North of Beautiful (8 page)

“Jacob, are you okay?” came the woman’s voice from behind us now, strident with insistence. Even distraught, she was still the portrait of wealth, hair colored preternaturally blond, a red overcoat cinched tightly around her waist, and perched in high black boots. You could almost smell eau de Republican wafting from her as she threw her arms around Jacob.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“God, I thought you were behind the truck.” She shook her head, reeling at the miracle of his survival. And then her eyes settled on me and I witnessed a second miracle as she transformed from distressed woman to avenging warrior. She threw back her long hair and straightened to her full height, a few inches shorter than me and Jacob, but it was her laser-sharp tone that made her deadly: “Do you know what you almost did? You could have killed him.”

“Mom, chill,” said Jacob. “You skidded, too, remember?”

Mom? I looked from Jacob to his mother, two disparate maps connected in a seam I couldn’t see. The only adopted Asian kids I’d ever seen were Chinese girls, all under ten, who visited Colville with their families. I knew this because I used to make a study of them, wishing I was so obviously adopted no one could mistake me for being biologically related to Dad.

“I wasn’t driving recklessly,” she said, eyes accusing reckless driver me.

If I was going to be yelled at, I wouldn’t take it crouching down. But Jacob blanched when I stood up shakily, almost at eye level with him.

“God,” he said, “your face.”

God, my face, indeed.

I flinched away as though Jacob had slapped me and quickly averted my raw hamburger cheek. Lovely. I focused on the
I VOTED FOR KERRY
sticker on Jacob’s back window, which covered the older
I VOTED FOR CLINTON
and
I VOTED FOR MONDALE
ones. Let’s face it: his mom didn’t look like the type to litter her vehicle with bumper stickers. So I was guessing this was his Range Rover and chalked him up as a rich Seattleite taking in the kitschy Christmas festivities here in town. What would he have thought of my town’s Western hoedowns, fiddling festivals, and big bug contests?

“You okay?” He touched my arm gently. Whether he was reassuring me or trying to get my attention, I didn’t know. I just didn’t want anyone to look at me, least of all him, this too-cool-to-be-true Goth guy. “You’re bleeding.”

Despite myself, I glanced up at him and touched my fingers to my forehead, almost surprised that they came away wet with blood, but more surprised that he wasn’t staring at my birthmark.

“Of course she’s not okay. She must have hit the steering wheel,” announced his mom, as though her discovery made it a fact.

“Here,” he said, salvaging a Starbucks napkin from his pocket. That, he folded in half and held out to me. Even his fingernails were painted graveyard black.

“Don’t use that,” Jacob’s mom ordered, snatching the napkin out of his hand and wadding it up. As if I was actually going to hold that sketchy wad of germs against my open wound. Who knew where that napkin had been? “I’ve got a first-aid kit here somewhere.” And then she strode around the Range Rover to the passenger’s side.

Jacob patted his pocket and pulled out another napkin. “Take it,” he urged. “It’ll be next century before she finds the first-aid kit.” He smiled at me crookedly. A faint scar stretched from his left nostril to the topside of his upper lip, tugging his mouth higher on one side than the other. It looked like someone had sketched his face fast, the edge of their drawing hand smudging his upper lip. His own eyes dropped to my mouth, completely aware of my stare. I grimaced, forgot I was supposed to be hiding my face, and then embarrassed, I pinched the napkin between my fingers and asked, “Is this clean?”

“God, you’re one of those.”

“One of what?”

“Those germaphobe control freaks.” Then he laughed. “You are, aren’t you?”

A child’s muffled wail, bewildered and overwhelmed, cut through my own bewildered denial.

“It’s okay, honey,” I could hear Jacob’s mom soothing loudly to be heard over the caterwauling. “Just a little accident.”

If anything, the kid’s howling strengthened, a baby Pavarotti: “I want Jaaaa-key!”

Jacob sighed, “Great,” and ambled to his mom’s side, his ankle-length black coat fluttering behind him like an explorer eager for adventure. This was my chance to check on my mom, call the police, find a tow truck. Instead, after a quick glance at Mom — she was still mounded in her seat — I watched Jacob.

Another earsplitting screech from the Range Rover and Jacob nudged his mom aside with a “Mom, I got him,” before disappearing into the truck so that only the bottom of his coat showed. “Hey, Trevor, what’s going on, little man?”

