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

by Cea Sunrise Person

  “Cea . . .”

  “Yes. It’s me. I love you.”

  “Love you too . . .” Her eyes were already closing again. “So much . . .”

  I laid my head on her chest, choking back a sob. I saw her face in the dying light of the fire, smiling as she read to me. Yes. Wherever we had been and whatever we had done, my mother had always built us “a fire of ruddy glow.” And now, she was finally finding her home.

  “Thank you,” I whispered to her. “Thank you for being my mommy.” It was all I could think of to say, and in that moment, I had never meant any words more truly.

  CLOSING THE DOOR BEHIND me, I sank down onto my mother’s guest bed and pressed my palms to my eyes. Tears spilled around my fingers, dripping down my cheeks and off my chin. I could hear the last of the guests leaving upstairs, and the lyrics to Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” were still echoing in my head. It was the perfect send-off, I thought, for the woman with a true gypsy soul. My mother was dead, and her last party had just ended.

  I found a tissue and blew my nose, thankful that at least James wasn’t with me. The last thing my husband could offer me right now was comfort. Our marriage was holding on by a thread, and all that kept it from snapping was my fear of trying to raise my son with barely a penny to my name. Business ventures in recent years had been difficult for both James and me, and we now found ourselves in dire financial straits. I felt like a spider trapped in a drain; I was frightened, resigned to a life of misery, and just waiting for the water to come down and really mess things up. Only my love for my son kept me going.

  A knock sounded at the door, startling me out of my self-pity. I blew my nose again and pulled the door open a crack. It was my Aunt Jan.

  “Hey,” she said, and I opened the door wide. If there was a sight sorrier than the photo of my mother’s still-young face beside her urn of ashes upstairs, it was her sister Jan. Most of her teeth were missing, her hair was a matted mess and her skin looked ravaged from years of drug use.

  “Hi,” I said, wiping my eyes. “Sorry, I was just . . . having a moment.”

  “Yeah. This probably isn’t a good time. Should I—?”

  “No, no, come in. We’re family, right? We need to lean on each other.” I gave her a quick smile, hoping she hadn’t caught the irony in my voice. Other than Grandma Jeanne, my aunt truly had nobody and nothing in this world.

  “Tough day, huh?”

  “Yeah.” I sighed. “The toughest.”

  Jan entered the room and stood awkwardly. “Well,” she said, giving me a little shrug. “Jessie wanted to be here today. She just . . . you know, has a hard time with social stuff.”

  “I know. How is she?”

  “Okay. Getting by. She has a new husband.”

  I nodded, taking comfort in the fact that at least she had someone. Jessie’s first husband had died many years before, and from what I understood, she almost never left her tiny apartment. I looked up to meet Jan’s eyes.

  “And what about you? How are you?”

  “Oh, you know me. I just keep on keeping on.”

  I grinned back at her sadly. Both of us knew that after this brief resurfacing, she would disappear once more into the drug world. I wished there was something I could do to help her, but we were a useless team, because I lacked the funds and she lacked the willpower.

  “Seriously, I’ll be fine, I always am. Anyway, um . . .” She was fidgeting uncomfortably with the hem of her sweater.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s just . . . you’re leaving tonight, and I’m not sure when I’ll see you again, so . . .”

  “Uh-huh?” I smiled at her expectantly.

  She sat down on the bed. “There’s something I have to tell you. About your mother. She kind of . . . left a message for you. Before she died, I mean.”

  “Before she died?” I repeated. “Why didn’t she just tell me herself?”

  Jan tucked a strand of unkempt hair behind her ear, a gesture so like Mom’s. “It was when she first went into the hospital. She didn’t want to tell you herself because . . . she said she didn’t want it to be your last memory of her.”

  “Oh. Okay,” I said cautiously, lowering myself onto the bed beside my aunt.

