The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  The driver grunted and pivoted back to face the street. The taxi accelerated. Darlene leaned her cheek against the cool glass of the window. California unspooled before her, a jewelry store, a movie theater, a pet shop. The warthog was gone. She saw an impatient woman pushing a stroller. She saw a man staring so intently at his cell phone that he nearly walked into a fire hydrant. She saw a child holding a balloon.

  For the first time, Darlene felt a stab of sympathy for Tucker. She had the luxury of sympathy, now that he was a body beneath a sheet. He could not harm anyone anymore. Soon he would be cremated, reduced to particles. Tucker was free of the addled, unregulated state he had endured for so long.

  Maybe it all came back to the tornado. Maybe everything, in the end, came back to the tornado. Darlene wondered whether the storm transfigured her brother—shattering his temperament and reforming the shards into a new structure—or whether it had merely been a catalyst for a tendency already inside him. She would never be certain. Maybe the seeds of instability were present in his brain since birth, lying dormant, awaiting the right trigger to flourish. If it had not been the tornado, it would have been something else. Perhaps Tucker was always destined to chase wildness.

  But it was also possible that he would have grown up normal and sane if the finger of God had skipped over Mercy that day. Perhaps the tornado had infused him with something of its own essence—its relentless motion, its unpredictability, its capacity for destruction. Darlene pictured the funnel cloud roaring through Tucker’s mind, scattering the elements of his personality across the landscape, leaving only chaos in its wake.

  45

  Cora and Jane were asleep in the hospital bed. Darlene paused in the doorway, struck by the loveliness of the image—her sisters sharing a pillow. The lack of expression in their faces made them look more alike; Darlene could see the similarity in the shape of their mouths, the dead-straight brow line and small oyster-shell ears. They did not stir as she set down her purse.

  Roy was watching the TV on mute, lounging in an armchair. Darlene noticed a few empty coffee cups on the table beside him. He motioned her over with a wave, and she sank gratefully into his lap. As usual, his body radiated heat. A human furnace. He stroked her hair.

  “It was Tucker,” she murmured.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Was it awful?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You should have let me come with you.”

  Darlene shrugged. “It’s over.”

  The hospital room was as blank as a blown egg. The walls were white, the door white, the blinds white and always a little askew, regardless of how much Darlene fiddled with the cords. The window gave onto a brick wall coated with ivy. Darlene readjusted her position in Roy’s lap. She gazed across the room at Cora’s still figure.

  It was blind luck that her sister had been found. Yesterday morning, a passerby came across Tucker lying in an alley—a puddle of blood and flesh—and called an ambulance. The EMTs arrived quickly, but several hours too late to help him.

  Then they noticed a dumpster on its side, one corner dented in, claw marks scored into the metal. They decided to investigate. This simple, offhand choice saved Cora’s life. Darlene shivered, imagining her sister hidden among the garbage bags. How easy it would have been for the paramedics to overlook her little body.

  At first the EMTs thought she was dead too.

  Cora was unconscious when she was admitted to the emergency room. A contusion on her forehead. Three cracked ribs. A fever of 106.3. Pulse erratic and thready. She was diagnosed with pneumonia and a double ear infection. The latter had caused a rupture in her right eardrum. In addition, the bloody gum from a lost baby tooth had not been properly cleaned or tended, which led to a severe infection in her jaw. Eventually, when Cora was stronger, this would require surgery. She was badly malnourished and dehydrated. All in all, she was fortunate to have survived.

  Darlene took a steadying breath. She reminded herself that Cora was in stable condition now, though her appearance was still a shock. She was hooked up to an IV and a refrigerator-sized apparatus that monitored her vital signs. Heavily medicated. Warm beneath a blanket. Painfully skinny. There was a knot on her temple, a flowering bruise. Her hair had been chopped away in uneven shards that were just beginning to curl at the tips. Her upper arms were thinner than her elbows. Her skin was tattooed all over by fresh welts and scratches.

  Darlene closed her eyes, leaning against Roy’s chest. He began to massage her shoulders, kneading a little too hard. She winced but said nothing; it seemed petty to critique a generous impulse.

  “Hey,” he said. “Look at that.”

  She glanced up at the TV, bolted to the wall at a height that did not suit anyone. She reached for the remote control to turn up the volume, then threw a glance back at her sisters. Jane’s arm was visible above the blanket, the golden snake of her braid twining past her elbow. Cora’s body was so slight that she scarcely made a bulge beneath the white coverlet. Darlene could hear her pneumonia in each raspy, bubbling snore.

  She set the remote control aside. On TV, a newscaster mouthed something. Then an image of an elephant appeared, its ears flared and trunk raised. The animal seemed to be trundling between lanes of traffic toward an intersection.