I should have kept an eye on his mom. As soon as Jacob got the wailing to ratchet down decibel by decibel to blessed silence, she frowned over her hurt expression and then spun around to march to Mom. Oh God, now what?

I hurried around the back of our car just as she introduced herself crisply, “I’m Norah Fremont. We need to trade insurance information.” When Mom didn’t respond or retrieve our insurance card, Mrs. Fremont prompted her, “Your insurance information is probably in your glove compartment.”

I blurted out, “Do we have to?”

“Have to what?” Mrs. Fremont turned to me, her thin eyebrows arched.

“Have to tell insurance.”

“Your car . . .” She waved helplessly at the lump of metal that used to be our car, the front crumpled like a shar-pei’s face.

“— is pretty much totaled,” finished Jacob. I had been so focused on his mom and mine, I hadn’t seen him come over, carrying a little boy, three or four, with blond hair and dewy green eyes, their mother in miniature. “You’re better off having it hauled to the junkyard.”

“Are you kidding?” I crumpled his napkin still in my hand, swallowing my instinct to throw it in his face. Crushed or not, that car was my freedom. “I’m not abandoning my car.”

“You won’t have to. Insurance will take care of it,” Mrs. Fremont said confidently.

That was it. Sure, we could report the accident and insurance could pay for the repairs, but then our premiums would go up and we’d hear about it endlessly from Dad. That was about as appealing as living with Dad for the rest of my life. A breeze dragged a strand of hair across my cheek. It felt like the lash of a whip. I bunched my hair into one hand, cheek exposed, but there was nothing I could do about it.

As if the ramification of the accident only now occurred to Mom, she said, “Oh, Terra.” She looked so vulnerable sitting there, pleating and unpleating her sweater, my heart contracted hard.

I crouched so Mom could look directly at me. With a hand on her soft upper arm, tense but no longer taut with muscle, I assured her, “It’s going to be fine, Mom. I’ll take care of everything. Dad won’t even know.”

From behind me, I could sense Jacob and Mrs. Fremont eavesdropping. Sure enough, when I stood, they were watching me with a canny understanding I didn’t like. Not one bit. It felt too close to pity. Mrs. Fremont, who I expected to shoot one last zinger at Mom, instead held her hand out, saying, “There’s no sense staying out in the cold. Let’s get a cup of coffee, warm you up.”

Those were the magic words. Mom levered her way out of the passenger seat, one hand on the doorframe, the other on the seat, huffing. I bit my lips, trying not to be embarrassed. Still, my eyes sidled to Jacob to see if he was watching Mom’s struggle, but he was already leading the way to the coffee shop, holding Trevor on his hip. Soon, Mom was trailing the Fremonts through the shop door.

The police needed to be called. Auto body shops consulted. A tow truck scheduled. I was almost done architecting my plan for this crisis when Jacob backtracked out of the coffee shop to me, Trevor now riding astride his shoulders.

“Aren’t you coming?” Jacob asked.

Behind him, a man walked out with a commuter cup, steaming appealingly and making me acutely aware of the arctic temperature out here. My feet were so cold, even my toenails felt frozen. And that didn’t cover my shivering that had nothing to do with the temperature. God, I had almost killed him!

Jacob’s gray eye shadow created a smoky effect, better than anything I could ever have achieved. The result: his black eyes gleamed darker than obsidian under his tangerine-tipped spiked hair as he waited for my answer.

I shook my head. “I got to make a couple of calls.”

“You might as well make them where it’s warm.”

A sign that said
CELL-PHONE FREE ZONE
hung in the window. I nodded toward it now. “You’re not supposed to make calls inside.”

“Do you always follow the rules?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. First, there was the control freak bit. Excuse me, the germaphobe control freak bit. And now this accusation of me being a blind rule follower. I didn’t like the picture he was painting of me. Anyway, I had to admit, “Warm sounds good.”

“Come on, then.”

As I stepped away from the mangled mess of my car, I spotted a small, compacted piece of metal lying on top of the curbside snow, a relic of my car. Even though Jacob was watching me curiously, I couldn’t help snagging the remains of my freedom, twisted into an ugly lump.

“Coming,” I said, flushing as I shoved the metal into my pocket.

“What are you doing?” asked Trevor now, his high voice piping like an out-of-tune flute.

