Rosie had a map and a headache. For the latter, she had taken an aspirin she didn’t have the remotest hope would work. For the former, she had three different colors of highlighters and the opposite kind of hope—the impossibly high kind, the this-will-solve-everything kind, the kind where you fix the problem you can instead of the problem you can’t. It was sometime after three, maybe four. The kids would be up soon, she knew. She should go to bed, she also knew. But she had not been sleeping well. She had not been sleeping at all, and better to get up and do something—anything—than to lie there and think about why.
So she got up and spent midnights and after with her map. It was the whole of the United States, road and topographic. Fully unfolded, it took up the entire dining-room table, but she didn’t need it fully unfolded. For a while, the middle five pleats had stayed closed, but that left a bumpy mass in the center that sometimes made her color coding awkward. Eventually, she got a scissor and cut them away, carefully laying tape along only the back so that she could use her pens and markers wherever she needed without interference. She was on her second map, in fact, the first having become too messy with notes and arrows and big and bigger Xs.
Penn said, “Come to bed.” Penn said, “Eschew the crazy,” because he thought phrasing it quirkily might make her laugh and soften—while still planting—the suggestion that she was being insane. Penn said, “Madison is perfect. It’s liberal and beautiful. It’s broad-minded with smart, educated citizens and world-class medical facilities.” Penn said, “You can’t control everything. Anywhere you live, there will be some bad people. Anywhere you live, shit will occasionally happen.” But Rosie knew Penn said these things because Penn was a poet and a storyteller and a disciple of the cult of narrative theory, a grown man who still believed in fairy tales and happy endings. For her, diagnosis and treatment were much more clinical propositions. She assessed the infirmity as she always did: initial presentation, physical exam, symptom analysis. She took into account patient history and environmental factors. She developed a treatment plan.
What was clear was that they could not raise this child here. They could not raise these children here. They had to go Away. Madison was open and accepting and tolerant, yes, but tolerance was bullshit. Fuck tolerance. Madison was tolerant, except for when it wasn’t. Madison was tolerant, unless you strayed so much as a mile outside in any direction or invited people from outside in—Chad Perry was from Kenosha, it turned out—and then it didn’t work, did it? Poppy wasn’t something to be tolerated like when you got a cold, and yes it was annoying, and no you weren’t going to die, so buy some tissues and a book about zombies, and get in bed for two days. Head colds should be tolerated. Children should be celebrated. That’s when she took scissors to the middle of country and most of the south as well so that her new map of the United States looked like a foreshortened frowny face, its middle fused, its bottom, except at the very edges, excised. Her mother made an impassioned plea for Phoenix. Her mother sent articles and emails about the Phoenix gay pride festival, about a trans boy in a Phoenix high school who’d been named homecoming king by his peers, about the importance of family and especially grandmothers in kids’ lives, about the weather in February (sunny every day, highs in the 70s), about the ways in which her daughter was putting the mental in judgmental when she suggested that everyone living more than one hundred miles from an ocean was a bigot. Rosie deleted them without reading.
The sky-scraping, difference-celebrating, coast-abutting megacities were tempting with all their cutting-edge medical facilities and pride parades and diversity. But Rosie wasn’t so crazy, at least not yet, as to believe her multitudes could do with that little space. They needed more grass and less concrete, more meandering and less high rising, and even if they had been willing to live in one, they could not afford an apartment for seven on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The leap from tolerant to celebrated turned out to be an expensive one. So she kept looking.
When cajoling optimism didn’t work, Penn switched rallying cries. “We can’t give up and slink away,” he said. “That’s letting the bastards win. We’re stronger than that.”
“They beat her to death,” Rosie answered.
“You have a job you love.”
“He threatened our child with a gun,” his wife replied.
“The kids love it here.”
“In front of our whole family.”
“You can’t leave because of one horrible, drunken fraternity party,” said Penn. “You can’t leave because of one terrible playdate.”
“You can’t stay,” said Rosie, “knowing what happens here.”
“You can’t uproot a whole seven-person family because of the needs of just one of them,” said Penn, and it wasn’t clear whether the “just one” in question referred to Poppy, with his need to be somewhere he could be who he was, or Rosie, with her need to be Away, but that was how Penn lost the argument regardless because of course you could uproot a whole family of seven for the needs of just one of them because that’s what family means.
