Nearly Normal

by Cea Sunrise Person

  Each morning I gazed up at my ceiling and told myself that I had no choice but to remain optimistic—no easy feat considering I had no career prospects, no education, no great business ideas and no capital to start one even if I had. I thought of getting a job at Starbucks and trying to work my way up to manager, but after a quick calculation of what I would need to spend on child care for Avery versus income, I realized that what I made wouldn’t even cover my monthly rent. So what did I have, I wondered, besides a willingness to work hard? My answer was immediate: I had my story. Yes. I had my story, and despite what every editor in New York may have had to say about it, I still believed it was publishable.

  One evening I put Avery in front of some cartoons and sat down beside him to scan my manuscript. Sometimes when I’d been writing about my child self, I’d made myself cringe. Wake up, I’d felt like yelling at that little girl. Stop being so eager and trusting. I could see now that instead of honouring my true personality through my writing, I’d shifted it slightly. It was still me, but the cooler version of myself that I wished I’d been, more like a sitcom character than one from a movie. Tough rather than strong, lacking vulnerability and a natural curiosity about my world. I realized that the success of my story lay partly in my willingness to reveal the true Cea, but the thought of that made me downright squeamish. I didn’t want to feel the wounds of that young child again.

  “We can’t give up,” Avery said softly beside me, and I whipped my head around to look at his face. He smiled shyly at me. He’d just repeated a character’s line from My Little Pony, I realized.

  I grinned back at him and ruffled his hair. Refusing to give up wasn’t a one-time promise; it was something to which you renewed your commitment every single day. And I was not a victim; in fact, I was rather lucky, because my life had prepared me for this.

  As I adjusted to my new normal, I thought about the things I could keep within my control. I sat down and made a list of what I could offer others in exchange for money, and another of seemingly impossible-to-obtain wishes for myself. Predictably my second list dwarfed the first. Stability. A man I can finally be truthful with. A marriage that won’t fail. A writing career. A house and a car to call my own. Another child?

  After I’d made my lists, I called a friend who’d used a surrogate to carry her first baby. This was how I would make enough money to support Avery and myself. Though the idea would have sounded outlandish and unthinkable to many, to me it made perfect sense. It was something I could easily offer a family while allowing me to stay home with Avery and continue writing. I called the number of the surrogate centre and asked them to send me the paperwork to get started. Then I got on my laptop and went on the Plenty of Fish website. I’d never thought about internet dating before, but given my financial and child-care situation, there wasn’t really any other way for me to meet someone. I liked that I could type my wish list for a man right into my profile. For the first time in weeks, I had a genuine laugh when I imagined myself sitting in a café waiting for my date, trying to figure out how I was going to explain away my pregnant state before he could run in the other direction.

  My perspective was changing. Despite—or perhaps because of—my nomadic past, I realized I’d been trying to create permanency in my life just like everyone else. Letting go of that expectation gave me a calm and strength I hadn’t felt before. Tough Cea may have been long buried, but she was not dead.

  1998

  Milan & Munich

  “Man, you look like crap,” Suzana said, when I entered our shared train compartment.

  I smiled ruefully. I loved my best friend’s honesty, and what she said was true. I was dreadfully ill with the flu. I’d just come off a four-day shoot in the Canary Islands with an unforgiving schedule that had forced me to model outfit after outfit instead of resting. The makeup artist had covered my red nose with pancake makeup and Visine’d my watery eyes, and I’d lived through it, trying not to faint from weakness. All I wanted now was to go home to bed, but I had another job to go to.

  “I’ll survive,” I replied weakly. “Just have to get through this next one. I couldn’t exactly cancel.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Suzana said sympathetically, and we grinned at each other knowingly.