I straightened, flushed, blinked at Jacob’s brother.

“What’s wrong with your face?” he asked before Jacob chastised him, “Hey, rude.”

I said, “It’s okay.” Frankly, as much as I hated point-blank questions, I didn’t mind them from little kids. Unlike adults who stared, wondered behind my back, or made lame comments, kids simply accepted my answer and moved on.

So I told Trevor how I had surgery to get rid of my birthmark, which was like a big freckle. That satisfied Trevor. And I noticed that Jacob still didn’t stare. If he wondered about my birthmark, he did it silently. Then he turned for the coffee shop, nothing more important to him than the little kid riding astride his shoulders. A couple of women walking down the sidewalk drew imperceptibly closer to each other, sheep in a wolf’s presence, when Jacob passed. If he noticed or cared, he didn’t let on. He sailed to his own longitudinal line, straight through the gawkers with a pleasant nod. Once clear of the onlookers, Jacob glanced over his shoulder at me, checking to make sure I was with him. I hurried, smiling to myself, to catch up.

Chapter nine

Orientation

“HONESTLY, HOW LONG DOES IT take for the police to come around here?” I asked Jacob where he had parked himself in front of the window. For the last couple of minutes while he was ordering his coffee, I was on the phone and then in the bathroom, washing up. For as much as I bled, I had seen worse with my brother Claudius, who always managed to mangle himself. Now I peered up and down the street for any sign of uniformed help. “I mean, it’s not as if there’s a whole lot of crime being committed.”

“It’s Bavaria,” he said. “They run on slower time here.”

“This isn’t Bavaria. It’s Disney.” I pointed across the street to Ye Olde Christmas Shoppe and the Nutcracker Museum above it. “See all those Santa decorations? It’s December twenty-fifth every day of the year here.”

He laughed, fingered a sugar packet, and started tapping it against the table in time to the accordion music playing over the speakers. “So, made all your calls?”

“Just about.” There was one call I wasn’t planning on returning (Erik’s — if I hadn’t told him about the laser surgery earlier, I wasn’t planning on telling him now). And another call I wasn’t planning on making (Dad — the less he knew, the better). Roughly three hours and two hundred miles separated us, but I could hear my father all too clearly in my head.

The thought of Dad cued my concern for Mom. Automatically, I glanced over my shoulder to where she was sitting with Norah on mismatched threadbare chairs, one a soft fern green and the other what used to be orange but was well on its way to becoming coffee-spill brown. At their feet, Trevor was happily motoring around some grungy trucks he had fished out of the coffee shop’s battered toy box. Meanwhile, Mom and Norah were cackling like old chums with no troubles in the world when an impending fight was waiting for us at home.

“I’ve never seen Mom this relaxed with someone she’s just met,” I said without taking my eyes off them.

“My mom could make even the most hardened gangbanger spill his guts. All my old girlfriends stay friends with her.”

Old girlfriends? I sidled a glance at Jacob, wondering if he was dating anyone now and then looked back out the window hastily. As if I had a chance with a guy like him. Geez, what was I doing here with him anyway? He was the kind of guy who’d shun me when he was with a group of his über-cool Goth friends, pretend he didn’t know who I was. I dug out the piece of metal I’d scavenged and placed it on the table, a boundary line separating our two totally different worlds.

“So,” Jacob drawled, holding the O for three long beats.

“Yeah?”

“So I figure, you must be in my debt.”

That got my full attention. I turned completely to face Jacob, not even bothering to hide my cheek since it was a little late for that. Besides, he didn’t seem to mind it.

“And how do you figure that?”

“Another second” — he touched the piece of the bumper on the table — “and I would have been a double amputee. That is, if I didn’t bleed out first.”

I grimaced. “God, could you not talk about it?”

He shrugged, silent. And then he smirked. “Who would have known?”

“What?”

“I bet you can’t watch horror.”

“Or read it.” I made a point of looking him up and down. “I take it you do.”

“Actually, no.”

“Really? I thought that was one of the prerequisites of being a Goth and all.” I waved in his general direction.

“You poor, misinformed soul,” he said, shaking his head, checking over his shoulder, and then he tossed down the packet of sugar. “Just a sec.” He strolled to the counter where not one, but two cups were waiting. I started to get up, but he shook his head and brought the drinks over to me.