North of Beautiful (38 page)

The tea had steeped for too long in the hot water. No doubt, it’d be a bitter brew, but I poured Dad his mug of tea, placed it on the table. Only then did I see the box I had opened blindly. Iron Goddess.

“What are you doing, Lois?” demanded Dad, ignoring the tea to stalk toward Claudius’s bedroom.

Mom didn’t answer, waiting calmly for me to find safety in my bedroom. When I was at my door, she nodded. “Good night, Grant.” And only then did she close the door. Do not cross this line.

“What? Why should I have gone grocery shopping?” Dad demanded. “You were the ones gallivanting off on vacation. I had to do all the work around here.”

Even from my bedroom, I heard the click as Mom locked the door. Her answer was all too clear: I don’t trust you.

And then I did the same.

At first, I waited for Dad to pound on her door, threaten to break mine down. Certainly, we must have had the key to these bedrooms lying around somewhere.

Nothing.

I slumped against the door, listening, remembering every story I had ever read about fathers snapping and killing their families.

Still nothing.

And then it occurred to me that maybe Mom didn’t need my protection as much as I thought she did. She couldn’t have drawn her line more clearly. Her line that said, From here you do not cross. From here I will not budge.

She’ll be fine, Norah had assured me in China. For the first time, I allowed myself to truly believe that my mother just might be fine. And I was free to breathe.

Chapter thirty-three

True North

ACCORDING TO KARIN’S WEEKLY PODCAST, Love and Hate in High School, thou shalt not call a boy more than once a day, preferably every other day if one must. Broke that rule by nine that night. Not that it mattered. I kept ringing directly into Jacob’s voicemail. It was probably for the best; how many ways can you say you’re sorry? How many times can you try to explain yourself before your excuses sounded more and more like guilt-ridden rationalization?

At the very least, I would have thought that jet lag would knock me out. But between Mom’s snores rumbling from Claudius’s bedroom and my habituated listening for Dad, I couldn’t sleep. I flipped over, covered my head with my pillow, and finally flung it to the floor. The clock read two. I sighed and decided I might as well be productive. As I powered on my computer, I could almost hear Jacob teasing me about it: are you always this compulsive?

Well, yes. You know that . . . just as you knew I hated roses.

Impatient at myself for pining like the pathetic boy-centric girl I vowed I would never be, I grabbed my camera from my backpack and downloaded all five hundred and twenty-two of my China photos. If anything, reviewing the pictures made the trip seem even more distant than it really was. We had said zaijian to China less than twenty-four hours ago.

There was Mom and me at Sea-Tac Airport, the one Norah had taken of us at the gate, waiting to board. We looked way more nervous than I remembered, with the same half smiles, the same pocket of worry creasing the middle of our foreheads. Then came the shot of Mom and Norah on the airplane, giggling as they clandestinely swigged their mini-bottles of wine. They hadn’t seen me sneaking up on them. And then at dinner after their first day of shopping in Shanghai, Mom wearing the same bright silk shirt she had worn today.

I cropped the picture down to Mom’s face. This wasn’t the pale vestige of the beauty queen Mom had once been, but the queen herself. Her head was cocked to the side and she was smiling mysteriously, transported by a great story. Ink was so expensive, I saved it for the really good pictures. This was one of them.

As the printer worked its magic, I studied the next photo, a group shot at that same dinner. It wasn’t Jacob or Mom that held my attention, but Merc who was — surprise, surprise — checking his BlackBerry, frowning, completely unaware that he was sitting before a feast. I flipped through a sequence that Mom must have taken, one of me sleeping in Merc’s apartment, mouth open. I almost deleted the three of them, but then, that was the trip through Mom’s eyes.

I skipped ahead to the orphanage, wishing I had been able to take more. But it was a miracle I had been able to snag even the few shots I did before I got chastised by one of the nervous staff members. Photographs within the orphanage walls still weren’t allowed. But there was one of me and Peony — I finally teased the girl’s name out of her before we left the orphanage — cheek to cheek, birthmark to birthmark. Another picture worthy of my printer ink.

But it was the last photograph, the one I had asked Mom to take of me and Jacob on the doorstep outside the orphanage that made me lean forward. Something about our expressions was different. I zoomed in. More than relieved, we looked whole. Triumphant. Only then did I notice Jacob’s scar, that faded rainbow over his upper lip. When had I stopped seeing it when I was with him?

