Nearly Normal

by Cea Sunrise Person

  —Didn’t watch her. Just heard her through the door.

  —Clarification noted. Let’s move on to age seven. One of your only friends, Art, breaks your trust by molesting you. You know you can’t tell your mother about it, because she’ll chastise you for being, according to her, prudish. When you’re eight, her boyfriend Barry molests you for several months. You find out your mother knows about it and does nothing to stop it. Barry tries to coerce you into watching the two of them have sex. When you and your mother finally leave him, you’re frightened out of your mind by a man who picks you up while you’re hitchhiking. Then, after finally beginning to integrate into society and feel a little normal, you’re sent back into the wilderness to live with your grandparents. Your mother, the only constant throughout your life, leaves you behind for a year. Then you almost drown when you fall through the ice. Shortly after that you move to the city, where not only are you navigating a completely new environment, you discover your mother is once again living with Barry. Is that all accurate?

  —Uh-huh.

  —So, would you consider any of these things, on their own, to be traumatizing events?

  —Traumatizing events? I don’t know if I’d go that far. But I’ll play along.

  —Cea?

  —Yeah?

  —When we first started our sessions, you brought something up, and we haven’t talked about it since. Something that happened just a little while after you’d returned to live in the wilderness with your grandparents. When you were eight.

  —Eight, right. The year it all went down.

  —I think we need to explore it.

  —Explore? I don’t think so. I mean, like I told you before, all I have is these little memory fragments.

  —Yes. But let’s go a little further than that and see if we can put them together. So—you were living in the Yukon. Your mother had gone to Calgary, leaving you behind with your grandparents.

  —Okay, yeah. And I was babysitting for some friends of theirs. In Whitehorse. They wanted to go to some folk festival or something, so they left me in charge of their kids. I looked after them a few times.

  —Yes?

  —And . . .

  —It’s okay, Cea. This is a safe place for you to talk. Tell me what happened.

  —It’s hard to remember. I know there’s more to it, but I keep seeing this one thing happening, but every time I think about it I feel so disgusting. Like I really really hate myself. But it’s still there. Not going away. Like it will never go away.

  —It’s okay. I want you to just close your eyes. Take me back there. Tell me where you are, what it looks like, what you can see.

  —Do we have to do this? I really don’t think it’s going to change anything.

  —Of course we don’t have to. But think of it this way: you say you feel like it will never go away, so what do you have to lose? Maybe this will help. Maybe you just need to confront it.

  —All right. Okay, I guess. Well, it’s a living room. There’s an old brown couch, one of those velvet poster things everyone had in the seventies on the wall, and a small TV on an oak table.

  —Where are the kids?

  —In bed. I finally got them to sleep.

  —Good. What do you hear?

  —A clock. The clock ticking. Some cars going by on the street.

  —Tell me what you’re touching. You’re sitting on the couch—what does it feel like?

  —The cushions are too soft, like they’re all old and sunken in. The arm I’m leaning on is cold and hard. They have those plastic protective thingies on the arms.

  —Great. That’s great, Cea. And what do you smell?

  — . . . Smell?

  —Yes. Do you smell anything?

  —

  —Cea?

  —

  —Cea? Are you all right?

  1978

  Whitehorse

  I awoke with a start and sat up in the bed, glancing around the darkened room. On either side of me, the babies slept. Finally, I thought as I slipped carefully off the mattress. I closed the door quietly behind me and crept down the hallway to the kitchen. I’d been wanting to do this all night, but the kids had needed snacks, new diapers, toys, more snacks, pyjamas and stories. I’d finally passed out between them in their parents’ bed as they squirmed and kicked.

  I hadn’t wanted to babysit again, but Papa Dick had insisted that I’d be just fine, because I did such a good job last time. I looked up at the clock on the kitchen wall: just after nine o’clock. Papa Dick and Grandma Jeanne had gone to a concert with the parents, and I was pretty sure it would be hours before they got home. Last time I’d gotten through an entire bag of Doritos and two chocolate bars before they came through the door, breathy-voiced and shiny-eyed from smoking pot all night. As I’d watched them leave earlier, I’d comforted myself with the knowledge of what was in the kitchen.

