Wilding

by Melanie Tem

  “And I’m sorry to say we never got past it,” Pam went on. “She died two and a half years ago in a car accident on the Western Slope. Two days before Christmas, but she wasn’t coming home for Christmas. We hadn’t had much real contact for a long time. She was twenty-three when she died. I kept counting on her growing up so we could both get over her adolescence and have a relationship again. But it never happened.”

  The gentle hands had stopped moving while Pam had said all this, resting on Lydia’s shoulders. They were warm. Sitting still under the warm, still, silent touch of another person was almost more than Lydia could bear.

  She had started to get to her feet when Pam sighed and resumed both talking and massaging again. “People have helped me,” she said.

  Lydia nodded slightly, which made her head ache, and could think of nothing to say.

  “A lot of teenagers go through this,” Pam said reasonably. “Getting emancipated is so hard.”

  Lydia leaned her head very slightly back against Pam’s stomach. Sleeplessness created rainbow haloes around the flickering fluorescent lights. Her head buzzed and rang with noise from inside and outside. The motions of Pam’s hands were hypnotic. “It’s more than that. I think there’s something really wrong with her.” She almost laughed at the enormity of the understatement.

  “That could be,” Pam said.

  Lydia shivered. The deliberate pressure of Pam’s fingers increased, and hurt.

  “But,” Pam went on, “I was pretty crazy when I was her age, and I bet you were, too, and look, we turned out pretty okay.”

  Again Lydia almost laughed. “How could she do this to me?” she whispered.

  Pam’s hands had moved to Lydia’s scalp, and amazingly, the massage became faintly erotic. “She’s not doing this to you,” Pam said reasonably. “You’re the symbol, the conduit. That’s what mothers are for.”

  That wasn’t true about her, of course, though it might well be true about other mothers and daughters. Oddly, there was comfort in hearing it, in the momentary delusion that her family might be like other families and her terrible fatigue like the fatigue of any other middle-aged mother. “I hate her.” She was still whispering. “I hate my own daughter.”

  So far, Pam hadn’t been shocked by anything. Now she just cradled Lydia’s head in her hands. Lydia could feel Pam’s fingernails in her hair; they were not at all like claws. “I used to feel that way when my daughter did things to scare me or hurt me. But parents can’t always keep their children safe,” Pam said. The simple, terrible truth infuriated Lydia—for her daughter but mostly for herself, for she had never in her life been safe.

  A customer came into the store ten minutes before closing, and although Lydia did everything she could think of to be both unfriendly and efficient, it was after six and she was nauseous with irritation before she got out of there. The thermometer on the bank across the street still read 98 degrees F when she went out to the parking lot. Waves of heat from the asphalt were nearly tangible, and they made her skin itch. The car’s air conditioner had gone out again; she wouldn’t be able to take it in now because Deborah had run away, and she might need the car to capture or rescue her.

  The car didn’t want to start. Lydia gripped the sticky steering wheel until her wrists and forearms ached, tapping the long nail on the little finger of her left hand against the hot spoke. Her chest tightened with frustration. Her body itched fiercely between the skin and the flesh. She could hardly breathe; she was panting.

  She found herself wondering whether extreme heat by itself could bring on the change, and was further enraged that she didn’t know such things by now, that there were still secrets the elders of the family hadn’t taught her. As if she wasn’t good enough. As if she hadn’t paid her dues. She took care of mundane, everyday life so the rest of them could express their true natures; she sacrificed her life for theirs, and they kept secrets from her, and Deborah didn’t appreciate it, wasn’t even ready when her time came.

  Finally, reluctantly, the car started. Dizzy from heat and anger, Lydia managed to pull safely out of the lot. Traffic on the Colfax viaduct was awful, backed up all the way past the Aurora campus. By the time she realized she should have taken Speer, it was too late to turn around and she was trapped. She took no comfort in the jovial insistence of Sky-Spy on the radio that, compared with other metropolitan areas, Denver hardly had a rush hour to speak of.

