Steal the North: A Novel (35 page)

In and out of bed, Matt drives me bonkers in a good way. We’ve been sleeping together for more than a year. I don’t think he and Beth had a lot of sex, at least not in the years leading up to her death. The woman was just too ill. I still think Beth was a healer, or could’ve been if not for that church. I sensed it strong in her. I also, oddly enough, sensed it a bit in Emmy, although I doubt she’ll ever recognize or trust it in herself. Matt continues to be gentle in bed. I am teaching him that sometimes it’s fun not to be so gentle. “Damn,” he’ll say. “Damn, Teresa.”

Does he love me? He wants to. Will he leave me? No. Do I love him? Yes. Do my kids love him? All but Grace, but he goes to her basketball tournaments. Does he go with us to powwows on the rez? Yes. Did he take Kevin hunting and then drive the meat to Nespelem so Kevin could give it to the elders, as is the custom when a boy makes his first kill? Yes. Has he introduced me to his family? Yes. Were they nice? More cordial than his coworkers when Matt took me to his Christmas party. Has he invited me into his trailer—into his bedroom? No. But he talks about buying us all a house this summer. I think he’s still paying off Beth’s hospital bills. Do I make him happy? I think I really do. Will I leave him if he doesn’t say he loves me soon? I could never.

Emmy begins her third semester at Berkeley. She sends her last journal at the end of January. None in February or March. It’s been two and a half years since those kids have seen each other. I don’t blame her. A letter arrives from Emmy the first week of April. I am so scared about what it might say and by the fact that it feels like there’s a feather enclosed in it that I call Reuben. I put in an emergency call for him, that is. He doesn’t have a phone. He calls two days later. The static on the phone line is horrible, and I swear I can hear the sea. I tell him there’s been no journals for two months and that a letter arrived—like a warm chinook—and it’s about to melt everything he’s been working for in the bitter cold. “It’s time to stop,” I tell him. “It’s time to go get that girl.”

Emmy

The first day of my senior year, Connor corners me in the hallway after third period. “What’s up, sexy?” he says. I’d been trying to avoid him. He wears a tie and bright green Vans. The last time I saw him, the tips of his hair were dyed that color green. Now they’re bleached. “I missed you, Emmy.”

“You have no idea what it means to miss someone.”

He moves in closer. “So, you want to chill in my room after school?”

“No, thanks.” I think about the numerous fluffy pillows on his bed and how Reuben slept all summer on Teresa’s couch without a pillow. “There’s nothing between us.”

He gives me the twice-over. “You look different.” He feigns anger. “Did you have an affair on me this summer?”

“Screw you,” I say, but I should’ve known better.

“Anytime.” He softens. “I
really
did miss you.” He touches my sleeve. “Don’t cry.” I’m not. He tries to rub my arm.

“Stay away from me.”

His best friend already approached me during first period to tell me that Connor wasted the last six weeks of summer “moping like a bitch” over me.

“I can get any chick here,” Connor brags, and no doubt he can. He’s attractive and talented. Being an asshole only gives him more edge.

“I’m happy for you.”

“You don’t look happy.” He pulls his car keys from his pocket, so I can see he uses the Tibetan key chain I bought for him. “Where’s the necklace?” He dares to touch the spot on my neck where his diamond heart pedant had rested for a few short weeks. I shove his hand away. I should tell him I sold it at a pawnshop for thirty bucks, but he’s not worth it.

“Please, Connor, just leave me alone.”

He stares at me for a second, and then he smirks. “Did you heal your Bible-thumping aunt?”

Reuben
. I close my eyes, remember the wind in the poplars.

“I had the best summer of my life.”

I feel Connor’s eyes on my ass as I walk away and he calls me a cunt. He’s probably thinking,
Let the games begin
, but he’ll find out that I’m not playing.

Reuben’s last words to me were to be sure I didn’t lose myself back in California. He tried to make me strong during our last week together, so I could make it through my senior year. He took me to the reservation. He tried to give me his spirit power. But I refused to accept it. He begged me, then the spirits of the rivers and the mountains and the land. But he needed to keep his own power. I was drummed over and sang to. I was held. And held.

I will be strong, Reuben. I promised you.

