Fierce Little Thing

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  “What happens when Teresa comes through on the ‘or else’?” I say. “Did you forget why we came? To stop whoever ‘knows what we did.’ I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust that Teresa’s just going to let us walk free.” Really it’s you I’m thinking of, you up there, waiting. I don’t care about the ‘or else.’ But Cornelia does. And Cornelia can’t leave. Issy can’t leave. I need them back on that land, and Ben and Xavier, too, so that I can find you.

  “Didn’t you think,” Xavier says, “that it was odd how Teresa … I don’t know. How she didn’t seem sure of herself?”

  “You know what I think.” Cornelia nods at a new thought. “They don’t know what we did. They just want money, and they figure everyone who lived at Home must feel guilty about something, and they decided to send random letters to all of us, and we’re the idiots who fell for it.”

  “Or it’s Abraham,” I say.

  “Or someone else who knows,” says Xavier.

  “You sound excited,” says Issy. She means me.

  “All I’m saying is Abraham could have set Teresa up to get us here,” I explain. “She said she sent the letters, but she didn’t say she wrote them.”

  “Or she did write them,” Cornelia replies, “and she and Tomas are playing with us, and they don’t know anything about how Home ended.”

  “Why play with us?”

  “Because they’re crazy!”

  “Well, I’m crazy,” I say, “and I’m not blackmailing you over the murder we committed.”

  Her look of shame buys me time. “Please, Cornelia. For all of our sakes. Please don’t run away, not until I’ve had a chance to—”

  “I’m not running away. If anything, I’m running back toward the life I’ve chosen.”

  “For Issy’s and Xavier’s sakes, then.” I muster a smile. “Solitary confinement would not be a problem for me.”

  “Exactly. Why do you care so much?” Issy’s frowning.

  The dogs return home then, bodies slamming the house. They bark for their human. Issy picks up Sekou. Xavier opens the door with a look of trepidation. The animals thunder in. Probably they are covered in ticks. Remarkably, they ignore our chicken. They’re well trained, I’ll give Ben that. They tear through the kitchen and into the laundry room, where he feeds them.

  “You think they want dinner?” Cornelia asks.

  Xavier grimaces, then goes that way. Sekou wants to go, too, but Issy holds him fast.

  “I can’t believe Ben abandoned those animals,” Cornelia says.

  “He’s coming back,” I say. “Give me one more day to convince him.”

  “You two can’t even be in the same room together. After this morning’s showdown, I can’t imagine how—”

  “I’ll fix things. I promise. But you have to promise, too. One more day. Midnight to midnight. Please.”

  They do not want me to convince them. But I always do.

  84

  On the water, we were just teenagers—too loud, jumping off cliffs, dumb, rowdy, unthinged from Unthinging. The velvet lake was cool over our limbs, turning us into otters: Ben pouncing on Xavier to push his head under; Cornelia holding her breath for a minute at a time; Issy floating on her back. The boys tossed me over the side of the canoe when I said I was cold, but this was a good thing, it was good to shriek and swear to get revenge. The warmth from their hands lingered long after I’d swum away.

  On Blueberry Island, Cornelia squeezed the ends of my mop. “Split ends. If we took off a few inches it would be so much lighter around your face.”

  Issy beat the boys in a swim race. We filled our straw hats with handfuls of late summer blueberries. We lay out on the rock, thigh to thigh to thigh to thigh to thigh, hands scrabbling together for the small purple balls, kissing them into our mouths. But the sky turned from blue to golden to pink to red. We had to go back. When we neared shore, I noticed Jim standing in the shadows. Issy splashed out of the canoe.

  “You should have peed in the water!” Ben called after her.

  “I’m not disgusting like some people I know!”

  “I need to go, too,” said Cornelia. Issy helped her out, leaving me rocking side to side as they darted into the forest.

  Jim waded in and caught Issy’s end of our canoe while Ben and Xavier tied themselves to the dock. Jim pulled me in. We dragged the canoe up onto the pine needles. The long fiberglass boat was as unwieldy on land as it was graceful on the water. By the time we had it flipped, the boys were up the hill. Under the evening trees, cool set into my bones. The scent of sautéing onions wafted down from the Main Lodge.

