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

by Cea Sunrise Person

  I was halfway through eating when I heard the thump. I stopped chewing and held my breath. Thump . . . thump . . . thump . . . It was the sound of footsteps, I realized, and they were climbing the front stairs.

  My body flooded with terror. I dropped my sandwich and bolted upstairs to my bedroom. Glancing around the room, I made a dash for the closet. I pushed backwards into my clothes, pulled the door shut behind me and crouched down in the darkness. Whoever was down there was knocking now, each rap as loud as thunder in the silence. My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my throat. I was going to cry. I squeezed my eyes shut and took a long, shaky breath, waiting for the sound of a key in the lock and footsteps climbing the stairs to discover our secret.

  NOT TOO MUCH LATER, I heard the front door open and close.

  “Cea?” Mom called out, and I burst from the closet and hurled myself down the stairs and into her arms, bawling.

  “Mommy! There was—I heard—There was someone—I had to hide—”

  Shushing me quiet, she sat on the sofa and pulled me into her lap while I told my story. Even this long after the event, my heart was still thudding out of my chest. “What if they heard me? What if we get kicked out? What will we—?”

  “Shh . . . It’s okay. You did the right thing, sweetheart. I’m sure they didn’t hear anything.”

  I nodded, still wiping away tears. Mom stared past me at the window, its curtains drawn tightly against the daylight. “In a way, it’s good this happened. Maybe Karl will take our situation seriously now. Hmm?” She gave me a half smile and then shook her head. “Anyway. I have some good news. I found you a school! You start kindergarten tomorrow.”

  “Kindergarten?” I stared at her. A couple days before, Mom had tried to register me for first grade at the local elementary school, but had hurried me out the door again when the secretary asked for our address and phone number. After that, I thought I would be off the hook as far as school went. “But I thought—”

  “I know, I know,” she replied, waving a hand in the air. “It was the best I could do. So what if you’re a year behind? I’m sure you can make it up later or something. They were very nice, very understanding—nothing at all like that other school. I told them we were staying with relatives for a while, and they said I could give them an address later. I even met a nice mother who said she would drive you to and from school. She has a daughter in your class. Who knows, maybe you’ll even become friends with her.”

  She smiled at me, and I ducked my head under her chin. Given the choice between going to kindergarten the next morning or going back upstairs to my closet, I would happily have hidden in my dark little den for days on end.

  I STOOD AT THE side of the road, holding Mom’s hand. As usual, my pants were too short, ending an inch above my scuffed snowmobile boots. The zipper of my coat was broken, so I hugged it around me with my arm. I wished it wasn’t so cold outside, so I could take it off.

  Over the hill, a long yellow car appeared and stopped beside us. The driver had rollers in her hair and held a skinny cigarette between her fingertips. She leaned across the pretty girl beside her and rolled down the window.

  “Climb in,” the woman said to me, flicking her ash down the side of the door. “The back’s all yours.”

  I nodded through the lump in my throat and got in. Mom shut the door behind me and tapped on the window. “I love you,” she said through the glass, and I swallowed hard, staring straight ahead. The woman tilted the rearview mirror toward her face and twisted up a tube of lipstick, but I only had eyes for her daughter. Her hair was silky blond with a butterfly barrette on each side. She was wearing a pink wool coat, and on her feet were shiny black shoes with silver buckles.

  “Tina,” the woman said, tapping her daughter on the knee. “Why don’t you say hello to your new friend. What was your name, honey? Cecilia?”

  “Cea.”

  “Cea, yes. Say hello, Tina.”

  Tina turned around in her seat and peered at me from under her bangs. “I don’t want to. She smells funny.”

  “Tina!”

  “It’s true,” she said sulkily, and faced forward again.

  I blinked, trying to stop the tears, and lifted my coat sleeve to sniff it. Tina was right. My clothes smelled like pot smoke. As her mother pulled back onto the road, I turned in my seat to see Mom through the back window. She was standing by the side of the road with a go-get-’em expression on her face, and I noticed that the hem of her coat was coming down on one side. She waved at me and blew me a kiss, and in that instant, I loved her and hated her more than I ever had in my life.