I write Reuben once a week. He never writes back. I tell him I sleep with his flannel Kurt Cobain shirt, and I carry the feather he gave me in my backpack just as he instructed. I tell him about my classes, clubs, homework, more homework. Physics. Economics. Calculus. I write out hard integral problems that I solved and mail them to him. Mom wishes she and I still did our schoolwork together at the table, but those days are over. I draw Reuben comic strips of Otis, the Stouthearted Baby Sea Otter, able to crack open abalone with a single pebble. I tell him about books I’m reading. I make him tiny origami frogs, foxes, elephants, and bears, but not salmon. I tell him about the house Spencer built us (every detail with Mom and me in mind). I tell him I don’t belong in Spencer’s house. I belong in eastern Washington, where the wind rattles the windows and Indians ride horses down a sheer cliff (I tried to cover my eyes, but he made me watch) and across the Okanogan River. I tell him I stare at the little map he drew me, which hangs on the wall next to my bed. I tell him about Mom and Spencer’s small wedding on the coast. I ask him what to do about Connor, who won’t leave me alone. Reuben doesn’t respond. I tell him that he’ll always be my best friend, and my letters will prove it. I tell him I can’t give back his heart, not yet, maybe never. I probably should, for his sake, though I assure him no girl will ever love him as much as I do. I ask him about school, football, his aunts, Lena, Ray, Teresa, his nieces and nephews. I ask him if he dressed up as Smokey the Bear for Halloween. I ask him about hunting and if he’s helping the elders fill the freezers of the old people before the snows get heavy.

I tell him I know he wants me to make friends, but I can’t. I eat lunch with Hedda and Harpreet just like last year, so I don’t have to eat alone. I try to act as if my summer were as uneventful as theirs—as if the only time I was embraced by a boy was also in my dreams. They think I’ve changed. Mom and Spencer send me to a shrink. But then Spencer gives me permission to stop going. Mom is letting him make some of the decisions. I tell Reuben how at night, remembering the times we made love in that tent on the reservation, I touch myself. The sound of the coyotes scared me at first. Then I kept pretending they scared me to hear his laugh as he kissed my neck. He laughed his butt off at how squeamish I was when he took me fishing. I’d already been fishing a few times with my uncle and aunt and even caught a walleye. Reuben laughed even harder at how terrified I was when he tried to teach me how to ride a horse. He thought I cried because his laughter hurt my feelings, but that wasn’t it at all. Rather, I was beginning to feel the enormity of his absence.

I was so watched over by Reuben from the very beginning that how can I not feel miserably neglected by him now.

Mom is pregnant, I tell him, and in a fury that Republicans are trying to impeach President Clinton. “Better blow jobs than no jobs” is her favorite new saying. I tell Reuben I got accepted into Berkeley. I tell him I heard he won a scholarship to WSU, my dad’s school. I let him know how incredibly proud I am of him, but not in the least surprised. I’ll always believe in him. I ask him if he still wants to major in fish biology and help bring the salmon back to the reservation. I call him Coyote, then my coyote
.

I tell him that when I saw the images from Columbine, my first thought was of him and how we should be going to high school together. What if he’d been shot and killed at Omak High? Or been a student running for his life or jumping out an upstairs window?

Connor asks me to prom, though he’s going out with another girl at Valley Art and two “virgins” at St. Francis. Spencer finds me a date, the son of an engineer, who is cute and polite. We dance close together but barely talk. I describe my dress for Reuben. I tell him my date liked how soft my bare shoulders were. I had two glasses of champagne. One more, I tell Reuben, and I would’ve let him kiss me. Not really. He doesn’t respond. Did he go to prom? Touch a girl’s bare shoulders? Worry about me when he saw the images of Columbine?

Does he believe me when I tell him how lonely I am for the river and the wind? Lonely to drive the reservation roads again in his truck, with the windows down and Nirvana cranked on the stereo or with no music at all. But I am used to being lonely. And I can wait. All my childhood I read novels about British heroines who knew how to wait. Years and years. I can wait also. I tell him he has his Coyote and Beaver stories. I have Tess and Anne Elliot and Jane Eyre and Fanny Price. He’ll see how long I can wait. I may not have the courage of an old-fashioned heroine, but I have the patience. I am stubborn. Like him. He’ll see.

He doesn’t respond when I write telling him I’ll come back for the summer—and stay. Mom can’t stop me because I’ll be graduated and almost eighteen. He is all I want. Fuck Berkeley. I can wait a year and apply to WSU. I will stay with him, get a job. I will stay forever this time. We can be like Salmon and his wife.
Remember you told me that story, Reuben?
They took shelter together under the falls, hiding from Rattlesnake and all the Land People who wanted to keep them apart.
But you have to tell me you want me to come back.

Tell me, Reuben.

Uncle Matt says Reuben disappeared and no one knows where he is.