  As a fellow model who’d started nearly as young as I had, Suzana knew all too well the ins and outs of our volatile business. We were neither top girls nor bottom girls. We were mid girls, the ones who worked steadily but were easily replaced if we cancelled a booking or dared voice a complaint. I’d worked in minus-twenty degrees for full days with no place to warm up, and I’d posed in swimsuits, being bitten by sand fleas for hours and later counting more than five hundred bites on my body. I’d taken trains with dodgy-looking passengers through the night to reach remote destinations, worn clothes so ugly I wanted to cry when I looked in the mirror, and worked through entire days without being offered a bite of food. I never complained. I knew my place, my value and my limitations.

  I sat down across from Suzana in our compartment. We were doing a shoot in Italy the next morning, and because of the job’s location in a small town, it was more practical to take the train than to fly. As always when I travelled, I stuffed my passport under my shirt and placed my wallet under my coat beside me. I was slightly nervous, because the Canary Islands client had paid me partly in cash, and I hadn’t even had time to go to the bank before catching my train.

  “Hey,” I said. “I heard from James. He sent me a letter last week. He seems really nice.”

  “Really? That’s awesome! I seriously think you guys would be a great match.”

  “Mm. Well, we’ll see.”

  “Okay, bedtime for me,” Suzana said with a yawn, glancing at her watch. “Remember, no sleeping at the same time. Wake me up in two hours.”

  “Of course.”

  As I gazed out the window at the passing landscape—green fields punctuated by tiny storybook towns—my thoughts drifted to James. A great match. I barely knew him yet, but I already agreed with my friend’s statement.

  The moment I opened my eyes, I sensed something was wrong. My head hurt, and my eyes ached. The train, bearing down on Milan Central Station, rocked beneath me. Passengers clomped down the aisle outside the curtained window, chattering in Italian and German. Across from me, Suzana sat up and rubbed her eyes.

  “We were supposed to take turns.” I groaned. “How did we both fall asleep?”

  “I don’t know. Did you wake me up?”

  “I—I can’t remember.” I brought my hand to my temple. I could vaguely recall the conductor coming in to check our tickets and passports, passengers opening our door to look for empty seats and then moving on, but it all seemed like a fuzzy dream. “My head is pounding. Something feels weird.”

  “Holy shit,” Suzana said, catching sight of my face. “Look at your eyes!”

  I turned to the small mirror behind my seat. My green eyes were swollen into narrow, red slits. “What the hell?” I reached for my handbag and grabbed my wallet, but I already knew what I would find. It was unzipped, revealing an empty space that last night had held more than three thousand Deutschmarks in cash. “The gas sprayers,” I said furiously. “They got me. I can’t fucking believe it.”

  The sleeping-gas sprayers were notorious on the night train that ran from Munich to Milan. It was rumoured that conductors were paid off to allow them to go about their nasty business, and I didn’t doubt it. Train compartments weren’t lockable, and all the perp needed to do was slip a hose through a crack in the door, release the gas, wait for the victims to fall asleep and then rob them. And as if that weren’t enough, I’d also had an apparent bad reaction to the gas. I was due to start my modelling job in an hour, and I knew exactly what would happen when they saw my eyes: they’d send me straight back home.

  Home. Whatever that meant.

  When I returned to my apartment in Munich, there was a large yellow envelope on the floor beneath the mail slot. I picked it up and looked at
the return address. Papa Dick? It had been years since I’d heard from him. I still wrote him the occasional postcard from my more exotic shoot destinations, but he rarely replied.

  The envelope was thick. What could he be sending me? Years’ worth of correspondence that had been returned to him, perhaps? I ripped the envelope open at the kitchen table.

  It was a magazine. Staring at me from the cover was my grandfather’s face, with his familiar blue eyes and long greying hair. He was dressed in his usual bush garb of wool shirt and suspenders. A yellow sticky-note affixed to the cover said, Dear Cea, I thought you’d like to see this. There’s a big feature on me on page 62. Love, Papa.

  I dropped the magazine in disgust. The self-centred prick was my first thought, but then I realized that maybe this wasn’t so different from the postcards I sent him—a way of saying Look how well I’m doing! And I’m doing it all without you! Maybe this was just a stupid contest to see who had the better life. It wasn’t a thought that made me feel any better about him, or myself.