  ON MY VERY FIRST day of school, I remember being lined up against the wall with the rest of the girls for a game of dodgeball. “My goodness, are you ever tall,” the teacher said, looking me up and down. “What on earth are your parents feeding you?”

  I smiled, just happy she was talking to me. She’d barely said a word to me since I’d walked through the door, other than loudly announcing my full name to the classroom. “Well, my favorite is bear meat, but I haven’t had any for a while. Mom says I’m just tall because my dad is. But I’ve never, um . . .” I stopped talking when I saw her expression. Her lips were stretched into a grin, but it looked more like Suzie Doll’s smile than a real person’s.

  “You can go over there,” she said, pointing to the line of boys against the opposite wall. “You’re much too tall to play on the girls’ team.”

  I ducked my head and walked across the room, feeling twenty pairs of eyes on me as I did. In that moment, any fragile hope I had of slipping into kindergarten unnoticed was shattered. I was a freak, and my height was just the start of it.

  After our dodgeball game, the teacher sat us down for craft time. The noise of the other children jangled around me. Across the room, Tina whispered behind her hand to a girlfriend. The teacher walked over to them and looked down at their work.

  “Good job, Tina,” she said with a smile. “And Cindy, I love how you’ve put a dress on your snowman.”

  I glued my cotton balls onto construction paper, trying not to cry. Like a stuck merry-go-round, my mind kept circling around all the things that were weird about me. There was my name, my clothes, my secret home, my young (and different, though I still couldn’t name exactly how) mother, my missing father, and my wilderness past. Then I started to think about the things I could change. I could get a different name, better clothes, make up a story about my past, and never let anyone meet my family or come over to my house. The idea was kind of exciting. For the first time in my life, I started to think that maybe I could turn myself into whoever I wanted to be.

  MOM WAS EXPECTING KARL to blow a gasket when she told him the news that I had just had my first day of kindergarten, so she was surprised when he said almost nothing.

  “Really,” he said flatly, spearing an apple slice with his fork as we finished supper.

  “Yes,” Mom said, flicking her eyes nervously to mine. “Don’t worry, though, nobody knows we’re here. I didn’t have to give them an address or anything. And her ride picks her up and drops her off half a mile up the road.”

  Karl kept his eyes on the table and didn’t say anything. Then he lit a cigarette and left the table. A moment later, we heard the front door open and close again. Mom stared at his empty seat and shook her head sadly.

  “Mommy, why did Karl go outside?”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart. This seems to be his new way of punishing me. Silence.” She sighed. “I think I preferred the arguments.”

  “But he isn’t yelling. Isn’t that better?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. It’s just . . .”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “But what were you going to say?”

  “It’s just . . . I worry sometimes, that’s all. We rely on Karl to support us. That means we need him to buy our food and keep a roof over our heads. I don’t know where my parents are, and if Karl ever decided to leave us . . .”

/>   A needle pricked at my belly. “What? If he ever decided to leave us then what?”

  “Nothing.” She got up from her chair and started clearing the table. I wasn’t finished eating, but suddenly I wasn’t hungry anymore. I picked up my plate and brought it to the sink.

  “Mommy. I was thinking. Do you think I could change my name to Cindy?”

  “Wha—Cindy? What are you talking about?”

  I shrugged. “Just . . . I don’t know. Cea is kind of . . . hard to say, that’s all.”

  “No, it’s not.” She shook her head. “Anyway, you should be proud of your name. It’s beautiful and different, just like you. And plus, your father chose it.”

  “Yeah, okay. It’s just . . .” I shook my head, knowing this was a battle I probably wouldn’t win. “Can I see a picture of him?”

  She blinked at me in surprise. “Your father? Yes, of course.” She left the kitchen and returned with a shoebox. She reached into it. “Here you go,” she said, handing me their wedding picture.

