Wilding

by Melanie Tem

  Julian was talking to a family. Not a whole family because there was no father, but a mother and two little kids and the mother was pregnant again. Just have more and more babies, till you could keep one. Babies always grew up and left you alone, so you had to have more.

  Julian was holding the smallest child, singing to her, bouncing her very gently on his shoulder. She’d been fussing; now she giggled, her dirty little face lit up. He kissed her on the cheek and handed her back to her mother. The kid started to cry again and kept reaching for Julian, leaning out of her mother’s arms toward him. Deborah watched.

  She pulled around her the clothes and pieces of blanket that Julian had given her. A soft dress that looked gray in the streetlight but might have been blue or green, might have been any color. A flannel shirt. A man’s sweater. They smelled sweet and clean, although she didn’t think they were. They smelled of other people. For some reason, she thought they smelled like Julian, and for some reason that was comforting. She squirmed a little, found a spot in the soft, sloping ground that held her body like a nest, and pulled the ragged half blanket up over her face.

  “Deborah, my dear, you must eat. Here’s something I thought you might like.”

  She didn’t exactly wake up because she hadn’t exactly been asleep. “What for?” she muttered into the chest of the sweater, which had six little oval holes where buttons used to be.

  Maybe somebody’d crouched over a heat vent in the street somewhere and held six white buttons in their hand like teeth. Maybe somebody in some nice house somewhere, some mother, had snipped the buttons off with tiny curved scissors and saved them, and then thrown the sweater away because they couldn’t use it anymore. But Julian had known that she and her baby could use it.

  She wanted the buttons back. It pissed her off that she didn’t have the buttons. Who the fuck did they think they were, ripping the buttons off her sweater?

  Without thinking about it she’d worked the long black nail on the little finger of her left hand through one of the holes. Now she deliberately pushed it in and out, in and out, making the hole bigger and bigger. The ragged wool was a relief around her finger, as if her skin had been itching fiercely and she hadn’t known it.

  “You must eat because you are carrying a child,” Julian said reasonably.

  “I don’t give a shit about the child,” Deborah snarled, although it wasn’t true. “I hope it fucking dies.”

  Julian stiffened. Now she’d offended him. Now he’d leave her. “You have no right to regard your child in such a disrespectful manner. You made a decision that gave it life, and now you must honor it as fully as you honor yourself.”

  “Well, I hope I fucking die, too.”

  “I would miss you,” he said.

  She was so surprised that she sat up, scrambled a little way up the slope away from him until the bridge support forced her to duck her head and stop.

  “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said gently. He was coming closer. She didn’t want him any closer. She was afraid of him.

  At her back were the bridge abutment and the riverbank rising steeply to meet it. In front of her was this guy Julian, talking about honor and offering her something to eat.

  She could run. She didn’t think he’d chase her, and anyway she’d be a lot faster, because she was young and she hadn’t been living under a bridge and she was a werewolf. She could fight; she knew she’d win.

  Instead, she sat down, scooted herself down-slope a little ways toward him, cocked one knee, and smiled at him. “I’m not afraid of you,” she cooed.

  He nodded vigorously. “I’m gratified to hear that. You have nothing to fear from me.”

  “It’s so nice of you to take care of me like this.” She leaned forward until she could touch his arm. “People aren’t nice to me very often.”

  “My pleasure. My honor.”

  “What’s that?” She pointed to his cupped hand.

  “Oh, this is multigrain bread with sugarless strawberry jam. I thought it might be less intimidating than stew.”

  She made her eyes wide. “Did you bake the bread, Julian?” She said his name lingeringly. They always liked it when you said their name like that, even if it wasn’t their real name.

  He laughed. “Oh, my, no. I can manage stew over a campfire, but baking bread is an infinitely more complex process, requiring far more time and attention. I have with me a wonderful bread book which has as its epigraph:

  Kneading dough

  Rising yeast Eating bread All the same Patience

  Of course I can’t use the actual recipes without a kitchen and an oven, but I read them and I find the very words, the very images, to be wonderfully soothing. No, this is day-old bread from the Whole City Bakery at 2971 Wynkoop Street. The baker, a man named Carlos Esparza, is very kind. He—”

  Deborah put her hand over his where he held the bread and whispered, “Feed me.”