  I opened the cupboard and looked inside. Yellow boxes of macaroni and cheese, tins of soup, a stack of candy, two half-eaten bags of chips. Perfect. I took a bag down and crammed half its contents into my mouth. The chips were a little stale, but I didn’t care. I folded the bag loosely, so it didn’t look empty, and put it back on the shelf. Then I pulled out a bag of Nibs, tore it open and emptied the little black candies into my hand. How would I explain if they discovered them missing? Papa Dick would kill me if he found out I’d eaten junk food. No, not kill me, just give me that disappointed look that always withered me. They wouldn’t notice, I decided. Not in the state they came home in. I popped the candies into my mouth one by one. They tasted like the rough, barky sticks Grandma Jeanne sometime gave me to chew on after supper, but much sweeter.

  As I was reaching for a chocolate bar, I heard a noise at the front door. A key turning in the lock. Afraid of discovery, I shoved everything back in the cupboard and slammed it closed.

  “Hey,” said a voice behind me, and I whipped around.

  A tall boy of about fifteen was standing in the doorway. He had a bit of black fuzz on his top lip. I stared at him, petrified.

  “Who—who are you?” My voice was shaking.

  “Um, I live here? Didn’t they tell you?”

  “Uh—no.”

  “Figures. I’m Kate’s kid. Not Jeff’s, though.” He looked at me more closely. “And what are you doing here?”

  “Babysitting.”

  “Oh yeah? How old are you?”

  “Eight.”

  “Mm. Well, eight-year-old, you’ve got something on your face.”

  I wiped my sleeve across my mouth, and it came away with a black smear.

  “You like licorice, huh?”

  I shrugged, praying he wouldn’t tell my grandparents. He was looking at me kind of funny. Something stirred in my body. I dropped my eyes.

  “Kate say when they’d be home?”

  I shook my head.

  He tossed his keys on the table and took the stairs down to the basement. Junk-food binge interrupted, I went into the living room and opened my book.

  Something was behind me, curled around my back. I opened my eyes and turned over on the couch.

  “I like you,” he whispered into my ear. “Do you like me?”

  The room was pretty dark, only a little light coming through the window from a streetlamp. I could hear a clock ticking, a car whooshing by outside. His hair brushed the side of my face. He smelled like cigarettes and soap. His hand was down there, on me.

  “I like you. Do you like me?”

  My compass spun. Out of control, righting itself briefly, and then off again. Did I like him? He was good-looking. He was nice. He gave me that funny feeling in my belly that I got when David and I had our first kiss. He only knew me as the babysitter, not some freaky girl from the wilderness.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Prove it.”

  “Prove it?”

  “Yeah. What do you do if you like a guy?”

  “I can’t do that. I’m only eight.”

  “There are o
ther things you can do, sexy girl.”

  I could hear the blood rushing through my ears. I was scared, nervous, but also excited. A guy liked me and had even called me sexy. A guy who wasn’t Art, the old pervert, or Barry, who had belonged to my mother. I felt suddenly as if I were the one in control. For the first time, I understood why Mom had always told me there was nothing more important in life than this.

  He unzipped his fly. It sprung out toward my face, bigger than I’d expected. So close I could even smell it. It smelled kind of funny, different from the rest of him. I held my breath and opened my mouth.

  It was over in a minute. My jaw was sore from opening too far, and there was slimy stuff in my mouth that I spat out into my hand. He tucked it back into his underwear and zipped up his fly. He was standing above me now, so I sat up a little bit taller. I didn’t want him to remember that I was just a kid. He smiled at me.

  “Did you like that?”

  I looked up at him, but I couldn’t see his face with the light behind him. He was a dark silhouette looming over me. I nodded.