  When she finally got over to the west side, traffic was moving better. People were actually watering their lawns in this heat, at this time of day. The blatant waste of water—and the collective underlying stupidity that led residents of a semiarid climate to try to grow bluegrass—made her sick.

  She thought she saw Deborah sitting at one of the concrete tables outside Taco Bell. She pulled into the parking lot. It wasn’t Deborah. Lydia rested her forehead for a minute on her hands still clutching the steering wheel. When she looked up, the girl who wasn’t Deborah was walking away laughing with her friends, and Lydia entertained disorganized thoughts about running them down.

  Her family’s four houses looked, even to her, like ordinary houses in an ordinary middle-class neighborhood, interesting to local history buffs, maybe, but otherwise hardly noteworthy. You’d never know there were skulls in the basements. You’d never know women put on wolfskins and smeared themselves with salve made from the fat of babies in order to claim their true nature. Looking at the houses now as she drove toward them, Lydia herself could hardly believe all that. You couldn’t even tell that two of them were essentially vacant; Lydia and Ruth worked hard to make them appear lived-in, and maybe the fact that Mary routinely slept in each of them made a difference, too.

  Lydia had been assigned to live with Deborah in the house on Harvey Street (originally Hannah’s house, so there were no bones in the basement). Although she reminded herself that it wasn’t hers, that any day it could be taken away, she tried everything she could think of to make it her own and to distinguish it from the other three, especially from the mother house on Ingram Street, Mary’s house.

  The house on Ingram Street faced west while the one on Harvey faced east, so that the cyclic play of light and shadow across them was each a negative of the other. The fifteen-foot-high hill on which the Ingram Street house sat had a sharp south-facing slope that supported rampant bindweed, shoulder-high ragweed, rabbit ears with tall penile blossoms, the occasional colony of Canadian thistles that in July produced creamy white flowers with, apparently, millions of hardy seeds. Lydia’s house on Harvey Street was at street level, and Lydia kept neatly trimmed the three rosebushes that grew along the wall.

  Lydia’s house had a wide front porch with three pairs of fluted white pillars that gave it an airy look, and the bay window on the north side was covered only by lacy half curtains. The porch and south-facing bay window of her grandmother’s house on Ingram Street were draped with heavy Engelmann ivy, which late into every spring looked dead, then sent out tendrils to coat and disintegrate more of the old brick and pull the drain spouts farther away from the roof, then every autumn turned jewel-box red and gold if the first hard frost came late enough.

  Her grandmother’s house seemed much older than her own, though she knew all four of the houses had been built in the same year. She’d found the original deeds of trust in the attic, though no one else in the family seemed to know what they were.

  Mary’s house seemed a lot bigger, too. Maybe that was just because she’d been a child in it. As an adult she’d counted and measured, and there were in fact the same number of rooms of the same dimensions in the same floor plan. The big room across the back of each of the houses, opening onto the central open courtyard—where in her grandmother’s house the women of the family gathered every full moon, where they’d gathered pointlessly for Deborah’s initiation—was in her house nominally a guest room, although she and Deborah hadn’t had guests in years.

  The lawns of all four houses needed mowing. Deborah could be doing some work ar
ound here, but she wouldn’t, she was always sick or she acted as if she was too good to get her hands dirty. Deborah wasn’t here. Deborah had run away. Deborah was in danger. Deborah had been in danger all her life, and Lydia resented her for it.

  She’d have to fix something for dinner. She herself was too upset to eat, but the others had to keep their strength up and between kills it was up to her to feed them. She really didn’t know why she bothered. Her mother criticized everything she cooked, her grandmother barely noticed, and half the time Deborah wasn’t home for meals, or wouldn’t come out of her room, or ate no more than a few bites and then made herself throw up. The last time Lydia had caught her sticking her finger down her throat, she’d spanked her, a girl nearly as tall as she was sprawled over her knee and hardly struggling. Deborah had become so gaunt, bones so close to the skin, that her buttocks and the backs of her thighs had bruised badly and the deep scratches left by Lydia’s nails had flared bright red, had become infected so that for weeks there were stripes down the backs of the girl’s legs. But the punishment hadn’t made any difference. Deborah still starved herself.

