Wilding

by Melanie Tem

  “Oughtta call a vet,” he muttered, advancing.

  “Oh, dear, I don’t think so. We really don’t have much money, don’t you know, and we can nurse her quite well here at home.”

  He was close enough to Marguerite now that she put up a hand against his chest. He looked surprised, and his hand with the weapon in it—a knife, Ruth saw—came up. Marguerite’s other hand swiped at it, and the knife clattered onto the floor. A dark, shiny streak appeared on the back of the boy’s hand, and he yelped.

  “And now,” Marguerite told him evenly, “Ruthie’s daughter Lydia has arrived to prepare our breakfast. She is by no means a gourmet cook, but her food is quite edible.”

  Ruth hadn’t heard Lydia downstairs. She still didn’t hear her. She wondered uneasily whether her cousin’s hearing was now so much more acute than hers, or whether Marguerite was making this up.

  “I—I ain’t hungry,” he stammered, foolishly.

  “Ah.” Marguerite drew her lips back in a wolf’s grin. “But we are. And my aunt here requires food, a fresh kill, in order to heal. I’m sure you understand. We are most grateful, my dear, that you came along in our time of need. You will bathe now.”

  “No.”

  “Ruthie,” said Marguerite, and together they carried the boy, who really didn’t struggle very much, down the attic stairs to the bathroom on the second floor.

  They bathed him in the high-sided, clawfoot tub. He hardly fought them at all, and Ruth wondered about that, worried. When he was cleaned, Marguerite easily slit his throat. His blood reddened the water in the tub. Lydia would scrub it out.

  Then Marguerite took the heart of the young rescuer—the would-be robber or rapist or gigolo—up to Mary. Ruth wanted to do it but dared not say so for some reason, and anyway couldn’t quite think how to do it right.

  Now she heard Lydia in the kitchen. She heard Marguerite’s footsteps in the attic. She crouched on the floor beside the bathtub that held the opened body of the nameless male and thought about her father, whom she was sure she remembered but could not possibly remember because he had been killed, too, and his heart consumed long before she was born.

  Chapter 8

  Morning sunshine fell leaf-lacy across the hardwood floors of the house on Harvey Street, turning the old oak a warm gold, softening the gouges and scars and cracks so that they looked like part of the grain. Morning sunshine washed across the carpets in such a way that their fading colors and fraying designs looked lovelier, even, than when the carpets had been new. Sunshine made distinct rainbows through the leaded glass at the tops of the stairway windows; equally pretty were the blurry suggestions of barely fractured white light through the three panes of the north-facing bay window.

  The house looked wonderful on this bright summer morning, if you didn’t know what it sheltered. Lydia thought briefly, bitterly, of other women in other sunny houses throughout the city, and wondered what tricks their lives played on them, what evil and misery the surfaces of their lives hid. Briefly and bitterly, too, she thought of her mother Ruth at her age in the house like this one on Ingram Street, and then of her grandmother Mary, and then of her daughter Deborah, who was gone.

  The truth was: The floors were dusty, although she went over them with a mop every day. Fur and grime migrated out of the cracks between the boards and the cracks in the boards themselves, no matter what she did. Dirt had compacted deep into the pile of the carpets, and nothing got rid of the faint caustic odor of urine and feces, cooked fat and blood. Only last week she’d washed all the windows on all three stories inside and out, clambering through bushes, swaying on the rickety ladder, straining with the long-handled squeegee, and already the glass was speckled with bird droppings, littered by the out-of-control Engelmann ivy that poked its tendrils around the sills, and miscellaneously streaked.

  And the courtyard gardens. She weeded them. She watered them, fighting with the hose and the sprinkler head to get the water at the right force in the right direction for the right duration. The hose sprung leaks. The sprinkler head stuck. Water pressure in the neighborhood fluctuated so that she suddenly got insufficient water or too much. Weeds flourished and crops didn’t. Sometimes she’d stand there with the hose in her hand and could actually watch the leggy tomato and pepper plants droop, the henbane and sage and belladonna curl up, while bindweed and ragweed took their water and grew thick and strong.

