the pile of brown stuff that looked like what Milo used to leave on the carpet when he was a puppy. I think city life just turned out not to be Dad's thing after all, but now he can't admit he was wrong about moving, and Mom can't admit she was wrong about moving either.

"Take the car," Mom says to the inside of the closet. "It's raining. You don't want to catch pneumonia."

Milo trots to the door, gives me a pleading look. "I'm sorry," I say. Milo's the kind of dog you are always apologizing to. I close the front door behind me, ignore Mom about the car. We live in a brick townhouse built in the 1920s, one of ten joined together in an open oval, which surrounds a center rose garden and fountain. It's smaller than my old house--less 55

modern, but more charming, with its intricate molding around the ceilings and windows, and its elaborate fireplace and stairwell. Everyone knows one another. There are the Chens next door, with little Natalie and the new baby, Sarah; old Mrs. Simpson, with her bird feeders and favorite Energizer Bunny sweatshirt her kids gave her for her eightieth birthday; and Ken Nicholsen, with the perfect house, inside and out. Hank and Sally Berger, who treat their parrot like a kid. It's a comfortable, safe place.

I walk down the porch steps and through the garden. When you leave our enclave, it's city houses and the Union 76 station and Total Vid, the video store where Titus, one of the guys who works there, always tries to rent you his favorite movie, even if you've seen it before. Riding Giants is this surfing movie, and Dad's brought it home three times now because Titus is so convincing, even with his bleach-blond hair and favorite/only attire of jeans and a T-shirt with a large pineapple on it that cryptically reads juicy pineapple. Total Vid has, I swear, a hundred copies of Riding Giants, since Titus tells everyone how gnarly and bitchin' it is. Anyone in Total Vid's radius knows more about surfing history than the average person.