  Jim scratched his belly. “What were y’all up to out there?” His oilcloth coat smelled of bonfire. I didn’t know how to explain the pleasure of new air in my face, or the longing that that freedom opened, both an ache and an answer. But then I remembered him on the night of his howl, brought back from the Thinged World, and I realized: he knows.

  “You ever get lonely?” His mouth twisted. “You didn’t tell your friends what I told you about the”—he lowered his voice—“you know. The prophecy?”

  I shook my head.

  “Seems like a place with no rules. But there’s so many fucking rules. Like Sarah, you know? Always controlling the food.”

  “Without Sarah, we’d starve.”

  He waved his arm. I was hit with a wave of whiskey. “Who died and made her queen? Isn’t it Unthinging, to get to live without everyone acting better than you all the time? Fuck Amos and fuck Ephraim with all the things we’ve got to fix. Fuck Teresa and all the fucking things she says I’m doing wrong.” He leaned forward. “Fuck. Abraham.”

  “We should head to dinner.”

  “They talk about you, you know.” He tried to fix me in a steady gaze. “They have all these theories. Abraham thinks you’re special. You’re going to save us with your superpowers.” He took a step closer as my heart hammered on that word. “A sweet little thing like you.”

  “I’m not special,” I said.

  He stopped. He cocked his head. “Why do you say it like that?”

  “Because I’m not.”

  “But you said it like you are. You said it like you have something up your sleeve.” The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. He saw me, plainly, through every layer.

  “There you are.” A bark—Dog rocketing down the hill, jittering toward me, tail whipping—and behind him, still halfway up the path, Ben calling impatiently, “Sarah needs you, Saskia.”

  I was moving up the hill before I made the choice to do so. Dog doubled back to me with a yelp. I tripped on a root but I righted myself. I couldn’t bear that Ben had seen Jim lean into me like that. I couldn’t bear what Jim had somehow understood. I left Ben in the blackening night, and Jim down at the shore, behind him.

  85

  Everyone sleeps, eventually. The boules crackle and whisper when I set them out to cool. I go upstairs. I lay my body down.

  Past midnight comes the rumble of his motor. I knew he would return.

  86

  “I know they’re good. Goddammit, they’re the best fucking things I’ve painted. It’s time the world knows, too.” Philip paced our short hallway—every step, every syllable, wound with pride and manic frenzy. Wind howled off the lake, a hint of the winter to come.

  “Can’t you send them to New York?” Xavier gnawed on his knuckle. “I bet the gallery would pay.”

  “Can’t trust anyone.” Philip stopped in front of one of the bigger paintings—a patch of murky water, overlaid with the inside of Butterfly’s wrist, tendons straining against the skin. The painting was two steps shy of obscene. Butterfly hadn’t stayed over in weeks, not since we’d seen her come out of Abraham’s cabin. Jim was to be avoided—I knew this now—but whatever had broken in him, I couldn’t help blame it on Butterfly, or believe that the longing she called up in men had passed, like a virus from Jim, to Philip, to Abraham. I didn’t like how close Philip got to the canvas, nor how he pulled himself away from it, vee
ring toward us. “No, I’ve got to take them down to the city myself. They’re going to make a shit ton of money, you know.”

  Xavier stood, resigned. “I’ll pack my stuff.”

  “No,” Philip shook his head mightily, “no. You, my darlings, will stay put. I’ll be back in no time. A few days—tops. I’ll swing by and take you both back to the city—in time for school.”

  I opened my mouth—I wasn’t going back to the Thinged World, not while I knew you were still at Home. (Did I know you were at Home? You hadn’t shown yourself in so long. Were you the reason I wanted to stay anymore?)

  But Xavier’s protest won: “You can’t just leave us.” Philip stopped then, and put his hands on Xavier’s shoulders, ready to administer some wisdom. But Xavier feinted left and disappeared out the door.