  Everything was an endless, fruitless chore. Keeping the four houses habitable and usable.

  Earning a living. Taking care of Mary (who was not in danger of dying but was in some sort of danger, the nature and terms of which Lydia did not understand), of Ruth (who would hardly speak to or answer her), and of Deborah (who was gone).

  Deborah.

  Lydia could think of nothing more to do to find her daughter other than calling the police, which she was afraid to do. That seemed futile anyway since there was no question that Deborah was a runaway. She could think of nothing more she could have done to make things easier for her daughter either, or to keep hurtful things from happening to her.

  Other than running away herself, and staying away. She could have stayed in Pennsylvania with the child even after Jake had abandoned them. Or she could have gone somewhere else—she remembered thinking about Hawaii, wondering humorlessly whether there were lycanthropes in Hawaii, whether werewolves could live in the tropics. Maybe it wouldn’t have been enough to save Deborah, and she would have been depriving as much as protecting her. But the truth was, Lydia had come back to Denver because anything else she’d thought to do had been too hard, too risky, and too much effort.

  Eight days on the road, a trip that could have taken three, that had taken a month when she and Jake had driven it in leisurely, sightseeing love. Hitchhiking and walking.

  Sleeping: in the back of a pickup, afraid Deborah would bounce out, jolting awake with every bounce and turn, never taking her arm away from the whining child. In the bathroom of a rest stop where the odor was so bad they both had splitting headaches most of the next day. In a park in some little town in Nebraska where Lydia hadn’t meant for them to go at all but they’d been dropped off there by a family who’d all stared back at them disapprovingly, the parents in the side mirrors and the kids only slightly more overtly through the back window. The last night in the courtyard of the family houses, afraid to go in, afraid not to, afraid someone would come out and discover them, hoping someone would.

  It had been February, bleak almost everywhere, not much snow except for a half-day blizzard in eastern Ohio but even there the snow turned gray on the gray roads and didn’t stick.

  Lydia had turned thirty on that trip. Five-year-old Deborah didn’t know, of course, probably didn’t even have the concept of somebody else’s birthday, certainly didn’t understand dates or months or any age she herself hadn’t yet been. Lydia had said, “It’s my birthday. Today’s Mommy’s birthday,” but that only served to spark the child’s annoyingly selfish chatter about how long was it till her birthday and Daddy said she could have a red bike with training wheels. The four college students who picked them up on the east side of Chicago and dropped them off on the west side had no way of knowing, of course, that it was her thirtieth birthday and didn’t, of course, care. Jake would remember her birthday whether he wanted to or not, but he wouldn’t care anymore, either.

  She was never to see him again. She was never to celebrate her birthday again, either. Every year, she was aware of stupidly waiting for somebody to mention it—thirty-three, thirty-eight—but naturally nobody did and she wasn’t about to bring it up herself.

  Nothing much had happened on that long, wearing trip home. No particular threats from any of the strangers they’d ridden with—just the inherent twin threat that emanated from everybody, stranger or family, that they would notice her and that they would not. No memorable kindnesses other than the fact of the transportation itself, which had made Lydia resentful rather than grateful.

  Deborah had been difficult
on that trip, unreasonable, screaming and crying, carsick, climbing into strange men’s laps and asking if they knew her daddy, sometimes even (to Lydia’s extreme embarrassment) calling them Daddy. In the back of the pickup in Nebraska Lydia had finally had enough. She’d put the child over her knee and—speeding along the highway at seventy miles an hour, wind in her hair and gray sun in her eyes—spanked her. Physically, visibly hurting her child in an attempt to get her to behave sometimes could make Lydia feel, very briefly, as if she knew what she was doing.

  The child’s howling had been nearly lost in the noise of the traffic. Fresh marks were left across Deborah’s bottom, scratches and a palm-sized bruise, and she’d stayed quiet for the rest of that ride, squatting as far away from her mother as she could get in the bed of the truck and staring at her with a fury beyond her years that had disturbed Lydia and had also made her feel that maybe she was raising this kid right after all.

