Nearly Normal

by Cea Sunrise Person

  “Cea!” Mom looked scared as she knelt beside me. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I stood up, and Apache pushed his head into my belly.

  “You see? You’re fine. Apache wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”

  “I know.” I brushed off the seat of my pants. “Can I get on again?” I asked Randall.

  “Sure thing. But you better stay awake this time,” he said, and we all laughed.

  When the first scream came, everyone in our camp turned toward it—me, Mom, Papa Dick, Grandma Jeanne and a few summer visitors. A second later, Papa Dick grabbed his rifle and ran in the direction of the log bridge that connected our camp with the Indians’. There was another scream. One of the guy visitors took off after Papa Dick, and before anyone could stop me, I ran after him too. My moccasins gripped the log bridge as I raced over it. Ahead of me, I could see my grandfather disappearing into the trees, and I ran even faster so I wouldn’t lose sight of him. Branches grabbed at me, but I didn’t even feel them scrape my skin.

  The screams had turned into crying. Two of the Indian women were kneeling on the ground and rocking back and forth. I could hear voices—Papa Dick, the summer visitor, Randall, and someone I didn’t know. I ducked behind a tree to hide and peeked out.

  The first thing I saw was three strangers with green-and-brown hats. They all had rifles slung over their shoulders, and one of them was waving his hands in the air while he talked. “Wandering in the trees . . . fired a shot . . . Who would expect a horse around here . . . ?”

  Papa Dick stepped forward. He was shorter than the man he was talking to, but that didn’t stop him from jabbing a finger into the man’s orange vest. “A deer? You thought he was a deer? Are you fucking blind?” Papa Dick was yelling really loud.

  Randall stood quietly behind him with his arms crossed.

  My grandfather waved a hand at the people who were crying. “Do you even realize the grief you’ve brought upon these good people? You should be disgusted with yourselves and your sick city ways.” He swung his arm out and pointed through the trees. “Now, I suggest you get your goddamn asses out of here. Now!”

  The men looked at each other and then hurried off in the direction Papa Dick was pointing. My grandfather dropped his rifle and sat down against a tree trunk. I looked around for the deer they’d been talking about, but I couldn’t see anything except trees and Indians hugging each other, almost the whole camp by now. Papa Dick put his head in his hands, and I realized he was crying.

  I didn’t care about hiding anymore. I came out from behind my tree and ran toward him. “Papa Dick! Papa Dick!”

  He looked up at me, and his face wasn’t mad or even surprised; it was just sad. I slammed into his arms, and that’s when I saw it over his shoulder.

  Surrounded by crying Indians, an animal lay on its side. A really big animal, black and white . . .

  “Noooo!” I screamed, struggling to escape Papa Dick’s arms. “No no noooo!”

  He let me go. I ran to Apache’s body. Blood was leaking from a hole in his head and making a sticky red pool in the dirt. I threw my arms around him. He was still warm.

  “Will he ever come back again? Will he? Will he?” I cried.

  No one answered me, but I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up and saw Randall. His long braids were swinging, because he was shaking his head. There were tears on his cheeks.

  “It’s only his body,” Randall said to me. “His spirit will never die. It’s only his body.”

  It seemed like I stayed there for hours, but finally Mom pulled me off Apache and curled me into a ball in her arms. I buried my face in her neck, thinking there could never, ever again be anything as sad as the day Apache died.

  “Mommy. When will Apache come back?” I asked for the twentieth time. If I’d once understood that Apache wasn’t coming back, all I felt now was confusion. Where had he gone, and how could he really never be coming back?

  “Never, darling. I’m sorry.” Mom was lying across our bed, smoking a joint and looking at her astrology calendar. Since Papa Dick thought anything that told time was for folks living in fear, she always kept it hidden under our bed. “Here,” she said, tearing out a page from the front of her calendar. “Why don’t you draw a picture of him?”

  I took the page from her and stared at it. It was covered in squares, numbers and a weird wavy symbol. “But there’s no space.”

  “Sure there is. Just use the margins.”

