“That’s what they all say.”
They? Who, they? As in other girls?
“You’re the one at my house at five in the morning,” I pointed out.
Jacob laughed, pulling me to my feet. “For the record that makes twice you’ve practically run me over.”
“Excuse me?”
For a second, I thought he was reaching for my face. Instead, he turned off my headlamp and held my hand while my eyes readjusted to the darkness. He may or may not have had a girlfriend, but I most definitely still had a boyfriend. So I pretended to cough, pulled away from him, and began babbling. Honestly, I have no recollection what I said, just that words spewed out of me.
“You okay?” he interrupted.
“I’m fine.” I smiled brightly.
Jacob shook his head. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t fake it.”
His honesty stung almost more than the blasts of laser on my cheek. I stepped back from him, spinning away from his gaze that stripped away the defenses that fooled everybody else. I faced the dark, hulking mountains.
“Hey,” he said, and touched my arm. “What’s up?”
I admitted, “Christmas sucks.”
“Tell me about it.”
I glanced at him and then really studied him, this boy who could disarm me with a few words. Jacob, as usual, was in the wrong getup for this weather — and for this town — in his head-to-toe Goth black. That thin trench coat. Those flimsy Vans. At least today he had on gloves and a polar fleece beanie. He shifted the shovel he was carrying over his shoulder.
“I hate to ask what you’re planning to do with that,” I said, and then added more curiously, “and what exactly are you doing here at this hour?”
“Geocaching for Kryptonite.”
“Geocaching?”
“Yeah, it’s like Easter egg hunting with a GPS.” He lowered the shovel to the ground and pulled a cell phone–sized device from his trench coat pocket. “You know, global positioning software —”
“I know what GPS is. My dad does work for some GPS companies.” I narrowed my eyes at him suspiciously. “Is this some kind of weird Seattle thing?”
“You kidding? Geocaching is a worldwide adventure game. People hide treasure caches everywhere, even in Antarctica. You just load in latitude and longitude coordinates to find them.”
“And people actually go look for them?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Why?” I demanded.
“Because it’s fun.”
“You’re kidding.”
He laughed at me then. I had the suspicion that he was enjoying my dubious reaction. “Yeah, it’s fun to take something from the cache and then leave something.”
“Like what?”
Shrugging, Jacob answered, “Toys, stickers, pins. Anything small. And then you write about your find in the logbook.”
“This is very geeky.”
He frowned in disbelief. “I can’t believe you, daughter of a GPS designer, have never geocached.”
I shook my head. “My dad thinks it’s illegal to have fun.”
“Well, you know what they say.”
“What?”
“There’s a first for everything.” Jacob consulted the GPS device and faced north, where there was no path, just untouched snow. Untouched by human feet, at least. I could make out the slender holes punched in from deer hooves. Much too boisterously for five in the morning, he said, “Okay, this way. The Kryptonite is close.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me, right? Kryptonite where I live?”
“Apparently. That’s the name of the geocache, anyway.” Jacob stepped off my path away from me.
I didn’t follow.
He paused. “We won’t know if it’s here unless we look.”
We. I flushed at that. Stop it, I told myself. He was not my type. But then again, was Erik, who had stood on my own doorstep and pretended not to know me in front of his cousin?
Jacob eyed my well-trodden path, the one I had stomped along every day this winter and the winter before that. I still hadn’t budged off it. He followed the trail to the hill, where it disappeared. “So you always go the same way every day?”
“So?”
“So.” Jacob returned to me, holding out his GPS device. “Lead the way.”
For as long as Dad used to work on the software that ran these devices, I could count the number of times I had actually held one. Maybe twice. Definitely no more than three times. They freaked me out, that unerring ability to find someone’s exact position. Frankly, I wouldn’t have put it past Dad to implant some kind of tracking device inside me and Mom so he could pinpoint our location, every minute of every day. I shivered, wrapped my arms around myself. Despite the unrelenting cold, I dithered.
“You know,” Jacob said conversationally, as if he had all the time in the world while he was getting frostbitten, too, “two days after Clinton ordered the Defense Department to turn off the jamming signal so civilians could use GPS, the first geocache was logged and hidden. A big, old five-gallon bucket of prizes.”
“Really?” I couldn’t help it. I was intrigued. “That’s the last thing the military probably thought their tracking system would be used for: games.”
“And five days after that, there was a cache logged all the way over in Australia.”
I looked past him into the vast darkness. “And now there’s a cache here.”
“And now there’s a cache over there somewhere.” He jerked his head northward.
“Why would anyone put a cache here?”
He shrugged.
“My path ends up over that way, you know,” I told him.
“We can make our own.”
The stars were still gleaming in the dark morning sky. I gripped the GPS tightly in my hand, easily imagining the satellites circling up there, some 12,000 miles overhead, providing the directions we needed to locate this Kryptonite. I shot him a challenging look before I stepped deliberately off my trail. He grinned and slipped, his Vans providing zero traction in the snow.
I sighed, walked in front of him. “Just so you know,” I said over my shoulder, “I’m only doing this to keep you from killing yourself.” I set off, GPS in hand, my snowshoes forging a new wide path across the pristine snow with Jacob’s soft laughter accompanying me.
