North of Normal- A memoir of my wilderness childhood, my unusual family, and how I survived both

by Cea Sunrise Person

  “Can’t we stay? Please can’t we stay?” I begged over the roar.

  “We can’t, darling,” Mom said. “Karl is waiting for us.”

  “But . . .” I stepped away from the dryer and looked at her pleadingly. She was putting the last of our laundry, clean but still wet, into her duffel bag. She stacked our tin dishes on top of the clothes and pulled the drawstring shut.

  “Come on, honey,” Mom said. “We need to get going before people start asking questions. You’ll have other friends, I promise.”

  I crossed my arms and bit my lip as my eyes welled with tears. Before I could stop it, my hand swung out and hit her squarely in the chest. “No fair!”

  “Cea!” she said, catching my wrist in her hand. “Listen to me. You can’t have everything you want in life. You have a mother who loves you, and that’s more than a lot of kids in the world have. Be grateful for that.”

  It wasn’t the first time my mother had said these words to me, and they never failed to fill me with a strange, crawling feeling of guilt. I sank to the floor, completely deflated. As I cried, I tried to block out the sight, burned behind my closed eyes, of my mother’s hurt and shocked face. Because what she didn’t understand was that for forty short minutes, I had felt almost normal.

  STOCKING UP WAS LIKE a business, Karl liked to say to us. You started off small and got bigger, and you always kept in mind that time was money, which meant you never left empty-handed. With each passing day, Karl was getting bolder. In the beginning, he had seemed happy enough with his finds of toilet paper rolls, crackers, and canned pork and beans, but now he was going for bigger prizes. Among the items under his tarp were a ten-speed bike with flat tires, a pair of fishing rods and a huge canvas tent that he had had Mom help carry out of someone’s garage. As for never leaving empty-handed, Karl had that covered too. Some of his odder treasures were a blender jug with no base, a moth-eaten business suit, a metal barrel filled with some sort of liquid and a set of hair rollers. The back of the truck was so full now that Karl was storing stuff in the cab. Cans of soup rolled around at my feet, army blankets scratched at my ankles and a pile of musty Rolling Stone magazines sat on the seat between Mom and me. When my mother complained that we no longer had anywhere to sleep, Karl got out the tent and pitched it by the side of the road, and there we spent our nights for the next week.

  One rainy evening, we were driving down a back road when I saw in the distance an old farmhouse with peeling yellow paint.

  “Why are all those windows covered up?” I asked Mom, pointing.

  “It’s abandoned. That means nobody lives there.”

  “Why did the people leave?”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart.”

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe . . . maybe they died. Or they couldn’t pay for it anymore.”

  “Pay who?”

  “The bank.”

  “Oh.” I thought for a moment, wondering why anyone would leave their home instead of just giving their money away. If it had been up to me, I’d have given that bank place anything to keep that house. “So then can we sleep there tonight? Please?”

  Mom glanced at Karl, who shrugged, and when we reached the driveway, he pulled in. He drove around to the back of the house, where we found a sagging barn and, beside it, a rusted tractor with tires so flat and dusty that it was hard to tell where they ended and the ground started.

  “Yep. This was a farm, all right,” Karl said, sliding from the cab.

  Mom and I waited in the truck while he pried the plywood from the back door with a crowbar, then we ran inside with our heads lowered against the pouring rain.

  It was hard to imagine anyone had ever lived here. In the kitchen, the cabinet doors hung off their hinges at crazy angles. The roof was full of holes, letting the rain pour down here and there in noisy streams. In the living room, the floorboards were so rotted through that when I knelt down, I could see right into the dirt cellar. A chandelier hung at the center of the room, stripped of its crystals. Every corner was draped in spiderwebs. But there was also a pretty ceiling made from stamped tin, and a dark wood banister as smooth as the inside of my forearm.

  Karl went to look for forgotten goodies while Mom searched the main floor for the driest room. Finally she settled on the bathroom, and went to work making a bed for me in the claw-foot tub.

  “There,” she said, tucking my sleeping bag around me. “Isn’t that nice and cozy?”