  “I don’t know much about what went on when you were a kid. I know your mother had boyfriends, and that they weren’t always the best kind of men—”

  “Except Karl,” I interjected. “I always liked him. He did some crazy things, but he was always nice to me, and he was funny, and in a weird way we were kind of happy when we were all together, so . . .” I shrugged and my voice trailed off. My aunt’s eyes were darting around the room. I could tell that whatever she had to say, she just wanted to get it over with.

  “I’m glad about that,” she said with a nod. “But there was another one. Gary, I think?”

  “Barry,” I said robotically, and my stomach clenched. I could still see him, shining a flashlight up and down my naked eight-year-old body as I cringed inside. I could still feel my fingers, landing upon my mother’s hand as they reached toward a place a child’s hand should never go. The most shameful moments of my life.

  “Yes, Barry,” Jan replied. “Well, Michelle . . . she wasn’t very coherent, she was already pretty bad, but she told me that she made a huge mistake. She said there was a time when he did something wrong to you. You knew that she knew about it, and . . . well. She’s sorry. She’s just so sorry.”

  I nodded slowly, my mind whirling.

  “Are you okay?” Jan asked after a moment, touching my shoulder.

  “Yes. I guess I should be grateful for the apology, but it’s kind of just . . . another drop in the bucket of craziness that’s been my life. Sometimes I feel like I’m defined by what I’ve survived, and I’m not sure if I like that.”

  My aunt grinned. “If it’s any comfort to you, our family is nuts. Even I can see that.”

  “I know. But sometimes I just wonder why. Why there’s so much love there, and yet also so much madness.” I avoided my aunt’s gaze, aware that I was including her in my statement, but she didn’t flinch.

  “Well. There was a lot that went on before you were born, especially with Dane. He and Dad . . . it was rough for them. Did you know that Dad used to seduce Dane’s girlfriends away from him, right in front of Mom? It was pretty awful for everyone, even though my parents had an open marriage. Dane was really in love with this one girl Debbie, and he never got over it. Crazy Debbie, we used to call her, and when his mind went he became convinced she was your real mother, and . . . anyway, I’ve already told you that story. ”

  “Yes. The night he stole me away from Mom, right? Yelling that she was an impostor.” I shook my head. This piece of information about my grandfather wasn’t really news to me, of course, as Dane had mentioned it during our visit to him in the hospital so many years before. All the same, it was an appalling fact. “I wonder if that’s what pushed Dane over the edge,” I ventured.

  “I don’t know,” Jan responded, shrugging again. “And he’s still in the hospital, so we probably never will.”

  “Right.” I stood up and paced the room, suddenly angry. Although I could intellectually understand my family’s strangeness, I still resented it. Why couldn’t any of them just be normal? Why did my mother have to choose a course of useless herbs over readily available help for her disease, leaving her dead at fifty-four? And why did she wait so long to apologize to me?

  “I wish Mom had said sorry in person,” I said to Jan finally. “Now I’m just left with more questions. Like . . . here’s an obvious one: why did she let it happen if she knew it was wrong?”

  “Mm. I don’t have the answer to that, of course, but . . . the sexual lines were very blurred in our family. Besides Dad taking Dane’s girlfriends away, I mean. You do know about Michelle and Dane, don’t you?”

  Michelle and Dane. Only then did I realize how rarely I heard their names in the same sentence, so intent had my mother been on avoiding her brother
my whole life. “No. What do you mean?”

  “I mean . . . she never told you he molested her?”

  The hair on my arms stood up. “Molested her? What are you talking about?” Jan looked away and shook her head. “No,” I said. “You have to tell me.”

  “I thought you knew.”

  “No.”

  “All right. You see, Dane was . . . touching her. It started when she was thirteen. He always made her believe it was her problem, so she never told our parents. And when she finally had enough and told him to stop, that’s when he stole you that night. She thinks that if she had just let it continue—”

  “But she couldn’t have,” I said, horrified. “She couldn’t have. It was so . . . so wrong.”

  “Yes, it was. But he was ill, and our parents, well . . .”