  And now she’d failed at her initiation. Mary had decreed that the time wasn’t right, although Lydia had tried as hard as she could to get her ready. Mary had commanded, “Go deeper,” and Lydia had no idea what she meant. Now Deborah had run away, had taken the baby away. And all of it, of course, was somehow Lydia’s fault.

  Fumbling in her purse for her house keys in the heat and painful glare of sunlight on cement, Lydia went faint with remorse and with frantic love for her daughter. Something bad was happening to Deborah. She was in some kind of trouble, some kind of danger, and Lydia didn’t know how to take care of her. She had never known how to take care of her.

  Before she could stop, Lydia was yearning for her other children, mourning them as acutely as if they’d died yesterday instead of sixteen and eighteen years ago. She knew that if they’d been allowed to grow up they’d have brought her joy, not this fearsome worry and resentment. Two beautiful baby boys, marked in their baby sleep with the sign of the claw and then killed before they were ever fully awake again.

  Her mother had said it was for the best, the way things should be; she’d had to give up a son, too. Lydia remembered him, her little brother. She’d seen him when he was born. She’d been there when he died, and what she remembered most was the smoothness of his skin both warm and cold and the odd mixture of horror and gratitude with which her family had regarded him. She’d glimpsed what might have been sadness in her mother’s yellowish eyes when the older woman had told her that male babies didn’t suffer because their nervous systems weren’t as developed as girls’, that they’d have suffered more if they’d lived. Lydia didn’t believe any of that; she’d heard her second son cry out.

  Her grandmother had taught her, wordlessly, how to make the lost babies forever part of herself. Even now, after the jar had been emptied and refilled numerous times, she could feel the essence of her sons whenever she anointed herself, understood their power in her life and the reason they’d been born to her. She rubbed her forearms now, brought the back of her wrist to her nose and mouth. The fragrance of the unguent, the lingering taste of it, was reassuring.

  Her eyes burned and itched; there were, of course, no tears.

  She wasn’t supposed to have named the baby boys, and she didn’t think their names now. Instead she thought Deborah, and desperately hoped Deborah had come home. With that hope came also a profound fear.

  She was afraid to go into her house. She was also afraid not to, and the sun was making her sick, blinding her. She wished Pam were here with her, and told herself again that Pam could never come here, could never be part of her real life.

  She took a deep breath, went swiftly inside her dark cool house, and locked herself in. She went upstairs to Deborah’s room, knocked, went in. It was, of course, empty, but it smelled and felt so strongly of her daughter that Lydia stood in it longer than she meant to, feeling closer to Deborah in her absence than she ever did in her presence. Although she knew Deborah was not there, she looked in every room of the house, in the attic and the basement, too, and tried to ignore the persistent fantasy that the girl was following behind her, hiding in rooms she’d already searched.

  One of the cousins met her in the upstairs hall. “I’ve been opening the windows,” she said, without greeting. “I don’t know how you stand the pollution and the noise, but I guess it’s better than no air at all.”

  “I always keep the windows closed,” Lydia said, stubbornly.

  The cousin paid no attention. She had gone into Lydia’s bedroom. “I can’t get this one open,” she called. “Do you have something to pry it up?”

  Lydia fantasized leaping on the cousin’s back, tearing out the cousin’s hair, sinking her teeth into the back of the cousin’s neck. The woman was family; she was also enemy. One of these days—when the mountain people were down here or, more likely, when Mary and Ruth and Lydia and Deborah and Deborah’s daughter (so many fewer of them) were up in the dizzying mountains—somebody (not she) would determine that the time was right and the battle would be joined between mountain and city and all places leading from one to the other.

  Lydia knew to expect this ultimate confrontation, and knew that she could neither avoid nor call it. She would have no say, and wanted none. So, instead of attacking her arrogant cousin or saying anything in protest, she went quietly back into her absent daughter’s room, shut the door, closed the window, and crouched beside the bed, where she dug her nails into her own wrists.