You know, I don’t even see your birthmark, he had said to me at the lake’s edge in Beijing. Which makes me sad.

I understood that now: how nothing looked more beautiful than that scar of his, that borderline that separated what Jacob could have been had he stayed in that orphanage from who he was.

While the printer whirred for yet one more ink-worthy photograph, I knew better than to check my cell phone, turned to its highest volume and placed by my bed so I wouldn’t miss his call. But I did. No messages. What had I expected? It was compulsive and control freakish, but I wanted to clean up this mess I had made between us, make things right. I could have listened to one of Karin’s podcasts. But I didn’t need her relationship advice; I needed a map that would tell me where to go, which way to proceed. I lifted my eyes to the wall, papered with Merc’s maps. Those weren’t going to help. Merc was more lost than I was, mistaking exhaustion for enlightenment.

Anger that I never allowed myself to feel expanded inside me now. I could feel it strumming in my stomach, my head, my fingertips. I had been there, in Merc’s adopted country, in his apartment, and we had spent a total of six hours together. Jumping to my feet, I ripped down the maps: the free road maps from AAA. The cheap topographical ones inserted into National Geographic. The world map pinholed with the places Merc wanted to visit, and the places he had already seen. The pins scattered on the floor, making even tiptoeing dangerous. But I excelled at that. After all, didn’t I walk on pins whenever Dad lurked nearby?

Spent, I fell into bed, closed my eyes, and dreamt of torn maps falling on me like fresh snow.

The next morning, just as I was finishing my e-mail to Merc, I heard a light rap on my bedroom door. Mom called softly, “Terra? Are you awake?”

I pushed away from my desk, scampered across the floor swept clean of last night’s rain of pushpins, and unlocked the door. Mom was back in her pink sweats and sneakers. But she had makeup on, lipstick, eye shadow, the works.

“I’m going grocery shopping. Is there anything you want?” she asked. She noticed the maps strewn on my floor, raised an eyebrow at me. “What’s going on?”

“I’m redecorating.”

“Is that all?”

“And e-mailing Merc.”

Her eyebrows rose even further.

When I awoke this morning, I realized had I been straight with Erik and Jacob and myself, I wouldn’t be in this mess. Just be honest. So I told her, “I want Merc to know that it hurt that he didn’t want to spend more time with me in China.” I bit my lip. It was hard to be that vulnerable, to make my feelings known. “It’s good to let him know how I feel, isn’t it?”

For the longest time, Mom stared at the overlapping maps that created a great collage on my floor. Then she nodded. “That’s brave of you.”

“Give me fifteen minutes and I’ll go with you to the store,” I told Mom now, suddenly.

“You have school.” But then she looked at my baggage, still unpacked in the corner, the photographs laid out on my desk. She walked over to them now, inspecting them silently one by one. Then she murmured, stunned, “These are beautiful.” Mom picked up the picture I had worked on last night, the cropped one of her at the restaurant. I thought she’d put herself down, comment about how fat she looked, how many double chins she had. Instead, she set the photograph carefully back on the desk. “I don’t suppose missing one more day will hurt. Can you be ready in five minutes?”

“Twelve,” I countered, like we were bargaining in one of the markets she had dragged me to in Beijing.

Mom laughed. “Ten.”

After I threw on some clothes and brushed my teeth, I went back to my computer, ready to hit send, but hesitated. Before I sent the e-mail to Merc, I wanted to review my words one last time, make sure I said what I wanted to say without antagonizing him or accusing him. The wrong words could damage our relationship; that’s not what I wanted. So I clicked on save instead.

Control freak that I am, it was one thing to have my clothes still neatly folded inside my suitcase, and another for the maps to be strewn like a great, messy collage on the ground.

A collage.

When the creative impulse sweeps over you, grab it. That’s what Lydia always advised. You grab it and honor it and use it, because momentum is a rare gift. So when I had the impulse to roll up the maps and scrounge under my bed for my Beauty Box, I followed it. A layer of dust had settled on the box’s lid since the last time I had added to its contents. I grabbed the pile of China map travel bugs I had removed from the cache outside and kept in the bottom drawer of my desk, under a box of old papers. I now swept them into the Beauty Box. Then I stowed box and all inside my backpack. I was about to leave my bedroom when — don’t ask why — I darted into my bathroom and plucked my vials of makeup off the counter — the thick Covermark made especially for port-wine stains, all my concealers in descending shades of beige from tanned brown to ashen white, my powders, both the cakey ones and the shimmery sheers.

