North of Beautiful

by Justina Chen Headley

  “Aren’t you overreacting a little?” asked Elisa. “God, your brother is headed to the hospital.”

  “It was a mistake to come here.” Merc was as implacable as Dad.

  “Or do you mean, it was a mistake to bring me here?”

  No answer.

  I retreated to the kitchen, removed all the different dishes still warming in the oven, our Christmas Eve banquet.

  “I’ll leave,” said Elisa. “You should stay.”

  Another grim pause and then Merc: “I don’t have to take his bullshit anymore.”

  “But the bullshit wasn’t about you. I’m a big girl. I can handle it.”

  “That’s just it. I don’t want you to have to handle it.”

  Quietly but firmly, Elisa said, “But you weren’t either.”

  I swallowed hard, leaned my head against the cold steel of the refrigerator door. I could imagine how Mom and Dad started this way early in their marriage: one placating, the other fuming. When had the tenor of their arguments completely changed so it wasn’t about calming, working things out, but blaming? What had happened so that all the power coalesced with Dad, vanished from Mom?

  I couldn’t stand the fighting anymore, and before I could think better of it, I crossed the kitchen to stand before Merc’s bedroom. He was in the adjoining bathroom, hastily stuffing his toiletries back into his shaving kit with Elisa looking on. She was shaking her head, disapproving. Or disillusioned. I couldn’t tell.

  “You can’t leave already. You just got here,” I said. I waved in the direction of the kitchen. “Dinner’s ready. . . .”

  Merc flinched, glanced at me, and then looked away guiltily, busying himself with recapping his toothpaste.

  I couldn’t modulate my voice, which came out as a wail, an accusation, a plea: “I haven’t seen you in two years.”

  “We’ve got to go,” he said simply, and then brushed his hand impatiently through his thick hair, leaving his curls even more unruly.

  Elisa closed in on Merc carefully as though she were caging a wild beast. “Maybe we can stay at a hotel or something.”

  “The River Rock Lodge,” I offered. “I’ll bet there’s room. I’ll call now.”

  “No,” said Merc. He zipped the shaving kit, tucked it under his arm like a football. I half expected him to thrust his arm out, barrel past Elisa and me to the front door. But Merc stopped at the bed, wadded up the jeans that he had left on the floor, and wedged them into his luggage.

  “You’re not really leaving, are you?” I asked, dismayed. “Mom’s been planning this for six months. You should have seen her these last couple of weeks. She made all your favorite food.”

  At first, I thought maybe I had broken through to Merc. He was closer to Mom than any of us, or at least he had been when he lived at home. He held his green T-shirt like he had forgotten he was folding it. But then he scrunched that, too, and stuffed it into his luggage. Without a word to me, he strolled to the door where I was still standing. Maybe now he’d tell me that, of course, he’d suck it up and stay at the local resort. Or maybe he’d relent and stay here and I’d pack my things and move back upstairs for the week the way it had been planned. Instead, he bent down to grab his briefcase. I stared dumbly at him as he threw the strap over his shoulder and then lifted his luggage and Elisa’s off the bed. With one last regretful look at me, he was out the door.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Elisa, looking at me sadly. She wrapped her arms around me, hugging me hard so I got a whiff of green tea and peonies, like she was wearing China on her. And just as swiftly, she held me away from her and murmured, “I’ll see if I can change his mind.”

  Merc was waiting at the front door, his BlackBerry already out as if this latest episode with Dad had shaken off the easygoing personality he had been trying on. The affectionate, carefree boyfriend was gone. Mr. Let’s Make a Business Plan was back. Still, how could Merc focus on the bottom line now? A car outside honked, its headlights flooding our entry.

  “Where are you staying?” I asked.