  He gave a little laugh. “Figures,” he said. Then he turned away and walked down the stairs.

  The power I’d felt slid away, replaced by a fiery ball of regret a hundred times bigger. I went into the kitchen and drank a glass of warm water, hoping it would stop the nausea that had suddenly come on. I thought about Mom, hundreds of miles away in Calgary. What would she say if she knew what I’d just done? I had a pretty good idea. Very possibly, she was doing the exact same thing with some guy right now.

  I went back to the couch and stayed there until my grandparents got home, hating myself for wanting him to come back to me again.

  I stopped typing and stared at the words on my screen. Three memories—babies, junk food and him. Until that therapy session in Munich, the rest had always been connect-the-dots. Over the years since, Darcy’s face sometimes came to me as I was drifting off to sleep. Instead of letting myself think about him, I would just repeat his name again and again in my head until it sounded warped and ridiculous. It joined the other words I avoided in the English language, like stoned and pussy and lovemaking—words that grated on my nerves because my mother used to use them all the time, years before I should have known what they meant.

  This story I had promised myself I would take to the grave. But even sitting here with my memories released onto digital paper, I felt a slight loosening of my shame. Darcy. He was fifteen, sixteen years old, and I had let him do it, because that’s what I thought you were supposed to do. Now I saw the truth. That it wasn’t really about Darcy—sure, he’d done something unconscionable—it was about me, how I hated myself forever afterward because I let him. Because I’d behaved like my mother, the one person in the world I never wanted to be like. How long had I carried this around like a black tumour, festering and growing? Every time I tried to be happy, it would remind me of how worthless I was.

  This was the last scene I would write for North of Normal, I thought. I’d revealed all that I comfortably could elsewhere in my manuscript and knew that what I’d written was the best work I’d ever done.

  I sipped from my coffee cup, sighed and put it down. No. The Darcy story still hurt too much. Barry had been enough—the decades I’d argued with myself against being his victim, because rather than touching me, he had made me touch him and thereby become his accomplice. And then Darcy, straight on Barry’s heels, again not forcing me but guiding me to fulfill his desires, proving once again that I was unable to say no. How deeply and pathetically I had craved approval of any kind. I copied the entire chapter and pasted it into a deleted-pages document. There it would live, I decided, recorded but safe from the public eye. The world would know my story, at least most of it, but there were some things I needed to keep for myself.

  I closed my laptop. I was ready.

  Epilogue

  December 2015

  Vancouver

  I sit in my home office, surrounded by pieces of my past and present. On the wall are four pen and pencil sketches done by my father in 1969, the year Mom was pregnant with me: young versions of Papa Dick, Grandma Jeanne, Mom and Dad himself. Faces straight and expressionless, breasts exposed. Los Gatos, California: these are the memories I wasn’t there for but almost feel I was, because the stories are so detailed in my mind. I like the idea that my family members touched these sheets of paper, possibly shuffling them among themselves while they got high and discussed health food, rock ’n’ roll, the state of the nation. How I would have loved to see the inner workings of the Person family during that time. Things were simpler then, before I came along.

  Beside the sketches is a photo of Remy and me celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary, happier and closer than ever. On my desk are photos of my three children, frozen in time in a world completely different from the one in which I was raised. Well-adjusted, expected to be nothing other than kids, by turns needy and vulnerable and independent and rebellious in their journey to self-discovery. A few days ago, Avery, who’s ten now, asked me if I’d be writing a third book about my life. “Not unless something really crazy and exciting happens in the future,” I replied, and his face lit up.

  “We’re going to Hawaii for spring break. That’s crazy and exciting!” he said, and it made me ridiculously happy that such an event was the height of insanity in his young world.

