The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  “I only want you,” he said. “Not the others.”

  “But—”

  “I’m not going far. You’ll know where I am.”

  “I don’t know,” I said dubiously.

  “We’ll work everything out. Just you and me.” He smiled. “Say it.”

  “You and me,” I echoed.

  “Good girl. Now help me outside.”

  I nestled against him, his uninjured arm digging into my shoulder. We stumbled together into the soup of evening. The sun had set, the high clouds painted with watercolor hues. We were operating as two halves of a single entity, albeit a lopsided and ungainly one. My brother grunted and swore, his heart thumping in my ear. The ravine looked ominous at this time of day, an absence, a hole in the world. Tucker and I made our way there at a snail’s pace. I could feel the expansion and contraction of his ribs against my cheek. In the twilight, Shady Acres lived up to its name, a patchwork of silk and slate.

  At the edge of the gully, Tucker sat down. It was more like collapsing, his legs folding, a gasp escaping him. The short walk from the trailer had cost him everything. I perched beside him, knotting my hands together anxiously.

  “I want you to stay home from school tomorrow,” Tucker said. “Can you swing that?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Tell Darlene you’re sick. She’ll leave you here alone, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. We’ll have the whole day together. We can figure out everything then.”

  His face was infused with affection. His eyes were the same brown as mine.

  “You’re my favorite,” he said.

  I did not want him to go. As he began his descent into the ravine, sliding down the slope on his backside, controlling his speed with his good hand, his ponytail swinging, his feet skidding, I felt a cry rise in my throat. Tucker did not hear me. He dipped into the pool of shadows, melting away.

  7

  My sisters came home a few minutes later. I was seated at the table when I heard car wheels in the driveway. I ran outside and plowed into Darlene, my face in her belly, my arms around her hips. She gave a dry cackle.

  “What the heck?” she said. “You never hug me.”

  “I like you,” I said.

  She rumpled my hair. “I like you too, wild thing.”

  I pulled away and looked up at her. At once, I could tell that she was suffering from one of her migraines. I knew the signs—unnatural pallor, a tautness around the eyes, her shoulders rounded. My heart sank. I should, perhaps, have expected this. Darlene was getting her period, which often triggered a migraine. She and Jane were synced up; one week of every month was always fraught. My sisters’ moods would clash in midair like the shifting winds and static electricity of a thunderstorm. Sometimes there were quarrels, sometimes shared crying jags about puppies on TV. This was what I had to look forward to. In a few years, I would join the coven.

  Jane was already crashing into the house. Darlene followed sluggishly. She kicked off her shoes and set her bag down on the table.

  “Y’all can get your own dinner, right?” she said.

  “Does popcorn count?” I said.

  “Tonight? Sure.”

  She peeled off her pantyhose and tugged her skirt down, showing none of her customary modesty, too tired to bother with her robe. She shook her hair out of its ponytail. There was a dent in the dark mane where the rubber band had been. Jane flopped onto the couch, still dressed in her smelly shin guards. I hovered in the middle of the room, feeling as though wings were beating in my chest.

  Darlene removed her glasses and rubbed her temples. “I’m going to go sleep in y’all’s bed for a while,” she said. “Get me up when you’re ready to hit the hay.”

  “All right,” Jane said, her gaze on her phone.

  I watched Darlene disappear into the bedroom. She flicked off the light and shut the door.

  Even then, I understood on some level that my fate had just been sealed. If Darlene had been herself that night—alert and wary—she would have noticed that something was amiss. She would have turned her attention to me, her gaze as bright and unsparing as a bare bulb in a police interrogation room. She would have wormed the truth out of me—about Tucker, about everything. She would have stopped what I could already feel was coming.

  Instead, I spent the evening on the couch with Jane, sharing a bowl of popcorn. As I got myself a soda, as I changed into my rocket ship pajamas, as I leaned against my sister’s shoulder, I felt as twitchy as a fawn in the forest. I had a secret. I had never had a secret before. It was on the tip of my tongue, taking up all the room in my brain, cupped in both my empty hands. My voice sounded odd to my own ears. Beyond the window, my fire was still burning in the Avilas’ garbage can, pale smoke trickling upward.

  I glanced around the trailer. There were no photographs of Tucker here. Every snapshot of him was hidden away. Mama and Daddy were framed on the kitchen counter, smiling in their wedding outfits. My sisters and I were displayed on the fridge—grinning in school pictures or posing with our arms looped awkwardly around one another—but Tucker was entirely absent. If you walked into No. 43 unawares, you wouldn’t know that we ever had a brother.

  Jane changed the channel to a cop show. She glanced up from the little screen in her hands to the big one across the room every time there was gunfire. She announced that the show was too violent for me but did not turn it off. In the distance, the cicadas sang with renewed intensity, a nerve-jangling, rhythmic screeching. The moon wrapped itself in the curtains. Somewhere far off, a coyote howled, a guttural cry, pleading but unanswered.