And so it was that one predawn morning, she found it, the perfect course of treatment, the antiserum for all the Nick Calcuttis in the world and all the Chad Perrys and all the nightmare fraternity parties as well: Seattle. Seattle was so far past tolerant that heterosexual reviewers complained they felt awkward holding hands at some brunch places and were treated rudely by the waitstaff. Seattle had not just therapists and doctors touting transgender expertise but acupuncturists, nutritionists, and yoga studios as well. Would eating more grapefruit and less gluten help Poppy be a celebrated human? Rosie had no idea. Which was why she suddenly felt she needed a transgender nutritionist who did. Seattle had space—mountains and lakes and ocean and beaches, parks with paths through old-growth forests, skiing and scuba and ferries to nearby islands. And there was a job. It wasn’t an ER job, but private practice might be nice for a change now that the kids were all in school and she didn’t need to work nights. She could sleep instead. And she’d be able to because picking Seattle would get rid of her map and her highlighters and all her late-night searches.
Seattle also had a house that was almost if not quite big enough and that they could almost if not quite afford—if they were careful, if she got the job, if their farmhouse went for what it should, given what a perfect place it was to live if only you didn’t mind threatening playdates and murderous fraternities in your practically backyard. Rosie looked at the house online night after night. The school district got high marks. There were parks and beaches nearby. Roo and Ben could share the basement. Rigel and Orion could have their own rooms for a change. They could convert the garage for her mother to come up in the summers.
The house had a turret with a pink-painted attic bedroom, and the school had a skateboarding club, so Poppy was sold. Rosie bought Rigel and Orion wetsuits, and the twins spent hours online looking at pictures of what lived underneath Puget Sound: giant octopuses who changed colors like Gobstoppers and spotted ratfish with eyes like puppies and wolf eels that looked like old men who’d forgotten to put their teeth in. Ben required no convincing at all, for he knew Seattle to be a city where someone with smarts and computer savvy who had skipped the sixth grade would be treated not like a nerdy dweeb but rather like a nerdy demigod, a hero among middle-schoolers.
Penn needed no convincing in the end either, for he had learned about leaving. He learned it from Grumwald, who went Away even though he had a castle and a kingship calling him to stay. He learned it from Nick Calcutti, who had fairly begged every fiber of Penn’s being to stay and fight, but every fiber of Penn’s being mustered all its strength and insisted upon leaving anyway. He learned it from Claude, who’d known leaving was only making room for someone else. He learned, finally, that when the ER doctor comes into the waiting room and tells you you can go, you can, you should, you had to go. Leaving wasn’t weak, and it wasn’t giving up. It was brave and hard fought, a transition like any other, difficult and scary and probably necessary in the end. Fighting it only delayed the inevitable. And as far as transitions in his family went, Wisconsin to Washington wasn’t very far at all.
It was Roo who didn’t want to go. Roo was first-chair flute that year. Roo was quarterback of his peewee football team and president of every activity that had one: student government, class council, band, the No Girls Aloud (Quiet Ones Welcome) Club he’d formed with three friends in fourth grade when they were studying homonyms. Roo had friends, lots of friends, friends he’d known since preschool, friends who just shrugged and then laughed about something else when he told them his baby brother was wearing dresses to kindergarten. Roo did not want to share a room or give up his rope swing or move someplace where there was no sledding because it never snowed. Roo felt that Poppy could wear a skirt or Poppy could wear pants or Poppy could wear chain mail or a tuxedo made from bacon or a cape knit out of Jupiter’s fur, but that didn’t mean he should have to throw out half his stuff and then pack what was left into boxes and then drive two thousand miles to someplace where he had to start all over again in every way that mattered. And Rosie agreed. He was right. He shouldn’t have to do that. It was sad and unfair and very hard that he had to do that. But he did have to do it. That, she explained, was what family meant.
“I hate family,” said Roo.
“That too, I’m afraid,” said his mother.
Her new job paid to ship everything, including the furniture, including the boxes, including the cars and even the dog, so they got to fly to Seattle instead of driving. The road trip would have been romantic, cathartic maybe, to feel each mile drop behind them, to watch the landscape change and change again, to eat hamburgers in sticky diners and make picnics from sad grocery stores and take over motels so beaten they could afford to stay two to a room and everyone could have his own bed. That was, Rosie thought, what a move of this magnitude should feel like, how it should be marked, but in the end, it was already the weekend before school started up again by the time they closed on the pink turret house. On the final descent into Seattle, they flew so low over snowy, craggy Mount Rainier it looked like they could hop a few feet out of the plane onto its lid and just walk down. And that’s what the whole move felt like in the end, in the beginning, epic and age-old and monumental, ice-covered and treacherous and breathtakingly beautiful.