  On the afternoon of another chilly day—this one brighter, though, with Denver’s blue sky; Lydia remembered the sky hurting her eyes, hurting the bones of her face—mother and daughter had walked from the Interstate exit at 30th Avenue the six blocks west to Ingram Street and then two blocks north. When they climbed the steps to the gate in the stone wall, Deborah had, quite suddenly, allowed her attention to be caught, and was awestruck by the big, big houses, were they haunted? Daddy said there was no such thing as haunted houses when would Daddy be here? Who was Nana anyway? Nana was a funny name she didn’t know anybody else named Nana.

  You’ll learn, Lydia remembered thinking fiercely. You’ll see.

  The gate was locked. Of course. Lydia had to take Deborah around to the tall front door on Ingram Street, like any stranger. She had to ring the doorbell more than once and wait in the bright blue cold for someone to let them in. Her mother, finally.

  Lydia’s throat had tightened at the sight of her mother. She looked much the same as when Lydia had last seen her. (Was she immortal, too? Was there such a thing as immortality, which you could earn by being either extremely good or extremely evil? If so, Lydia didn’t think that either she or her mother had that much courage.) Her mother Ruth opened the door, paused, then stood aside, neither welcoming them nor inviting them in, showing no interest either in Lydia’s leaving or in her coming back.

  Lydia realized now that for a moment her mother hadn’t realized who they were—early signs of the senility that apparently had begun while she was gone. Her fault for leaving. It would also have been her fault if she’d stayed, for disappointing her mother all her life.

  “Ma, this is your granddaughter, Deborah. Deborah, wait, pay attention, this is your grandmother.”

  “Nana?” the impossible child had demanded. “No, not Nana. This is Grandma.”

  “No fair! You said Nana!” Deborah had stretched out her face, narrowed her eyes, clawed her hands, bared her small sharp teeth, and—to Lydia’s utter mortification—flung herself at Ruth.

  Ruth dropped to her haunches and caught the furious little creature with a swipe of her nails. Deborah hit the floor of the entryway, took a moment or two to catch her breath, then gathered herself and leapt clumsily at her grandmother’s throat. The last intelligible thing either of them said, and Lydia didn’t know which of them said it, was “Stay out of the way!”

  Lydia had managed to get inside, to shut the door on the blue sky and bustle of the city, isolating all of them in the dark house on the hill. The fight between grandmother and granddaughter—between her mother and her child, skipping her —probably lasted no more than a few minutes, and, as far as Lydia knew, was never to repeat itself. Lydia was to think of it—thought of it now that Deborah had run away, might be gone forever but more likely would come back angrier and more demanding than ever—as the irretrievable moment when her child had claimed the place in the family that should always by rights have been hers.

  Ruth seized the little girl’s head in both hands and dug her nails into the back of the soft sinewed neck. Deborah gave a small, savage roar, twisted her body and head, and sank her canine teeth into the pad of the old woman’s palm. Grunting, Ruth let go with that hand, and Deborah pushed herself upward toward her adversary —not away, not toward escape as Lydia certainly would have done.

  Ruth was able to throw the child off, but not before the small jaws had snapped and the small sharp teeth had drawn her blood. The back of the child’s head hit the newel post hard, and she lay still. Lydia started toward her child, but Mary—whom, incredibly, Lydia hadn’t noticed there, crouched in the cobwebbed shadows—growled softly and swiped at her ankles, easily knocking her down to sit like a schoolgirl on the steps, knees drawn up, fist pressed to her mouth.

  Constrained from fully circling by the walls, doors, stairs, furniture of the old house, Ruth was pacing a narrow arc, her intent yellow gaze on the collapsed child. She was much bigger than normal—her hackles raised, her shoulders and thigh muscles bunched—and Deborah looked much smaller.

  Lydia found herself thinking distinctly, about both combatants: This is her chance.

  Ruth crouched, gathered herself. Lydia forced herself not to cry out, either to warn her daughter or to urge her mother on.