  He blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

  “My hands are shaking. I feel a little weak and sick. Please, Julian, could you feed me?”

  He hesitated, then sat on the ground beside her and let her guide his hand with the bread to her mouth. It was a thick grainy slice of bread, and the jam wasn’t sweet enough and it had seeds in it. At first it tasted good, but she could hardly swallow it. She squirmed around until her head was on his shoulder. Feeling the muscles of his upper arm tense under her neck, she let the full weight of her upper body rest against him, knowing he’d hold her.

  He smelled bad. He smelled familiar. Deborah was starting to like the way he smelled.

  Finally she managed to swallow the lump of bread and jam. He’d been watching her; immediately he brought the bread toward her mouth again, but she shook her head. “That’s enough,” she murmured. “Now kiss me.”

  “Pardon? I beg your pardon?”

  With both hands, nails carefully turned under, she brought his face down to hers and kissed him. Before he pulled away she heard his shocked gasp, felt his lips part under hers, but she wasn’t in the right position to tell if he had a hard-on.

  Julian pulled away, but he didn’t drop her. She still lay in his lap, head in the crook of his arm. “Deborah,” he said. She liked the firm way he said her name. He looked at her steadily in the pinkish streetlight reflecting gray off the concrete and the water. “You must not dishonor yourself or me in that manner. You must not dishonor our relationship.”

  “You don’t want me?” Now he would leave her. She was relieved and very sad. He would leave her, and she’d just have to get another one.

  “This,” he told her, “is to be a sanctuary relationship. For both of us. A place of peace and trust.”

  Deborah knew what he meant, although she didn’t want to and couldn’t have said so. She didn’t say anything. When he offered the bread and jam again, she opened her mouth and ate, and it tasted so good.

  Chapter 10

  Ruth was keeping up with her cousin, but just barely. They’d been out much of the night and all day, and she was exhausted. Time was when she wouldn’t have been tired at all. Marguerite didn’t seem to be.

  They hadn’t found Deborah or any trace of her. Marguerite hadn’t remarked on their failure. Ruth was embarrassed and very worried.

  Sometimes she was confused and, sometimes, aware of being confused. Sometimes she forgot whom they were looking for, although the urgent sense of searching never abated. Sometimes she knew it was her mother, whom they’d find impaled on a fencepost. Then she knew it was Deborah, a nameless girl, her granddaughter, a nameless and relationless girl. Then she knew it was someone else and knew she couldn’t let Marguerite find him—male, lost but not dead, lost more surely than if he’d been dead, she didn’t know who. They were searching for someone, not finding.

  All day the sunshine had hurt her eyes—hurt where it came out of the sun in the first place, hurt where it reflected off cars in the street and house windows on both sides. She was too hot, although as the sun went down she could t
ell that the air was cooler now with the first suggestion of fall. Her skin prickled uncomfortably from underneath. Living with this unreachable, uncontrollable itch all her life had only made it more miserable.

  Marguerite didn’t seem to be bothered by the light or the heat. Surely she had hair growing between her skin and her flesh, too—especially, Ruth speculated, on the hump. Surely her single eye was sensitive to light; fleetingly, Ruth wondered if the empty socket was sensitive, too. Surely those things were true of everybody in the family. Wondering, Ruth watched her surreptitiously.

  Wondering, too—and certainly not for the first time in their lifelong familial association—whether her cousin ever felt herself to be neither wolf nor woman, not both but neither. Not for the first time, she looked for and didn’t find the right words to ask. But Marguerite made her way through the too bright, too warm city twilight as though she were nothing other than an impatient old woman in a place she didn’t want to be.

  Family was coming tonight, the clan’s monthly gathering. Social only this time, with no initiation or birth or sacrifice to celebrate, and Ruth doubted many would come. But some would. She sighed. Maybe afterward Marguerite would go home. Ruth would miss her, and would be relieved.