  “Oh my God. Oh my God. That’s just so awful.”

  “I know. But maybe this will help you understand her a little better.”

  I clasped my hands to my head amid a hurricane of emotions, overwrought from the events and revelations of the day. So that was it. My mother was a victim of sexual abuse, not only at the hands of a stranger mistaken for her teacher in her parents’ backyard, but at the hands of her own brother as well. It really did explain a lot.

  “Thank you,” I said to Jan. “Thank you for telling me. I needed to know this.”

  She nodded and stood up, smoothing her bulky sweater down over her hips. “Well. It’s been great seeing you, despite everything. I’m proud of you, kid. Somehow, you managed to escape it all. I mean, look at you. You got the beauty, the smarts, a glamorous career, a house, even a husband and kid. You turned out pretty good.”

  I smiled back at my aunt, wishing I could find some satisfaction in her words. The truth was, I had successfully created the appearance of my dream—beautiful from the outside, and perfectly hollow within. It was an illusion I knew would have to be completely shattered to be rebuilt in reality, but the idea of doing so was scarier than anything I’d ever faced. I thought about my mother, who, though she had made her share of mistakes with me, had refused to let her darkest experiences ruin her life. And in that way, her time on earth had perhaps been more successful than my own.

  As I hugged my aunt goodbye, I made a decision: I had survived too much to let anything as mundane as financial stress and domestic discord stop me from achieving my dreams. I wasn’t going to be the one to fail the legacy of my family. The Persons may have had their share of craziness and weaknesses, but they never lacked courage in their convictions or allowed themselves to be derailed by fear.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I walked through the woods, singing a favorite old Fleetwood Mac song in my head to the sound of snapping twigs beneath my feet. “Future Games,” with its poetic questions about what was to come, seemed perfectly fitting for where I was in my life now.

  Sunlight filtered through the trees, dappling the stream that ran beside me with fluid shadows. It was a Tuesday morning, and the path was empty aside from a few chattering squirrels. Overhead, several crows screeched at a circling hawk. Having grown up in the bush, I’d always felt that city parks, no matter how vast and wild, were just cheap substitutes for the real thing. But Lynn Headwaters, a park at the edge of the city that included rivers, a lake and a small mountain range, was massive enough to swallow unprepared hikers for days at a time, occasionally never to be spat out again.

  I crossed the suspension bridge, stopping to gaze down at the rushing waters a hundred feet below, then made my way down a hillside and continued along the river. It was almost noon. I found a log to rest on and took a sandwich out of my knapsack. As I ate, I tried to focus on nothing but the distant knock of a woodpecker, the rush of the water and the wind moving through the trees. The truth was that I should have been using this time to search for a job. Avery was with James today, as he and I had been sharing time with our son equally ever since we’d split up. Since leaving my second husband, my financial situation had become so desperate that I’d even had to pawn my wedding ring to put gas in my car (my friend’s car, actually, as I had left my marriage without even a vehicle) and food in my fridge. But somehow, despite the daily stress of living under an umbrella of constant worry, I was happier than I had ever been. It was as if, for the first time as an adult, I was experiencing real freedom. I often thought about my grandparents, who had found their independence only when throwing all things material to the wind, and the irony of our parallel situations was not lost on me.

  I finished eating, scanned the trees around me for birds, and then turned my gaze to the riverbank. What I saw there caused me to jump in surprise. Not thirty feet away, sitting against a tree trunk eating soup straight from the can, was a homeless man. Near his feet, I could see a backpack with a rolled tent attached to the bottom. I looked more closely. How had I not noticed him before? And was he actually homeless? I couldn’t be sure. He looked to be about sixty, his face weathered and his long hair shaggy and tangled, but he didn’t look the least bit drug-addled or unhealthy. Although certain parks in the city were a mecca for vagrants, this particular one wasn’t.

  I stood up and brushed off the seat of my jeans. I had meant to turn and walk away, but something held me to the spot. The man glanced up and gave me a friendly wave with his spoon.

