Steal the North: A Novel (7 page)

Then he too fades.

Emmy

The night before my flight to Washington, I woke to find Mom soaking in a bathtub of water gone cold. She wasn’t a bath person like me. She preferred showers. “Mom,” I said, opening the pinstriped curtain slowly to give her time to cover her private parts, which she didn’t, “what are you doing?”

She said she was thinking about the last time her mother was dipped into a lake for healing. “She was in such pain, Emmy, that even the wind hurt her.” Mom claimed the lake water was so salty that people could easily float or bob away. Had her mother bobbed away? She said no more, and I cruelly didn’t ask her to. When she refused to get out of the bathtub after I leaned over her and drained the water, I called Spencer.

“Don’t worry about your mom,” Spencer said to me on the way to the airport the next morning. Mom asked him to take me. She rarely asked him for favors. We were in his work truck with a canvas bag of tools between us on the seat and rolls of blueprints on the dash. He designed and built houses. “I’ll take care of her.”

I wasn’t worried about Mom, not really.

His beeper went off, but he silenced it. Clearing his throat, he said, “I want you to know that I don’t agree with her sending you away like this.” I knew he’d been wanting to say that to me, and more. We crossed the American River. “Or with her forcing you to take part in that bizarre ceremony.” He took a drink of coffee from his travel mug before continuing. “And I don’t know
why
she lied to you for all these years about your dad.” My eyes got watery. “Parents do strange things, I guess, trying to protect their kids.” Why couldn’t there be more traffic this morning? Or tule fog like in winter to stall travel? Spencer had never talked to me quite so bluntly about Mom. Usually he just intimated when he thought Mom was being unfair. Connor, on the other hand, often asked me what my mom’s fucking problem was. Spencer and I were almost at the turnoff for I-5 North and the airport. I prayed his truck would break down or we’d get in a minor accident. “I wish to hell I had a say in the matter,” he continued. I wished to hell he was my dad so I could tell him how much I loved him.

I hoped he would propose to Mom while I was away. I suspected he’d proposed to her once before, but she’d shot him down and I didn’t see him for a month. If Mom shot him down a second time, I might never see him again. I stared over at him, then out the window at the rice fields that surrounded the airport. Maybe Mom had shot Spencer down because she still loved Jamie—and not
just
because she was stubborn and independent. Maybe if my farmer father had really died in a tractor accident, she would’ve married Spencer and we would’ve already been a family.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said, smiling. “Can you keep a secret?” I nodded. “I bought your mom and me tickets to Europe.”

I couldn’t help but smile too. “That’s awesome.”
He
was awesome.

Mom had always wanted to travel to England to see the birthplaces of her favorite writers. And to France to tour the Louvre. But she hardly ever let Spencer spend his money on us: a few trips to the Bay Area, once to Tahoe. I felt sick as the airport came into full view. Before getting out of his truck, Spencer gave me an envelope with a dozen prepaid calling cards and more than enough cash for an early ticket home, if need be, or in case of an emergency, or just for fun.

“I’m really scared,” I admitted to him at the departure gate. My hands shook. “I don’t want to go. I can’t do this.”

“You’ll be okay. You’re strong like her.” I wasn’t strong in the least, but I hugged him a long time for saying so and because I’d given Mom such a short hug. “I love you,” he said to me for the first time. I’d felt his love from the beginning.

The card he’d given me last year for Christmas (I didn’t show it to Mom), along with the paid receipt for driving lessons, had read, “To make up for not being there when you took your first steps or when you learned to ride a bike.” Mom had gotten upset at the prepaid driving lessons, claiming it wasn’t her boyfriend’s place to decide when I learned to drive a car. She thought it was too dangerous in a big city, despite the fact that she hated my having to take public transit home from school two days a week. The dangerous city excuse was also the one she used for never teaching me to ride a bicycle.

I didn’t hide my tears now as I had at Christmas. Panicking, I asked him, “What if you and Mom break up while I’m gone?”

He knew what I was getting at. “You’ll always be part of my life, kiddo.” I wanted to believe him. “I’ve known you too long to walk away.” His voice strained. “Okay?”

