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

by Cea Sunrise Person

  “Anyway, I didn’t mean to blow up. It’s just . . . you and I are better now, I guess we’ve learned to accept each other’s differences. Even though you’re still with . . . him,” I added quietly, unable to help myself. Mom’s mouth tightened a little. It still made me furious that she had, after all these years, stayed with the man who had broken both of our hearts multiple times. It was like a hangover reminder to me of all the bad choices she’d made in men throughout my life.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” Mom said, and I nodded back at her curtly.

  Really, there was nothing more to say on the matter. It was a conversation she and I had already had several times, and there was simply no resolution to it.

  “Yeah, well. Anyway, it’s just . . . I wish I could feel some sort of closure with my family. I mean, even Grandma Jeanne—”

  “Mom? What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. I’m her only grandchild, I’ve known her my whole life, and yet I feel like I don’t really know her . . . She’s so . . . guarded.”

  “Yes. But Dad told me that she wasn’t always like that. It’s like . . . as much as she spoke of living her life without guilt and regret, I think she actually has a lot.”

  “What from?”

  “Us kids. Jessie’s mental state, Jan’s depression and drug problems, Dane’s . . . craziness. And . . .” She glanced sideways at me.

  “And what?”

  “Well. There was a thing that happened to me, before you were born. It wasn’t her fault, but I think she thought she should have been there to save me—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Just . . .” She hesitated again, and then cleared her throat. “Are you sure you want to hear this? It’s kind of . . . awful.”

  “Yes,” I said, although my mouth had suddenly gone dry. “Of course I want to hear it.”

  IT HAPPENED WHEN MOM was fifteen, she told me. The year before she got pregnant with me, when she was living in Los Gatos with her family. It was late October, and my mother was riding her bike home from school. During that spell in her life, she spent a lot of her time getting high. She passed many lunch breaks under the bleachers behind the gym, sitting alone in the shade having a little toke. And sometimes she did mushrooms, supplied by one of her male classmates who seemed to have a crush on her.

  This was something she was noticing more and more lately: guys were paying attention to her, and though they never asked her out on dates, she had seen them staring at her boobs and bare legs as they passed her in the hallways. She liked to wear miniskirts, all the rage in late-sixties California, and even though she had been sent home once for wearing one too short, my grandfather had sent her back the next day with a note telling her teacher that if he insisted on living in fear of the female form, it was nobody’s problem but his own.

  Anyway, it didn’t matter, because Mom wasn’t really interested in other guys. She already had a boyfriend named Little Joe, the fourth guy she’d slept with since losing her virginity two years before. Little Joe’s home life was rather sketchy, so lately he’d been living in the shed in her family’s backyard. Mom brought his dinner out to him in the evenings, and sometimes she slept with him overnight if they smoked too much pot to bother getting up.

  All the same, Mom’s loyalties didn’t extend to her not accepting other boys’ gifts. And so it was that on this particular afternoon, Mom was high on mushrooms. The earth tilted slowly on its side, left and then right, as she pedaled down the street. Clouds swirled above her in gently rolling waves. She let go of the handlebars and spread her arms wide, enjoying the wind in her long hair. She was feeling good. The sun was warm on her face, and the mushrooms had given the passing world an appealing brightness she wouldn’t normally have noticed. She grabbed the handlebars again and stuck her legs out to the sides like a child.

  “Hey there,” a male voice said to her out of nowhere, and she almost fell off her bike in surprise.

  She looked to her left and saw a man on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette. She found the pedals again and braked, certain he looked familiar. It was Mr. Jackson, her math teacher from school. It seemed odd to see him here on the street, out of his regular context, but she smiled at him. Mr. Jackson had always been kind to my mother despite her failing grades and many missed classes, and she knew that his wife had died from cancer not too long ago.

  “Where are you off to?” he asked Mom cheerfully.

  “Home,” she said, gesturing ahead. “Just up the next block.”

  “Ah. Well, I’m going your way. Mind if I walk with you?”