Only then was I ready for Mom.

Like always, I headed to the mudroom to take the car keys off the rack so I could drive. But as I passed Claudius’s bedroom, I stopped. Mom had covered the bed with her new duvet, the one she had bought in China. So cheerful and bright and wholly feminine, it should have looked out of place with Claudius’s fantasy books and posters. But like all of Mom’s creations, this mysterious alchemy of design worked somehow.

Mom was waiting for me outside, facing the valley spotted with cabins and homes among acres of rolling green from the few remaining farmlands. As expansive as the view was, my hometown had shrunk without anything changing but my perspective. This, my home, was an anthill compared to even the smallest towns in China, which numbered at a million people.

We headed silently to the garage. Dad’s keys had been missing in the mudroom. And so was his car. It wasn’t like him to leave the house this early.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked Mom, worried. What was he up to now?

Mom shrugged — she didn’t know. Or maybe she didn’t care. “Shall we?”

“So,” I said casually, as I opened the trunk to stow my backpack, “I saw your sheets in Claudius’s room.”

Mom nodded, fussed with the zipper on her sweatshirt, yanking it up, pulling it down. “I thought I’d stay there for the time being.”

I wondered what Dad thought of that, Mom moving out of their bedroom, and closed the trunk firmly.

“Hey, Mom,” I said, “do you want to see the geocache that Aunt Susannah left here?”

For the longest time, Mom didn’t answer, her hand turning white as she gripped the passenger door. “Okay,” she said finally. Before she could change her mind, I grabbed my backpack out of the trunk and led Mom toward the cache, letting her set the pace.

The geocache was exactly where Jacob and I had left it last winter, seemingly undisturbed through back-to-back seasons of snow and snow melt. I was surprised to find two new entries in the logbook that Susannah had started and was about to read them to Mom. But she hadn’t even glanced inside the box. She was staring at the box itself, lettered boldly with the name of the cache: KRYPTONITE.

“What, Mom?” I asked her gently. “What is it?”

She swallowed, tracing the letters on the top of the box. “That was Susannah’s nickname for me growing up. Kryptonite.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Lois. Lois Lane.”

I followed her. “Fell in love with Superman . . .” Then I got it. Kryptonite. It was the only thing in the universe that crippled his powers.

“I used to be quite popular with the boys,” Mom said, smiling feebly. She sat on the log with a shaky sigh. “Susannah always said that I was Kryptonite to them. Made them fall to their knees.”

From my Beauty Box, I pulled out the handful of travel bugs Susannah had made of these ragged, fading fragments of the China map, and held them out to Mom. I’d let her decide what to do with them. Susannah’s intention with these travel bugs wasn’t the noblest — cast Dad’s humiliation around the world. I was no better. Left to me, I’d disperse them myself at every geocache I encountered.

But Mom? She just cupped the bagged scraps of her past in her palms. Through her tears, Mom smiled at me. “Susannah just wanted to remind me of who I am.”

I sat beside Mom on that tree trunk that must have fallen in some past windstorm when no one had noticed. The air swam with the thick piney scent of the living trees around us in this small copse. Neither of us said anything as the sun rose higher, warming the air. A hummingbird — an early migrator — buzzed by, coming back to hover near Mom. It inspected her pastel sweatshirt as through expecting her to spout nectar freely. Disappointed when she didn’t, it darted away.

Out of nowhere, Mom blurted, “If you want to go to Williams, you can.”

“What do you mean?”

“Susannah left me some money. Our brother has been holding it in trust for me. And I’ll get a job.”

“Mom,” I said softly, “that would be great if you got a job for yourself. But I’ll find my own way.” As I said those words, I knew it was true. It was funny, but everyone had found their own path to escape Dad — Merc moved around the world, Claudius bulked up, even Mom had reclaimed herself. I’d find my own path, one that led me from Dad but that I’d keep clear for Mom to follow, if she ever wanted.