Steal the North: A Novel

by Heather B Bergstrom

  I had to pause every time at this point in the story because there’d been something in my mom’s voice—or something missing, her usual edginess—when she’d told it to me. She didn’t sound that way when she talked about Spencer, or her beloved Bill Clinton, or when she read me her favorite passages from books. She kept touching the ends of her bobbed hair. The image of my parents standing together at the edge of a lake was blurry, at best, but it was more than I’d ever had.

  Somehow Jamie managed to sneak Kate away for long, unchaperoned canoe rides on the lake. Time, it seemed to Kate, hung back on the shore with the counselors and other campers. She and Jamie sat close during morning worship service, all three meals, and around the camp bonfire in the evenings. At Bethany’s bidding, Matt had a talk with Jamie about his intentions toward Kate. By the end of the conversation, Jamie had convinced Matt that if he really loved Bethany, he would prove it to her by holding her hand, not listening to the church fathers, who were just horny old men. People who love each other hold hands and hug, Jamie claimed. It didn’t have to go further, he said, but it had to go that far.

  Kate had never felt happier. Jamie loved God—not that it mattered to Kate—but he talked of other things also: his dad’s wheat farm, which would one day be his; the rolling hills of the Palouse region, like no other place on earth; Washington State University in Pullman, where he planned to enroll in the agricultural science program; and his love for Kate. He’d had other girlfriends. He knew what he was talking about when he said there was something definite between them. Kate didn’t need to run off to Africa to get away from her father or to do her Christian duty. She could be his wife. He was serious. He’d prove it to her.

  At the last bonfire, there were more testimonials of faith than all the other nights combined. Jamie Kagen took a stand, in his cowboy hat. His confidence and energy had made him a camp favorite with the rich Seattle kids, as well as with the handful of not-so-rich kids from western Washington whose dads worked in the lumber mills. The entire crowd hooted for him. “I want to testify before you guys and before God,” he said, “that I love this girl.” He pulled Kate to her feet and again put his hat on her head. “I’m going to marry her someday.” The crowd cheered. “In honor, I propose a group hug. Find the babe you love and give her a hug. Right now. A long hug in front of God. Go ahead.” The adults in charge swiftly made their way to him, as if he’d just proposed an orgy.

  After camp, Jamie and Kate did their best to stay together, though they lived more than two hours apart and Jamie had harvest and planting duties. They were both seniors in high school. Jamie went to public school in Colfax. They met as often as they could before the heavy snows started. He had a pickup truck, and Kate had her mother’s old car that barely ran. They’d meet midway in tiny farm towns with Indian names, like Washtucna, parking in the shade of enormous silos. Or they’d meet at Army Corps of Engineers parks along the Snake River. Kate’s father didn’t like Jamie, but she didn’t care. Her father threatened for a while to take the car, but Bethany relied on Kate for rides, and he knew Kate would walk if she had to or run away.

  Jamie’s parents weren’t enthused to learn their son had found the girl he wanted to marry at age seventeen. They agreed to meet Kate but weren’t impressed with her junk car, long dress, and supposedly old-fashioned ways. They wanted their son to meet his future wife at the university, and they wanted this wife’s family to have either money or land. Although Kate felt guilty doing so, she hocked her mother’s ring for cash to buy gas to meet Jamie. Before long she wound up pregnant. They might not have had premarital sex, hooking up the first time at the Appaloosa Inn, if they could’ve seen each other more often and if Kate hadn’t felt Jamie’s resolve faltering as his dad threatened to take everything from him unless he dumped Kate.

  Jamie loved the land and felt tied to it in a way Kate didn’t understand. He took her to Palouse Falls to show her the muddy water spilling two hundred feet over the canyon edge. The water was so muddy, he told her, because of soil erosion. If farmers didn’t find a way to slow the erosion, the Palouse region was doomed. He started to flunk his high school classes, even drink. But once he made his decision, choosing the farm over Kate, he didn’t waver. Kate’s belly, in the meantime, grew round as one of Jamie’s beloved Palouse hills. When her father noticed, he let the preacher condemn his daughter from the pulpit, call her a whore. She had to drop out of school. Kate swore to her father that the baby wasn’t Jamie’s. She said she’d committed adultery with a bunch of public school boys she barely knew.