  Chapter 4

  Ruth and her cousin Marguerite crouched on either side of Mary’s bed. It was a canopy bed, very elegant and very old. The sheets were filthy, stained gold satin.

  Mary was asleep. Her flanks twitched. Her limbs bent, relaxed, bent again, as if in great leaps. Her throat muscles spasmed. Her teeth bared and her jaws snapped the air, snapped her own fur.

  Her daughter Ruth watched her, listened to her, touched her. She had always done these things and for much of her life she had been able to believe that the arcane knowledge her mother possessed was, in fact, bit by bit being passed to her. An heirloom. A bequest. But now more and more Ruth was confused and forgetful, couldn’t quite grasp the relationship between one nature and another. More and more now, her mother was secretive and dangerous to her, alien.

  In the closed room on the hot summer night, Mary panted. Ruth put her hand in the saliva that dripped from the long gray tongue.

  “I wish I knew what she’s thinking. I wish I could see what she sees,” Ruth said quietly to Marguerite. Marguerite nodded. “I wish I had her dreams,” Ruth said.

  “My mother sometimes walks in her sleep,” Marguerite offered. “Hunts. She’s a better hunter in her sleep than I am awake.” The cousins laughed a little, mirthlessly.

  In her sleep Mary whined, growled, yipped. Her fangs were beaded with dried blood—her own, or that of a kill Ruth didn’t know about. Or had known about and forgotten.

  Her mother knew many things Ruth didn’t know, couldn’t learn. Knew, Ruth was sure, secrets of hers so secret that Ruth herself had forgotten them. Mary didn’t forget.

  They’d long ago agreed on one annual human kill. When it was time, Ruth took care to range as far from home as she could, and to find someone not likely to be missed. On the night of Deborah’s initiation they’d planned to take the senile, childless old widower who still lived alone on his homestead outside of Eads. But Deborah had failed that night. Lydia had failed, as she always did. Somehow, Ruth herself had failed. So there had been no hunt, and Mary now was two weeks past her feeding time, so there was no telling what she might have done. The longer she lived, the less cautious she cared to be. Ruth was always worried, more and more as the world made less and less sense to her, and now there was Deborah’s uncontrollable carelessness to worry about, too.

  “She’s crazy,” she told Marguerite.

  “So are you. So am I. Madnes
s runs in the family, you know?”

  “She and the girl are putting this whole family in danger.”

  “That’s what comes from living in the city all these generations. My mother’s right. You are all corrupted. Weakened.”

  Ruth remembered:

  The tall boy who’d danced with her. Who’d told her his name and his dreams. Who’d walked her home to the big old house on Ingram Street and kissed her hand. Her mother watching from the attic window, and she’d never seen the tall boy again.

  Her forever-unnamed baby brother, dead in his pile of rags. His breath and blood sucked out of him, his heart split. Her mother’s tearless yellow eyes swollen as if in too-dim light, and her howling utterly human when it began.

  Then Ruth’s own son. Unnamed. She’d killed him herself while the umbilical cord was still intact, the two of them still one. The human mother raged, but she’d done it, done it right. Slit his soft chest and belly, his throat.

  Then Mary took him out of Ruth’s arms. Carried his lightweight body in her long mouth and lowered it into the huge white porcelain pot. Chanted, sang, incanted. Distilled his potent baby-fat with the prescribed portions of belladonna and henbane to make a wonderful rich ointment that lasted the family far longer than the little boy had lived.

  Ruth had taken his sweet head and hands for herself. Mary had punished her severely, bitten nearly through one ear, insisted she eat them, insisted. But Ruth had saved one small blue eye and parts of two little fingers with round rosy nails, had buried them on a moonless night in the corner of the courtyard nearest the abandoned house on 32nd Avenue. Sometimes she still visited the spot. Her son’s grave. Human, she tended scraggly flowers there. Wolf, she buried and reburied what was left, what she imagined was left.

  Now suddenly she realized that her mother knew and didn’t care. There was something else, too, some memory that her mind kept shying away from before it took shape. Something about her own most secret and intimate past that her mother knew better than she did.