Nearly Normal

by Cea Sunrise Person

  In any case, my dwindling bank account didn’t keep me from indulging more than I should have, especially when my life felt directionless. Since giving up on my writing idea, I’d had little success in finding my life’s purpose, and after working steadily since the age of thirteen with a clear intention, such aimless floundering was excruciating. I craved productivity, busyness, a place to focus the energy and drive that had propelled me for so many years.

  “Keep at it. You’ll figure it out,” James would say. He believed in me, I knew he did—just as I believed in him. Unlike me, who could barely come up with a single creative career idea, James was full of them. Venture concepts bounced like rubber balls as he excitedly cast them out to me over dinner. Though I understood little of what he was saying—science, technology and business plans were not my forte—his enthusiasm was infectious.

  The Banana Republic cashier read out my total with a smile, and I handed over my debit card. At least James wasn’t here to see how much money I’d spent; though he’d come shopping with me, he was nowhere to be found. I did a quick round of the store and then walked into the mall, annoyed by his disappearance. I was about to dial his number on my cell phone, when I spied him in a jewellery store across the way. I rushed over and stood beside him, hand on hip.

  “Hey, I’ve been looking all over for you. What are you doing?”

  “Buying you an engagement ring.”

  “What?” I pulled back in surprise. This was typical of James, to deliver startling news with little emotion or preamble. I was sometimes struck by our absolute opposite characters—I was always rambling on to friends at parties while he stayed quiet; self-deprecating where he was serious; uncertain of my convictions where he seemed unwavering in his; grounded where he was busy dreaming up life-changing ideas. But so far, it seemed to be working.

  “Sure. We’ve talked about it, right?” James said, shrugging. “Do you like this one?” He held out a modest solitaire set in white gold.

  “Well, sure, I mean . . . okay.” My thoughts were spinning.

  We had talked about it, of course, and generally things were on track. We’d just bought a house in deep suburbia, the only area we could afford in this overpriced market, and I was hoping our new space on neutral ground would finally give me the sense of home that had continued to elude me.

  I gazed down at the ring in James’s hand. At least I had him. At least I wasn’t going through the motions of a pretend-happy life alone.

  “It’s very pretty,” I said.

  “All right.” James smiled, slipping it onto my finger. “We’ll have to get it fitted, of course, but here you go.”

  I sat beside James in my window seat, staring glumly out at the whiteness shrouding the plane. I knew I should have been happy—after all, I was on my way to the beautiful island of St. Lucia to get married—but my head felt dark and heavy. Just before we left, Mom had called to inform me that although her oncologist had recommended a round of radiation to kill any remaining cancer cells, she’d decided against it in favour of alternative medicine. As far as I could gather, this would consist of Chinese herbs, acupuncture treatments, and her go-to homeopathic cure of Rescue Remedy drops. There was no talking to her about it, and I knew with absolute certainly that she was going to die. More than sadness, I felt helplessness and anger at her absolute refusal to face reality. It seemed this was destined to be the dynamic of our relationship—her making bad choices, me trying to make her see reason, each of us frustrated with the other. Sometimes I wondered if she ever saw the poor choices I’d made over the years—certainly she didn’t comment if she did. I put it down to her unfailing determination to live in the present and remain positive, but sometimes it infuriated me—weren’t mothers supposed to offer their unsolicited opinions? I would happily have labelled it guidance.

  I sighed and turned to look at James’s profile. The man I was four days away from marrying was right here, a potential captive audience to my musings for the next three hours, and I couldn’t say a word to him about what was going on in my head. Since early in our relationship, it had been clear to me that James regarded my mother as little more than an annoyance, so what I shared about her had petered out to almost nothing. It occurred to me that my ambiguity over revealing my past had resulted in my subconscious choice in a man—someone who really wasn’t interested in hearing about it. But maybe this was for the best, I thought. Maybe my childhood and complex family relationships needed to stay where they were, buried beneath layers of love and resentment and joy and pain. I could never hope to explain them to the man beside me, or to anyone else for that matter.