  I lit a cigarette and grabbed my purse. I’d had a shitty week, and I knew a couple of ways to make it better. I walked the few blocks to Leopoldstrasse, Schwabing’s main shopping street, and started at my favourite clothing store. Two hours later, over a thousand dollars lighter and many shopping bags heavier, I let myself back into my apartment and opened a bottle of wine. I had a party to get ready for.

  By the time I sauntered into my favourite bar, Cosmo’s, to meet up with my friends, I’d finished off a bottle and a half. They all gathered around and hugged me. My friends were my salvation. We came from everywhere—Australia, Sweden, America, Brazil, Canada—and landed here with two things in common: we were models, and we were outsiders. This lifestyle made my carefully constructed persona so easy to uphold. No one knew where I came from, and questions were easy to deflect—because really, people were way more interested in talking about themselves than hearing about anyone else. I’m from Calgary. My mom was a hippie and had me young. We don’t talk much now. In a world of models striving to stand out as being unique and special, my story was plausible and not very interesting.

  But tonight was different. I kept drinking, and each drink made me a little surer of myself. I felt popular, invincible, powerful. I enthralled everyone with my story of the train fiasco, and since that went so well, I decided to keep going. “Guess what?” I slurred, placing my empty wineglass down on the table too hard. “You guys will never believe this. I used to live in a tipi when I was little!”

  My friends looked at me blankly for moment, then they all drunkenly cracked up. “You mean, like, a wigwam?” someone said.

  “Totally! We hunted for our own food and everything. My favourite was bear meat!”

  Before long, I was running through my craziest stories: the pot bust, stealing from cottages, starting school while we were squatting in one, the tree fort my mother used as a babysitter while she went off to meet her lover, falling through the ice and almost dying. They all stared at me in shock, laughed hysterically, asked for more. I’d never felt more accepted and loved.

  After the bar closed, we took the party back to my house. I stood barefoot in the kitchen, swaying in place, while my friends chatted drunkenly around me. I was beginning to feel ill. I leaned forward, lost my balance and fell against a free-standing cabinet. Something landed hard on my head. Liquid poured down my face as the bottle crashed to the ground and shattered. I looked down at it, stunned, and then began laughing maniacally. My current favourite song was blaring from the CD player: “Seether” by Veruca Salt. Without another thought, I jumped barefoot into the red puddle of wine and broken glass and started to dance.

  The next morning dawned harsh. My body was racked with pain, but that was nothing compared to the pain of my emotions. I couldn’t remember a lot, but I knew I’d said way too much. Remorse and guilt replaced my bravado of the night before. The self-loathing I felt was pushing out reason. My carefully constructed mask had finally crumbled.

  My feet were screaming at me. Slowly I lifted the covers to inspect them. The soles were bloody and raw, with glass shards sticking out. My face and hair were soaked with booze, and beside my bed was Papa Dick’s magazine. Black marker was scribbled all over his face. I dropped the magazine on my bed and gingerly lay back on my pillow. Papa Dick. Sure, he had disappointed me by not being the person I’d thought he was—by being a narcissistic egomaniac, rather than the hero of my childhood. But did that really warrant this much resentment toward him? I glanced down at the cover again and, in that moment, heard a name in my head that was not my grandfather’s. Before I could stop myself, I picked up the phone and dialled Mom’s number.

  “Are you okay?” she asked when she heard the hangover in my voice.

  “No,” I said, rushing on before she could ask more questions. “Listen, I have to ask you something. A while ago I was doing a job in Tunisia, and a man—well, I was pretty sure he was going to attack me—”

  “Oh, Cea, I’m sorry—”

  “It’s fine,” I said abruptly. “I dealt with it. The point is, ever since then, I’ve had this face in my head. And now there’s a name. Like that guy triggered a memory, only I can’t remember what it is. I don’t even know if the name and face belong to the same person.” I paused. “Who’s Darcy? Every time I think of that name, I feel like throwing up. Who is he?”