  Why had Mom protected Jamie like that? Was it love? Too much love? Was it pride? The same pride that kept us alone all these years in this apartment? Had Jamie really chosen the endangered land over Mom? Or was it actually his youth that felt eroded?

  Every day Kate’s father yelled at her, spitting Bible verses in her face about harlots. Bethany swore the baby in her sister’s belly was a gift from God, and her father had better accept it as such. He would not, so meek Bethany took charge. She and Matt got married. His parents weren’t thrilled, but they conceded and even lent Matt the money to buy a trailer and give those two girls a home. Matt got a job at the potato factory. After Kate gave birth, she too got a job, waitressing at a truck stop café outside town by the interstate. By that time, she heard, Jamie Kagen had started college at WSU. Still, she expected any day for him to show up at the café, even after the first snowstorm had obliterated the highway.

  When he didn’t, she began living hard, which at first just meant wearing jeans and mascara. Then drinking. Bethany took care of the baby—sewed little dresses and blankets. Kate sank further. She had to get out of the area come spring. It would devastate Bethany to lose the baby, but Kate reasoned her sister could have her own babies soon. Kate couldn’t take another day at the café, staring out the windows at the plowed highway, dropping ketchup bottles or spilling coffee when she spotted a pickup similar to Jamie’s. Bethany went to their father and demanded the money their mother’s family had left for the girls when they turned eighteen. It wasn’t a lot, but Bethany gave both halves to her older sister. Kate owed her life and the life of her daughter to Bethany and Matt.

  Now, sixteen years later, Kate had just found out that Bethany never had any babies of her own. In those long years, Kate’s little sister hadn’t once been able to carry a baby to term. She’d lost them all. Kate couldn’t even imagine how Bethany had suffered. If only she’d known. So how could Kate possibly tell her sister no, that she wouldn’t allow her daughter to fly north to spend the summer and to participate in a faith healing for Bethany, who was pregnant for what she feared was the last time? How could Kate say no, even though she didn’t believe in faith healings, even though she found them, in fact, total bullshit? Even though she’d hoped after all these years that her sister would’ve left that backward church? There was a new young preacher at the church, and he suggested a virgin lay hands on Bethany’s belly to help heal her womb. A virgin who was also a relative would be ideal. How excited Bethany was when Matt found Kate’s number at the library on the World Wide Web and then again when she learned from Kate that her precious niece was, in fact, still a virgin. How could Kate possibly say no to this request even if it went against everything she believed in, or didn’t believe in? Everything she’d worked so hard to get the hell away from?

  “I owe Beth,” Kate said to her daughter. “And the only gift I can give her is you.”

  * * *

  “You’re shitting me, right?” asked Connor. “The whole summer? What am I supposed to do?” We were in his bedroom. It was Monday after school.

  “Isn’t your family going to Hawaii?”

  “Hawaii’s boring. How fucking suburban.” Connor hated the suburbs, found them stifling and unimaginative. I found his house mammoth and beautiful, even if it did look just like the other houses on the street with palm trees and Spanish tile and a multiple-car garage. “Besides,” he said, �
�I mean the rest of the summer.”

  “You can study for the SATs,” I suggested. His scores were mediocre, unlike his art. My scores were good, but Mom wanted me to take them again to try for even better. I sat on his bed. It was made up for him every morning by a maid. Other than his art and art supplies all over, and the words PARTY LIKE YOU’RE THE CLASS OF 1999 spray painted on his ceiling, his room looked like one from a Pottery Barn catalog, with solid matching furniture. “Unless you actually think you can get into college with your scores.”

  “Wow. Kitty’s got claws today.”

  I stood up. “I’ve had a lot to think about,” I reminded him. So much I hadn’t been sleeping well.

  He pulled me to him. “Sorry about your dad not being dead. That’s heavy.”

  “I don’t want to go to Washington.” It seemed so unreal, all of it. Connor kissed my neck. His tongue was pierced, which he’d done to shock his parents and their country club friends. Occasionally Connor dressed preppy in khaki pants or in vests over white T-shirts, but only when trying to get something from his parents or to get off restriction. Most days he dressed like the members of Green Day, in skinny ties and lots of black. He spiked his hair and dyed the tips bright colors. I incorporated a little punk, a little Goth, a little grunge, a little preppy, and even a little hippie—depending on my mood—into my otherwise basic and clearance rack wardrobe. I feared looking too plain in a student body of expressive dressers, but I just couldn’t pick a single style. I liked elements from each.