“You know, those devices require user guidance,” Jacob called up to me after we had been trudging for a few minutes.
“You don’t say.” I finally turned around, hands on my hips. “What happened to relaxing? Enjoying the ride? Stopping and smelling the coffee?”
“Are you quoting me?” He glowed — he actually went radioactive — with glee.
I spun around fast, or as fast as I could with snowshoes on my feet. His laughter splashed over me, rich and smooth, caramel macchiato. What I wanted to do was turn back, tackle him, taste that laughter on his lips. . . .
I cleared my throat, forced myself forward as I read the GPS for the coordinates and veered sharply so that we had to step over a boulder mounded with snow.
“You know, sometimes the most direct route isn’t the right one,” he said, almost losing his balance on the rock.
“Hey, I’m making this up as we go.”
“And where are we going, exactly?”
“North . . . ish.”
“North-ish.” A pause, and then: “Is that Terra for I’m lost-ish?”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “I’m directionally challenged, what can I say?”
“Give me that,” he said, commandeering the GPS and after a brief consultation, quarter-turning. “This way.”
“Which way would that be?”
“West . . . ish.” His feet slipped on the snow.
“Honestly,” I said, tramping up to his side, “you wouldn’t last a day in the backcountry.”
“And you would?”
“I’d survive . . . I’d just be lost.”
“So we’d make
a great team,” he said, sliding again. This time, he grabbed me for balance, and we both tumbled.
“Ouch!” I said, my forehead knocking against his chin. “Shit! My face.”
But I forgot all about my face, any pain, any potential scarring, because somewhere in our fall, his arms had slipped around me, taking the impact. He rolled me over to my back, looked down at me anxiously, and then breathed out, relieved. “You’re okay.”
His face was so close, it was tempting to pull his head, those lips, to me.
“God,” he murmured, his breath on my cheek making me shiver. “I forgot you were the trouble magnet.”
“Me?” I poked him in the chest. “You were the one who pulled me down with you.”
Jacob merely grinned, swift, teasing, warm, and then he lay back on the snow, gazing up at the fading stars. I blinked at his profile, wanting nothing more than to lean over his chest, kiss him. But Erik. There was Erik. I jerked back, confused, and tugged my parka down so my bottom was on it instead of directly icing on the snow.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” he said, still staring overhead. He actually sounded miffed. “You didn’t return my calls.”
“Christmas has been . . . stressful.”
“Or was it because of what I said in your studio?”
I sat up, uncomfortable with this conversation, and would have set off except I didn’t know which way to go. Slowly, Jacob faced me. His stare was so probing I could have been back on the operating table, the unrelenting overhead light glaring down on me.
“You really want to know why I don’t want to be in that show?” I asked, hugging my knees as close as the unwieldy snowshoes would allow.
“Yeah.”
“I’m afraid people will laugh. No.” I shook my head, tired of my denials. “I mean, I’m afraid my dad will laugh.”
The wind blew but didn’t rumple his hair. It was too shellacked with gel to move. Jacob nodded. “I can see that.”
For a second, I was taken aback, hurt that he thought my artwork was laughable. I mean, I didn’t think my collages were exactly worthy of anyone’s private collection, but they weren’t all that bad, either. Were they?
“Everyone laughed at the Impressionists. Monet, he was a complete joke,” Jacob said. The sun was peeking over the hill now so I could see the black stubble over his lip. “And the pointillists like Seurat. Are you kidding me? Oh, and Jackson Pollock. No one could stop laughing at his drips of paint.”
As he listed one master after another, I went completely speechless.
“How do you know all this?” I demanded.
He hesitated. “My dad’s an art history buff.”
No way in a million years could I ever have imagined a content-rich conversation like this with Erik, much less at five fifteen in the morning, me without makeup, reeking in yesterday’s workout clothes, and sporting a dopey headlight around my forehead.
“So, really,” continued Jacob as if this were perfectly normal to expound on art in these circumstances, “when you think about it, the artists who make people stop and think, who push the form, who make you uncomfortable, who are laughable, well, they’re the ones who get remembered.” Idly, Jacob dug a hole in the snow with his shovel and then another one next to it. “So why wouldn’t you want to join the ranks of the ridiculed?”
I had to laugh. Really, I did. My face burned, all those facial muscles needed to form a smile. But I didn’t mind. When I stopped laughing, I didn’t flinch under his steady gaze that peeled away all the hardened layers I’d decoupaged over myself — years of denials, Covermark, fake smiles.
“That’s not what’s really holding you back though,” he guessed.
How did he do that? Excavate the truth armed only with his divining rod of persistent questions? Discomfited, I bent over to pick a lone pinecone lodged in the snow. I threw it as far as I could and admitted softly, a dirty secret, “I need money.”
“And?”
“Artists aren’t exactly rolling in dough.”
“Point taken. But aren’t you forgetting something?” A pause, then, “What if someone wants to buy your artwork?”
I thought about Elisa, who claimed she loved my artwork, who asked if I had anything to sell. Even if she had only said that to get in good with her boyfriend’s kid sister, the very fact that she sounded like she meant it had made me feel good. Still made me feel good.