  Being Avery’s mother has given me a new perspective. He was eight when North of Normal came out, which seems kind of perfect, because I was eight myself when I endured some of the worst moments of my childhood. When I look at his absolute innocence, it’s hard to believe I ever thought I was responsible for Barry’s or Darcy’s actions. I try to imagine Avery coming to me concerned about nude photos of children, or seeing him as competition for my lover’s sexual attention, as my mother did when I was his age. Then I imagine Emerson, who is five, squatting in summer cottages and fearing the cops will take me away from him. Shivering under a sleeping bag while we camp in a truck by the side of the road, and then watching his beloved dog get shot. I think about my three-year-old, Ayla, confused and afraid as night after night, she witnesses her mother having sex beside her with an array of strangers. And in these moments, my anger rises to the surface, and I feel like maybe I really do despise my mother after all and have not forgiven her and never will. But then time allows me to take a step back, and I remember how much better equipped I am to make good choices than she was, and how I believe that we are put on earth to learn lessons that often take a lifetime to figure out. And how I was wrong about something—that while my mother wasn’t really able to learn from her mistakes, I was.

  Many but not all of those mistakes are catalogued in one of the products of my own life’s purpose. Here in my office, positioned next to my children’s photos and held up by a paperweight presented to me by a book club, is North of Normal. That I can even hold it in my hands still feels surreal sometimes—that six years of writing and rejection resulted in this, a best-selling book. The whirlwind when it all finally happened—offers from five agents within a week, landing my dream agent, and then her selling my book with multiple offers—just proves to me that my reason for writing it meant everything.

  Do you feel normal now? is the question I get most often from my readers.

  Almost, I say. Nearly normal.

  Over the past year and a half, I’ve marvelled at how the power of truth and story can break down preconceptions. My readers have given me the strength and confidence to tell the rest of my story, even the smaller moments I thought no one would care about. It had never crossed my mind to tell the story of Art the pervert. He only touched me that once, I thought; it hadn’t affected me. So many have experienced much worse. But I came to realize that it wasn’t so much what he had done as how my mother reacted to it: no big deal, your body is beautiful, stop being such a prude. Laying the groundwork for me to accept Barry’s and Darcy’s abuse.

  After my book came out, something I’d always suspected w
as confirmed for me—that my gauge for what was normal, interesting and acceptable was not to be trusted. My readers fixed that gauge for me. I think about the story of the fake bear chasing me. While I’d once dismissed it as boring, it actually held valuable insight into my grandfather, myself, and the power struggle between us. Our lives have so much meaning if we just look a little deeper.

  Once, in a moment of self-pity, I moaned to Remy that my family had set me up for a life of failure by not modelling healthy behaviour and relationships. No, he responded, they’d just given me blind spots. He was right, and I still have them—insecurity when it comes to setting boundaries, resolving conflict, parenting, managing finances, trusting my judgment. But I’ve learned to check my blind spots carefully before I take action, just the way I do before changing lanes in a car. Which isn’t to say that I don’t still crash now and then. After all, my longtime friend and enemy, impatience, is also my fire. It bubbles inside me like a mini-volcano, reminding me what must be done—the house bought, the renovation handled, the business started, the wedding planned, the baby planted in my womb, the book written. But I’ve learned to temper it.

  I’ve almost finished writing my second book, but I have a few things to add. I open the file labelled North of Normal—Deleted Scenes and read through the Darcy chapter. These pages tell a truth I’ve always held about myself—that I’m tainted, worthless, a product of my family’s values despite my best efforts not to be. I realize now that my outrage toward Papa Dick is about more than his abandoning me as an adult—it’s about his leaving me in charge that night, never considering that I was far too young for such a responsibility. Darcy isn’t the only memory I told myself I’d never reveal but then did here. My fight with Mom in the food court, her offering my bedroom to a friend for sex, the story about baby Grace and the fact I’d never tried to find her again—these chapters disclose a harsh truth about my feelings for my family members that I didn’t want to admit to. And then there were the events that were simply too raw for me to write about in my first memoir: the stories of Shyla and Apache, my PTSD when I moved to the city, overhearing Papa Dick on the phone, my feelings about Sam, and mostly, Halloween night with Kevin.