  Always there was an undercurrent of violence at the family gatherings, especially when they were social and marked no major, transforming event. Always there was a premonition of the great confrontation to come, which both aroused Ruth and worried her. Sometimes now she could not quite say to herself what this tension was about, and sometimes it was so clear to her that she couldn’t think of anything else. Power. Dominion. And always she was aware of Marguerite watching her, taking her measure.

  Ruth’s hips ached, as they always did these days and especially in the aftermath of a change. Her jaw ached. Her eyes stung. Her mind skittered from one thing to another—thought, image, thought, words and no words, were-thoughts themselves transforming and transforming her as she thought them. “I don’t know where she is,” she said again. She was out of breath and the words came hard, unnaturally, not precisely or completely what she’d meant to say—although the older she got the less she could tell what she’d ever meant to say. She tried again. “I don’t understand why we can’t find her.”

  Marguerite snorted. “It’s a big city, Ruthie. Full of things. I don’t understand how you can ever find anything here, or how you know it when you find it. Looking for her was a waste of time. I knew it would be.”

  “So why didn’t you say so? Why did you come with me?”

  Marguerite reached over and squeezed her shoulder. The nails hurt in the muscles. “You and I don’t see each other enough, cousin. We have to stick together.”

  Ruth looked at her and nodded. “I appreciate it. Cousin.”

  Marguerite turned her head slightly and seemed to eye her out of the eyeless socket. “So. Now you owe me.”

  Ruth didn’t understand. She waited for Marguerite to explain.

  A man was coming toward them with too many small children in tow. The mob of youngsters forced both Ruth and Marguerite off the sidewalk. Their clothes were bright. Their voices were high, thin, and sharp. The man was having trouble controlling them; he kept shouting their names and dropping one small hand to grab for another. Some of the children stared at the two old ladies, especially at Marguerite with her hump and missing eye. One boy, red hair a nimbus around his pale face, said aggressively, “Hi.” He pivoted and kept saying it until finally Marguerite bared her teeth and said “hi” back.

  “Come home with me,” Marguerite said to Ruth. “Come live in the canyons for a while. I’ve never understood how you could live in the city, and I’ve always wanted to see what you’d be like in the high country. Now’s the time.”

  Always before Ruth had tried to defend, to describe the pleasures of the city, to explain the complex sense of opportunity and danger that could be so invigorating. This time she just said, “This is where I live. It’s where I’ve always lived. “

  “It’s not too late to change that. It’s not too late to change anything.”

  Ruth barked a short, bitter laugh. “I’m an old woman, Marguerite. So are you. I don’t think either of us has much chance of living forever. So it seems to me that it’s too late for a lot of things.”

  A man in a loose red bathrobe and floppy slippers, setting out his sprinkler, knees white, looked up and said, “Good morning, ladies! Fine morning. Makes you proud to live in Colorado, doesn’t it?” Startled, Ruth smiled and nodded.

  Marguerite said, “You underestimate yourself. You always have.”

  Ruth thought she understood what her cousin meant, but then lost the comprehension as they went down a hill toward a traffic light alternately glowing very red and then fading into the nearly horizontal rays of the sun.

  Marguerite didn’t say anything while they navigated the complex intersection where the Speer Boulevard diagonal cut across 32nd Avenue, Golden Street, and several alleys wide enough to have been thoroughfares. It was rush hour. Traffic was nonstop, variegated, loud. Ruth had pushed the crosswalk button on the pole, but still the light turned yellow and then red just as they stepped off the center island. The driver in the near lane stopped for them holding up traffic, but there was no break in the far lane and cars whizzed by close enough for Ruth’s nostrils to flare at their sharp metallic odor and for her tongue to be coated by the fumes of their haste and heat. She glimpsed their drivers’ and passengers’ exposed faces, forearms, throats, and instinctively her glance would fasten on one after another of the vehicles and follow it until she couldn’t see it anymore, then swing back left and focus on another.

