North of Beautiful (37 page)

I had been so busy blocking out the inevitable homecoming with Dad that I didn’t think about the other guy I had so carefully forgotten. So carefully pretended didn’t exist. Now, I crashed headlong into my Denial.

Erik was waiting at the top of the steps, holding an armful of red roses.

Chapter thirty-one

The Great Trigonometrical Survey

WHEN I WAS IN SECOND grade, I did my should-be-famous person report on one Nain Singh, who surveyed over 2,000 kilometers from Nepal to China. That alone might not sound entirely worthy of a report, but consider he accomplished this in 1865 and on threat of death. Tibet wasn’t so tolerant of foreigners back then, famous for beheading uninvited visitors. So Nain set out, disguised as a lama on a pilgrimage to Lhasa, to conduct the Great Trigonometrical Survey and triangulated his way across the Himalayas, using two known points for every unknown to measure the length of his country. He survived.

I wasn’t so sure I’d be that lucky as I mounted the last few steps that led to my two known points: Jacob, who was standing next to Erik. They couldn’t have been more different, those two. And I was the unknown in this triangulation problem.

While Jacob may not have noticed Erik, Erik was certainly making note of him. He lowered the roses to his side, their blooms hanging head down. And his face, the one I had always trusted to be placid, now wore a foreboding frown.

“What’s wrong?” Jacob asked, already jogging down the steps, his hand stretched out to lighten my load if I needed it. “Hey, you okay?”

No. I was a liar. And a cheater. And a coward. No different from his barista of a stepmother and his philanderer of a father.

The hundreds of excuses I’d told myself so that I didn’t have to admit to Jacob that I had a boyfriend — technically, still had one — were as untrustworthy as the antique maps Dad collected and hoarded. As beautiful as they were, painstakingly hand-painted, they were wrong.

I wanted to sprint down the stairs, but instead, I forced myself to walk with Jacob to that top floor where Erik awaited, stony-faced. How could I tell Jacob that I was going to break up with Erik as soon as I was home and that I couldn’t do it over e-mail when Erik himself was standing here? He deserved better, too.

“Jacob,” I said quietly but clearly so I wouldn’t have to repeat myself, “this is my boyfriend, Erik.”

I cringed when Jacob glanced from Erik back to me, his look of confusion fast giving way to calculation as canny as Nain Singh’s, that great surveyor. Jacob narrowed his eyes at me, seeing me clearly without my two-faced mask, both sides made up — one with cosmetics, the other with lies.

“You hate roses,” he said, flat and hard.

“What?”

“I bet you hate roses,” Jacob continued relentlessly. “Don’t you?”

“Jacob . . .”

“Don’t you?”

I nodded. He was right about me again. I did. I hated roses. I hated them for being so trite, so clichéd, a default, all-purpose flower that said I love you, I’m sorry, and get well soon. Give me peonies and tulips, orchids or gardenia. Those were flowers with character.

Without another word, Jacob stepped around me, stopping only to thrust Mom’s packages at Erik, a perverted changing of the guards. And then he strode away at a fast, angry clip.

“Excuse me,” said a man, irritated, behind me. “Do you mind?”

Numbly, I moved out of his way, noticing my somber mother, Jacob’s disappointed one, as they filed off the escalator. Ashamed, I studied the carousels, wishing I could jump on one, swirl away. I wouldn’t have thought that Mom would stand by me, but she did, striding toward us. She had to stop momentarily to jockey up her sagging pants, but she was at my side soon enough.

“Erik,” said Mom, “we weren’t expecting you here.”

“Mr. Cooper asked if I could pick you guys up.” He shrugged, as if driving hours for me had been no big deal. It was more than what Dad was willing to do for Mom and me.

As if she felt the sting of Dad’s neglect, too, Mom’s smile wobbled, a leaf blown about in a squall. “That was very nice of you.”

Erik shrugged again.

“Well,” Mom said, shooting me a meaningful look, “I’ll meet you over in baggage claim.”

I watched Mom go, watched as a petal from those unwanted roses drifted to the ground.

“So,” said Erik, not looking at me, but off at the reader board, listing all the arrivals at the airport. There was an awkwardness, an uncertainty on his face that I had never seen before; he was usually so sure.

“So,” I repeated, not knowing what to say any more than he did. I couldn’t have missed my usual shield of makeup more.