  By the next night, Philip and his canvases were gone, our cabin lightened to a tunnel of wood and wind. Ben knocked on the door. Xavier got out of bed. The boys played rummy on the porch. I sat on the porch steps and watched Dog snuffle in the dirt until Nora and Tomas flew up. They were playing witches, using pine branches as brooms. Dog snapped up Tomas’s branch. Nora had taught Tomas to never back away so he grabbed it back, and then Dog came at the boy, snarling. Tomas screamed. Nora screamed. I stood to help but Ben was already down the stairs past me, roaring at Dog. Dog slunk to the water. The children’s mothers called them in. It was dark by then. I crept out onto the lakeside where Dog had brought himself to cower and called him to me with an open hand. I calmed him. Together, we moved back through the dark. Ben’s eyes wandered over me as I climbed the porch stairs with Dog at my side, but if there was something he wanted to say, he didn’t.

  87

  “You must have gotten hungry, hiding out in your van.”

  My voice, and the sight of me in my ghost-white nightgown cast in the refrigerator’s feeble light, gives Ben a good fright. He manages to swallow his terror in his next gnaw of chicken thigh. The dogs lift their heads, their collars clanging in the moth-riddled light coming in from the window. Of course he came home.

  “Can I ask about your mom?”

  I could have started, instead, with apologies. But Ben doesn’t work that way. I could have started with how Tomas pulled a gun on us because Ben refused to come along. But the trick is diversion.

  He pulls down a plate. Well trained by years of marriage, I suppose, or perhaps it’s the civilizing force of Jenny. “Ma’s losing her marbles.”

  “Dementia?”

  He sits. “I mean, she was messed up from childhood. Home—I mean Home, not the home where she was born—was where she felt safest, which should tell you something. But then Dad left, and Home fell apart.” He swallows another mouthful. “It was Nora that did her in. Her heart broke when Dad left, but she couldn’t survive losing Nora.”

  How easily he says Nora’s name. How good he is at pretending everything is nothing.

  “That starter?” I point across the room at the cooled loaves. “It’s from your mom.”

  “She threw it out.”

  “I have my ways.” That makes him smile. “You didn’t know I had it in me to keep a dependent alive, did you?”

  If Sarah were the one sitting across the table, she’d reply: “The Mother isn’t mine.” She would say the Mother belongs to the women who came before us, who fed her day after day, and fed their families from her, generation before generation, back to the log cabin where Sarah’s great-great-great-great-great-grandmother first made her with a bit of flour and water and air, in an act of hope and the need to feed her children.

  Ben smooths his fingers across the tabletop. They skim toward mine. Then, as if it isn’t dangerous, he lifts his eyes. That jolt is all it takes, to be back in the memory:

  I was fighting laughter from the bed. Ben was young and fit and buck naked. His hardening cock bobbed enthusiastically as he came down the hall, swiping at his wet hair with the towel. Surely he couldn’t be ready to go again, not so soon, and I thought: good on you, Ben. I thought: why didn’t we do this sooner? Why did we spend all that time circling each other when we could have been doing this? All the rules had changed—disdain had become lust, or maybe we had finally skipped to love. He climbed back in with me, pulling the crazy quilt over his shoulders. What would Cornelia say? And Issy? And oh, Xavier—if Xavier found out, he’d be so mad. It was Ben! The truth hit me then, for just a moment—Ben had a wife, and little Anna, and another baby on the way. This was not as free and easy as it could have been, if we’d managed to get to it sooner. Maybe it was wrong. But how could it be wrong if we’d been moving toward this since the moment we met, years before he ever laid eyes on poor Shelley-Ann? Then I didn’t care anymore about poor Shelley-Ann because Ben was kissing me, really kissing me—my mouth still so raw from the night before that it hurt to be kissed, but a good hurt—and I was kissing back. I wanted him. I wanted Ben! Ben, mine, not someone else’s, not his wife’s, not Xavier’s—mine. Here he was, in my arms, in my bedroom, we were coming off a night of doing it, over and over, again and again, and now here we were, here Ben still was, on top of me, inside of me, his breath, my breath. I couldn’t even tell if this felt good anymore, just that it seemed to be the only option we had.

