North of Beautiful (17 page)

Chapter fifteen

Here Be Dragons

CHRISTMAS MORNING WAS SUPPOSED TO dawn clear and blue, according to the meteorologists. It was still black when I woke. My eyes were drawn to the out-of-date world map hanging over the foot of my bed. I couldn’t see the lines or colors, the room too dark for that. But I could picture the world’s borderlines in my head, long since inaccurate because the countries themselves had changed after the map was printed in 1990: Germany reunifying, the Soviet Union dissolving. Estonia declared independence. So had Namibia. And now almost two decades later, Merc had declared his, leaving abruptly last night. What did that signal if not that he didn’t need or want us at all?

I rolled to my side and peered between the slats into the darkness, where, far off, the North Star twinkled. Downstairs, Mom was rustling in the kitchen, unable to sleep either. She was probably whipping up a batch of butter-laden shortbread. Or maybe double chocolate brownies, Claudius’s favorite. If she couldn’t soothe our family, she’d soothe our stomachs. Claudius’s palm only needed a few stitches last night; luckily, the glass hadn’t severed any important nerves. Unlike the news that Merc and Elisa had left. As soon as I broke that to Mom, she had started crying, great, heaving sobs the way she had when her sister died. Not caring that Dad was watching and listening, Mom had collapsed at the kitchen table. He had actually approached her, and I bristled, suspicious of his intentions. Dad saw my glare. He turned around and hastened to his office, head hanging low.

I had been so mad — mad at Dad for his belated remorse, mad at Merc for leaving, mad at myself for not being able to stop Merc. Without thinking, I sent my brother a scathing e-mail, telling him what I couldn’t say in person. Even now, I could feel my accusations spitting acid words from my computer:

You should hear Mom crying now. She’s been waiting for 2 years to see you again. First, you don’t call us, not even once in the last year. And then you forget her birthday. How hard is it to remember? Valentine’s Day, Mom’s birthday. And then you just bailed.

Well, you get the gist.

Apparently, Jacob was right; I’m good at making statements. It’s the fallout that I can’t handle. And if there was one thing I was certain about, it was that my brother, Mr. Married to My BlackBerry, had read my message. If he answered, it would be no different from his irregular missives: a handful of inadequate words, all lowercase because he couldn’t waste a split second on holding down the shift key to capitalize anything.

Unable to stand another second communing with my inner critic, I threw off the heavy duvet, the flannel sheets. I padded to my closet, reached over to flick on the light. The glare of the bulb inside my closet reflected off Merc’s framed diploma from Western Washington, one more relic he’d left behind in this room, a reminder of a past he no longer wanted. Or needed.

Over my huge T-shirt, I wrenched on a thick, shapeless sweater. Then I foraged for some thermal underwear as well as my polar fleece pants from the dirty laundry bin. I smelled them — not bad. Besides, what did it matter? I wouldn’t see anyone this early.

My headlamp was still hanging around my bed knob where I had left it yesterday morning. Behind me, I shut the bedroom door softly and crept to the mudroom and broke out of this homegrown jail.

The wind nipped at my uncovered fingers, ghostly teeth hungry for flesh, as I strapped on my snowshoes outside the mudroom. Clumsily, I thrust my boot into the openings in the metal shoes, snapped the ankle strap, and then tugged my favorite mittens on. I wiggled my fingers beneath the pilled polar fleece, and when that didn’t thaw them, I rubbed my hands together. My warm bed upstairs beckoned, but so did my insomnia. I had already wasted enough time beating myself up, especially considering Dad had done such a thorough job of that in my head. So I grabbed my poles and set off on the trail behind the house.

Once I rounded the bend, the lights in Dad’s office switched on, a warden sensing an escapee. I couldn’t help myself; I stopped, stared up at his Aerie perched atop the house. Which, as Claudius had snickered once, was what Hitler called his own retreat and hideout in Obersalzberg, the eagle’s nest.

I imagined Dad up there, pounding away at his bank of computers, surrounded by the most precious of his antique map collection. Overhead on the ceiling was the mural he’d commissioned of the Mappa Mundi, the medieval map that divided the world into three unequal parts — not unlike our family. Dad commanded the bulk of our world, Mom and me splitting the bottom half, side-by-side. Merc and Claudius? They were safely off the grid. In a bit, Dad would take a break, open a book of travel essays, and read about expeditions pitting man against the wild in some epic adventures he’d never take.

