North of Beautiful (18 page)

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.”

“Getting lost is just another way of saying ‘going exploring.’”

From the box, Jacob retrieved a stub of a pencil and a tiny pad of paper, scrawled with different handwriting, over fifty logs. I read the messages over his shoulder: Great cache. Could it be harder to find though? And my favorite: Watch out for rattlesnakes.

“Rattlesnakes?” he asked.

“I’m telling you, don’t go putting your hands under rocks, inside logs. . . .”

He eyed the hunchbacked log suspiciously, but then shrugged. “Have you ever thought that might be a warning to keep away the muggles?”

“Harry Potter?”

“No, people who don’t geocache. I mean, think about the Beware of Dog signs little old ladies hang when they just have a Chihuahua or some other kind of rat dog. It makes them feel safer, keeps away the bad guys.”

“Here be dragons,” I murmured.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I started to say, so used to Erik not tracking with me. But this was Jacob, so I explained, “That’s what the old cartographers used to do. Include sea monsters, dragons, dog-headed men in areas where the Church didn’t want people to explore.”

“That wouldn’t have stopped me.” Jacob gazed off into the horizon, where dawn was breaking orange behind the mountains. He could have been Zheng He, the Chinese explorer who sailed the Pacific and Indian Oceans, a full century before Columbus. Well, Zheng He, except for the eunuch bit.

“Would any place scare you?”

“Hell, yeah. Plenty of places. Angola. Afghanistan. Pakistan. But I’d still go if the conditions were right.”

I swallowed. The difference between us couldn’t have been more glaring. Jacob was the kind of well-traveled guy who’d wing it without a hotel reservation, much less an itinerary. I needed everything plotted, every contingency thought through and covered.

“Here be dragons.” Jacob nodded, wrote the words down.

“No one will know what it means.”

“We will.” And then he signed the log: MM.

I guessed, “Mappa Mundi?”

“What?”

“Map of the world.”

“No, try again.”

“Come on, just tell me. What does it mean?”

“Look it up.”

“You know, I hate it when teachers tell me that.”

His face turned so solemn, I thought I had lost points with him, but he pointed up to the sky. “Have you ever seen that orange before?”

A brilliant sunrise was cresting over the mountains, the kind that made me want to burrow in my studio to recapture the colors. After a few minutes, Jacob placed the pencil and paper back inside the box. “So you need to choose something, your first geocaching trophy.”

I swept aside a few random objects until Jacob said, “Stop.” He lifted a scrap of paper from the bottom. There was no mistaking the yellowing paper inside the plastic envelope, the frayed edges, the thin boundary lines; it was a piece of a map. There were more fragments of the map in the bottom of the box. “‘Travel bugs,’” he said, reading the typed note included in the bag. “You’re supposed to take this and put it in another cache. I’ve just never seen one that was filled with so many of the same travel bugs.” Jacob placed the map fragment into the palm of my hand. “So Merry Christmas, Trouble Magnet. It’s perfect for your atlas.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It is.” My hand closed around the paper carefully, not wanting to let this perfect Christmas present go.

Chapter sixteen

Deaccessioning

CLAUDIUS WAS HIDING OUT IN his room, earphones on, lost in the murky, magical deep of his old fantasy novels strewn around him. The thick book was propped on his knees, his favorite, the one set in Noor. His hands were swaddled in bandages.

“Hey, Claudius,” I said.

He didn’t hear me, somehow, perfecting the art of having both music and story pump into his brain at the same time, a collage of senses. It was a gift I wished I had; my brain seemed to shut down with too much stimuli. Just as I had when I was a little girl, I marched over to his bed and gave him a good shove: pay attention to me. He jolted, an abrupt return to reality.

“Jesus! Talk about heart attack. I thought you were the Beast,” he said, raking me with his glance. “You could be.”

“Gee, thanks.” I was about to sock him in the shoulder, but nice sister that I am, I didn’t want to risk retaliation with his bandaged hands. “How’re you feeling?”

“Oh, this? It’s nothing.”

“So, good Christmas, huh?”

“Yeah, merry Christmas and all that.”

I lowered myself to the floor beside his bed, leaning my head against his mattress. I breathed in deeply, catching the ever-present aroma of roasted garlic mingling with today’s turkey and candied yams.