  The margins were barely big enough for me to draw a heart or flower. I thought about going over to my grandparents’ tipi to ask for some paper, but I wasn’t sure they’d have any either. It had been a few months since Papa Dick made a trip to town for supplies.

  I got out the cutting board that I used as a lap table, then I dug around in my backpack for my crayons. All the prettiest colours like pink and purple and orange were worn down to papery stubs. I pulled out black, which was still so new its tip was sharp. Pressing hard, I turned the two wavy lines on the paper into Apache’s flowing mane. Then, drawing right over the numbers, I traced out his body. Still using my black crayon, I circled dark patches on his body and coloured them in. Then I gave him a big red smile.

  “Mommy, look,” I said, holding my drawing up.

  “Oh, honey, it’s beautiful!”

  For the next couple of weeks, I did almost nothing but make drawings of Apache. Some were just of his foot or his ear or his tail. Others were filled in blue or purple with huge yellow suns above him and green grass under his feet. I drew on book pages, shopping lists, my grandfather’s rifle manual, and an old Rolling Stone magazine. I gave my pictures away to Mom and Randall and the Indians and the summer visitors and my grandparents.

  Papa Dick smiled and ruffled my hair when I gave him his. “Remember, Peanut, Apache was wonderful, but he’s gone. Don’t waste your beautiful energy on living in the past.”

  I nodded, even though I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant. But I did notice that he didn’t tape the picture of Apache to his bookshelf the way he did some of my others—the ones of bears and flowers and tipis, and him and Grandma Jeanne with huge smiles and legs that ran all the way up to their necks.

  A couple of days later, instead of reaching for my crayons when I woke up, I went outside and rode my stick horses. “Apache, Apache, Apache,” I sang softly as I galloped around the meadow. The words matched the rhythm of my feet. “Apache’s gone, Apache’s gone . . .”

  A little while later, Mom found me crying beside a log. She dropped down beside me and took me in her arms. “Shh . . . it’s going to be okay,” she whispered.

  And, of course, it was.

  Chapter 3

  April 2014

  Vancouver

  Today I’m a published author, I thought when I woke up. I reached for the iPad on my bedside table and typed North of Normal into the Amazon search engine. There it was, number one-million-something in the sales ranking. I smiled as my belly pinged nervously. I’d been counting down to this day for a year and a half, ever since my book was bought by HarperCollins.

  I rolled toward Remy and kissed his shoulder, woke the kids, showered, and wound my way through the forest of stacked boxes into the kitchen. A drizzly rain mixed with fog pressed against the windows as my family gathered around the island for breakfast. I poured cereal into plastic bowls, packed lunches, refereed chaos at the door as we searched for misplaced coats and socks and shoes. We were moving in two days, and as usual I’d been overly efficient in my packing, as if getting everything in boxes would make the big day come that much sooner.

  “Do you want me to drive them?” Remy asked as I herded the boys out the door, Ayla in my arms.

  “No, just keep Ayla,” I said, passing our youngest over. “I’ll be right back.”

  I drove the mile to school, parked and got out, tossed Avery his backpack as he burst out of the minivan. Then I grabbed Emerson’s hand and pulled him toward his preschool classroom. I’d run out of the h
ouse without my raincoat, and a fine mist settled on my hair and clothes. I felt weirdly jumpy. I’d dreamed of this day ever since I started writing my memoir seven years earlier, and many times, as I faced rejection from publishers or agents, I’d wondered if it would ever come. Now that it was here, all I could think of was the question I’d been asked countless times since my book was bought: Won’t it feel weird for the whole world to know about your life?

  Yes. It would. I knew how most people likely saw me now: stay-at-home mom, upper middle-class, happily married, friendly to everyone, easy-going. Normal, maybe even a little boring. As familiar parents waved and smiled, I couldn’t help thinking how their opinion of me might change if any of them read my story.

  “Nice weather, huh?”