Like me.

Let’s face it; the second I stepped a single degree outside my comfort zone, I regretted it the way I did my rash e-mail to Merc. The wind rattled the fat boughs of an evergreen tree, somehow spared a shearing by Mom. I trudged through the snow at a quick pace, now warming too fast. A trickle of sweat slid down my back. Go slower, I told myself. Stop rushing. A week post-op, I still wasn’t supposed to sweat and irritate my broken capillaries. Besides, it wasn’t like I was in any big rush to return home.

At the edge of our property, I switched off my headlamp. The stars cast enough light so I could pick out my trail, which I knew by heart. I had just turned my back on the view of the open valley when a furtive motion to my right startled me. Most likely, it was just a deer. Bears didn’t venture out just yet, but you never knew. Two years ago, a cougar meandered down the mountains to a neighbor’s house, forced out of its usual haunts in the protected national forest by hunger. I looked for a large branch, but didn’t find one. If I couldn’t outrun the animal, I’d blind it. I whirled to face the noise as I switched on my headlamp.

“Could you aim your light somewhere else . . . ,” said the one voice I’d managed to dodge successfully for the last few days, “. . . unless you plan on blinding me, too?”

“God!” I jerked back, stumbled, and fell on my butt in the snow.

A dark figure appeared before me. Laconically, Jacob held out his hand. “If you wanted to see me, all you had to do was say so.”

“I didn’t want to see you!”

“That’s what they all say.”

They? Who, they? As in other girls?

“You’re the one at my house at five in the morning,” I pointed out.

Jacob laughed, pulling me to my feet. “For the record that makes twice you’ve practically run me over.”

“Excuse me?”

For a second, I thought he was reaching for my face. Instead, he turned off my headlamp and held my hand while my eyes readjusted to the darkness. He may or may not have had a girlfriend, but I most definitely still had a boyfriend. So I pretended to cough, pulled away from him, and began babbling. Honestly, I have no recollection what I said, just that words spewed out of me.

“You okay?” he interrupted.

“I’m fine.” I smiled brightly.

Jacob shook his head. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t fake it.”

His honesty stung almost more than the blasts of laser on my cheek. I stepped back from him, spinning away from his gaze that stripped away the defenses that fooled everybody else. I faced the dark, hulking mountains.

“Hey,” he said, and touched my arm. “What’s up?”

I admitted, “Christmas sucks.”

“Tell me about it.”

I glanced at him and then really studied him, this boy who could disarm me with a few words. Jacob, as usual, was in the wrong getup for this weather — and for this town — in his head-to-toe Goth black. That thin trench coat. Those flimsy Vans. At least today he had on gloves and a polar fleece beanie. He shifted the shovel he was carrying over his shoulder.

“I hate to ask what you’re planning to do with that,” I said, and then added more curiously, “and what exactly are you doing here at this hour?”

“Geocaching for Kryptonite.”

“Geocaching?”

“Yeah, it’s like Easter egg hunting with a GPS.” He lowered the shovel to the ground and pulled a cell phone–sized device from his trench coat pocket. “You know, global positioning software —”

“I know what GPS is. My dad does work for some GPS companies.” I narrowed my eyes at him suspiciously. “Is this some kind of weird Seattle thing?”

“You kidding? Geocaching is a worldwide adventure game. People hide treasure caches everywhere, even in Antarctica. You just load in latitude and longitude coordinates to find them.”

“And people actually go look for them?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Why?” I demanded.

“Because it’s fun.”

“You’re kidding.”

He laughed at me then. I had the suspicion that he was enjoying my dubious reaction. “Yeah, it’s fun to take something from the cache and then leave something.”

“Like what?”

Shrugging, Jacob answered, “Toys, stickers, pins. Anything small. And then you write about your find in the logbook.”

“This is very geeky.”

He frowned in disbelief. “I can’t believe you, daughter of a GPS designer, have never geocached.”

I shook my head. “My dad thinks it’s illegal to have fun.”

“Well, you know what they say.”

“What?”