But Erik didn’t ask about my face, almost as if he hadn’t noticed or didn’t care that I was barefaced. Instead, he wanted to know: “So who’s the Chinese guy?”

“He’s American,” I shot back automatically.

He waved impatiently in the air, having forgotten that he was holding the roses. A faint trace of fragrance trailed in the air when Erik lowered the bouquet hastily, embarrassed. His real questions hovered unspoken: are you into him? What is he to you?

Deflect, that’s what my instincts were telling me. Deflect. Reroute. Send him on a different it’s-fine-everything-is-fine path, but that was an uneven, graveled route. Easy to trip yourself up on. I couldn’t go back in time, couldn’t change what I had done, couldn’t pretend that I hadn’t loved the idea of being with a popular jock. But Erik deserved to be more than my vanity plates. He deserved to be so much more than proof that someone could find me attractive.

I took a deep breath. “I’m so sorry, Erik. I should have been up-front with you.”

“You should have.” Then, a memory clicked. “He was the guy you were hanging out with over Christmas.”

I nodded miserably.

“While you were ‘sick.’”

“I’m sorry.”

“Did you hook up with him then?”

“No. God, no.”

“In China?”

“Does it matter?”

“It does to me,” he said. Where was this dogged persistence coming from? Something had unlocked the key to Erik.

“We kissed; that’s it.” What did I mean, that’s it? That was more than enough. I whispered, “I’m so sorry, Erik.” And then, finally, I let him go. “You and me . . . we shouldn’t see each other anymore.”

He didn’t answer, his hand tightening around the roses. Suddenly, he winced, loosened his grip. A thorn must have punctured him; blood welled in the curved archipelago below his thumb. I withdrew a napkin from my pocket, doubled it over, pressed it against his hand. Across the baggage terminal, Jacob had just lifted his mom’s luggage off the carousel and as he set it down, he caught sight of me at the same time I did him. And now, he stared at me in disbelief, my hands still wrapped around Erik’s. I ripped my hands away, took a step away. It was too late. The swarming crowds blocked Jacob from view. I knew he had wrenched around anyway.

Erik nodded over to the carousels that were spitting out baggage blithely, everybody’s downsized lives fitting into neat packages. “Let’s get your stuff.”

“You don’t have to drive us home.”

His eyebrows furrowed, offended. “What kind of guy do you think I am?”

Apparently, more of a guy than I had given him credit for when we first hooked up. Erik walked toward the baggage carousel. I lagged behind, awkward now that we were heading to Jacob, who was flanked by Norah and my mom as if they were protecting him. From me.

“Tell me something,” Erik said gruffly, waiting for me now.

I pushed back my hair and studied Erik, his full mouth that I had always thought too lushly feminine for his face. Those rough hands that had touched every bit of my body. Now those hands balled up the napkin and were tossing it along with the roses into a trash bin a few feet away from us. He made the shot. When had he ever not?

“So what’s with that guy?” he asked, nodding over at Jacob, who was striding with his luggage and his mom’s out the door without a backward glance at me. Norah lifted her hand for a halfhearted wave before disappearing through the sliding doors, too.

I knew what Erik was getting at: Why Jacob? Why this lanky kid who Erik could take down in a moment?

“He got me,” I said simply.

Chapter thirty-two

Magnetic North

IF IT WEREN’T FOR OUR luggage by the front door where we had parked them, we might never have left the house. Within minutes of Erik dropping us off (after what was quite possibly the most uncomfortable car ride in the history of girlhood), Mom was back in the kitchen. And I was back to hovering in the background, patrolling in case Dad blew.

We’d been gone for eleven days, and the first thing Dad had to say when he finally deigned to notice us from where he was sitting in the kitchen, reading his newspaper? “What are we having for dinner?”

As though Mom knew she was being set up for a crime she didn’t commit, she opened the refrigerator cautiously. The three main shelves were empty. Not even Mom, the culinary miracle worker, could do much with only organic butter and homemade jams, jars of honey Dijon mustard and plum sauce for ingredients.

“He didn’t go grocery shopping?” Mom muttered to herself. I don’t think she was even aware she had spoken aloud. My stomach tightened, and I glanced automatically at Dad. I hoped he hadn’t overheard.

Naturally, he of the big ears heard every word. “If I didn’t have to go for the past week and a half, why would I have gone now?”