  “Darcy? You mean . . . the guy I dated for a while? Before Sam and I got back—”

  “No, obviously.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “Well, I don’t know, then,” she said finally. “I have no idea.”

  I closed my eyes against my throbbing head. Mom was an easy read, and I knew she was telling the truth.

  The darkness knocked me back onto my bed like a physical force. My past was the boogeyman coming to get me, and I was pretty sure I couldn’t outrun it anymore.

  Chapter 19

  2008

  Vancouver

  I leaned across the restaurant table toward Remy and touched his hand. “So I’m standing there with my little kindergarten friend, and here comes my mom to the door all, like, ‘Hi, girls, did you have fun at the birthday party?’ And not only is she topless, she’s smoking a joint!”

  Remy threw his head back and laughed. It was one of the many things I loved about him—his emotions were always close to the surface, and there was something about him that made me sure I could trust him. We’d been together for two months, and I’d already told him more stories about my crazy past than I’d told James in nine years.

  “Hey,” Remy said suddenly. “Do you get Avery back tomorrow? I was thinking we could take him to the water park.”

  I smiled so hard I felt my face might split in two. Against every odd, it seemed I had met my perfect match on my very first internet date. Right from the beginning, I’d felt something different with Remy. Unless you counted that he seemed too perfect to be true, there were no red flags. Unlike me, he came without baggage—at forty-two years old, he’d never so much as lived with a woman. He had no kids, no exes to speak of, was financially secure, handsome, romantic, attentive, and best of all, hilariously funny. His family wasn’t perfect, but they weren’t horribly dysfunctional either. We’d even both lived in Europe and lost our mothers to breast cancer. He insisted that he loved kids and wanted his own and had just been waiting for the right person to come along. And so far, though I’d told him about my two divorces, wild family and current financial situation, that person appeared to be me.

  Needless to say, after telling Remy about my surrogacy plan and having a good chuckle about it, I’d thrown it out the window. Lately I’d landed a few modelling jobs, which was keeping me in groceries and allowing me to continue work on my memoir. Even my being an aspiring writer who planned to reveal her crazy life story to the world hadn’t scared Remy off.

  “So,” he said, taking my hand. “When do I get to read this book of yours? I’m dying to know every little thing about you.”

&n
bsp; “Soon,” I promised. “Soon.” Not surprisingly, my old go-to fear about revealing my past had not died. But in that moment, I realized one of the reasons Remy was so different from the men in my past: rather than making me feel like damaged goods, he made me feel like some sort of treasure.

  I thought about the wish list I’d made when my world had bottomed out just a few months ago. Of the bad karma I always knew I’d pay off someday when I was cheating on Kevin. Of Guthrie the astrologer, predicting that my time of trouble was finally nearing an end. Of our dead mothers, plotting our meeting somewhere in the ether. And I felt a tipping toward a truth that I’d long suspected—one that, just as my beginnings had dictated, defied the passivity of hope and affirmed the power of action.

  I sat beside Remy, nervously tapping my foot on the floor. A glance at the wall clock informed me that exactly one minute had passed since I’d last checked it. I tried to distract myself by looking around the room. It was small and drab, with a few posters of puppies and kittens. It looked more like a waiting room in a children’s hospital than a genetic counsellor’s office.

  I placed my hand on my belly, feeling for movement beneath my T-shirt. My second baby was an active one, an endless source of entertainment as Remy and I watched its Alien-like antics.

  “I don’t know why I’m so nervous,” I remarked, and Remy squeezed my leg reassuringly.

  “Because this is important to you.”

  I smiled back at him and then glanced down at my eternity engagement ring. We planned to get married in December, before our baby boy was due to come along. Just as I’d predicted when we first met, Remy was not only a man to be trusted but the right one for me. We’d barely been together a year when I got pregnant, and he had been ecstatic about it.