  “I don’t want to leave you, Connor.”

  “Take off your shirt.” He liked me to undress myself.

  I unbuttoned the first few buttons on my blouse. “Why didn’t you call?” I’d never missed three days of school in a row before.

  “I’m not allowed to call your apartment, remember?” He sat down on his bed, then scooted back on his elbows.

  Actually Mom had never said boys weren’t allowed to call me, but I preferred her knowing nothing about Connor. That way she couldn’t question me about him or forbid me from seeing him.

  “And besides,” Connor said, “I did call. Ask your master. I mean your mom.”

  “What?” I stopped unbuttoning my blouse. “You talked to her?”

  “Sure. She and I, we had a little chat. I told her she was heartless for never having taken you to Disneyland.” He liked the fact that I’d never been there. He also liked that I lived in a small apartment and didn’t wear expensive brand names (though he did). “She didn’t tell you? Shit, that hurts.”

  “You’re lying. I asked her if anyone called for me.”

  “She’s the liar, Emmy,” he said smugly.

  “Don’t call her that.” Not that I really cared. She was a liar. She’d been lying to me my whole life. I suspected she was still lying to me, that she’d left something out. There was more to deserting her beloved sister and never being in touch than my dad, her dad, and that oppressive church, even combined. I planned to find out the whole story this summer. I also planned, without her help or approval, to locate my dad. He’d probably been searching for me for years.

  In the meantime, I was barely talking to Mom. After only allowing me to a few slumber parties in my life (not that I’d had a lot of invitations), she was now forcing me to fly far away and live for three months with religious fanatics. On top of that she was trying to make it seem as if I’d agreed to go—as if I’d been given a choice and weren’t being coerced.

  “Just tell your mom you’re not a virgin,” Connor said. “It’s simple. Then you won’t have to spend your summer with Bible-thumpers.” I finished unbuttoning my blouse. Connor sat up at the sight of my bra.

  “It’s not that simple.”

  First, I couldn’t tell Mom I wasn’t a virgin. According to her, intelligent girls waited until college. Second, Mom already said, in regard to the faith healing, that it didn’t matter at all whether I was a virgin or not (though she was proud I was) because the ceremony was bogus. What Mom did believe in, however, and she made this very clear, was in her sister’s being so cheered and comforted by my company this summer that she might finally carry a baby past the slippery first trimester. In other words: “Would you actually deny your dear aunt who loved and cared for you as an infant the chance to have a baby of her own?”

  “My old man was euphoric the first time I asked him to buy me condoms,” Connor said. “It proved his ‘artistic’ thirteen-year-old son wasn’t gay after all.”

  “The condoms were for you and Alyssa, no doubt.” I threw my blouse at him. I despised the way his ex-girlfriend looked at him. He said she offered almost every day at school (backstage in drama class) to show him her thong. I wasn’t allowed to wear thongs.

  “Oh, fuck. Don’t start that again. Take off your pants. No, slower.”

  I took off my pants quickly and threw them at him, as I had my shirt. He threw them both back at me a little too hard. Screw him. I walked to his window. I peeked out the curtains at the glittering water in his pool and tried not to cry. What if Mom’s sister had a miscarriage while I was there? Would my aunt blame me, especially if she found out I wasn’t a Christian, let alone a virgin? The closest I’d come to attending church had been last November, when I went to the giant Sikh parade in Yuba City with Harpreet’s family and saw the elaborate float with their holy book. I heard Connor sigh on his bed. Would Bethany be able to tell I wasn’t a virgin upon first glance? Connor bragged he knew I was a virgin when he first saw me. When he sighed again, I turned around. “I’d still be a virgin, you know,” I said, my voice shaking stupidly, “if it weren’t for you.”

  “If you want, Emmy, I can stop touching you.”

  “How could I go on?” I asked sarcastically. “Besides, you don’t touch me at school. You don’t even hold my hand.”

  “I thought you were different from all the spoiled bitches at school. No? Maybe you just dress differently. Or your mommy dresses you differently.”

