Spiral of Bliss 03 Awaken (13 page)

It’s a good feeling, even if it’s still scary, this working toward something both new and risky.

The sky is starting to darken by the time I head home. I can’t wait to see Dean again and tell him about the magazine article and our plans. Maybe he’ll have a few more plans of his own too.

Anticipation fills me as I hurry across Avalon Street. I pull open the door of our building.

And stop.

A woman is sitting on the stairs, dressed in a leather jacket and jeans. Long, wheat-colored hair spills around her shoulders. Her blue eyes meet mine.

“Hello, Liv,” my mother says.

CHAPTER TEN

Olivia

have only one picture of me and my mother, and one of me and my father. I keep both photos in an envelope tucked between the pages of a tattered paperback copy of
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
I bought the book for a quarter at a used bookstore when my mother and I were living outside Seattle. The name
Lillian Weatherford
is written on the inside cover in large, looped penmanship. I’ve always liked her name.

Lillian Weatherford, whoever she was, has guarded my photos for the past twenty years.

The picture of my father was taken at Christmas when I was five. He and I are sitting next to the tree—a small fir covered with lights and artificial snow. He looks handsome, young, a smile on his face. His arm is around me, and I’m holding a white stuffed bear with a red ribbon around its neck. I look happy.

In the picture of me and my mother, we’re in California. I’m thirteen years old. My mother and I are sitting beside a campfire, both of us smiling, our faces shiny and lit by the glow of the flames. We look alike, our hair pulled back in ponytails, our smiles almost identical. We look like mother and daughter.

I remember everything about this photo. I’ve shown it to Dean, of course, told him the story of where it was taken and who took it.

The man’s name was North.

“North?” I repeated after he’d introduced himself.

“Short for Northern Star,” he explained. “Parents thought I’d have a good, steady life with a name like that.”

“Do you?” I asked.

“Life is always good,” he replied with a shrug. “But rarely steady. Waves are always on the horizon.”

He was a medium-height, bulky man with long, graying hair, a bushy beard, and an open, kind face. He wore old T-shirts, torn jeans, and ratty sandals, when he bothered with shoes at all. A few strands of his beard were tied into a braid and held with a tiny, red ribbon.

North lived and worked on a Northern California commune called Twelve Oaks, a fifty-acre farm near Santa Cruz that my mother had heard about through an LA acquaintance. We stopped there en route to Oregon—hoping for a free meal and bed for the night—and ended up staying for seven months.

It was a weird place, but I liked it. About fifty people and their children lived there, and they made their own soaps and grew organic herbs and vegetables—all of which they sold at farmer’s markets and to local groceries.

“Heard you have rooms for visitors,” my mother told North when we arrived, her car keys dangling from her slender fingers, wide sunglasses concealing half her face.

North nodded, glancing from her to me. I stayed by the car, my arms around my middle. We’d just come from the urban sprawl of Los Angeles with its brown-smudged air and clogged freeways, but I was trying hard not to hope that we’d stay for a while in this farmland right by the ocean.

“Visitors have to earn their stay,” North told my mother.

“How?”

“Work in the kitchens or gardens. Help with laundry. Clean. Asha keeps the work schedule, so we can talk to her about it.”

My mother crossed her arms. She was wearing a yellow skirt and a purple tank top studded with yellow flowers. Her long, wheat-colored hair fell in waves to her tanned, freckled shoulders.

“All right,” she finally said, snapping her fingers at me. “Come on, Liv. Let’s get settled. I need some rest after all that driving.”

I dragged a suitcase from the trunk of the old car that had taken us so many hundreds of miles. North showed us a bedroom in the main house, then brought us to the kitchen where an older woman with frizzy, blond hair explained the work schedule.

“Liv can do that.” My mother pointed at the column for gardening. “And cleaning in the kitchen, right?”

I nodded.

Asha wrote my name in the column. North looked at my mother.

“And you?” he asked.

“I’d prefer not to be outdoors.”

“What are you good at?” North asked.

“She makes pretty jewelry,” I put in.

“Well, maybe you can help out in the workshop.” North nodded at Asha, who wrote my mother’s name on the chart.

“We won’t be here very long,” my mother said.

“Doesn’t mean you can’t work,” North replied.

North had been at Twelve Oaks for over a decade. He played the guitar, did macramé and woodwork, and was in charge of the commune’s website. The day after we arrived, he took Crystal to his workshop and taught her how to use different tools and materials. He sold wooden bowls, signs, and decorations at art fairs and the farmer’s market, so he was well-equipped to help Crystal with her jewelry making.

“He’s nice,” I ventured one morning when my mother and I were getting dressed. “Seems to know a lot.”

Crystal shrugged, looking at herself in the mirror as she tied a purple scarf around her hair and applied lipstick.

“He’s no different from the rest of them, Liv.”

But he was. He was one of the few men who didn’t seem interested in my mother sexually, and she didn’t set out to try and seduce him. Maybe it was the environment of Twelve Oaks or the fact that she didn’t have to sleep with him in order to stay… Whatever it was, I welcomed the change.