  It was a photo I had seen many times, the only one she had of the two of them together. They were standing by the side of the road in Reno, Greg holding a JUST MARRIED sign and my mother smiling so big she had dimples in her forehead. Parents. My parents, I thought, but the word sounded strange and warped in my head.

  “No, the other one,” I said. “The one of me and him.”

  She dug around some more, stopping to comment on a few of the pictures (“Look, here’s your Uncle Dane. Wasn’t he handsome before he lost all his teeth and went wacko?”), and finally pulled the right one from a yellowing envelope. I looked at it carefully: the only proof I had that I’d ever met my dad. There was me, two years old and screaming with my back arched, and there was my father, sideburned and horrified as he tried to hold me.

  “Why was I so mad?” I asked Mom, pulling the picture close to my face.

  My parents on their wedding day in Reno, Nevada, in 1969. My mother was already several months pregnant with me.

  “You weren’t mad, you were just shy. You didn’t really know him, so you were probably a little scared.”

  Scared? But he looked really nice. Why couldn’t I have just been nice back to him? Then maybe he would have wanted Mom and me to stay in California with him. I pictured the three of us living in our same cottage, but surrounded by palm trees.

  “Will I ever get to meet him?”

  “Your father? I’m sure you will, honey.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. Someday.”

  “Good. ’Cause I really want to.”

  She smiled sadly. “I know. You must have a million questions for him . . .”

  I shook my head and opened my mouth to show her my tongue, which I’d folded into the shape of a clover. Mom said that she couldn’t do it, so I must have gotten it from my dad’s side. “I just want to show him how I can do this.”

  “Oh, sweetheart . . .” She wrapped her arms around me. “He loves you,” she said into my hair. “Don’t ever doubt that. You know how he never misses sending you a birthday card? Even though we’re hard to find sometimes? I send him letters to let him know where we are, and he keeps track of us. He even sends me money. A hundred dollars a month, never misses one, even though that’s a lot of money for him and it’s late sometimes. He loves you, honey, you must believe that.”

  I nodded into her chest. What she said was true; inside my pink ballerina box, I had a collection of six birthday cards with American stamps on the envelopes. They were all signed With much love, from your dad Greg. Every now and then I would take them out to look at, just repeating those last three words over and over again until they sounded a little more real.

  “Well, that means he loves you. And now here you are, on your first day of kindergarten.” Mom hugged me close. “I know he would be so proud.”

  IN MID-DECEMBER, A LITTLE while after I started school, my mother brought up a scary point to Karl: the owners of our cottage might decide to come back here for Christmas vacation. It was the push Karl needed. He got up from the table, crossed the kitchen and picked up the telephone. Then he dialed the owner’s number and asked if he could rent their cottage—and just like that, we were free.

  We drove to a neighbor’s house and traded them an envelope full of cash for the key, and Mom was so happy that she promised Karl a blowjob when we got home.

  Our being real home renters made me feel a little better about going to school, which I usually looked forward to about as much as a daily beating. I ran a brush through my hair each morning and tried to be nice to everyone, though the other kids still barely talked to me. Just before Christmas, the teacher called Mom in to discuss my “lack of social interaction.” Mom came home in tears and hugged me so hard my ribs cracked.

  “My little girl, lonely and friendless,” she cried, shaking her head sadly. “It’s just like school was for me. I’m so sorry, sweetie.”

  I hugged her back, feeling bad for her tears. I didn’t really feel lonely and friendless, though, so much as I felt just plain weird.

  That evening at the dinner table, Mom told Karl about her meeting. Karl slowly put his fork down, and then he asked me to go upstairs. From my bedroom, I could hear his muffled voice on the telephone.

  The next day at school, one of the boys gave me his crayon when mine broke, Jenny Lund played with me at recess, and Sarah Parker gave me one of her cookies at snack time.