“There’s a first for everything.” Jacob consulted the GPS device and faced north, where there was no path, just untouched snow. Untouched by human feet, at least. I could make out the slender holes punched in from deer hooves. Much too boisterously for five in the morning, he said, “Okay, this way. The Kryptonite is close.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me, right? Kryptonite where I live?”

“Apparently. That’s the name of the geocache, anyway.” Jacob stepped off my path away from me.

I didn’t follow.

He paused. “We won’t know if it’s here unless we look.”

We. I flushed at that. Stop it, I told myself. He was not my type. But then again, was Erik, who had stood on my own doorstep and pretended not to know me in front of his cousin?

Jacob eyed my well-trodden path, the one I had stomped along every day this winter and the winter before that. I still hadn’t budged off it. He followed the trail to the hill, where it disappeared. “So you always go the same way every day?”

“So?”

“So.” Jacob returned to me, holding out his GPS device. “Lead the way.”

For as long as Dad used to work on the software that ran these devices, I could count the number of times I had actually held one. Maybe twice. Definitely no more than three times. They freaked me out, that unerring ability to find someone’s exact position. Frankly, I wouldn’t have put it past Dad to implant some kind of tracking device inside me and Mom so he could pinpoint our location, every minute of every day. I shivered, wrapped my arms around myself. Despite the unrelenting cold, I dithered.

“You know,” Jacob said conversationally, as if he had all the time in the world while he was getting frostbitten, too, “two days after Clinton ordered the Defense Department to turn off the jamming signal so civilians could use GPS, the first geocache was logged and hidden. A big, old five-gallon bucket of prizes.”

“Really?” I couldn’t help it. I was intrigued. “That’s the last thing the military probably thought their tracking system would be used for: games.”

“And five days after that, there was a cache logged all the way over in Australia.”

I looked past him into the vast darkness. “And now there’s a cache here.”

“And now there’s a cache over there somewhere.” He jerked his head northward.

“Why would anyone put a cache here?”

He shrugged.

“My path ends up over that way, you know,” I told him.

“We can make our own.”

The stars were still gleaming in the dark morning sky. I gripped the GPS tightly in my hand, easily imagining the satellites circling up there, some 12,000 miles overhead, providing the directions we needed to locate this Kryptonite. I shot him a challenging look before I stepped deliberately off my trail. He grinned and slipped, his Vans providing zero traction in the snow.

I sighed, walked in front of him. “Just so you know,” I said over my shoulder, “I’m only doing this to keep you from killing yourself.” I set off, GPS in hand, my snowshoes forging a new wide path across the pristine snow with Jacob’s soft laughter accompanying me.

“You know, those devices require user guidance,” Jacob called up to me after we had been trudging for a few minutes.

“You don’t say.” I finally turned around, hands on my hips. “What happened to relaxing? Enjoying the ride? Stopping and smelling the coffee?”

“Are you quoting me?” He glowed — he actually went radioactive — with glee.

I spun around fast, or as fast as I could with snowshoes on my feet. His laughter splashed over me, rich and smooth, caramel macchiato. What I wanted to do was turn back, tackle him, taste that laughter on his lips. . . .

I cleared my throat, forced myself forward as I read the GPS for the coordinates and veered sharply so that we had to step over a boulder mounded with snow.

“You know, sometimes the most direct route isn’t the right one,” he said, almost losing his balance on the rock.

“Hey, I’m making this up as we go.”

“And where are we going, exactly?”

“North . . . ish.”

“North-ish.” A pause, and then: “Is that Terra for I’m lost-ish?”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “I’m directionally challenged, what can I say?”

“Give me that,” he said, commandeering the GPS and after a brief consultation, quarter-turning. “This way.”

“Which way would that be?”

“West . . . ish.” His feet slipped on the snow.

“Honestly,” I said, tramping up to his side, “you wouldn’t last a day in the backcountry.”

“And you would?”

“I’d survive . . . I’d just be lost.”

“So we’d make a great team,” he said, sliding again. This time, he grabbed me for balance, and we both tumbled.

“Ouch!” I said, my forehead knocking against his chin. “Shit! My face.”

But I forgot all about my face, any pain, any potential scarring, because somewhere in our fall, his arms had slipped around me, taking the impact. He rolled me over to my back, looked down at me anxiously, and then breathed out, relieved. “You’re okay.”