I hold my breath and write against the panic in my chest.
Where are you? Please be careful.
I write all that summer and all fall. Because I wasn’t officially accepted into U.C. Berkeley until the spring semester (“a spring admit”), I go to junior college in Sacramento for the fall semester. I drive myself. I finally got my license, thanks to Spencer’s persistence. Mom has her baby. A boy named Liam. I hold my baby brother all the time. If it weren’t for Liam, and the way Mom and I marvel over his toes, his every coo, whimper, blink, and yawn, I would’ve by now completely shut her out of my life. I’ve been retreating from her since returning from Washington, or maybe since the moment my aunt hugged me at the airport and I remembered her smell, and even remembered missing it. I’ve forgiven Mom for lying to me about my dad’s death, and I understand now why she
had
to leave Moses Lake—but I’ll never understand why she turned her back so completely. And I’ll
never
forgive her for not letting me stay. It’s good, though, that Mom is allowing herself to be tempered by Spencer’s generosity and love. He’s always thought the world of Mom, but even more so now that she gave him little Liam. Spencer kindly includes me in everything, to a fault even, forgetting sometimes that I’m no longer a child. They let Liam sleep in my room on occasion, his bassinet pushed up next to my bed. I sing to him: Aunt Beth’s songs.

Reuben doesn’t go to college. He stays gone and misses his scholarship to WSU. It weighs on me every day at junior college.
Where are you, Reuben?
I’m so afraid for you.
Maybe he joined the military. I noticed
GO ARMY
stickers on cars and trucks on the reservation and multiple memorials to veterans. Reuben explained that Indians defend the land, not the government, and that, regardless of politics, warriors are highly esteemed. But what if he got deployed to the Middle East or Eastern Europe? He would have gone to college if he’d never met me. Or if I had let go of his heart when I left. If I would let go of it now, maybe it could be wrapped in the skin of a buffalo, like the heart of the Okanogan warrior in a story Reuben told me. The Sioux had tried to burn the warrior’s heart, but the buffalo’s spirit brought it back to life.

Mom begs me to stop crying. Please stop crying. She comes into my bedroom at night and runs her fingers gently through my hair to comfort me while I sob, and sometimes her touch does soothe me. Other times I jerk away. She tries to assure me that I’ll get through this because she did. Our tales of woe might overlap, but they are not the same, and it took her most of my childhood to recover. Once, after a long, colicky night with my baby brother, she hints that I should be thankful I’m not one of the millions of Albanian refugees wandering around without a home. But for all I know—for all anyone knows—Reuben is currently homeless. There is no way for me to be okay with that.

I know Mom thinks me foolish for still pining away for Reuben (especially when he has never written me back) like a character in the Victorian novels she now worries she allowed me to spend too much time with as a child. In an about-face worthy of a politician, she tries to claim that sentiments were different back when those novels were written. But that is bullshit, and she knows it. Love is love. I call Spencer at work to come get me from junior college when I can’t make it through the day, or through one class, or even find my car in the parking lot.
Reuben?
Mom is home for a year with Liam. Spencer always comes. He takes me with him to inspections, job sites, lumberyards, tile stores, instead of taking me home, so Mom won’t know I’m missing classes. I start calling him Dad. The first time I do, he tears up. But then he sides with Mom when she suggests I go back to a shrink. So I stop crying in front of them and I stop calling Spencer from college. I don’t stop calling him Dad.

I don’t stop writing letters to Reuben and mailing them to Teresa’s address. Finally Uncle Matt tells me Reuben sent word to Teresa. I’m so utterly relieved that for a whole day I can’t get out of bed, my body limp after months of worried tension. I was not only afraid for Reuben but afraid of what I might do to myself if he hadn’t surfaced soon: call Connor, who would make me pay in his way; bleed myself to alleviate the ache; hop on a bus to L.A. and get lost “in a big way,” as Reuben feared. Uncle Matt says Reuben’s been in Alaska working, mostly fishing at sea. Did I drive him that far away from his people and the land he loves? Where had I pictured him all this time? Actually I hadn’t been able to picture Reuben outside eastern Washington. He’s too much a part of that place. Which is why I’ll never return there unless it’s to be with him.

Uncle Matt tells me Reuben doesn’t have a permanent address in Alaska, but that somehow Teresa gets my letters to him. My favorite Austen heroine, Anne Elliot, waited eight years while the man she loved, but had been persuaded not to marry, sought his fortune at sea (probably at the expense of natives somewhere). Every Jane Austen heroine eventually gets her man, but not before at least one season at Bath with frivolous family members and class humiliations and usually only after years of struggle and solitude. Mom told me a long time ago that in real life Jane Austen
didn’t
get her man. I send Reuben a single picture of me in eighteen months: a Polaroid snapshot of me holding my baby brother. I simply write, “Someday,” on the bottom. He knows what I mean. I fill an envelope with sparkly confetti.
Happy New Year, Reuben! Happy New Decade, New Century, New Millennium!