I handed him the origami bird I’d made for him last night when I couldn’t sleep. I’d also made one for my aunt and placed both carefully in my backpack.

He took the paper bird but seemed unsure how to hold it. Then he hugged me again. “Call me if you need anything,” he said. “Try to think of this summer as an adventure.
Your
adventure, Emmy. Not your mom’s. Not from a book.
Yours
.”

WELCOME TO SPOKANE
, the airport sign read. Some adventure. I wished the sign read,
WELCOME TO PARIS
or
WELCOME TO NEW DELHI
(and I were older and braver).

The inside of the Spokane airport made the Sacramento one look spacious and almost sophisticated, like airports in movies. Then again everything was still a bit blurry from Connor’s Vicodin pill, which I’d taken early in the flight to calm myself down after the aromatherapy smelling salts (bought in the shop below our apartment) had quit working and I nearly hyperventilated. For about thirty glorious minutes the drug had calmed me down. It had also made me feel overly tender toward the old couple sitting beside me with their creased pants and spotted hands. When the plane hit some turbulence, I almost asked them if I could call them Grandma and Grandpa, but then I passed out cold. I now had an hour layover in Spokane and then a twenty-minute “hop, skip, and jump,” the stewardess said, to the airport in Moses Lake.

Home felt so far away. I needed the courage of a Brontë heroine to complete this journey alone. My stomach fell when I noticed two college-age girls wearing maroon WSU T-shirts. That was the university my dad had gone to instead of taking care of my mom. I’d looked up WSU in the counseling office at school during finals and copied down the phone number for the records office—in case I actually got up the nerve to search for my dad. Instead of finding him, I’d rather be back in my bedroom with the purple felt
SACRAMENTO KINGS
pennant that Spencer bought for me. If only I could rewind time, a few days even. I wasn’t strong. I was wimpy. I could never board a bus as Mom had and leave everything behind. One day I hoped to travel overseas, but for now even the thought of moving away to college at the end of next summer terrified me. I loved my bedroom too much, our apartment, the shop downstairs, Connor, his TV, the way he’d often watch me instead of the screen, my mom.

Mom should’ve been here with me, despite her busy work schedule and our lack of funds for an additional plane ticket. The fact that she wasn’t seemed more unimaginable than my cruelty toward her in the last week or so. Not only had I started referring to her sister as “that born-again lady,” which I could tell hurt Mom’s feelings, but I also told her bluntly that Jamie was related to me, not her, and I’d look for him over the summer if I wanted to. Swearing to help, she begged me to wait until next summer, after I graduated from high school. I didn’t need her help or consent. I did, however, wish she were here to introduce me to my aunt and uncle and then to stick around for a few days, at least, to make sure I behaved correctly. I’d never been around a relative. Mom was better with people than I was. She was reserved, even with her wit, but not shy. She didn’t blush. She could be blunt as heck but was always polite to service workers and clerks. With her students, for the most part, she had a great rapport. I’d seen her in action. Even with her least favorite types—snotty rich girls, potheads, young boys who wanted mothering, and flirty male students of all ages—she handled herself in a professional manner.

To give Mom even more credit (why?), she’d been trying desperately to provide me instructional information—“travel tips for my summer vacation”—and with the umph of her wit. I hadn’t been impressed. After twice warning, “It’s a whole other world up there, honey,” she went off: “The high school color is camouflage; cars, trucks, and cheese are American; county fairs and rodeos are considered highly cultural events; crockpots full of wild game and cream of mushroom soup is as culinary as it gets; Grand Coulee Dam is their mecca.” She claimed men up north went to the slopes and the coulees (what was a coulee? who cared?) hunting and fishing on the weekends while their wives stayed home slowly going insane trying to keep the dust from settling on their assembled furniture. I rolled my eyes. She said she wanted my stay with her sister to be as comfortable as possible. “Survivable.” All I had to do was survive the summer, and then everything would be back to normal. But what about Connor? She couldn’t control him. On the phone with her sister, Mom laid down some conditions. She tried to assure me that she wasn’t just throwing me to the wolves (Christians). First and foremost, other than for the healing ceremony, I wasn’t allowed to attend Bethany’s fundamentalist church, where I’d be judged as harshly for wearing mascara as for tattooing “the mark of the beast” (I didn’t even ask) on my forehead. If curiosity got the best of me, I was to look up a nondenominational-type church in the phone book and go to services there. But she hoped I wouldn’t. I could take as many world religion classes as I wanted to in college—“at Berkeley.” I laughed at
that
. She didn’t ask what I found so amusing, and I’m not sure I knew myself. I knew she’d always been down on spirituality and tried to make me that way. It wasn’t fair. I was “allowed” religion only in an academic setting? Something changed between us in that moment: in my laugh and her silence.