  As the night wore on, I found myself transported by recollections. Contact with Tucker had dredged hidden things to the surface. These memories were powerful, displacing what I was actually seeing, shoving Jane and her cell phone into the periphery. I remembered dancing with Tucker, standing on his feet as he pivoted and twirled, the music loud. This was an encounter from three years ago—post-tornado, pre-abandonment. I had been small enough then that my head did not reach his waist. His hands guided me as confidently and irresistibly as a puppeteer.

  I remembered sitting with Tucker in a lobby. We were waiting for Darlene to finish an interview. He was spinning a story about the two of us on a journey in an enchanted kingdom. Though he was plainly making it up as he went along—every now and then pausing for inspiration or correcting himself, “No, we didn’t go that way after all . . .”—he spoke with such assurance that even now, I still remembered his tale. Surrounded by the buzz of fluorescent lights and the stale taste of uncirculated air, Tucker and I were gone—climbing a mountain, fording a river, charming a dragon, mapping a deep forest, and finding a happy ending, relying only on our wits and each other. I had been young enough then to step inside a game of make-believe and shut the door behind me. Tucker transported me from our world to another, better place.

  Perhaps I was still young enough. Perhaps I was being transported now.

  The news came on. A female announcer appeared, standing in front of the familiar sight of the cosmetics factory. She had skin like amber and a braid made up of tinier braids.

  “Breaking news,” she said.

  Jane set her phone aside, gazing at the TV with curiosity. The announcer touched her ear, then nodded and spoke to the camera. Her languid drawl suggested she was from somewhere farther south than Mercy. Louisiana, maybe.

  “The police have enhanced the surveillance video,” she said. “They now have a workable sketch to share with the public. Please be on the lookout for this man. He may be armed and should be considered extremely dangerous. If you see him, do not engage with him. Dial the hotline shown here and wait for assistance.”

  A drawing flashed on the screen. Even before I registered what I was seeing, I felt a frisson of fear. I might have moaned aloud, but Jane did not notice. She was frowning at the TV, one hand twirling a lock of her hair.

  The man in the
picture was Tucker. Of course it was Tucker. His prominent brow. His broad jaw with the dimple at the front. His ponytail of lazy curls. It was a pen-and-ink sketch, skillfully rendered, showing my brother’s face tilted at a three-quarter angle, his mouth in a determined jut, his expression defiant.

  If I had been older, I would have figured out the truth much earlier. But I was only nine. I had not yet asked myself how and why Tucker had been so badly injured. In the manner of a child, I was still busy with the essential revelation that he was home. I certainly had not made a connection between the recent news story and Tucker, between an injured man on the loose and my injured brother, between the blood found at Jolly Cosmetics and the blood in our bathroom.

  My breath turned fast and shallow. To my eyes, it was obviously a sketch of Tucker, but I was not sure whether the resemblance would have occurred to me if I had not seen him just a few hours earlier. Some of the details were off. In the drawing, the man’s neck was slender, whereas Tucker’s was muscular. The man’s eyes were scrunched and aggressive, whereas Tucker’s were wide and watchful. The man’s eyebrows were atilt, whereas Tucker’s were straight across. Still, the artist had captured the gist of him.

  A band seemed to constrict around my chest. Jane gazed at me in consternation as a wheeze escaped me.

  “For heaven’s sake!” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  I did not break down. I did not cry. I did not tell her anything. I waited for the agitation to pass through me like an earthquake, the vibration dancing across the length of my small body. Jane turned off the TV. There was no other light in the room. Shadows pooled around us. The moon was hidden, the cicadas finally silent for the night. We had outlasted them.

  “Enough TV for you, young lady,” Jane said.

  Through tacit agreement, we decided not to wake Darlene and kick her out of our bed. Jane tunneled beneath the covers, and I folded my body against her. Darlene rolled closer to the wall to make room for us. That night—my last night at home—my sisters and I slept crushed together, not an inch of space between us.

  8

  When I reached the ravine, I heard a rustle at the bottom. My brother climbed out of the thicket, grinning up at me with twigs in his hair.

  Tucker was not dead. I had been afraid of this—awful injuries, no medical attention, a night spent in a ditch. I had imagined insects crawling on him, making nests in his hair.

  “Took you long enough,” he said.

  He scrabbled toward me, wincing but climbing fast, a hint of his previous athleticism visible in his movements. The gulch was filled with brambles and vines, scratching him with thorns and stuccoing his clothes with nettles. The sun was low in the sky, hidden behind a swatch of filmy cloud. The cicadas were just waking up, chiming here and there. Their discordant song was not yet at full throttle.

  “Where’s my breakfast?” Tucker said.

  In the trailer, he consumed a box of frozen waffles. He emptied the syrup and finished the butter. He scrambled a dozen eggs and ate them all. He complained that there was no bacon. He told me to do the dishes, and then he told me not to bother. He turned on the TV, switched it off, and reached for the radio. When a country song came on, he flipped the dial all the way to the right and sang along in a voice as rough and sweet as brown sugar. He mimed a two-step dance move on his good foot. He was not yet at full strength; pain flickered across his face. But he was well enough to take a shower without my assistance, cursing beneath the hiss of water. He was well enough to change his own bandages, though I helped him tape up his hand. He was well enough to root through Darlene’s closet for a better outfit, standing with a towel around his waist, his long hair dripping down his bare back. It was delicious to look at him, and a little painful, like eating too much birthday cake. Finally he unearthed a novelty shirt from the state fair large enough to fit him. He found a pair of plastic flip-flops that could accommodate his feet.