  I sighed and opened my book, trying to redirect my foul mood. My cheeks felt too warm. I stripped off my cardigan and then my T-shirt. Even wearing just a tank top, I felt my face breaking out in sweat. I turned to James and put my hand on his arm.

  “Hey. Are you okay?” he asked in surprise.

  “No,” I managed to say as I unbuckled my seat belt. “Bathroom—” I tried to step over his legs, and that’s when I blacked out, tumbling into the aisle headfirst like a rag doll.

  When I regained consciousness, James, two flight attendants and a passenger were looming over me.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “You fainted,” a flight attendant replied.

  “That’s weird. I’ve never fainted in my life.”

  “How do you feel now?”

  “Fine. I think.” I was helped up, put back into my seat, buckled in. “Thank you,” I said to no one in particular, embarrassed by all the faces now turned my way. “We’re, uh . . . on our way to get married. Just nerves, I guess,” I added with a weak laugh.

  The lady in front of James turned to peer at me between the seats. “Well, let’s hope this isn’t a bad sign, then.”

  Of course it wasn’t a bad sign. If St. Lucia was lovely, our Sandals resort was magical, immediately putting me under its spell of breezy palm trees, bottomless piña coladas, and sugar-sand beach. This was the sort of place women in childbirth or people on the verge of painful death might transport their minds to, and being there did well to erase the tumult of my anxious thoughts.

  A couple of days before our wedding, James and I went scuba diving. He’d recently introduced me to the sport, and though I’d quickly come to love it, I had only a few dives under my belt. As we swam side by side, I watched a school of fish go by in a synchrony of flashing yellow and blue. James pointed to a dark shape, a massive manta ray cruising the ocean floor above trailing sea plants. I swam after a baby sea turtle. Lobsters’ antennae waved in the current. A moray eel darted out of its den, startling me. I stopped beside the reef wall. We were at 110 feet, my deepest dive yet, and I knew that between the depth and my nerves, I was sucking air too fast. I checked my dive computer. I was down to 400 PSI, just enough to get me to the surface again.

  I spun in a slow circle, looking for James. I could see a few divers from our boat in the distance, but not my fiancé. James was an exceptionally safe and conscientious diver, and I knew I had a tendency to swim off. If I couldn’t see him, he had to be just behind me, hidden by the reef. I started back that way, but anxiety was making me breathe fast, which was exactly what I shouldn’t do. Stay calm, I thought. You need to stay calm. Ascending alone was a bad idea, but I would have to make a decision soon.

  Suddenly James was beside me, holding my dive computer and signalling for me to remove my regulator. Relief rushed through me. I took the regulator from my mouth, trying not to think that all there was between life and death was a single, accidental inhalation of water. James pushed his spare regulator into my mouth and slammed the purge button.

  Are you okay? he signalled with his hand, and I signalled back that I was.

  We bobbed in place for a minute, while my heart rate returned to normal. James pulled out his underwater slate and started writing, then held it up for me to see. I love you. Will you marry me? he’d scrawled in messy black letters.

  I nodded,
filled with relief. Though I hadn’t wanted to make him feel bad about his original proposal, it hadn’t exactly bowled me over. But I hadn’t given him enough credit—he did get it.

  I put my hand in his, and we stayed like that, two people connected to a single life source. The moment felt symbolic. As we floated face to face, it occurred to me that maybe I’d been looking at James the wrong way—that his power in helping me heal lay not in his ability to listen and empathize but in the similarities I recognized between him and my family. In James I saw the protection of my grandfather, the hard work ethic of my grandmother, the optimism of my mother and the intelligence of the father I still yearned to connect with. Perhaps this was my second chance to experience their best qualities without their selfishness and dysfunction. Maybe I could actually have the happy life I’d always pretended to. Because for as long as I could remember, I’d been smiling through my pain.