  “Oh, I’m different. Not only have I never been to Disneyland, but I would never cut myself for you, like Alyssa.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Don’t say that. I hate it when you say that to me.” I crawled onto his bed. “I’m sorry, Connor. Don’t get mean. Not today. I’m sorry.”

  He told me to take off my bra and my “good girl panties,” and then we had sex. He was a little cruel, refusing to take my hand, then covering my eyes as he entered me. But he held me longer afterward. I loved to watch TV in his bed after sex. We didn’t have cable at our apartment. We had a TV on which I’d watched PBS as a kid. On the other channels Mom and I watched Bill Clinton be elected, then reelected. We watched images of the Gulf War, the L.A. riots, the Oklahoma City bombing, Bosnia—but never silly sitcoms. We watched movies on our VCR, mostly heavy or artsy dramas, but occasionally Mom let me rent popular movies.

  “I’m going to miss you,” he said, but he sounded as if it were for good and he’d already resigned himself to it. “I’m going to miss how excited you get to watch the stupid fucking Disney Channel.”

  “We’ll stay together, right?” The panic I’d been trying to keep at bay about leaving him, leaving Sacramento, even leaving my mom rushed over me, and I began to sob. It irritated Connor worse than soccer moms and golfing dads when chicks cried after sex. I only cried the first time we did it, but it was more out of anger at myself and embarrassment at the blood on his high-thread-count sheets. “You’ll wait for me, Connor, won’t you? Please, Connor.” Mom had said never to beg and never to tell a guy you love him first. I didn’t love Connor, but I could have—it was right there—if only he loved me the tiniest. “You’ll wait?” He held me closer, which I hoped meant yes. When I still couldn’t quit sobbing, he reached into his bedside table, where he kept his flavored and textured condoms and his collection of souvenir scrunchies and headbands (only two of which were mine).

  “Here, take t
his.” It was one of his mom’s Vicodin pills. “It’ll help you chill.”

  I stopped crying and sat up. “I don’t take drugs.” His mom probably did to put up with his unfaithful dad. Connor had told me stories. I got out of his bed. “I hate you.”

  I expected him to remark, “How original.” Instead he said, “That’s too bad, Emmy. I could never hate you.” He rolled onto his stomach and buried his head under his numerous pillows.

  Probably not, but that didn’t mean he loved me any more than he’d wait for me.

  “Will you wait for me?” I had to ask one more time.

  He didn’t reply, but at school the final week he held my hand every lunch recess in front of his friends, who smirked. We exchanged gifts in his bedroom our last afternoon. I gave him an amulet key chain with a Tibetan symbol—the umbrella, for protection from desire. I told him it was to protect him from suffering. He gave me two gifts. The first was a bottle of Vicodin. He said I’d need the pills up north living with Jesus freaks.

  The second gift was a necklace with a diamond heart-shaped pendant (pretty suburban) that I put on immediately. I already knew what I would say to Mom when she asked who had given it to me. I would hesitate for effect and then stutter while telling her that Hedda, my only other lunchtime friend, bought it for me. I wanted Mom to wonder if a boy at school had really given the necklace to me and what I’d done with the boy (everything, Mom) to deserve diamonds. I promised Connor I’d wear the necklace the entire summer—not that he asked me to—but instead I wound up hocking it at the same dusty pawnshop surrounded by sagebrush where my mom had hocked her mother’s ring years ago. And so I entered their story.

  2

  Bethany

  I used to park my car at the Greyhound station and wait for the buses. More people got on, I finally realized, than off. My sister wasn’t coming back, despite my prayers. Before Kate left, she’d let a truck driver at the highway café where she was working cut off her long hair, which I used to braid. She said he’d offered her “extra” for the souvenir. I understood what she meant, but after all these years I still can’t bear to think of it. In the direct sun, Kate’s brown hair glowed red underneath. My blond hair also catches the sun, Matt says. But he must see it doesn’t hold the rays as Kate’s did. Matt claims I’ve never gotten over the loss of my sister. He says it might’ve been easier on me if Kate had died like our mother because then I wouldn’t feel more betrayed every year that passes without her making contact. But Kate didn’t betray me. There’s more to her leaving than Matt knows. My husband always has an excuse for my behavior: to his parents, coworkers, the other deacons at church whose wives, especially recently, have complained that I take up too much of the new preacher’s time. Probably even in supplication does my husband offer up excuses for me.