The earthquake child, p.1
The Earthquake Child, page 1
Praise for The Earthquake Child
“A riveting familial rollercoaster, The Earthquake Child portrays one mother’s determination to raise a child. Bravo to Elayne Klasson for so honestly describing the ripple effects of adoption, for child, birth parents, and adoptive parents. This is a gripping story wrought with emotion and truth.”
—JEANNE MCWILLIAMS BLASBERG,
author of Eden and The Nine
“In Elayne Klasson’s new novel, the mother-child relationship takes center stage, but is amplified by the adoption equation. This well-crafted and true-to-life plot involves two mothers and the son they both cherish. It is about love, loss, longing, and the road to becoming whole. The Earthquake Child shows the fierceness of a mother’s love, the angst of adoption, and the secrets that set individual wants and needs colliding. Whether you are inside the adoption experience or on the outside looking in, Klasson’s well-informed novel will leave you thinking. And isn’t that what a really good book should do?”
—JULIE RYAN MCGUE, author of Twice a Daughter:
A Search of Identity, Family, and Belonging
“This fine novel provides the reader with many pleasures. You’ll find well-drawn characters to care about, a suspenseful story, an emotionally-resonant depiction of the psychological stresses related to adoption, and a prose style that is clear and enjoyable to read.”
—MONICA STARKMAN, MD, author of The End of Miracles,
Professor emerita of Psychiatry,
University of Michigan Medical School
Praise for Love is a Rebellious Bird
2019 National Jewish Book Awards Finalist
“From first love to last love, Love Is a Rebellious Bird by Elayne Klasson explores the manner in which some one special always holds a place in our heart. This book illustrates that our connections help us deal with the obstacles we all encounter . . . its message will resonate with readers who maybe facing challenging life decisions now; realizing we will all experience the vicissitudes of life sooner or later. This poignant novel addresses the nature of love and commitment (through a Jewish lens) and is a remarkable depiction of such.”
—JEWISH BOOK AWARDS
“Klasson fills every scene she can with thought-provoking reflections on the nature of love, family, and romance. A surprisingly complex and realistic love story delicately narrated by an endearing protagonist.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
“Elayne Klasson’s artistic and compassionate novel Love is a Rebellious Bird focuses on a lifelong love affair . . . an operatic, enduring, and subtle romance.”
—FOREWORD CLARION REVIEWS 5/5
“Love is a Rebellious Bird vividly evokes the worlds of Judith Sherman and Elliott Pine: 1950’s Chicago in the Jewish neighborhood of West Rogers Park, the subsequent whiplash of the liberated ’60s, marriages that fail and marriages that thrive, losses from illness and ambitions denied. Klasson shows us the seismic repercussions of a love, more unequal than unrequited, that vibrate over a lifetime. While Elliott may never fully love Judith the way she deserves, the reader certainly will.”
—STACEY SWANN, author of a
Good Morning America Book Club pick Olympus, Texas
Copyright © 2023 Elayne Klasson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.
Published 2023
Printed in the United States of America
Print ISBN: 978-1-64742-446-6
E-ISBN: 978-1-64742-447-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023902859
For information, address:
She Writes Press
1569 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707
Interior design by Katherine Lloyd, The DESK
She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.
All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Permission for unprinted “Elegy for a Sweet Family Man” on page 154 by Hank Lazer.
Permission for quote on page vii given by author, A.M. Homes.
To D.K.
And to Wendy
“To be adopted is to be amputated and sewn back together.
Whether or not you regain full function,
there will always be scar tissue.”
—A.M. Homes
Chapter 1
The Runaways
2006
Nick and two other kids slipped away from Mount Richmond Academy late on a moonless night. Using headlamps, they traveled west, hoping to reach Wilcox, the town closest to the school. At daybreak on the fifth morning, they discovered a small cave and collapsed into exhausted sleep. The weather was mild that summer in the Oregon high desert, and they slept deeply until nearly noon, when the whirring noise of a helicopter overhead woke them.
Nick slowly sat up, rubbing his shoulders. The nights of walking, sometimes stumbling, through the rough terrain had made his muscles ache. Sleeping nearby were his traveling companions, Noa and Jacob. A sorry duo, Nick thought. They weren’t kids he might have deliberately chosen for this getaway and long hike, but they were the only two who remained from the original group. Noa, in Nick’s opinion, was the school’s most disagreeable girl, and her boyfriend, Jacob, a skinny, pathetic kid, had no mind of his own. The stench in the filthy cave was made worse by the smell of their unwashed bodies. Energy bar wrappers and who knew what else littered the cave’s floor. Nick stared longingly toward the entrance, at the fresh air and clear blue sky beyond. He didn’t move, though. The sound of the chopper froze him in place.
Jacob woke and rubbed his eyes. In his puny voice he asked, “A helicopter?”
“They’re fucking pigs,” Noa said. She walked to the cave’s opening and looked out. Her hair, with its wild red curls, would be visible to anyone watching them.