  1974

  Kootenay Plains

  If the porcupine caught up to me, it would jump on me and jab me with its quills. I counted as I ran: one, two, three, four . . . If I made it to the fallen log up ahead by the time I got to ten, I decided, the porcupine would climb a tree and leave me alone. I made it to the log by the count of eight, then I stopped for a moment to catch my breath. Not for long, though, because if my grandparents got too far ahead of me, I’d never find them again, and I’d be lost in the forest just like Hansel and Gretel in my Big Blue Book.

  “Grandma Jeanne, wait up!” I called.

  My grandmother stopped and glanced back at me. “Keep going, Cea. Try to keep up with us, okay?” She started walking again.

  “But how much farther? How long?” I asked for the hundredth time.

  “Soon. We’re almost at the river. You’re doing great.”

  I scrambled after them. Papa Dick walked just ahead of my grandmother, the quietest on his feet even though he had the heaviest load on his back. There had been a wet spot on my bum for the past hour or so, and I knew what it was without looking. My pack was filled with chunks of the caribou Papa Dick had shot this morning, and some of it had come free of its wrapping and was dripping blood. But there was no time to fix it. Papa Dick had said we had to get back to our tipi camp before sundown, so that we could get the meat into coolers before it spoiled. That and so we wouldn’t get lost.

  I was four, a year older than I had been when a man named Fred came to visit our tipi camp. I wasn’t born in the wilderness, but I may as well have been, because it was all I remembered. Mom told me that she’d carried me all the way from California to Canada in her womb, that I was born right at sunrise and that we all lived in a drafty old house in a town called Hills. She had one picture of me in that house. I was sitting in a chair with a tray around my belly, and there was flowery paper on the wall behind me. I liked that paper. When I asked Mom why we didn’t stay there, she told me that the house had never really been part of Papa Dick’s grand plan. He’d moved his family to Canada so we could be in the wilderness, and we’d only stayed at that crappy house because Mom had been so sad about my dad leaving her, she’d almost gone crazy like my uncle Dane. At that part of the story, I stopped asking Mom questions, because I didn’t even know my dad, so he was boring to talk about.

  But hunting trips weren’t boring. We’d been away from our camp for four days, and I’d loved every minute of it, even though Grandma Jeanne kept saying how she couldn’t wait to get back to take a bath in our river and eat some real food. We’d taken just a few supplies along, so we could fill our packs with the meat from Papa Dick’s kill. We wore the same clothes each day, ate dried meat and bread for every meal and slept in forts that Papa Dick built from tree branches and twine. Going hunting with my grandparents was like being on a treasure hunt. Papa Dick would point out clues like broken tree branches, piles of poop, tracks, and marks on tree trunks, and when we found a few of those things in a row, we’d all stop talking and walk as quietly as we could to look for the animal. Papa Dick had even let me bring my bow and arrow along to practise. The only thing that made it not perfect was that Mom didn’t like to come. She would stay at camp, because, she said, someone needed to look after it—but this time I knew it was because she wanted to be with Randall, the Indian chief from across the river. I knew they were back together because they were doing the screwing again.

  My tummy was grumbling. “I’m hungry,” I said as we walked. “Can I have a snack?”

  Without stopping, Papa Dick reached into his pocket and passed a leather pouch back to me. I opened it, already knowing that it held pemmican, my favourite. I ate the dried, powdered moose meat as fast as I could so I wouldn’t have to slow down. At least the taste of the food distracted me from the pain in my feet.

  I tucked the pouch away and tried to come up with my next game. I’d already done a bear and a cougar chasing me, and I was getting bored of pretending to be their next dinner. I watched the ground as I walked, trying not to step on rocks, because if I did, the earth would open up and swallow me whole. When I got tired of that, I just started chanting in my head to the beat of my footsteps. One more step . . . almost there . . . one more step . . . almost there . . . And finally, there it was, the best sight in the world—sun-dappled water sparkling through the trees.

  “The river!” I shouted, darting toward it. Thirsty from the pemmican, I dropped down, stuck my whole face into the water and drank until I was full.