  “Of course not.” She started riding again, keeping her pace slow so he could walk along beside her.

  “Lovely day,” he remarked.

  “Isn’t it?”

  He dropped his cigarette butt on the sidewalk and ground it out with his heel. “So, home, huh? Tell me who’s there. Brothers and sisters?”

  “Two sisters, yes. And a brother. And Mom and Dad, naturally.”

  He nodded. “Naturally. Bet they’ll be glad to see you.”

  “No, well, I mean nobody’s home right now. Mom and Dad had to go into the city today. My dad’s a climbing instructor,” she added proudly.

  “Is that right? I do a bit of climbing myself.”

  “Wow. Really?”

  They had reached my mother’s house by then, so she got off her bike and walked it across the yard to the side gate. Mr. Jackson followed, chatting animatedly about his climbing days. She opened the gate and walked her bike through it, and that’s when he grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her back.

  “Ow!” she yelped, more surprised than hurt. “What are you doing?”

  “Shut up! Just shut the hell up, or I swear I’ll break it! Now get down on the grass!”

  She craned her neck over her shoulder to see her teacher’s face, shocked by the sudden change in his behavior. “But—but this is stupid, Mr. Jackson. What are you doing? I’ll tell at school. And you’re—you’re nice. I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  The man snorted. “Mr. Jackson? Mr. Jackson? Who the hell is he?”

  “Who—?” Oh God. Of course. This wasn’t Mr. Jackson. Now that she was looking into this man’s face, she could see that his eyes were brown, not blue like her teacher’s. And Mr. Jackson’s wife had died of lung cancer; he never would have touched a cigarette. How could she have made such a mistake? This man wasn’t even tall like her teacher.

  “Get down,” the man commanded again. “Get down!”

  Mom did as he told her, crumpling to the grass on her knees. The man pushed her head forward into the ground and reached under her skirt, ripping her underwear off with one vicious pull. She needed to scream, she knew, but she couldn’t. Her voice was frozen in her throat. Was this really happening? She felt so buzzed from the drugs, almost as if she weren’t in her own body, that she couldn’t be sure. Then she thought of something: Little Joe. He was almost always in the shed when she got home from school, and he was probably there right now.

  “Joe! Hel—!” she managed to scream before the man’s hand clamped over her mouth.

  “Joe? Who the fuck is Joe? No, forget it,” he said, tightening his grip. The man pinned her arms in place and pulled her back up to a sitting position. “Don’t you dare scream,” he said in a low voice. “I swear to God if you scream, I’ll strangle you.”

  Behind her, my mother heard a fly being unzipped. She was scared now, really scared. She couldn’t think straight as it was, and now she had to find a way out of this mess. Trying to fight back would be pointless, she was sure of that. She commanded herself to stop struggling, and the man’s grip on her relaxed a little.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “You—you don’t have to force me, okay? I want to. It’s just . . . I have my period. It’s really heavy. How—how about if I give you a blowjob? I give really good blowjobs, guys tell me that a lot. And I—you won’t regret it. I swallow and everything. Okay?”

  H
e didn’t respond at first, and then he jerked her around to face him and shoved her head down to his groin. “Okay, you’ve got yourself a deal. But this better be good. And if you bite me, I swear to God—”

  “I won’t, I promise,” Mom said, her voice muffled against his crotch.

  “Good. Get to it,” he growled, and pulled his dick out of his pants and jammed it into her mouth.

  Somehow, Mom got through it. The drugs helped, she said. Instead of focusing on what was in her mouth, she focused on the sound of the birds chirping in the trees and the feel of the sunlight on her neck. She was almost able to convince herself that those were the things that were real, and the rest of it was all just happening in her imagination. She waited until he was finished, and then she held her breath and swallowed; she had come this far, and she didn’t dare mess it up now.

  It seemed a miracle when the man zipped up his pants and shoved her roughly to the ground one last time before he walked through the gate.