I refused to think about that change in this nowhere airport, where I felt sleepy and alone. Mom said when I was very young, she’d wake to find me wandering around the apartment, looking for someone, a woman whose name I didn’t know but whose absence I felt so heavily I couldn’t go back to sleep or fully wake up. Was that true? I wish I could say that I recognized my aunt right away as the woman I used to look for, but I didn’t.

Mom promised I’d have no problem finding Bethany at the airport in Moses Lake because she’d probably be the only person in the tiny lobby. She claimed the airport was used more as a parking lot for crop dusters than a real port of transportation. But just in case, I should expect long, straight hair pulled back tightly in a ponytail or bun, no earrings, a simple homemade dress, hemmed far below the knees, with a stretched-out, dull-colored cardigan overtop. Mom and I bought most of our clothes used at consignment stores or occasionally new at Target or on clearance at the malls. We were fashion conscious, not obsessed.

But I recognized my aunt immediately because she looked like Mom, so much so, in fact, that at first I couldn’t register what was happening, and when she took me into her arms, I began to cry. Which wasn’t at all how I’d pictured the scene.

“Oh, Emmy. Don’t cry.” But she too was crying. “Let’s sit a minute.” She said she wanted to get a better look at me (to make sure I was a virgin?) before we drove home. There were only a dozen seats in the entire lobby. All empty. We sat down, and I tried to stop crying, but her smell was familiar. “I never meant for you to journey alone,” she said. “I’ve been praying all day for you.” She hadn’t let go of my hand. “You must be so scared.”

I wondered where my luggage was—it was all I had of home.

Gaining composure, I said, “I’m okay.”

“Your mom kept saying on the phone how brave you were.”

Mom wished I were brave. There’s a difference. “I’m not.”

“You
are
—and so pretty.” She squeezed my hand before letting go. “I’ve never flown.” She whispered as if the lobby were full of people who would be surprised by her confession. “Can you believe it?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Nothing mattered in survival mode.
Right, Mom?
A man in coveralls started carrying in the luggage for the handful of passengers. He placed it in the corner.

“You must miss your mom and the fellowship of your friends.”

“I’m fine.”
Fellowship
? Her dress was baggy and looked homemade, but the dainty flowered print was pretty. Her hair, blond and straight like mine, was pulled back firmly in a ponytail, but I could tell she’d curled the ends. Mom had wavy auburn hair that she didn’t have to curl. I’d always been jealous.

Beth reached into her purse and pulled out a small amber-colored bottle with a handmade label, “peppermint.” “I made this for you. In case the flight gave you a headache.”

I did have a slight headache and cotton mouth—aftereffects, I assumed, from Connor’s Vicodin pill.

“Rub a little on your temples every few hours,” she instructed, “until your headache is gone.”

In the shop below our apartment there was an entire section devoted to essential oils and another to herbs. Mom didn’t really believe in the healing abilities of either, especially after she had sent me down there once in desperation to check for a toothache remedy and I spent seven dollars on ground cloves, which we already had in our spice rack. I wondered if Mom knew Bethany believed in alternative medicine and not just in “bogus” faith healings. Mom hadn’t said anything, so probably not. I liked knowing something about her sister that she didn’t. “Thank you.” I opened the bottle to smell. I figured I’d wait to apply the oil to my temples until we got to Beth’s house and I could clip back my bangs.