“So,” I said, brushing my hair out of my face. I had to know. “Are you? Laughing at my art?”
He answered solemnly, “My stomach would rupture if I laughed any harder.”
I smiled, relieved and pleased that he thought my art was decent. Ridiculously relieved and way too pleased. I should have been alarmed that what Jacob thought — a guy I met a scant week ago — meant so much to me. But I wasn’t.
“Okay, then,” I said, standing.
“Okay, then.” He held his hand out, and I pulled, helping him to his feet. With my hand still nestled in his, he asked, “Forgiven?”
I flushed, grateful that it was too dark for him to see what his touch did to me — and this through a mitten. “There’s nothing to forgive. You were just being honest.”
“Then here’s the deal. We’ll be honest with each other.” He took off his glove, held out his hand, waited for me to do the same. “No bullshit.”
Skin to skin in the cold, we shook hands.
A wind rattled the sage bushes around us. Standing there, unmoving, I became distinctly aware of how frigid the air was, despite the rising sun.
“Let’s go,” I said, working my mitten back on.
Jacob nodded, checked the GPS, and then grinned at me. “So tell me, am I good? Or am I good? According to this” — he waved the yellow device — “we are exactly where we ought to be.”
“We are?” I looked around at the small clearing, seeing nothing resembling treasure or Kryptonite. “So now what?”
“So now we look.”
“For what?”
“A small box.” After a few minutes of us tromping aimlessly around, forming crop circles in the snow, Jacob mentioned, “There was a clue.”
My teeth chattered with cold. “Now you tell me?”
“Yeah.” He pulled out a printed sheet with coordinates. “I’m a geocaching purist, but in times of extreme discomfort —”
“Like impending frostbite?”
“— then I give in.” So he read the clue: “‘Sit down and enjoy the view.’”
“That’s the clue? Sit down and enjoy the view?”
“That’s what it said on the geocaching site.”
“What kind of clue is that?”
Jacob sniffled, his nose running. “Having fun?”
I shot him a dirty look. “Tell me again why we’re doing this?”
He crouched down, brushed away some twigs beneath a snow-mounded sage bush. There was nothing but compacted dirt. A snow-drift fell onto his head when he released his hold on the bush. He shook the powder off and finally answered, “This is what I did with my dad growing up. We’d head all over the place while Mom was traveling. Dad would always say, no matter where Mom went, we at least knew exactly where we were. Geocaching was our thing.” He stood up, shrugged nonchalantly, didn’t say another word.
He didn’t need to. I could feel his sadness as palpably as the frigid wind rattling the trees surrounding this clearing.
“Sit down, sit down,” I mumbled, now determined to find the stupid cache. I scanned the deer-nibbled trees at the edge of the clearing, their branches picked clean of pine needles like ears of corn. Next to another mound of snowbound sage bushes, I spotted a humpbacked log that looked promising as a bench. I pointed to it. “Is that anything?”
“Yeah!” Jacob bounded heedlessly to the log, shoveling off the snow with his hands until he cleared away enough to find a hollow. He dropped to his knees, and using his shovel, scooped out snow until there was a small pile behind him. I kneeled next to him, peering at the small hole. He asked, “Can you
shine the light in here?”
I switched on my headlamp.
He was such a city boy; he stuck his hand inside. I downgraded his survival rate in the wilderness. “You know,” I told him, “that’s not a good idea. . . .”
But he grinned at me, wicked triumph, and withdrew a package wrapped in a dark green garbage bag. “You were saying?”
Curiosity got the better of my need to retort. So instead, I asked, “What is it?”
He stripped off his gloves, tossing them on top of the snow pile, where they were bound to get wet. I sighed, picking them up. He noticed and held out the package: “Here, trade. Do the honors.”
So I swapped the gloves for the package, shaking it gingerly. “What is this thing?”
“A treasure box.”
“None of us buried anything here.”
“Someone did. So open it already,” he said impatiently like a little kid, practically bouncing on his toes in his sneakers.
Whoever it was wanted to make sure the box stayed dry through snow and squall. Swaddled within two other black garbage bags was a plastic tub. Inside that lay a smaller package, bundled in a clear gallonsized Ziploc bag. And inside that was a tin box.
“This feels sacrilegious,” I told him, my hand resting on the lid.
“So unwrap the mummy.”
“When you put it that way . . .” As I pried the top off the box, I knew that Pandora had been lying. How could she not have known her world was going to change by lifting the lid? I peeked inside, slammed the lid down. “Oh God.”
“What?” He stepped closer to me.
I whipped the top off and screamed. He jumped back.
“What? Don’t tell me you’re scared,” I said, laughing. And then I showed him the contents piled in the box: a tiny plastic doll, the length of my finger. A dollar bill. A shoelace. A toy compass zipper pull. “So this is why we walked all over for the last hour?”
Jacob rummaged in his pockets, and for a half second I thought he was going to pull out one of his napkins. Instead, it was a key chain with a little globe of the world. That, he tossed into the box. “You take something and leave something. So what do you want?”
I held up the cheap compass. “You’d get more lost than anything with this.”
North of Beautiful Page 14