  At the instant the old woman lunged, the child leapt to meet her in midair. Her howl was shrill but not at all childlike. There was a crescendo of thuds and grunts as the two bodies collided with each other and then hit the floor, and a prolonged and repeated gnashing sound as teeth and claws ground against each other, raked along bone, scraped the century-old oak planks of the floor that already bore so many unhealed cracks and gouges. Fur, blood, dust, even flesh splattered Lydia and, behind her, the red-flocked wallpaper that had peeled in numerous tiny places to show the white plaster underneath in another pattern. Fur, blood, dust adhered now to the walls to form yet another layer.

  The cacophony rose, and then, abruptly, was over. Ruth lay on her side in the dim entryway, her pale underbelly partially exposed. Deborah squatted over her, playfully twisting her fingers in her grandmother’s gray hair.

  In the family’s sudden silence, Mary rasped, “Good.”

  Deborah cut her eyes at her great-grandmother, but didn’t move.

  “Enough,” Mary said. And, “Welcome home.”

  The matriarch erupted then into tumultuous laughter, which at first sounded most like yipping but gradually changed into the slightly breathless cackling of a very old woman. Almost immediately Deborah joined in, giggling and hooting like the little girl she was, yipping, too.

  Then Ruth raised herself from the floor and, laughing, wrapped her arms around her granddaughter. She hugged her, tossed her squealing into the air and caught her again. Laughing. Playing. Acknowledging.

  So, finally, Lydia laughed, too. Not much, never easily or heartily, but enough to avoid notice or at least overt censure. Never understanding what was so funny, she was always to suspect that the joke that day had been on her. And she was always to remember most vividly that Mary’s “welcome home” had not been for her.

  That day, and the much more recent morning when Ruth and Marguerite had killed that transient boy and fed his enlarged heart piece by piece to Mary as an elixir, and the night Mary had inexplicably, unfairly declared Deborah unworthy of initiation and sent her running away—at countless times like that throughout her life, Lydia could not doubt her family’s curse, its pathology, or its uniqueness. But there were countless other times—just as many, more—when it seemed to her that they were no more remarkable than any other unhappy family, no more remarkable than herself, petty cruelties and paltry anger passing down from one generation to the next without meaning or value. In either case, Lydia was ashamed to be a member of this family, and equally ashamed that she could never live up to it.

  Mary slept in all four houses, had a room in each attic. Again and again she marked all four houses with her dirt and spoor, which then Lydia was expected to clean up. This was the house Lydia lived in, but it was Mary’s house.

  Mary was
calling her again. Anxiety thickened in her throat. It was up to her to take care of everybody, now to nurse Mary back to health. But she had no idea how to do that, or even what “health” was for this peculiar ancient creature.

  It was up to her to keep the wound clean where the fencepost had pierced the flesh between the pinkish-gray vaginal opening and the top of the left hind leg. Inspecting the hole, touching it, made her own groin ache in a curious, horrific kind of arousal. No one, of course, helped her hold her grandmother while she changed the dressings; so far, she had claw marks the length of both forearms and a bite on the back of her wrist, and no more idea how to heal her own wounds than her grandmother’s.

  She was not a nurse. She had no particular knowledge of the healing or hurting powers of anything. She was not skilled at taking care of people. It was ludicrous for her to be the family caretaker. But here she was.

  She must be doing something right. Mary was up and walking. Roaming all over all four houses and the courtyard that internally connected them. Urinating and defecating everywhere; Lydia couldn’t keep up with her, and the houses reeked of excrement. As far as she could tell, neither her mother nor Marguerite ever cleaned up anything, and Deborah wouldn’t have, either, if she’d been here. But their disapproval of her was as palpable and ubiquitous as the stench itself.

  Wearily, nearly enervated by the familiar trepidation that she would do something wrong or inadequately, Lydia stepped onto the first landing. Someone knocked on the front door not inches away from her right shoulder, and she started wildly.

  A knock on the door was such an infrequent signal in this house that for a split second Lydia didn’t understand what it was or what it was ordering her to do. Finally, she peered furtively over her shoulder, and saw that someone was, indeed, at the door; a form loomed through the dirty frosted glass.