  Years later, Mom told me that Karl had called the teacher up and read her the riot act, claiming to be a former bigwig at the education department who could have her fired faster than she could say her own name. Then he made a call to every single one of the children’s parents and nicely asked them if they would please pull their goddamn heads out of their asses and teach their kids some manners. A few people hung up on him, but all in all, Karl’s technique seemed to work pretty well.

  THAT CHRISTMAS WAS THE best one ever. We built a fire in the fireplace and stoked it with so much wood that our faces turned red from the heat, ate cheese fondue for breakfast, and then opened presents.

  Karl’s gift to me was a bike. I knew it was stolen, but I hardly cared. It was purple, my third-favorite color, and it had silver streamers dangling from the handlebars. I spent the entire day rolling down the driveway until my feet found the pedals, and by that evening I had my balance. In the days afterward I rode up and down our road, pumping my legs furiously as the wind pulled at my hair. Now and then, just for fun, I would pretend the cops were chasing me so I could practice getting away from them. I was so fast that I could hear their sirens fading into the distance as I rode. But then I would remind myself that even if I got away, they would still catch Mom, so I would slow down again and just ride around like the other kids I sometimes saw pedaling down our street. I smiled at them shyly as they passed. I had a bicycle, a mother, and I lived in a real cottage where I could turn the thermostat up whenever I wanted to. Sometimes, I almost felt like a regular kid.

  THE FOLLOWING MARCH, SOMETHING so exciting happened that it literally kept me awake for nights on end. Jenny Lund was turning six, and I had been invited to her birthday party.

  When the day finally arrived, I dressed in my best outfit and waited on the front steps for Tina’s mother to pick me up. The car pulled into the driveway, and I ran down the steps and threw myself into the back seat.

  Tina looked at me over her shoulder. “Where’s your present?” she sniffed. “It’s Jenny’s birthday party, you know.”

  My smile faded. To my horror, I saw that Tina had a pretty wrapped box resting in her lap. “Oops, I forgot it. Could you wait a minute?” I dashed back to the house and stormed through the front door. “Mom!” I yelled. “I need a present!”

  Mom came out of the kitchen with a joint in her hand. “A present? Oh, my . . .”

  I jumped back a little. “Mom, I don’t want to smell like—”

  “Oh, honey, you worry too much about what others think. Your real friends will accept yo
u . . .” Her voice trailed away as she wandered upstairs to her bedroom.

  I followed, and stood beside her hopping nervously from one foot to the other.

  “Here. How about these?” she asked, holding up a pair of beaded feather earrings.

  I shook my head.

  She pawed through her drawers a little more and came up with a silk scarf printed with totem poles.

  I shook my head again, tears gathering in my eyes, and then ran to my own bedroom and looked around wildly. I had no choice. I grabbed my snow globe and took the stairs back down to Mom.

  “Good choice! I’m sure your little friend will love it,” she said happily, holding out a gold bow left over from Christmas.

  I stuck it on top of the globe and headed back to Tina’s car. All the way to Jenny’s house, I held my treasure in my coat pocket and tried not to cry. But when we walked through her front door, the magical scene before me was enough to make me forgot my sadness. The living room was filled with floating pink balloons, streamers and paper princesses. A giant cake in the shape of a ballerina sat on the table. The other birthday guests ran around me, their flouncy dresses swirling as they played. I glanced down at my own outfit: brown turtleneck, jeans and holey socks. I tucked my feet under my rear end and ran a hand through my hair.

  “Why, hello there,” said a voice, and I looked up. It was Jenny’s mother, holding a pitcher of red liquid in one hand and a stack of paper cups in the other. “Would you like some Kool-Aid?”

  I nodded shyly, accepted a cup and took a sip. It tasted too sweet. I gulped it down and then went to watch Jenny open her presents. She ripped open gift after gift, squealing with excitement, until there was nothing left except my snow globe sitting on the carpet. Jenny’s mother picked it up and handed it to her.

  “It looks like there’s one more present here. Who is this from?” she asked in a singsong voice, glancing around the room.

  I lifted my hand. Jenny took the globe, gave it a shake, and put it down again.