  “Yeah,” I said, fingering Papa Dick’s roach clip in my pocket. I let Mom bend down to kiss me, and put my arms around her neck before she could pull away. “Mommy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why couldn’t we live here?”

  She smiled down at me. “Oh . . . it would just be a lot of work to fix up, that’s all.”

  “I wouldn’t mind. I could help! And we could even get that tractor going again, and plant our own garden . . .” I looked up at her hopefully.

  “Sweetheart . . .” She gazed at the wall above me. “It’s just . . . even though nobody lives here, someone still owns the property—that means the land this house is on—and if they found out we lived here, we’d have to pay them money.”

  “But Karl has all that money from his pot plants.”

  “Yeah, I know, it’s just . . . we’re better off looking for a free place to live, that’s all. That’s why we love the wilderness so much. Nobody even knows we’re there. It’s like our own secret little world, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Are we ever going back?”

  “To the wilderness? Eventually, probably.”

  “No, I mean . . .” I hesitated, and then blurted it out. “I mean are we ever going back to live with Papa Dick and Grandma Jeanne again? And what . . . what about Aunt Jessie and Aunt Jan? Will we ever see them again?”

  “Oh, I . . .” Mom looked at me sadly. “I don’t know, sweetheart. Jessie and Jan . . . they’re hard to keep track of. I don’t even know if they’re with Mom and Dad anymore. And right now . . . well, we’re just taking it one day at a time, that’s all.”

  I dropped my chin to my chest, but then I had an exciting thought. “Mommy, you know that cottage Karl talked about before? The one he said we could live in on the lake?”

  Mom nodded, softly stroking my hair from my face.

  “How about it? Do you think we might? That would be so neat?”

  “Yeah, sweetie, it would. I hope so. We’ll just have to see what happens. Okay?”

  She placed Suzie Doll in my arms, then lay down on the floor beside me in her sleeping bag. I dozed off to the sound of rain pattering on the roof, happy to be snug and safe, and dreamed of living in a floating cottage that was just big enough for Mom and me, and no one else.

  I WAS LEARNING THAT although Karl liked to play the tough guy, inside he really wasn’t. The truth was that I liked him. Our relationship never crossed into the territory of stepfather and stepdaughter—he didn’t hold my hand when we walked, kiss me good-night, or teach me how to throw a ball—but it never occurred to me that he should. I didn’t imagine that Karl would be with us forever, and I didn’t imagine that he wouldn’t. Karl just was. But if I was ever unsure of his feelings for me, there was one thing that happened in Scotch Creek that changed that.

  A few days after the night in the abandoned farmhouse, my mother and I were snoozing in the truck waiting for Karl to complete a stocking-up session. Suddenly he rapped on the window, scaring the crap out of both of us. Mom scrambled across the seat and rolled down the window.

  “What is it?” she asked in a panicky voice.

  “Hey, loosen up, will ya? I thought we’d sleep here tonight, that’s all.”

  “Here? You mean in this cottage?”

  “Sure. Why not?” Karl was already reaching under the tarp to pull out our sleeping bags.

  “Oh, well . . .” She glanced at me, and I smiled back at her.

  Maybe it was the farmhouse that gave Karl the idea, I thoug
ht, and maybe he would like it here at this cottage so much that we would stay. I looked at it again with different eyes. With its brown siding and flat roof, it wasn’t one of the prettier houses, but I thought it would do just fine. I helped Mom gather our stuff, and we went inside.

  As soon as we entered the door, my hope dissipated. It wasn’t that the house wasn’t fine; it was that I could feel this wasn’t nobody’s home like the farmhouse. It was someone else’s.

  I didn’t sleep well that night. Mom put me in the kid’s bedroom, which had bunk beds and Winnie the Pooh curtains, but I tossed and turned as the clock ticked. I closed my eyes again and again, trying to calm my beating heart, but I couldn’t stop thinking about doors flinging open and lights flipping on and owners dragging me outside and slamming the door in my face. Finally, I left my bed and went to find Mom, who was camped out in the bigger room with Karl. I fell asleep next to her, but when I woke up the next morning, I was back in the bunk bed. I blinked against the bright sunlight, glad the night was over.

