North of Beautiful (16 page)

For a long moment, Dad stared at that balled threat in disbelief. We all did.

“Claudius, just stop,” Mom pled.

And then Dad snapped, “You want to hit me? You want to hit me?” He angled his face, exposing his cheek. “Hit me, then.”

Still, Mom didn’t make a move toward them, didn’t separate them with her own body. Instead, she was breathing little pants of fear, a trapped animal. And then, there it was. Her look. Aimed straight at me, that look that willed me to act, to intervene, to sacrifice myself, if need be.

I forced myself to Claudius’s side, and I said the words I never thought I would hear myself speak: “Claudius, you should go.”

He turned to me, startled and betrayed, his hand lowering so that now he gripped the glass ornament between both palms.

“Just go,” I whispered, nodding to his bedroom door.

His answer was a sound of shattering glass, accompanied by a sharp “shit!” I gasped. Blood dripped from Claudius’s hand to the hardwood floor.

“God, what did you do now?” Dad asked. “What the hell did you do now?”

Honestly, it was obvious. The tension in our house had felt so taut I could have crushed it in my hands. Claudius had done just that. The glass orb he had been clenching had shattered, squeezed to the breaking point between his hands. And now, Claudius, shaking, tried to pull a jagged shard from his bleeding palm.

Dad turned on Mom, vicious as a starved dog. “God dammit, Lois, I told you it was completely idiotic to put glass on display.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Mom said, flustered, trembling.

I wasn’t even aware that I echoed her words — “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” — as I led Claudius away from Dad and to the kitchen, where I could flush out his wound in the sink.

“It’s not your fault,” Claudius told me, glaring at the great room, leaving no doubt whom he was blaming.

Neither of us dared another word when Dad stalked into the kitchen, clenching Claudius’s coat, his own forgotten.

“We’re going to the hospital,” Dad barked. “Now.”

Even as Dad marched out of the house, pushing Claudius ahead of him, Mom shuffling behind, I could hear the ghost of our collective “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” as everyone but Dad accepted the blame, apologizing to each other for much more than this latest accident.

Chapter fourteen

Orienteering

MERC HADN’T BEEN HOME FOR more than eight hours, and here he was, packing to leave. From where I stood in the hall, I could hear Merc and Elisa arguing in their bedroom. The candles around the great room had burned low, flickering moodily as if dancing to their belligerent tone.

“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 told 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.