  At last, he led me to the couch, sitting down with a lurch and a grimace. His injured hand was curled in his lap, blood mottling the gauze.

  “I saw you on the news,” I said.

  The words came out in a rush. I found that I could not look directly at him.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “You blew up the cosmetics factory.”

  I was not sure how he would respond. On some level, I was hoping he would deny everything.

  Instead, Tucker laughed. With his good hand, he reached out and squeezed my fingers.

  “Awesome,” he said. “I was on the news. Man, I wish I could’ve seen it. My fifteen minutes of fame, and I spent the whole thing in a ditch.”

  “I don’t understand . . .” I could not find the right words. Perhaps there were no right words for this situation.

  “You can ask me anything,” Tucker said. “No secrets here.”

  “Did you really make a pipe bomb?”

  “Yes. Actually, I made three.”

  I kept my gaze locked on our intertwined fingers. The pressure of his grip increased, crushing my hand like a flower in a press.

  “I cut the pipe myself,” he said. “Then I went to a shooting range and gathered up some of the gunpowder off the floor. That’s the best method. It’s not specific to a particular brand. It doesn’t leave clues.”

  At last, I managed to meet his eyes. There was no shame or regret in his expression.

  “Did you feel the explosion?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “The ground shook.”

  “I thought I had the timing of the fuses figured out,” he said. “Three simultaneous blasts.” He let go of me, stroking his bandages. “One of them went off early. That’s how I got hurt. I’ll get it right next time.”

  “Next time?”

  “Sure. My work isn’t done. Not by a long shot.”

  The light in the room changed. Clouds were scudding across the sky, creating rhythms of gloom and glow. The sun threaded bright ribbons through Tucker’s hair. For a moment I experienced an eerie illusion of mirroring. From this angle, with that gleam on his cheek, there was a powerful resemblance between us.

  “Three years after the tornado,” he said. “Three years to the day. It was perfect, don’t you think?”

  I did not answer. I was experiencing a collision of irreconcilable emotions, horror and gut-wrenching love and slow anger splashing and caroming off one another.

  “But the bomb wasn’t the important part, Cora,” he said. “I freed all the animals. Every bunny and dog. You heard about that, right? It was on the news too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said. “I looked into Jolly Cosmetics after they poisoned our whole neighborhood. That place is evil. So many rats. You should have seen the state they were in. A few had been intentionally blinded. Some had their fur shaved off, and the bare skin was covered in hives and boils. The scientists were using beagles for their experiments, too. Do you know why?” He did not pause for a response. “Beagles are so sweet tempered that you can do pretty much anything to them and they won’t turn on you. Shoot them full of poison or amputate a limb. They never get mean, even when they’re dying. They’ll still wag their tails when they see you coming. It makes it easier on the researchers, you see.”

  His voice was hard. He was glaring into the middle distance as though seeing something I could not. The sunlight shifted again, bisecting his face, illuminating his cheekbone. Now he resembled Darlene.

  “I learned that a while ago,” he said. “Jolly Cosmetics had a whole wing filled with hound dogs. It haunted me.”

  “Oh.”

  “There was a chimpanzee,” he said. “Can you imagine? I didn’t know that beforehand. Those animals are sentient. No one to help her.”

  Tucker glanced around the room as though he had forgotten where he was. He rolled both shoulders backward, working out the kinks in his muscles.

  “One day I’ll explain everything,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said.

/>   “Do you have a suitcase?”

  “What?” I said, thrown by the change of subject.

  “A duffel bag or something. To pack your stuff.”

  I frowned, trying to gather my wits. I was unsuccessful.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, a slow sigh.

  The sun winked out, leaving a cold, sleepy pall. Tucker fingered his hair, which was loose, drying in untidy ringlets.

  “I haven’t told you the plan yet, have I?” he said.

  “No.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Nine,” I said. “You?”

  “Twenty.”

  In one smooth movement, he tugged his hair into a topknot at the back of his head. I waited for him to secure it with a rubber band, but he didn’t. His mahogany mane was thick and curly enough to cling to itself like velcro.

  “There’s a connection between us, isn’t there?” he said. “Always has been.”

  I nodded.

  “You remember the night we snuck out and went to find the horses?”

  “I think about it all the time,” I said shyly.

  “Me too. Remember how the horses came right up to us like they knew us? Remember how I carried you all the way home?”

  “I remember,” I said.

  He was watching me steadily, a grin hovering around his mouth. A single brown curl detached from his bun and twisted across his cheek.

  “I want you to come with me,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere.”

  He swept a hand toward the wall, an expansive gesture. Then he laughed, a brash, bright sound. In that moment, I had a sense of wild motion, as though I were caught up in another tornado, a current of air too powerful to resist.

  “I’ve got plans,” he said. “I’ve taken the first step. I freed the animals and I blew the place up. I marked the day.”