“Military. Probably practicing to kill babies in Iraq.” Without turning back to the boys, she stomped forward and raised both middle fingers to the helicopter above.
Nick quickly ran to the opening. He grabbed Noa by her sweatshirt and forcefully yanked her back into the cave. “Don’t be an asshole, Noa. They’re searching for us. I keep telling you, we’ve got to stay out of sight during the day.”
Only sixteen, Nick was already an accomplished survivalist. Under his guidance, the three had hiked almost forty miles off-road from the school. Although their food and water supply was nearly exhausted, Nick remained confident his skills would get them to Wilcox. He just needed to impress on the other two, especially Noa with that wild red hair, that they must stay hidden during the day. They must not, under any circumstance, get picked up and dragged back to Mount Richmond, their piss-assed school. He’d run away from home in California several times and always landed on his feet, but now the stakes were higher.
Noa slapped at Nick’s hand. “Hey, you’re the asshole. Don’t touch me.” She fixed the boy, a good foot taller than she, with a deadly stare, then reached into her pocket for another energy bar—her last.
They were running from Mount Richmond Academy, a therapeutic boarding school with 120 teenaged students, most there against their will. Nick had arrived at the program less than a month before.
“Fake it until you make it,” older students told him.
They meant for him to follow the rules until he turned eighteen. After that, he could sign himself out and do as he liked. But the prospect of staying at the school for almost another two interminable years was not one he entertained. Nick knew he didn’t belong at the school. He’d been taken there, snatched off the street by goons hired by his mother, and he was not going to stay and fake anything.
At night in the dorms, the kids talked. They told stories of how, before being delivered to the school by their parents (or in some cases, like Nick, by bonded and licensed escort services), most had wreaked havoc on their families. Drinking, drugs, and not coming home at night were typical reasons kids were at Mount Richmond. With the boys, the anger was directed outward. In most of their homes, as in Nick’s own, there were holes punched through Sheetrock. With the girls, more typically, there was cutting or an eating disorder, something inflicting pain upon themselves. The kids at Mount Richmond, sometimes ashamed, sometimes defiant, recounted stories to each other: the violence, trouble with the law, self-harm.
From the time he was brought to the school, Nick was cautioned that no one made it more than twenty-four hours after running away before being picked up. Water was scarce in that isolated region. There were irrigation ditches, but the water in them was likely contaminated from grazing cows. Someone could get a bad case of E. coli, maybe even die, from that polluted water. Running from the school meant risking dehydration, sickness, or worse. The steep, uneven terrain also meant the chance of injury. A broken ankle might be fatal in these mountains, a person not discovered until it was too late. Mount Richmond’s isolation was intenti onal, the staff told him. It was for his own good he’d been removed from the temptations that got him into trouble.
His own good. Nick narrowed his eyes when he heard those words. There was no way the school would contain him. His plan to escape was fueled by fury.
Led by Nick, the trio had slowly made their way by night toward Wilcox, where civilization waited. All three still wore the dark polo shirts, navy sweatshirts, and khaki pants, now filthy, that was the uniform of Mount Richmond. The evening before, they’d covered nearly ten miles. Their feet were blistered and bloody, their food supplies almost depleted, and the jugs of water stashed into their backpacks were nearly empty, but none had gotten sick or hurt. Nick’s confidence was unshaken.
Noa and Jacob did not share this confidence and were beginning to doubt Nick. They’d slept only a few hours at a time and were exhausted. They were sick of energy bars and trail mix and, more troublingly, there was little left to drink.
When the sound of the whirring blades finally grew faint, Nick strode from the cave. He shaded his eyes, carefully scanning the valley below. Suddenly he shouted triumphantly. “There it is!” he said and pointed east.
The eyes of the other two followed his raised arm and saw it as well: the outskirts of town. There were a few houses scattered on large parcels of land. Beyond these were regularly laid-out streets. Nick had been right. Yes, the terrain had been steep and rocky, and they were tired as well as hungry and thirsty, but they’d done it. They’d reached Wilcox. Nick had led them to freedom.
Nick would never forget being kidnapped by the two thugs his mother hired to bring him, against his will, to Oregon. He kept hearing the sound of the car doors’ locks clicking shut, picturing how he’d been driven away in the ugly beige Nissan, as his friends watched. It was the most outrageous act inflicted upon him in his young life, and as soon as he’d been admitted to Mount Richmond, he knew he’d find a way out. Although confident of his survival skills, there was one problem. Nick hated being alone. He liked an audience—people to appreciate him. He also realized having good-looking girls along would be an asset, so he talked up his project to some of the braver female students. He was surprised at how difficult it had been to get any of them, either the boys or girls, to agree to the runaway. They were pussies, with no fight left in them. They hated Mount Richmond, yet running away seemed beyond their energy or imagination. Maybe Noa with her crazy conspiracy theories was correct— the school had brainwashed them.