  A small boy riding hazardously in the open bed of a pickup waved at them and made faces. A young man in a sleek blue car, whose radio seemed to be emitting nothing but the sensuous pulsing of a bass so loud it was nearly subsonic, inexplicably gave them the finger as he went by.

  By the time they’d reached the south side of 32nd and were safely up on the curb, Marguerite was sweating, twisting her mouth, and rubbing her upper arms as though they itched. “We never found Helene,” she said.

  Ruth, baffled by the apparent non sequitur, blinked and demanded foolishly, “Who? What?” “Helene.”

  There were so many females on Marguerite’s side of the family—so many multiple births of girls that it seemed unnatural, so many surviving daughters and granddaughters that it seemed miraculous—that Ruth thought it quite possible that she’d missed this one. Possible, but humiliating. “Who’s Helene?”

  “My granddaughter,” Marguerite said, confirming Ruth’s suspicion. “One of my granddaughters. She was taken.”

  “Taken? How?”

  It was Marguerite’s turn to laugh briefly and bitterly. “By a wolf. A gray wolf. Rare, almost unheard of in the Rockies. A wolf bitch. I saw her, but I couldn’t get there in time. She came out of the hills at the base of the canyon in broad daylight and stole Helene right out of the cradle, right out of the den. Helene was four hours old.”

  “When did this happen, Marguerite?” Why didn’t we know about it? Why didn’t I know about it? Did I?

  “Three months ago yesterday. Long enough for us to have searched everywhere. Long enough for us to know she’s gone.”

  The horrifying implications of the story were legion. A girl infant kidnapped by a wolf not one of them. A mother’s grief, a grandmother’s, given full expression because the lost child was a girl. Heritage dangerously interrupted. Legacy distorted. The sweet particularity of a little girl named Helene, gone forever. A strange wolf with the child in her jaws.

  “I am so sorry,” Ruth managed to say.

  A pair of swaggering teenage boys, in Raiders jackets and Orioles caps turned sideways, refused to make room for them on the sidewalk. Ruth stood her ground until Marguerite said, “Don’t, Ruthie, it’s not worth it.” Then the two old women walked in the street, leaving the boys laughing behind them.

  “When a girl dies,” Ruth began, and th
en lost her train of thought, except that she was acutely remembering Estrella, dead for no reason in her crib, and thinking again that if Estrella had lived Lydia might never have been born.

  Marguerite said at once, “She’s not dead.”

  Ruth took a deep breath and tried to slow her heartbeat. She tried to comprehend her cousin’s meaning, and to decide how she should respond to it. Then she forgot.

  They cut across the dirt parking lot of the piano store on the corner of 29th and Ingram, where sometimes on summer afternoons the back door would stand open and the player piano would be turned on so that music would spill out happily into the neighborhood. Ruth liked that. The store was closed now and silent.

  Marguerite stopped behind the store, turned to face her, and said, “Ruthie, we have to talk. I have a proposition for you.”

  Ruth tried to protest. “They’ll be at the house—”

  “Listen. My mother isn’t planning on coming into town, but all I’d have to do is let her know her sister’s been seriously hurt and she’d be here. Maybe not tonight when the others come, but tomorrow or the next day, by herself.”

  “Mary and Hannah hate each other,” Ruth said, and thought that was true.

  “But they’re sisters,” Marguerite said. “Family. And my mother would come to see how the power had shifted.”

  Ruth didn’t think she’d seen her Aunt Hannah for years. But there were memories, whose chronology and context confused her:

  Hannah at the opening of a short narrow canyon, Ruth and Marguerite and others facing her from the place where the canyon abutted red cliffs. All the girls afraid of the wolf who trapped them there, and admiring.

  The howling of wolves up and down canyon walls, answering each other from ridge to ridge. Ruth climbing with the rest of them, higher than she’d ever been before or since, past where trees grew, to where rocks split and sheared in alpine winds. Closer and closer to the white moon. Aunt Hannah beside her, urging.

  “Let’s do it,” Marguerite was urging. “Let’s get her down here. And then let’s you and I take them both.”