  Mom wiped her hand over her mouth and struggled to her feet. She stumbled into the house through the back door, ran to the kitchen and washed her mouth out over and over again with hot water. She picked up the bottle of dish soap by the sink and squirted it into her mouth, then rinsed some more. She heard the screen door creak open and whirled around, terrified that her attacker had returned, but it was Little Joe. He was standing in the doorway, his grin coy and his hair disheveled from sleep.

  “Hey, babe,” he said, leaning lazily against the wall. “What’s goin’ on?”

  BESIDE ME, MY MOTHER was dabbing at her eyes. “And you know what the worst part of it was?” she asked me, shaking her head sadly. “I didn’t even break up with him. Little Joe. He didn’t see what had happened, but when I told him, all he said was ‘Wow, babe, that’s a real bummer.’ Like I had torn my favorite dress or something.”

  “Oh my God,” I said, momentarily lost for words. “That’s just . . .oh my God. I had no idea.”

  “Yeah. I never went to school again. I probably would have dropped out anyway, my grades were awful, but I really couldn’t go after that. I had this weird idea that even though Mr. Jackson had nothing to do with it, he would somehow know. Anyway, it didn’t take anything to convince Mom and Dad. You know how they felt about schools and other such evil institutions.” She gave me a weak smile.

  “Yeah. Did . . . did you tell anyone?”

  “Jeanne, of course. And Jan. They both helped me through it. That was the amazing thing about our family, we could always talk about anything without shame.” She paused and took my hand. “You know, though, it’s a funny thing. In a weird way, I’m almost glad it happened. Because if it hadn’t, I don’t know if I ever would have left Little Joe. I really didn’t think I deserved any better than him. But I couldn’t stand the fact that he knew. We never talked about it, of course, but that only seemed to make it worse. It’s like he didn’t even care, and it became this horrible sort of power he had over me. Looking at him made me remember it, day after day. So at one point, I made a decision. I decided I was going to find a better man, one who would treat me with respect.

  “And then, just like that, your father came along. It was almost like a miracle. We were only together a few weeks when I got pregnant with you. And even though he didn’t stick around, being with him was the one thing I did right, because you got his intelligence and his looks, and now you even have a decent relationship with him. I mean, imagine if Little Joe had been your father? Or Karl, or Barry?” She shook her head regretfully. “The sad thing is, though, my resolve didn’t last. After Greg left me, I was so broken that all my good intentions to find the right man left me. I just took whatever I could get. And what I got was . . . not very good, for you or for me. And for that I’m sorry.”

  I nodded, trying to wrap my mind around this new information. There was a familiarity to one of my mother’s statements that I couldn’t get out of my head: I just took whatever I could get. And there it was: as divergent as my life may have been from my mother’s, and as hard as I had tried to be completely different—opposite, even—from her, I had followed her pattern in love. Not once had I chosen a man based on his ability to meet my needs. Instead I had let them choose me, taking up with them at the slightest hint of interest regardless of our compatibility. It was an ugly admission, one that made me recognize the true standing of my self-esteem. But it was also very necessary.

  I put my arm around my mother’s shoulders and smiled at her. Her skin looked pale, I noticed, even though it was late summer.

  “Hey, Mom. You feeling okay?”

  “Sure, honey. Just tired, that’s all. Just a bit tired.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Michelle Person’s room, please,” I said to the nurse at the reception desk.

  She checked her computer screen and pointed down the hallway. “Number twelve.”

  I thanked her and moved forward, steeling myself for what I was about to see. “Now remember what I told you,” I said to Avery, taking his hand. “Grandma Michelle isn’t well, so she won’t be able to play with you like she usually does.”

  “Okay,” he said with all the present-mindedness of a two-and-a-half-year-old. “But when will she be better?”

  “I don’t know, sweetie,” I said lightly, steering him to Mom’s door before he could ask any more questions. I couldn’t tell him the answer that was in my head: Never.