  “At a friend’s,” said Merc. He shifted his briefcase uncomfortably in his hand, guilty at being so eager to leave again. “Call me about Claudius.”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to say anything. I didn’t want to cry in front of them, not with Elisa looking at me so pityingly. So I waved hurriedly like I had a billion more important things to do, shut the door, and then watched them blearily through the window. When Merc had left for college, I was in first grade. Back then, I didn’t realize my big brother was leaving for good. I did now. As soon as the rear lights vanished, I sequestered myself in the kitchen, putting away the rest of the dishes Mom had painstakingly prepared, starting a week ago. Then I wandered around the house, blowing out the candles one by one until I reached the great room. There, near the hearth, was the shattered glass globe, bits of our crumbled world mingled with Claudius’s blood. I got the broom, swept away the evidence of our fractured family, and as I was about to throw the glass away, I scavenged the largest shard, placing it on the empty coffee table where I wouldn’t forget it. Back in the kitchen, I filled the sink with hot water and a cup of vinegar, the way Mom disinfected our floors every Monday and Friday. With an old rag, I got to my knees and mopped up the blood.

  Finished, I let my weariness became a shroud, wrapping around my limbs, my face. Even though it was just six — when Christmas Eve dinner was supposed to be served — I grabbed the piece of glass I had salvaged and shuffled to my bathroom. Bed, I yearned for my bed. But I halted before the mirror. My face was molting. Tears and nervous sweat had made a mess of my makeup, cutting runoff lines down my cheek. A couple of weeks ago, after Mrs. Frankel so helpfully pointed out my obvious acne to me, I broke down and bought a new cleanser. Now, I used it to wash my mottled mask off, gently patted my face dry. The mere act of sudsing my face usually freed me to breathe as though I had removed a punishing corset. But tonight, my lungs felt so tight, so squeezed, I could have been petrifying from my insides out. I slipped into one of Claudius’s old oversized T-shirts and fell into bed.

  About an hour later, the doorbell rang. Irrationally, I expected it to be Merc come back to spend a merry Christmas with us. So I bounded light as Santa’s reindeer to the front door, sure it couldn’t possibly be my parents. The nearest hospital was forty-five minutes away. Besides, they’d enter through the garage.

  No sooner did I open the door than my grin faltered at the same time as Erik’s. He couldn’t quite mask the shock of seeing me au naturel any more than I could have feigned real excitement at seeing him, makeup or no makeup. As he continued to stare, I wanted to point to my cheek and remind him, But you were the one who wanted this, remember? You’re the one who asked — and I repeat — Why not fix your face?

  “You’re Terra?” asked a guy I hadn’t seen, hidden as he had been behind Erik. They had the same stocky build, the same pale coloring. This had to be his cousin Max.

  Despite Erik’s mumbled introduction, I discerned his meaning all too clearly: he was embarrassed to be associated with me. The girl he wanted to show off was the one in the pictures he tacked in his locker, displayed on his bedroom wall, the blonde with a killer body in a string bikini, wearing a ton of makeup and not much else. Instead, he had crashed onto a land he had known about but had never seen. Me, uncovered. Terra Incognita.

  If I hadn’t felt ugly enough standing there with his head ducked down, studying the piled snow off the porch, I was fully aware that I was wearing Claudius’s graying T-shirt. All in all, not my best sartorial moment.

  The awful thing was, I couldn’t stop smiling at him and his cousin, my mouth embalmed in a fake grin. And that’s when it hit me — where I’d seen Erik’s expression before. Why it was so painfully familiar. It was the same expression Dad wore in public with Mom, sheepish and mortified rolled into one uncomfortable mass. Terra Humiliata.

  The fact was, I was sick of it. Tired of hiding my face. Tired of apologizing for it. So I did what Jacob tol
d me to do. Let them stare. I didn’t even avert my face a single degree. I just told Max flatly, “I had laser surgery last week to lighten my birthmark,” as if it was no big deal.

  “Oh yeah?” he said. Unexpectedly, Max swiveled around, yanked his pants down.

  “God,” I said, holding my hand over my eyes. The last thing I thought I had wanted to see tonight was Merc walking out the door. I was wrong. It was this stranger’s rear end. “Please don’t tell me this is one of those stripping telegrams?”

  Max laughed and said to Erik, “You didn’t tell me she was so funny.”

  I heard Erik’s answer in his silence: I didn’t know she was so funny.

  And then, as if I could miss the big, black block letters tattooed just under his waistline, Max tapped the girl’s name on his hip: Eden. Apparently, Eden was a polluted paradise. “You think that laser could take this off?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He looked crestfallen.