At least I could make tea, placate Dad while I ran to the store.

Hastily, I turned on the Instant Hot faucet. I was in such a rush that I scalded the mound of my palm in almost exactly the same spot where Claudius had cut himself over Christmas. Slow down, I told myself as I ran cold water over it. Calm down. Jacob had told me that the best coffee — and best tea — began with cold water gently boiled. And that is what I did. Dad could wait for his tea. More mindful of my actions, I filled the kettle from the regular faucet, set it on the stovetop, switched the heat on.

Silently, Mom opened the freezer. Every single precooked and prepackaged homemade lunch and dinner that Mom had prepared in the weeks before our trip, neatly stowing them in their own Ziploc bag complete with her precise thawing and cooking instructions — all of them were gone, eaten. She just stood there, riveted by the sight of her freezer so cleaned out.

Without moving from her spot, Mom tugged her orange silk shirt down as though it had shrunk a size in the caustic heat of Dad’s presence. Or like she was finally gearing up for battle.

Not now, Mom. Dad was hungry; I was tired. These were not good battle conditions. All I craved was a quick retreat to my bedroom, forget about Dad and Erik and Jacob. Jacob and his last look of utter betrayal before he left the airport. But I couldn’t leave Mom.

Dad, of course, had to notice Mom adjusting her shirt. “Are you sure that’s a good color on you? It’s like looking directly into the sun, isn’t it?”

The kettle whistled. By accident, I had overfilled the kettle so that water leaked out and sizzled on the cooktop as it hit the hot surface.

“We’re out of tea,” Dad said accusingly, implying that I was the biggest idiot this side of the Cascades. “So why would you be heating up water?”

I turned off the heat and glared at Dad through the wispy steam. My tiredness disappeared. I was fully alert now. Mom was bending down to her tote bag.

Dad’s pent-up criticism, stored over the last week and a half, all but spewed out like storm water in a stopped-up gutter. He slapped the newspaper on the table.

Deliberately, Mom pulled out the three expensive boxes of tea she had selected especially for Dad in Hangzhou: dragon well tea leaves, handrolled into tiny pearls. Bundles of jasmine leaves, stitched together into a pellet, which would bloom like a flower when steeped in hot water. Aromatic strands of Iron Goddess. She set them down on the island now, one after another, in a straight soldierly line.

“Which would you like?” Mom asked mildly.

Dad’s lips tightened, thwarted. His eyes narrowed at Mom, at those tea packages that offered her this unexpected reprieve. “Are you sure they’re safe? They didn’t spike them with preservatives? Chemicals?”

Diffuse him. Since Dad didn’t choose a tea, I did randomly. With surprising calm as though Dad weren’t in the room with us, I sliced the package open, shook out a heaping tablespoon into the waiting tea-pot, and poured the boiling water slowly over the dried leaves.

Mom murmured so softly I could barely make out her words, “If you don’t want them, I can find someone else who would.” And then, as though shocked, as though she heard the echo of those words, the implications reverberated inside herself. She could find someone else.

Mom looked at Dad then, scrutinized him.

She could find someone else.

The same look of dazed surprise that she wore after her rickshaw ride and again when she talked our way into the orphanage now emboldened her eye. It was as if it finally occurred to her that she had been navigating Dad’s ever-shifting mercurial moods, always changing her course to accommodate him. Every time he lashed out and harangued and criticized and demeaned, Mom apologized and rationalized and accepted the blame, a tango that kept her off-balance.

He glowered, then repeated his question — “What are we having for dinner, Lois?” — more slowly, like Mom had lost her language skills in China. I maneuvered myself closer to Mom so that I stood between the refrigerator and the kitchen table, ready to defend her if it came to that.

Mom frowned at me. “I’m not hungry. Are you, Terra?”

I shook my head.

“Then I think we both better go to bed. I’ll do the grocery shopping tomorrow.” As clearly as Dad did upstairs in his office, creating his maps, Mom drew a line now, firm, unmovable.

She didn’t so much as glance uneasily at him when she collected her bags from the front door. Instead of going upstairs, Mom rolled her suitcase to Claudius’s bedroom, retreating there, fully conscious of her decision. Her statement. I thought she might close the door now, but instead she said so firmly, “Come on, Terra, it’s time for bed,” I could have been a little girl, the one who needed protecting.