  It was the day after my thirty-eighth birthday, and my mother was dying. Her cancer, a slow-moving breast tumor, had been curable with treatment, her oncologist had assured us. But Mom had refused both chemo and radiation, citing her belief in natural healing and leading to countless arguments between us. Not to be swayed, she had warded off the inevitable for a while with acupuncture and herbs before her decline. After that, it had all happened quickly. Two months ago, the last time I’d seen her, Mom had been well enough to cook a meal with me in her kitchen. Shortly after that, Grandma Jeanne had moved in with her to “help out a bit,” and yesterday, when Mom hadn’t called to wish me a happy birthday, I knew things must have gotten bad. My grandmother had finally called me late at night to inform me that Mom had been admitted not just to the hospital, but to the palliative care unit. I had boarded the first plane to Calgary that morning.

  I entered the room, holding Avery close to my side. Mom was asleep, her face so still and lifeless that for a moment I thought I was already too late. Then her hand twitched, and I took it in my own.

  “Mom,” I whispered, and she slowly opened her eyes. “Avery is here. He wants to see you.” I lifted him up to her face.

  “Hi, Gamma ’Shell,” he said.

  “Avery. My angel.” Her voice was a croak, but she smiled the tiniest bit before closing her eyes again.

  So began my vigil. I spent my days at the hospital, alternating between sitting at Mom’s bedside and playing with Avery in the visitors’ lounge. As horrible as was my reason for being there, it was almost a welcome break from the wreck of my home life. Back in Vancouver, I had a husband I no longer loved, a mountain of bills that I couldn’t pay and a failing business to contend with—several years before, I’d started my own line of swimwear, which, despite winning loyal fans and being embraced by celebrities, had proven too expensive and labor intensive for me to handle on my own. I watched my mother’s face, cradled Avery in my lap, and refused to think of anything but her. People came to visit, even my Aunt Jan, who I hadn’t seen in years. Grandma Jeanne stayed at her side almost constantly, rearranging pillows and fighting back tears. Nurses spoke in hushed voices, James flew out to pick up Avery, there was talk about stopping this machine or that, a minister even came. My mother’s eyes turned yellow. When I ran my hand down her back, I could feel tumors bulging under her skin. Prepared for the inevitable, I mourned the loss of her before she actually passed. At night, I thought about my son’s third birthday party that she wouldn’t be in this world for, and cried into my pillow.

  On the last day I saw my mother
alive, the sun rose pink and orange in the sky as I sat beside her sleeping body. I placed my hand on the book in my lap. A nurse entered the room and pushed some buttons on the drip machine.

  “How is she?” I asked quietly.

  “A little worse. Any day now. She’ll start to have fewer and fewer lucid moments.”

  I nodded, and she smiled sympathetically and left the room. Okay, I thought. Okay. I knew I couldn’t afford to wait any longer. My mother’s lucid moments were already down to one or two each day. Grandma Jeanne hadn’t arrived at the hospital yet, so we were all alone. I stood up and moved to her side.

  As I grew up, my mother and I began to mend our relationship. Here we are during a bonding trip we took to Hawaii.

  “Mom,” I began. “There’s a beautiful sunrise out there this morning.” I looked out the window, but she didn’t stir. I took her hand, staying quiet for a long time as the tears built behind my eyes. At least you have a mother who loves you. That’s more than a lot of kids have, I heard her saying, and for once it didn’t infuriate me. It was true. She had done the best she could. Memories of my childhood with her jostled with moments we shared during my teens and adulthood—watching her dance at one of her wild parties, slamming the phone down on her in anger, the two of us laughing together on the beach under a Hawaiian sun. I searched my soul for anything left unsaid. But after all these many years, our relationship was so complex, so filled with love and torment and everything in between, that it was hard to know where to begin or end. But perhaps that was the point. There didn’t need to be an end, and as long as there was love, the rest could just fall away.

  I swallowed hard. “I—I have something for you. I thought you might like it for your . . . journey.” I picked up the Big Blue Book from my chair and placed it on my mother’s chest, bracing for the dam to break behind my eyes. “Do you remember how you used to read this to me? And that time in the forest? The Brownie story was always my favorite. November, remember?” I squeezed her hand again, and she opened her eyes.