  “But I could ask my surgeon the next time I see her,” I offered.

  “Yeah?”

  I nodded.

  “Very cool,” said Max, grinning at me, and then, thankfully, jerking his pants up where they belonged.

  “Yeah, but word of advice, no more girlfriend names. And if you insist on doing that again, avoid the butt. Being on a guy’s ass isn’t a compliment. Got it?”

  “I hear you.”

  Erik looked relieved and bewildered at this exchange, more wordy than any conversation he and I shared. Then he handed me a present, so exquisitely wrapped with perfectly sharp creases and embellished with bells and ribbons, I knew it had to be his mother’s work.

  “You better open it alone,” he said, a real smile now. I cringed inside. Why did it have to be such a suggestive leer?

  “You didn’t have to,” I said. I tried to find something more to say to him, came up blank. And then, because the neurotic artist in me had to know: “So did you open my present?”

  He nodded, relieved. His way out of our conversational black hole, too. “Yeah, it was cool.”

  “Cool?” I had an image then of Jacob standing in my studio, how he had somberly called my collages provocative. I recovered, smiled at Erik. “Okay, cool.”

  Later, after Erik and Max left to join their families for Christmas Eve dinner, it was a good thing I unwrapped his gift alone in my bedroom, door locked, blinds drawn. Inside the box was a slinky nightie, fuchsia, a color never before seen on my body — except, obviously, in Erik’s fantasies. It rankled, that flimsy piece of polyester, especially since I was a cotton T-shirt–wearing kind of gal. I didn’t even bother taking the lingerie out of the box. Whoever said it was the thought that counted was wrong, dead wrong. Did he really think I wanted this? That I would wear it for him? Like, when, exactly, was that going to happen? And worse, did his mom know what she had been wrapping? Or, oh God, I groaned, threw myself back onto the bed. She hadn’t picked it out, had she?

  But then again, for all I knew, Erik’s reaction to my collage could have been the same as mine to his lingerie: bewilderment and not a little mortification that I knew him so little. It didn’t matter that I had spent the better part of the week working on it, that ode to us. After discarding image after image, I had finally settled on a gothic cross for the focal point, a reminder of when we had gotten together over Halloween. But when I had affixed the photograph of the cross over the map of the Northwest, I couldn’t help but think of a certain Goth guy. And how I suspected, as I propped the wrapped art on Erik’s doorstep this morning, that I was giving it to the wrong boy.

  Chapter fifteen

  Here Be Dragons

  CHRISTMAS MORNING WAS SUPPOSED TO dawn clear and blue, according to the meteorologists. It was still black when I woke. My eyes were drawn to the out-of-date world map hanging over the foot of my bed. I couldn’t see the lines or colors, the room too dark for that. But I could picture the world’s borderlines in my head, long since inaccurate because the countries themselves had changed after the map was printed in 1990: Germany reunifying, the Soviet Union dissolving. Estonia declared independence. So had Namibia. And now almost two decades later, Merc had declared his, leaving abruptly last night. What did that signal if not that he didn’t need or want us at all?

  I rolled to my side and peered between the slats into the darkness, where, far off, the North Star twinkled. Downstairs, Mom was rustling in the kitchen, unable to sleep either. She was probably whipping up a batch of butter-laden shortbread. Or maybe double chocolate brownies, Claudius’s favorite. If she couldn’t soothe our family, she’d soothe our stomachs. Claudius’s palm only needed a few stitches last night; luckily, the glass hadn’t severed any important nerves. Unlike the news that Merc and Elisa had left. As soon as I broke that to Mom, she had started crying, great, heaving sobs the way she had when her sister died. Not caring that Dad was watching and listening, Mom had collapsed at the kitchen table. He had actually approached her, and I bristled, suspicious of his intentions. Dad saw my glare. He turned around and hastened to his office, head hanging low.

  I had been so mad — mad at Dad for his belated remorse, mad at Merc for leaving, mad at myself for not being able to stop Merc. Without thinking, I sent my brother a scathing e-mail, telling him what I couldn’t say in person. Even now, I could feel my accusations spitting acid words from my computer:

  You should hear Mom crying now. She’s been waiting for 2 years to see you again. First, you don’t call us, not even once in the last year. And then you forget her birthday. How hard is it to remember? Valentine’s Day, Mom’s birthday. And then you just bailed.