  “Lovely day,” he called, revealing a mouthful of straight, white teeth.

  “Yeah. Sure is.” I hooked my thumbs into my back pockets, wondering why I, who so rarely had a word for strangers, was still standing here. I cleared my throat. “Looks like, uh . . . looks like you’ve pretty much got things figured out there.”

  “You got that right,” he said with a smile. “Food, water, clothing and shelter. What more does anyone need?”

  I blinked rapidly, hit by an unexpected wave of emotion. It wasn’t just that the man reminded me of Papa Dick. It was as if I had entered a time warp. Suddenly I was four years old again, riding the shoulders of a summer visitor who had visions of the wilderness life that could be his, if he could just learn how to build that fire in the rain. It was 1975, and I was sitting in Karl’s green pickup truck while he plundered a cottage for loot. I was eight years old, holding my mother’s hand as we waited for someone’s beat-up station wagon to show us its brake lights and give us a lift. And I was sitting inside my grandparents’ tipi as the wind howled through another minus-fifty-degree Yukon night, unquestioning of my safety as I munched popcorn by the woodstove. This man before me was a throwback to what had once been so popular—a movement toward minimalism, emancipation and freedom that, for most, had ended with the turning of a decade, maturity, ambition or family obligations. Not so for Papa Dick, my grandfather of innovation and courage.

  It had been two years since he died, and I’d finally made my peace with the way he’d failed me in my adult years. I realized that it was up to me to decide which man I wanted to remember: the deeply flawed one who had refused to acknowledge his shortcomings, or the father and grandfather who had given his family the ultimate gift of freedom, not to mention once saving my life. In a time and society obsessed with materialism and the pursuit of the American dream, he and my grandmother had created the ultimate sustainable lifestyle, embracing ideas that the rest of the world was just catching on to now. I saw him now, grinning at me beneath his battered felt cowboy hat as he recited a plethora of information about edible plants, bear poop, indigestion, porcupine soup, the evils of food preservatives, the benefits of marijuana and the craziness of the concrete jungle. Papa Dick, I thought with a smile, you may not have been a hero to me, but you were to many. And I know I wouldn’t be who I am today without you.

  When I was little, Papa Dick was my favorite person in the whole world. On the tree is the same hat that I posed in as a baby; he was still wearing it the last time I saw him before his death.

  “Funny, my grandfather used to say the exact same thing,” I said to the man on the riverbank.

  “Is that right? Sounds like a wise old soul.�
�

  “Yes, he certainly was. And he was right . . . except for one thing,” I added, and the man looked back at me questioningly. “There’s something he forgot. More than anything, everyone needs a family.”

  Epilogue

  Parksville, B.C.

  July 2012

  They come running down to the shore, small feet slapping against the wooden walkway, and land on my beach blanket in a spray of sand. Both of them talking at once, filling me in on their adventures and pleading for snacks. My boys. I break out crackers, apples and juice, all of which they quickly devour.

  “Watch this, Mommy!” Avery says, grabbing his skimboard and running toward an ankle-deep pool of water. Emerson follows, his chubby little legs pumping as he tries to keep up with his big brother. Avery throws the board across the water and jumps onto it, then loses his footing and crashes face first. Their laughter rings out into the air.

  Parksville is my favorite place to come in the summer. Its beaches are only a ninety-minute ferry ride from my home of Vancouver, but it’s a completely different world here. The sand flats are so expansive that you can walk a mile out to the ocean before stepping foot in it. Families converge on the sand, sculpting castles and tossing bocce balls by day and gathering around campfires with marshmallow sticks by night. Here, watching my kids from the shore, I can take a break from some of the daily tasks of motherhood. In fact, I am actually halfway through reading my first book of the year.

  I’m about to open it again when a little girl in front of me catches my eye. She’s piling sand dollars into a bucket and singing “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” in a high voice. Her features look similar to my own, as if she could be my own child.