  My grandparents filled and drank from their enamel cups, and when they were done, Grandma Jeanne knelt down beside me.

  “Let’s take a look at your feet. How are they doing?”

  “Okay.” I smiled gamely, glancing down at them. I knew my grandparents were proud of me because I hadn’t complained about my feet once. And anyway, they were in pretty good shape, seeing as I’d been walking barefoot for three hours. My soles were tough enough to protect me from most pokey things, but my toes were covered in scratches and thorn pricks, and there was a long cut on the inside of my foot from stepping on a sharp rock.

  It was all my stupid moccasins’ fault. Grandma Jeanne had already fixed them a few times, and yesterday they’d fallen right off my feet. “Talk about timing,” she’d grumbled as she threaded sinew into her needle, but no amount of thread could put them together again. After that she’d tried strapping the leather pieces to my soles with twine, but they hadn’t held on longer than a few minutes.

  “It’s okay, I can do it,” I’d said to her bravely, and I had.

  Looking down the riverbank now, I couldn’t see our canoe, but that was probably just because Papa Dick had covered it with tree boughs before we left it. No one ever came down the river this far into the bush, but Papa Dick was extra careful about our canoe. “It’s our primary source of transportation,” I’d heard him say more than once, and whatever that meant, it sounded important.

  Papa Dick took one more drink of water and pointed at the sky. “The light’s fading. We have to keep moving.”

  “Where’s the canoe?” I asked.

  Instead of answering, he just pointed and started walking along the shore. I followed behind Grandma Jeanne. The rocks here were sharper than the twigs and fallen logs in the forest. I won’t say anything won’t say anything won’t say anything, I repeated in my head. But time passed, and there was still no canoe in sight. My sore foot was hot and red now, and my grandparents were getting smaller and smaller as I fell behind.

  Suddenly I’d had enough. I stopped and stood as solid as a tree. “Ow!” I yelled. “My feet hurt!”

  “Not much longer, sweetie. Just around the next bend,” Grandma Jeanne called back, turning and giving me a smile.

  I rubbed my eyes and kept walking. But there was no canoe around that bend or the next one either. I was getting tired and hungry and mad, and the rocks were hurting with every step. I stopped again, but this time I dropped my bow and arrow and let my pack slide to the ground. Then I wiped my hand across my butt, looked at the blood and let out a howl.

  My
grandfather turned to me impatiently. He was so far ahead he had to shout for me to hear. “Cea! You know we don’t have time for this!”

  I howled harder. “I can’t walk anymore! Carry me! Carry meeee!”

  “We can’t, Cea. You know that. Now come on, we’re almost there. You’re being such a big help—don’t give up now.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “No! I don’t want to be a big help. I want you to carry me!”

  My grandparents looked at each other with squinty eyes, the way they always did when they weren’t happy about something. But I didn’t care. I was staying right there until someone picked me up.

  Suddenly Papa Dick’s gaze swung toward the trees above the riverbank. He was still, and then he shot his hand out to let Grandma Jeanne and me know to be quiet. The only reason would be for an animal, but we already had our caribou. My tears forgotten, I walked on tippytoes toward my grandfather.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  “Shh . . .” He knelt down beside me. “Look.”

  I followed his pointing finger and saw a large brown rabbit with a twitchy nose. I slumped over, disappointed. Bunny rabbits were nothing to get excited about. Actually I sort of hated seeing them, because sometimes Papa Dick would kill one for dinner, and they were icky and tough. I was just about to say so, when a shot rang out beside me. The rabbit fell onto its side with a little bloody hole over its eye. Papa Dick threw his rifle over his shoulder and picked up the animal by its back legs.

  “Is that for supper?” I asked with a scowl.

  “No. This is your new shoes. Winter’s on its way, and I bet your grandmother will be able to make some nice warm moccasins out of this fur.”

  “Wow. Really?” I reached out and touched the rabbit’s fur, thinking how my feet would feel wrapped in that softness.