  Well, you get the gist.

  Apparently, Jacob was right; I’m good at making statements. It’s the fallout that I can’t handle. And if there was one thing I was certain about, it was that my brother, Mr. Married to My BlackBerry, had read my message. If he answered, it would be no different from his irregular missives: a handful of inadequate words, all lowercase because he couldn’t waste a split second on holding down the shift key to capitalize anything.

  Unable to stand another second communing with my inner critic, I threw off the heavy duvet, the flannel sheets. I padded to my closet, reached over to flick on the light. The glare of the bulb inside my closet reflected off Merc’s framed diploma from Western Washington, one more relic he’d left behind in this room, a reminder of a past he no longer wanted. Or needed.

  Over my huge T-shirt, I wrenched on a thick, shapeless sweater. Then I foraged for some thermal underwear as well as my polar fleece pants from the dirty laundry bin. I smelled them — not bad. Besides, what did it matter? I wouldn’t see anyone this early.

  My headlamp was still hanging around my bed knob where I had left it yesterday morning. Behind me, I shut the bedroom door softly and crept to the mudroom and broke out of this homegrown jail.

  The wind nipped at my uncovered fingers, ghostly teeth hungry for flesh, as I strapped on my snowshoes outside the mudroom. Clumsily, I thrust my boot into the openings in the metal shoes, snapped the ankle strap, and then tugged my favorite mittens on. I wiggled my fingers beneath the pilled polar fleece, and when that didn’t thaw them, I rubbed my hands together. My warm bed upstairs beckoned, but so did my insomnia. I had already wasted enough time beating myself up, especially considering Dad had done such a thorough job of that in my head. So I grabbed my poles and set off on the trail behind the house.

  Once I rounded the bend, the lights in Dad’s office switched on, a warden sensing an escapee. I couldn’t help myself; I stopped, stared up at his Aerie perched atop the house. Which, as Claudius had snickered once, was what Hitler called his own retreat and hideout in Obersalzberg, the eagle’s nest.

  I imagined Dad up there, pounding away at his bank of computers, surrounded by the most precious of his antique map collection. Overhead on the ceiling was the mural he’d commissioned of the Mappa Mundi, the medieval map that divided the world into three unequal parts — not unlike our family. Dad commande
d the bulk of our world, Mom and me splitting the bottom half, side-by-side. Merc and Claudius? They were safely off the grid. In a bit, Dad would take a break, open a book of travel essays, and read about expeditions pitting man against the wild in some epic adventures he’d never take.

  Like me.

  Let’s face it; the second I stepped a single degree outside my comfort zone, I regretted it the way I did my rash e-mail to Merc. The wind rattled the fat boughs of an evergreen tree, somehow spared a shearing by Mom. I trudged through the snow at a quick pace, now warming too fast. A trickle of sweat slid down my back. Go slower, I told myself. Stop rushing. A week post-op, I still wasn’t supposed to sweat and irritate my broken capillaries. Besides, it wasn’t like I was in any big rush to return home.

  At the edge of our property, I switched off my headlamp. The stars cast enough light so I could pick out my trail, which I knew by heart. I had just turned my back on the view of the open valley when a furtive motion to my right startled me. Most likely, it was just a deer. Bears didn’t venture out just yet, but you never knew. Two years ago, a cougar meandered down the mountains to a neighbor’s house, forced out of its usual haunts in the protected national forest by hunger. I looked for a large branch, but didn’t find one. If I couldn’t outrun the animal, I’d blind it. I whirled to face the noise as I switched on my headlamp.

  “Could you aim your light somewhere else . . . ,” said the one voice I’d managed to dodge successfully for the last few days, “. . . unless you plan on blinding me, too?”

  “God!” I jerked back, stumbled, and fell on my butt in the snow.

  A dark figure appeared before me. Laconically, Jacob held out his hand. “If you wanted to see me, all you had to do was say so.”

  “I didn’t want to see you!”