  I snapped my head up. As if reading my mind, there was Christina, the mother of one of Avery’s schoolmates. She smiled at me, and I laughed lightly and kept moving. Our friendship circles overlapped, and I’d seen her occasionally at parties, but we’d never really talked. I was certain she would be horrified by my unsavoury past. The thought of the expression on her face as she read about the shit pit and Mom’s habit of giving blowjobs in moving cars almost made me giggle.

  Mom. As I dodged a flying tetherball on the way back to my car, I thought about what this day would have meant to her. I knew she would have celebrated it with me, though I also knew that my book, in all its honesty, would have been difficult for her to read. I hoped that my portrayal of her would convey the complexities of our relationship—how despite having sometimes disregarded my best interests, she had always loved me.

  A memory had been circling in my head for several weeks. It was a day I’d spent with Mom well over a decade ago, shortly after she received her cancer diagnosis. I’d been visiting her in Calgary, and on our last afternoon together, we’d gone for a hike. “I brought something with me,” she said when we stopped to rest, and she drew an old spiral notebook from her backpack. As I looked at the cover, a flood of memories washed over me. Shretson and the Great Castle: a thirty-page story complete with illustrations that I’d written during the year I’d lived in the Yukon with my grandparents. I would have been eight, I realized, the age that had held more shadows for me than any other. Sitting beside a glittering waterfall on that summer afternoon, Mom and I had spent an hour reading, laughing and reminiscing, and then she’d turned to me. “You always wanted to be a writer, even when you were little. Don’t give up on your dream, okay?” It was the best day I could remember having with her.

  Among other stories, this was one I wished I’d included in North of Normal. I wished I’d written about how the escape of reading had saved me over the years—how I’d read my only childhood book a hundred times, how I’d cried my eyes out over Call of the Wild, how I’d begged Mom to buy me used books at the thrift store for a quarter each, how I’d started riding the bus on my own to the library just weeks after I moved to the city for the first time, how I’d discovered Judy Blume books at a friend’s house when I was nine and borrowed every single one, how I’d read Fear of Flying at age ten after finding it at Mom’s bedside, and how I’d weighted my suitcase with English books when I was living in Europe and traded everything from Wayne Dyer to Danielle Steel with my modelling friends.

  Unexpectedly, tears sprang to my eyes as I buckled my seat belt. I was incredibly lucky—a publisher had deemed my story interesting enough to release to the world. But had I blown my one chance to say everything I needed to, everything that was in my heart? The book I’d crafted for my readers was the most honest account I could muster during the time I wrote it, but I had not included everything that mattered to me. I knew very well that a permanent recording of a life story on paper would always leave room for shifting remorses, opinions and conclusions, but I couldn’t help wishing for a perfection that could never be. It hadn’t occurred to me while I was writing my memoir that as much as I might worry about what I’d included, I would also regret what I’d left out.

  “So, how does it feel?” Remy asked when I got home.

  “I’m not sure yet,” I responded honestly.

  Remy was the only person in the world who knew my entire story before I put it into a book. I’d told him about it when we were dating and given him an early draft to read, and his wholehearted acceptance had encouraged me to continue writing it over the next five years.

  “Bring on the Twitter haters,” I said with an uneasy laugh. “Assuming a few people even read it.”

  Remy wound his arms around my waist. “Lots of people will read it. It’s a wonderful book. And no one is going to hate you.”

  “Except for anyone who knew my family, maybe. It’s not exactly a love letter to them.”

  “It’s the truth—the truth well told.” He kissed the top of my head and glanced at his watch. “Now let’s get over to the Realtor’s office. We’ve got a house to buy.”

  I smiled at him. It seemed fitting that on the same day the story of my life growing up in tipis, tents, empty summer cottages and unfinished houses was released, I should be signing papers to take possession of my dream house. In three days, I was due to fly to Toronto to begin publicity for my book. I was living my dream, through and through, and I was happier than I’d ever been.

  So why did some memories still refuse to release their grip on me?