One afternoon when I was picking basil, North stopped by the garden and tossed me a flat, metal medallion, the size of a half-dollar, attached to a silver chain.

“What’s this?” I caught it with both hands.

He squinted his eyes against the sun. “Read it.”

The medallion had an inscription—
Fortes fortuna iuvat.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“Fortune favors the brave.” North tilted his head. “Like it?”

Wariness coiled tight in my chest. I took a step away from him. Despite the fact that he was different, I’d had a shield up for a few years now, ever since a couple of perverts, my mother’s so-called boyfriends, had messed with me.

“Uh, thanks,” I said to North.

He studied me for a second. “You’re like a turtle, you know?”

“A turtle?”

North thumped his chest. “Hard shell. Hiding. You been on the road long with your mama?”

“Since I was seven.” I had no idea why I was telling him the truth.

“School?”

“I’ve been to a ton of schools.”

“What’d you like most?”

“I don’t know. English, I guess.”

“Come on. Let’s see where you’re at.” He tilted his head to the house where most of the commune members lived.

I wasn’t really afraid, just because there were always people around and little risk that I’d ever be alone with North. My mother and I stayed in our own bedroom in the main house, where about a dozen other people lived. Bedrooms were private, but we shared the other living spaces and kitchen. Some members lived in small cabins dotted around the farm.

North nodded to the rough-hewn trestle table and took a stack of homeschooling workbooks from a shelf. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I did the work he gave me, then frowned at the look on his face.

“What?” I asked.

“You ought to know advanced algebra and geometry by now. Maybe even some precalculus.”

I stared at him. With his shaggy hair and scraggly beard, he looked like he’d never set foot inside a classroom, let alone knew anything about mathematics.

“You know about that stuff?” I asked.

“Sure. I studied physics in college.”

“You went to college?”

A wide grin flashed behind his beard. “You think I’ve been a hippie my whole life? Yeah, I went to college. MIT. Plasma physics was my thing.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “So how’d you get from plasma physics to organic gardening?”

He tugged at the tiny, beribboned braid in his beard. “Sometimes you end up on a different path than the one you started on, you know?”

I didn’t, not really. I’d never started on a path by myself. I’d always just been dragged onto one.

North sat across from me at the table and opened a math workbook.

“So what made you take a different path?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Just life, Liv. No one’s immune from anything.”

“Are you sorry you left MIT?”

“No. Sorry about other things, though.”

“Like what?” I knew I was prying, but I was curious. And North didn’t seem to mind.

“I hurt people,” he admitted. “Did a lot of hard living before I found Twelve Oaks. Drugs, drinking. Fights. Arrested a few times. Hit rock bottom when a girl and I partied too hard. I blacked out. She ended up in the hospital for alcohol poisoning. A doctor got me into a rehab program, and as soon as I was done I moved out here. Lived in Berkeley for a while before a friend told me about Twelve Oaks. Came here and never left.”

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Twelve years, I think. Thirteen?”

I could see why he’d stayed for so long. It was a nice place. The fragrant smell of simmering marinara sauce came from the kitchen, along with the low hum of people talking. A woman sat sewing in front of the fireplace, and a few kids ran around outside, kicking a ball. Everyone seemed content, at ease.

Even my mother.

“So, look.” North pushed the workbook toward me. “We’ll start with basic concepts and equations. Work your way up.”

I wasn’t all that crazy about doing the work, but I knew I was behind most other kids my age when it came to education. And because I wanted to catch up, I agreed to meet with North every morning.

Some of the other kids in the commune attended public schools, but my mother didn’t enroll me since the school year was almost over. The younger kids were homeschooled and worked in a cabin that had been set aside as a schoolroom.

The work wasn’t always easy—North pushed me hard, even with things like trigonometric functions. He was a good teacher, patient and insistent even when I tried to claim it was all beyond my comprehension.

“Nothing’s beyond your comprehension, Liv, not even the reaches of your own mind,” he said.

I had no idea what he meant, but he was prone to statements like that. We studied in the morning, and I helped in the kitchen and gardens in the afternoon.

I got to know others in the commune. Greta, the woman with long braids and piercing blue eyes adorning her weathered face. Susan and Tim, a young couple with a new baby named Penny. Sam, Parker, Emily—seven-year-olds who surfed the Internet after making soaps and macramé baskets. Roger and Clara, teenagers around my age who’d lived at Twelve Oaks for five years.

My mother spent her nonwork shifts in North’s shop. Whenever I went to find her, she was working on a new jewelry technique, or North was showing her how to use a special type of pliers or file. They sat next to each other at mealtime. She went with him to unload boxes for the farmer’s market. He worked in the garden alongside her.

Not once did I see them touch each other. Not once did my mother spend the night away from our bedroom.

Near the barn, there was a stone-rimmed campfire and benches set up, and every night a couple of the men would build a fire. We sat around it, listening to people play various instruments, sing songs, tell stories.

I always sat silently, watching the flames, feeling the warmth around me.

One night I watched my mother. She sat on the other side of the fire. She looked different, younger. Her hair had grown even longer, and she usually wore it in a high ponytail to keep it out of the way. She hadn’t worn much makeup since we’d come here.