North of Beautiful (41 page)

My personal map was layered with experience — my trip to China with Mom, my cheating on Erik, the phone call I received from Merc the other night, apologizing for how he acted in China. How there’d be a ticket waiting for me and Claudius the next time he accumulated enough frequent flier miles, which wouldn’t be long, I knew. Together, we’d see Xi’an and the terracotta warriors. Even Dad added to my collage, adding one hard layer after another. And then, there was my old focal point, my port-wine stain. They were all just parts of my whole, pieces of my collaged life. It was time to explore a new subject. I wasn’t sure what, exactly, but I was ready to venture out. And in the meantime, there was Mom’s collage. God knew it needed updating and would again, depending on whether she was going to stay with Dad or leave him. Either way, the decision was Mom’s; she was comfortably in charge.

“Lydia, if you all were still interested, I’d love to be in the show,” I said.

“Good,” she responded tartly. “We sent out the invitations yesterday.” With that, she hung up.

I stared at my phone, then pocketed it with a bemused smile. As I backed out of the garage, I saw Mom’s fresh footprints in the dirt heading toward the new running path I had forged earlier this morning. I rolled down the window, breathed in the clean Methow air, pungent with evergreens and newly flowering sage. And then I drove.

At the crossroads, my usual route lay to the left. Since junior high, I never strayed from the path that took me to school five days a week: left onto Main Street, right onto Grover Street. Today, I hit the gas pedal and plowed out of the Valley. Independence, straight ahead.

Chapter thirty-five

Geographia

OTHER THAN MY RECENT TRIP to the airport, I literally could not remember the last time I had driven to Seattle for any reason other than my face. I didn’t stop to question my intentional ditching of school for the second time ever — and both in a single week. I didn’t worry about what my parents would do or say when they found out. I’d deal with those repercussions later. For now, I just drove.

The passage out of the valley is always exquisite, but especially so at the start of spring. Then, the two-lane highway bisecting the Cascade Mountains passes jubilant waterfalls fed by fresh snowmelt and exposed rock faces so sheer they make you dizzy just looking at them.

I turned off the radio, the one station that broadcast from Colville having gone fuzzy. Before me now rose Liberty Bell, that massive bell-shaped shaft of granite, its face some 1,200 feet high. I took my foot off the gas pedal and rolled down the window to inhale the sharp scent of liberation at the foot of this mountain.

Forty-five minutes before reaching Seattle, I saw signs I’d never noticed before for Lynnwood. The city sounded vaguely familiar — Lynnwood, Lynnwood — and then I remembered. That was the location of the spa Norah had told Mom about, the one that had Mom almost crying from laughter because she couldn’t even fathom a place where women went around in the nude willingly.

Why not? I thought. Why the hell not?

I took an exit, looked for a place where I could pull over safely to call for directions, and found the Convention Center with its large expanse of asphalt parking lot that I could smell even with my windows rolled up.

“What listing?” asked the prerecorded, teleprompted operator in her droning voice.

“Ummm . . . Naked Spa?”

A live operator came on. “What are you looking for?”

I explained as best I could: “There’s supposed to be a Korean spa in Lynnwood, women only. You go naked there.”

“Naked.”

I blushed, glad she couldn’t see me.

If there is such a thing as fate and things happening for a reason and things that are meant to be, then I was meant to go to the Naked Spa. Miracles, the operator located the spa for me, official name the Olympic Spa. Not only that, but it was right in front of me — as in I could walk across the parking lot to its front door. As fated as this appeared to be, that’s not to say I didn’t have doubts about it. I did. Located in a strip mall, the “spa” looked like a refurbished bowling alley, down to the ugly seventies stripe of terracotta across the front of the building. I was highly skeptical, Norah or not. Even the most shopping savvy have their off-moments.

But inside, the spa was an oasis, from its soothing earth tones to the tinkling of a tiny water fountain. Two friendly receptionists manned the front desk, which held an odd assortment of plastic barrettes and random Hello Kitty paraphernalia. The professional decorator must have finished the job, never checking back in to see how the misguided spa owners accessorized the place.