  Then I rolled over and saw it: there, sitting on the bedside table, was a pink satin music box. I sat up on my elbow and stared. How had I not noticed it before? Besides Barbie, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I opened the lid, and a tiny ballerina popped up and started spinning to tinkling music. More than once, Karl had offered me left-behind toys from the cottages, and I always shook my head no. But that was before I saw this. I snatched the box up and ran into the kitchen, where Mom and Karl were sitting at the table eating cereal out of blue bowls.

  “Mommy, look!” I held the box out for her to see.

  “Wow,” she said slowly, taking it from me. “I . . . I think we should probably leave that here. It looks like someone’s treasure.”

  “No!” I said angrily, snatching it back. Mom looked at me in shock. “If they really cared about it, they wouldn’t have left it here.” I turned to Karl. “Right, Karl? They wouldn’t have.”

  Karl finished drinking the milk from his bowl and dropped it onto the table with a clatter. “It’s all yours,” he said. “Pink. Your favorite color, right?”

  “Karl—” Mom started.

  “Just cool it.” He took the box from me, opened it and lifted a slip of paper out from under the tray. “See?” he said, holding the receipt up for Mom to see. “Bought and paid for. It’s a present, from me to Small Fry.” He winked at me, and I looked back at him in shock.

  A present? From Karl? It was the first brand-new thing I had ever owned. I gave him a hug, then skipped outside and played with my new toy until Mom swept me up an hour later and placed me in the truck to go steal some more.

  AFTER OUR FIRST SLEEPOVER in a cottage, we started staying in them more often. Karl never let us stay longer than one night for fear of someone catching on to us, but even though it was risky we all preferred the cottages to sleeping in the tent. One of the best things about them was the hot water. Most of the cottages left it on for the winter, so we were able do a load of laundry in the washing machine or take a bath. Mom would sit at the edge of the tub to shampoo my hair while I washed Suzie Doll, and then lift her up to drain the water from her body.

  With each passing night, my worry of being caught was fading. Now and then, I would wake up early to search for treasures while Mom and Karl slept in. I never took anything, but I liked to turn things over in my hands, wondering about the kids who had left them behind and looking for clues about who they were. There were books with names in them—This book belongs to Cathy M.—and frames around photos of smiling, gap-toothed children wearing shorts or swimsuits. I always put them back exactly where I found them, using the bare spots in the dust as a guide.

  Even when Karl just wanted to finish up a job and move on, I was getting braver. Mom still waited in the truck, her eyes glued to the road while she smoked Karl’s Player’s Light cigarettes, but I began leaving the cab to run around in the yards. Whenever I made a big show of jumping off a swing or hanging from a tree branch, Mom would give me a smile. Sometimes I’d get too loud, shouting, “Watch me, watch me, Mommy!” and she’d glance down the road and then bolt out of the truck, shushing me with a finger to her lips, but mostly I remembered to be quiet. Sometimes I thought about the kids from the photographs, the ones who got to spend their summers there without hiding, but I never felt jealous of them. Mom liked to remind me that I was a Sagittarius, which meant I was destined for great adventures. I was willing to bet the kids who lived in Scotch Creek didn’t get to do half the stuff I got to do.

  IN THE YEARS SINCE, I’ve wondered how long we would have gone on like this if we hadn’t been caught. Probably not long, considering there was barely a square inch left in the truck to store anything. It was mid-March, nearly three months since Karl had begun his stealing spree, and he was starting to make some noise about moving on. One morning, we went to the greasy spoon for breakfast and everyone was talking about some recent break-ins. My stomach dropped in fear. Karl sipped his coffee slowly, clucking his tongue and shaking his head as the waitress filled him in. Apparently a friend of hers had been dismayed to arrive at his cottage to find not only his bottle cap collection missing, but also the contents of his sock drawer.

  “Can you imagine?” the waitress said into the air, holding her coffeepot at a dangerous angle. “I mean, who would take socks, for land’s sake?”

  Back in the truck, Mom and Karl got into a huge fight. It was time for Karl to stop, Mom said, but Karl told her that business was business and he still needed some power tools. Just a couple more houses, he swore to it. Mom held her ground for a few minutes, but in the end she gave up with a cross of her arms and turn of her cheek.