  Now Ben glances at the living room, where Cornelia and Xavier are sleeping. He lowers his voice. “You never told anyone?” So that’s why he invited me to remember; not for the sweetness of it.

  “Never.”

  He leans back, relieved. Runs a hand down over his face. “I don’t do stuff like that. Despite what you think about Jenny.”

  I could ask why he showed up that night, of all nights, when I’d finally decided it was foolish to want a man with a wife and child.

  I could ask what made him finally get up the nerve to drive all the way from Maine down to Brooklyn and brave street parking and say his name over the buzzer and still be standing on the doorstep by the time I got down to the foyer, and lift those gentle eyes as I unlocked the latch, and wear baldly, on his face, his need for me, and grab me and kiss me, right there, in front of the world.

  I could ask how he could kiss me like that and then leave me.

  Instead, I shimmy the cotton drape off my shoulders. “Can’t you tell,” I say in a fake boozy voice, “that I’m trying to seduce you?” He cracks up. That’s when I put my hand on his arm quick enough to scald him. I tilt my head to the side, as if to say, but seriously, all joking aside, “Couldn’t you take me to see Sarah tomorrow, so I can bring her a slice of her bread?”

  88

  I was on my second folding of the twelve loaves, which was no small feat. My wrists ached. My arms were caked. Beside me, Sarah clapped together black bean burgers from a 117-ounce can, adding in some molding oats and almond flour that Gabby had traded for a hen. Nora played with a corn-husk dolly at our feet.

  “Couldn’t we make a sauce?” The bean patties would be the consistency of hockey pucks. “Aioli—we could use eggs.”

  Sarah tut-tutted. “An indulgence.”

  The screen door yawned open. Abraham’s tall form was a dark figure against the outside. His head was low. His shoulders sagged. He loped across the length of the Main Lodge. Sarah had her back turned but my hands stopped at the sight of him and rested on the butcher block. Into the kitchen he came, fumbling for the radio, flipping the dial until there was a fuzzy voice at the other end.

  “—reports that the boy was armed but on the family’s private land, and only approached the FBI after they shot and killed the family dog. We go to our correspondent on the scene in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, from affiliate station—”

  “Ring the dinner bell.” Abraham’s long finger pointed down to the little girl.

  “But it’s not dinnertime.”

  “Now.”

  Sarah pulled Nora up and patted her out the door. Soon the bell was clanging, on and on, much longer than for any meal. The Homesteaders crushed into the lodge, curious, afraid.

  The report was over by then. Abraham held
up his hands.

  “Yesterday the FBI murdered a boy on his family’s land in Idaho. Land like this land. Land where this family had made their homestead.” Dog trotted into the Main Lodge at Nora’s side. Gabby caught him by the neck to move him back to the door, but Abraham called him with a tap. “Except apparently it wasn’t private enough for the FBI. They’ve been camped out there for weeks. Snipers in the woods.” Our eyes followed Abraham’s finger as it peppered the trees.

  “The family dog found the FBI’s hideout. Those monsters didn’t think twice about shooting him dead.” Beside Abraham, Dog’s bubble-gum tongue spattered drool onto the wooden floor. “The boy came down the land to save his dog, and they didn’t think twice about killing him either. A little boy. When his mother heard the gunshots, she opened her door. She was holding her baby in her arms. Well, those snipers didn’t think twice about killing her either. Shot that mother right out from under her baby.” He looked at Teresa, holding Tomas.

  “I’ll say it again. This was on a family’s private land, a land they simply wanted to protect. Land they were legally allowed to be on. Land like ours. Now the rest of the family is holed up in their home. There are more kids up there, in the cabin. You think the FBI has backed off?” Abraham’s voice trembled. Butterfly cut through the room then, and wrapped her arms around Abraham, the long flush of her hair slipping over his face as he buried his face into her. He wept. It wasn’t hard to believe there were snipers out in our woods, too, lying in wait.

  “That family you’re defending? They’re white supremacists,” said a voice in the crowd.

  Abraham lifted his eyes, brow furrowed. The Homesteaders parted. It was Marta standing there.