Having never been to a spa, I had no idea what I was supposed to do and looked blankly at the menu of services. I almost turned around right then, almost sprinted to the door; everything was so expensive. But then again, I had just sold my first piece of art, and I wanted to celebrate.

“Have a body scrub,” one of the young women recommended.

Which sounded promising until they handed me a thin cotton robe, two towels, and a little pink cap. Norah did not mention any little pink cap. The benefit of the little pink cap, however, became instantly clear. I was too busy feeling stupid in my little pink cap to worry about being nude. Plus, Norah had overstated the whole naked business — the only section where nudity was mandatory was in the Jacuzzi room where I was supposed to marinate myself for an hour in four hot tubs, each hotter than the last.

While the spa wasn’t thronging with women, the ones here were a chocolate box’s assortment of shapes and sizes: grossly obese women who made Mom look svelte, emaciated ones who could have packed on fifteen pounds and still look gaunt. Women the age of the Twisted Sisters; a wedding party of women in their twenties.

That’s when it struck me: how gorgeous we all were, even with cellulite (saw a lot of that) and stretch marks, scars and tattoos. Let me just say this, not a single body was perfect, not even the fittest of women there. (She was a triathlete; she told me so after we dared to use the glacial plunge pool.)

The long treatment room had a full five stations, with nothing separating the vinyl tables from each other. I will admit: I panicked as I lay there on my stomach, naked before everyone in this tiny microcosm of the world. But the moment the middle-aged woman, bulging out of her black camisole and shorts, began scrubbing me with her hands enveloped in yellow mittens, I forgot to be embarrassed or scared. Norah was right. My heels, elbows, chest, stomach, upper thighs — every part of me was scrubbed clean, even my face. Twice. And then three times. And in between each round, the woman doused me with hot water infused with mugwort.

Little eraser dander of skin clung to the white table when I sat up for my final, cleansing rinse. I seriously had no idea how much dead skin one body — one live body — could produce. I swear, my entire epidermis had been sloughed off. She probably even skimmed a little from my underlying dermis. What was left of my skin felt smooth and baby soft.

After the service, I had to use the bathroom, and as I was washing my hands, I caught a glimpse of myself.

I glowed.

It was almost a shame to put on my clothes.

“So did you enjoy yourself?” the receptionist asked when I was ready to check out, but not ready to leave. I could linger in the serene quiet here for hours. But there was someone I had to find.

“Definitely.” And then I paid the spa the highest compliment I could: “I’m going to bring my mother here.”

Even with my unplanned pit stop at the spa, I still had almost two hours before I could intercept Jacob at school. Because he was, I had to admit, the real reason for my trip.

So I drove now to the University of Washington, asking myself, How hard could it possibly be to find a campus that was some twenty-two million square feet? Hard, as it turned out. Unintentionally, I found the University Village shopping mall. Which was definitely worth a drive-by look. But I turned around on 45th Avenue, and finally arrived on the campus.

The cherry trees in the main quad were at the end of their bloom, a few blossoms, pink and white, were left, interspersed with bright green leaves. Students milled around, some of the girls so dressed up they looked ready to go clubbing. The funny thing was, standing there in this university that I had written off as too monolithic, too overwhelming, I felt completely at home. After China, how could any place feel too large or too hard to navigate? I had walked through squalid alleys, negotiated the Forbidden City, and didn’t just figure out a way to get to the Great Wall — I geocached and tobogganed there. I did all of that with just a handful of Chinese words and one big smile.

There was no reason why I had to go to Western Washington.

I could handle UW. Take classes in its fine arts program. And major in business school, if I wanted.

This university wasn’t on Dad’s sanctioned list, but its tuition? That, I could afford on my own. And I had gotten in, after all.

I almost laughed out loud when I drove up to Jacob’s private school, Viewridge Prep with all its ivy-covered brick buildings (buildings!) and lush green soccer fields (soccer fields!). My school was a squat, two-story building, shared between the middle schoolers and high schoolers. We had Astroturf, because nothing save sagebrush and weeds grew in happy neglect in the Valley.