  “All I can say,” she said, lifting her chin, “is that the next house you hit better have enough power tools in it to fill a frigging store!”

  Karl nodded distractedly, his mind already on the job ahead.

  Twenty minutes later, we pulled up to a cabin with a play area in the backyard. I jumped out of the truck and went to explore. And as I was digging a moat in the sandbox with a plastic shovel, I heard the voice.

  I stopped, leaning toward the sound. The voice belonged to an unfamiliar man. I could hear Mom talking too, then a brief silence before he responded. My heart thumped. I tiptoed to the end of the wall and peeked around the corner. Mom was leaning out the window of the truck, talking to a man in a red baseball cap. Karl was nowhere to be seen. I walked to the truck and slipped in through the driver’s side door beside Mom.

  “Well, hey there, youngster,” the man said, tipping his hat to me. “I was just talking to your mama about this fine cottage you folks are renting.”

  I nodded silently. The man’s eyes swept the floor, taking in the soup cans, half-burned candles and a picture frame holding a photo of the wrong family. Then he peered over Mom’s shoulder at the back of the truck.

  “Looks like you folks’ve got quite the load here.”

  “Yes, well . . .” Mom glanced at the front door of the cottage for the hundredth time. Luckily, Karl had used his lock pick to break into this one rather than a rock through the window. “We were actually just on our way to the dump. Spring cleaning, you know?” She smiled weakly.

  Just then, I heard a door slam and looked up. Karl was walking toward us, smoking a cigarette and carrying a large black plastic bag. He spotted the man and smiled at him, and then pitched the bag into the garbage bin. I stared at it, wondering if Karl had just thrown away his power tools.

  “Well, hello there! Lovely day, isn’t it?” Karl said to the man, hurrying over and shaking his hand. “Sorry about that, just doing a little cleanup. Matthew is my name, Matthew Stokes. You new to the area?”

  The man shook his head and scratched it through his baseball cap with a thumb. “Nope, been here almost ten years. Hadn’t realized the Andersons were renting their cottage out this season. They friends of yours?”

  Karl smiled again. “Just acquaintances. Look, I hate to be rude, but we really have to run. The wife�
�” He waved his hand at Mom. “Late for an appointment.”

  “Yes,” Mom said quickly. “Before we go to the dump, that is.”

  “Mm. Well . . .”

  The man looked like he wasn’t really finished talking, but Karl was already climbing into the truck, closing the door and starting the engine. He pushed the gearshift into drive, waved once more and pulled down the driveway toward the road. I turned to look out the back window. The man was standing with his arms folded, watching us pull away with a mad sort of look on his face. I lifted my hand to wave goodbye, but he didn’t even wave back.

  THAT ASSHOLE IN THE red baseball cap’s timing had been perfect, Karl declared as he drove, as he was getting bored of Scotch Creek and its one-streetlight-and-a-barbershop mentality anyway.

  “Besides, didn’t I tell you?” he said to Mom with a grin. “All that stocking up has paid off. I’ve barely had to touch my cash supply. Which means . . .” He paused while Mom and I looked at him expectantly. He waited for the lighter to pop out of the dashboard, then he lit the end of his cigarette and exhaled. “I got a line on a cottage for rent. That’s right,” he continued while Mom and I clapped our hands excitedly, “just sixty or so miles down the road. We’re gonna put us down some roots!”

  I bounced up and down while Mom laughed and hugged me. We were on our way to greener pastures, Karl said, and greener pastures deserved a party. Mom slid Steve Miller into the tape deck and rolled a joint while Karl popped the cap on a bottle of stolen beer. We all sang along to “Jet Airliner” and boogied in our seats. A while later, Karl pulled off the highway and started down a road lined with maple trees, their shadows dancing on the pavement in the late-afternoon sun. We came to a dirt lane, and he touched the brakes.

  “Here, I know a shortcut,” Karl said, turning in.

  I swallowed hard and moved closer to Mom. We were on a logging road with potholes that looked big enough to swallow me, but Karl was picking up speed. With one hand on the steering wheel, he used his other hand to open his fourth bottle of beer. It sloshed onto his lap, so he drained it and threw the bottle on the floor.