Starting out, there had originally been six. But after that first chilly night in the woods, two boys and the other girl gave up. They left their supplies with the remaining three and promised to divulge nothing. Nick wasn’t pleased to be left with only Noa and Jacob, but he was determined to keep moving. He might have been okay with only Jacob. He and the other boy had arrived at Mount Richmond the same week. Both liked the same kind of music: death metal. Both passionately hated the school. But Jacob and his hot girlfriend, Noa, were inseparable. And Noa increasingly was a problem.
The previous week, Nick had seen the two lovebirds get busted for having physical contact. Touching a member of the opposite sex was one of many infractions at Mount Richmond. At admission, they’d been given a set of rules stating they were to abstain from physical contact with other students until they’d earned certain privileges. Holding hands, hugging and, God-forbid, kissing were big deals. These had to be earned through good behavior.
“Bullshit,” the kids said to one another.
There had been no privileges earned by Noa or Jacob. Neither was particularly good at following rules. Jacob was on the lazy side, easily distracted, never finishing his chores. Noa said “fuck you” to every staff member who spoke to her. She hated them all without exception. Both were put on restrictions after they’d been caught making out behind Jacob’s dorm. The no-touching rule, among others, was unacceptable to Noa. In group therapy, she reported she’d been avidly sexually active since middle school. Who was this place to tell her what to do with her own body? Jacob had never before had a girlfriend. To his dorm mates, he shyly admitted his surprise that Noa, with her beautiful red hair and sexy body, had chosen him.
Nick couldn’t figure it out either. He was much better looking than puny Jacob and had made some moves on Noa, which she quickly rejected. He supposed Noa liked that she could call the shots with Jacob and tell him what to do and not do. She could mold him to her will. Jacob may not have understood it, but with Noa, willing and gorgeous, crawling all over him, the little fucker just accepted his good luck.
As soon as Noa heard the escape plan through the underground student communication system, she passed Nick a note. Noa, and her boy toy, Jacob, would be at the designated meeting spot on the gravel road behind the boys’ dormitory at midnight on the next moonless night.
“I’m getting laid and I’m getting a beer,” she said to Nick when they met up at the spot.
Jacob nodded enthusiastically.
Tall, blond Nick was different than most of the kids. He didn’t break rules, nor give the staff a hard time. But he wasn’t buying into any of the crap at the school either. He listened at the endless group therapy sessions, quickly learning what was expected. He had real talent for mastering the psychological lingo of group therapy: speaking fluently about abandonment, loss, and grief. But when alone with the other kids, with no staff around to hear, he lost the obedient smile and charm he showed the adults. Group therapy was nothing but a pity party, he said to the other students. A waste of his time.
“I used to buy guns. On the internet,” he casually told the boys in his dorm. “For the Bloods and Crips down south.” He stretched his lanky body out on his bed, hands under his head.
“Right, Nick,” said the boy in the next bunk. “And how exactly did a pretty white boy like you meet the Bloods and Crips?”
Nick narrowed his eyes. “Oh, I got my contacts,” he told the kid menacingly. “In LA.”
Nick did seem to know a lot about gang stuff; and the other kids began to be a little scared of him, which Nick liked very much.
Although Noa and Jacob were a year older, Nick knew they were the ones who needed to be taken care of. He’d been on the streets. The last time he ran away from home in Northern California, he’d hooked up with a cool hippie group at a music festival in San Francisco. They were called the Dream Catchers. The music was lame, but he stayed with the group for days, until his mother found him and brought him back. From the Dream Catchers, he’d learned some serious panhandling skills, even how to get gas from pumps when someone walked away for a few moments. Nick was confident that once they got some distance from Mount Richmond, they’d survive just fine. He was unafraid. With his good sense of direction and street smarts, he was sure he’d be free of the school and even his mother. He’d travel with the other two, Jacob and Noa, until he didn’t need them any longer. Then he’d ditch them.
Nick wasn’t his real name. When he’d been adopted, soon after he was born in Wisconsin, his parents named him Joshua. For as long as he could remember, Nick hated this Old Testament name. He wasn’t anti-Semitic, but he felt his name was another example of how he was living the wrong life. His parents, both Jewish, had tried molding him into something he was not. When he was adopted, he had been dropped into a world he was not meant for. The Russells, his adoptive family, couldn’t even get naming him right. Joshua. The name irritated him. It made him want to puke. When he was a little boy, he’d woken one morning and knew with certainty that his name was not Joshua. His name was Nick. He fantasized that his birth mother had actually given him the name Nick, but he had no evidence, as he’d never seen his original birth certificate from Wisconsin. As much as he knew anything, he knew he was more a Nick than a Joshua. (And that was what his mom always called him, “Josh-u-a,” not Josh, all three syllables clearly pronounced, like straight from the Bible.)
So, at barely sixteen, when Joshua was admitted to Mount Richmond, he told everyone to call him Nick. And it worked. The staff went along with it, feeling a name change harmless. There were plenty of adopted kids at Mount Richmond. Most questioned how they fit into the family they lived with . . . the family they were not related to by blood. Some of these adopted kids were different racially or ethnically than their adoptive parents. There were Black kids or Asian kids adopted by white couples. Many did not look like their parents. Most were different temperamentally.