  1975

  Central Alberta

  When Papa Dick found the lady on the mountain, she was in pretty bad shape. She’d been living on her own in a big canvas tent for a few months, he told me and Mom and Grandma Jeanne when he got back to our tipi camp, and it hadn’t been going well. The lady had gotten really sick from eating meat that went bad, and then she’d run out of firewood and had to burn the bed she’d built. After that, she’d fallen out of a tree when she was climbing it to store her food and broken her leg in two places. One of the breaks made the bone poke through her skin, and she’d bled a whole lot. So it was a stroke of crazy luck that my grandfather came across her while teaching one of his courses.

  Papa Dick loved teaching his Wild and Woolly Wilderness Thrival courses, because he said the more people who learned how to hunt and climb and canoe and build shelters out of branches and twine, the more people could live just like we did—which he thought should be just about everyone in the whole world. This time he’d been taking a student up a mountain for an overnight trip when they’d walked right past the lady’s tent. Papa Dick thought he’d just stop in to say hi—after all, it wasn’t every day he came across a bush camp—but he found her lying there on the ground, and she asked him for some water. He wrapped his wool shirt around her leg along with a splint of wood, and then he and the student brought her home to our camp. Along the way she told them all about her problems, but Papa Dick said we couldn’t believe her for sure because she was probably delirious. Mom explained that meant that a lot of stuff she said didn’t make sense, kind of like my uncle Dane but not that bad.

  When Grandma Jeanne saw Papa Dick carrying the lady, she rushed over to make a bed for her. I peered through the door flap as my grandmother cleaned the lady’s leg, wrapped a big bandage around it and made her swallow some herbs. Mom sat beside her, dabbing the lady’s forehead with a washcloth and looking worried.

  “How is she?” Papa Dick asked when he came to check on her, but Grandma Jeanne shook her head.

  “Not so hot.”

  Papa Dick nodded. “Best get her to town quick.”

  “What happens if we don’t?” I had to ask.

  “She might die.”

  “Wow. Really?”

  As soon as Papa Dick announced a trip to town, our camp began buzzing. It was a good hour’s walk through the forest and then a two-hour drive to the nearest hospital, so plans had to be made. It was decided that Papa Dick and the student would carry the lady through the woods to our VW bus, and that Grandma Jeanne would go along to help her not die during the ride to town.

  Papa Dick said they would need a better way to carry the lady. I watch
ed as my grandmother, using her treadle sewing machine, quickly sewed a large piece of canvas into a tube. Then Papa Dick stripped two thick tree branches with his axe and slipped one into either side of the tube. They carefully laid the lady on the stretcher. Her eyes were closed, her face was puffy and red, and she was moaning. Papa Dick and the student hoisted the lady into the air, and then everyone disappeared through the trees.

  I was glad Mom and I were staying behind, because that lady had kind of freaked me out. I’d never met someone who might die before.

  The ball was huge and shiny and red and had a handle for me to hold on to when I sat on it. I pushed off with my feet over and over again, feeling the plastic squish under my thighs as I bounced. Papa Dick had bought it for me in town, and it was the neatest thing I owned besides Suzie Doll and my Big Blue Book. Bounce bounce bounce. I bounded past our VW bus toward the big cabin at the end of the road. Papa Dick had come here to help his friends cut up a moose they’d hunted, and I’d begged him to bring me with him. I loved it when it was just me and Papa Dick. The whole drive here, he’d told me stories about when he was a kid, and the night before, he’d made up songs for me on his guitar.

  I parked my ball at the door of the cabin and went inside. The flimsy metal door closed behind me with a bang. There was nobody in the main room, but I could hear my grandfather’s voice down the hall.

  “Papa Dick, I’m hungry,” I said, but he didn’t answer. I was just about to turn down the hall to get him when I saw something on a table. I walked over to it and stared. It was a telephone. I’d never seen a real telephone before. I picked it up and put it to my ear. To my surprise, I heard a man’s voice. Hello? I almost said but stopped myself. The voice was familiar. It was Papa Dick, I realized—but how could it be if he was in another room? As I turned to look down the hall, I heard a woman’s voice. I jumped a little.