But it wasn’t our differences that I wanted to focus on. So I parked in one of the visitors’ spots and pulled out the GPS I had taken to carrying in my backpack when I went running. I switched it on so I could pinpoint my coordinates, the longitude and latitude that placed me here and nowhere else in the world. The problem was, inside the car, the device couldn’t locate the satellites, so I unrolled the window, stuck my hand out and held the device to the sun. As soon as it calibrated, I grabbed my notebook from my backpack, ripped out a random page, and wrote my position on the paper. As I folded the sheet in half, I caught sight of my meager notes from the lecture about Fate Maps all those months ago.

Genetics might be our first map, imprinted within us from the moment the right sperm meets the right egg. But who knew that all those DNA particles are merely reference points in our own adventures, not dictating our fate but guiding our future? Take Jacob’s cleft lip. If his upper lip had been fused together the way it was supposed to be inside his mother’s belly, he’d probably be living in a village in China right now. Then there was me with my port-wine stain. I lifted my eyes to the rearview mirror, wondering what I would have been like had I never been born with it. My fingers traced the birthmark landlocked on my face, its boundary lines sharing the same shape as Bhutan, the country neighboring Tibetans call the Land of the Dragon. I liked that; the dragons Dad had always cautioned me about had lived on my face all this time. Here be dragons, indeed.

I leaned back in my seat now, closing my eyes, relishing the feel of the sun warming my face. No, I wouldn’t trade a single experience — not my dad or my birthmark — to be anyone but me, right here, right now.

At last, at 3:10, I open my door. I don’t know how I’ll find Jacob, only that I will. A familiar loping stride ambles out of the library. Not a Goth guy, not a prepster, just Jacob decked in a shirt as unabashedly orange as anything in Elisa’s Beijing boutique. This he wore buttoned to the neck and untucked over jeans, sleeves rolled up to reveal tanned arms. For the first time, I see his aggressively modern glasses, deathly black and rectangular. His hair is the one constant: it’s spiked as usual.

What swells inside me is a love so boundless, I am the sunrise and sunset. I am Liberty Bell in the Cascades. I am Beihai Lake. I am every beautiful, truly beautiful, thing I’ve ever seen, captured in my personal Geographia, the atlas of myself.

“Jacob!” I call, not minding when my voice echoes off the library building, so loud he and his friends turn to me.

For once, Jacob doesn’t look sure what he wants to do, whether he wants to stop or keep going. But I do. I know. I shut the car door behind me and venture into the Unknown. His walls are up, fortified by days and days of silence. To my relief, while his face is carefully blank, he doesn’t turn away when I near.

I feel his friends, both guys and girls, watching me. And I realize this might be a colossal mistake, a public humiliation. Maybe Jacob is seeing someone else now. Maybe he’ll never forgive me. His friends draw behind him like bodyguards.

I have no words, just myself and this piece of used paper, which I hold out to him.

Jacob takes my note silently and reads the two coordinates. “What’s this?” he asks gruffly.

This is what I want, I tell myself. He, of all people, is worth this risk of being transparent, of letting him know how I feel, what I want. So despite his friends who are watching, I straighten, throw my hair over my shoulder, and stand before him, utterly vulnerable.

“A geocache,” I say.

“A geocache.”

“If you’ve got the guts to find it.”

For the first time, his eyes glint with something like amusement, something like curiosity. “Well,” he drawls, “that depends on the cache.”

I shrug and shake my head. “It’s a new one. No one has ever found it.”

“So tell me more.”

“It’d take . . . oh, gosh, an entire day at least to tell you all about it.”

“I’ve got time,” he says easily. “Give me a clue.”

“You?” I ask in mock horror. “You, an expert geocacher, are asking for a clue?”

“For especially gnarly caches, I make exceptions.”

“Gnarly?” I frown.

“Complicated,” he amends. The beginning of his crooked smile begins to form, and the murky Unknown solidifies into familiar terrain. “So what’s the cache called?”

That, I hadn’t prepped for. So I improvise: “I’m a Moron and I’m So Sorry. But then really good geocachers know it by its nickname: I’ve Missed You So Much.” A breeze tangles my hair, and when Jacob reaches out to brush a strand off my cheek, the tension releases in me. “But the truly brilliant geocachers?”

“Yeah?” he says. “What about us?”

“They know it by its real name. Terra Firma.”