  Darlene sat up straighter. The elephant’s haunches towered over the cars on either side. Its ears were ragged around the edges, as though they had been hemmed inexpertly. Something in its posture suggested youth and energy, though its age was obscured by ill-fitting folds of charcoal skin, etched with lattices of wrinkles. To Darlene, all elephants looked ancient. The animal seemed to be in a footrace with a city bus, moving at a quick clip, its tail swinging and trunk erect.

  “Damn,” Roy said.

  A series of pictures flashed across the screen. Animal after animal, all of them in places they had no reason to be. An arctic fox sat onboard a trolley, a whorl of milky fur, hackles raised and teeth bared. A python lurked beneath a mailbox, its curves folded into a puddle of flesh. A group of kangaroos forded the highway, bringing the traffic to a halt. Most of the animals were out of focus, photographed in midleap, but one large male reared up on his hind legs and boldly turned to face the camera. It was disconcerting to see how anthropomorphic his figure appeared in that pose. He might have been a trickster god—a sinister, playful amalgamation of traits both human and animal: a man’s shoulders, a woman’s hips, lush chocolate fur, a long equine nose, his ears cupped forward, his eyes dusted with heavy lashes. His hands were perhaps the most startling part of him. Leathery monkey paws adorned by cruel, curved talons. Each claw was as long as its finger.

  “I saw a warthog earlier,” Darlene said. “Big as life in the middle of the road.”

  “Jesus,” Roy said.

  Then a cell phone video began to play on TV. The quality was poor, the image pixelated. Darlene rubbed her eyes behind her glasses and squinted up at the screen. The background seemed to be a public library. A group of children sat in a circle as a woman read aloud from a picture book. There were rows of metal shelves and a cart laden with plastic-wrapped tomes. The video joggled, then refocused on one of the small upturned faces, a nut-brown girl with a plump rosebud mouth. She was chewing on the end of her braid, captivated by the book. Story time at the library. A loving parent filming from the sidelines.

  Then a shape flitted across the screen—a man running. The camera swung. For a moment, the motion and blur were too chaotic for Darlene to follow what was happening. Roy grabbed her knee, digging in his fingernails.

  A lion inside the library. The camera framed the animal, and whoever was filming it froze. A faint shudder suggested a hand quaking with fear. The beige wall offered surprisingly good camouflage. The image slid mechanically in and out of focus. No mane. A female. Golden eyes. The cat’s shoulders were hunched in a predatory stance, her tail swiveling. She was stalking the children on the rug.

  “No no no,” Darlene whispered.

  A
woman’s silhouette appeared, too far away to show up as more than a bulky figure in a long skirt. A quick-witted librarian. She darted toward a red box on the wall and did something with her hand. The TV was still muted, but Darlene assumed that the woman had pulled the fire alarm.

  The reaction was immediate. The cat checked in midstride, one paw floating above the carpet. She flattened her ears in obvious concern. Her control over her own musculature was immaculate; she became rigid from snout to tail. By contrast, the children leapt up from their places around the circle. They started to holler and dance, reacting to the excitement of the alarm. None of them noticed the predator among the stacks twenty feet away.

  The lion turned and slunk off. Shielded behind a metal cart, she paused just long enough to shake the tension out of her flesh. Her stride changed, no longer taut and determined, becoming brisk and businesslike. She padded across the carpet with the lightness and insouciance of a house cat heading off to find a favorite napping spot. The video shuddered to a halt on a single frame: an image of the lion’s narrow haunches and tufted tail gliding away between the stacks.

  The newscaster reappeared on the screen. Seated behind a desk, he mouthed sternly at the camera again. Darlene scanned the man’s face and deduced that the lion had not harmed anyone.

  Roy seemed to come to the same conclusion.

  “Close call,” he said.

  “Too close,” she said.

  All at once, she could not bear to take in any more information. She fumbled for the remote control and switched the TV off.

  Cora rolled beneath her blanket, coughing damply. Darlene watched her until she grew still again. A tube curled out of the hollow of her sister’s arm, attached to a bag hanging from a rack above her. The fluid seeped constantly into her body, rehydrating her. The nurses used the IV port to inject additional drugs—the antibiotics and painkillers that left Cora too sleepy to move. It would be a while before she could have solid foods. Right now, she was eating and drinking through her blood and peeing into a tube, another translucent bag that the nurses kept examining and changing out. Cora’s ribs were bandaged. The knot on her brow was multicolored, melding from green to orange to purple like a kindergartener’s attempt at finger painting. There was a deep gash on her cheek, another on her palm. Her eyes were sunken.

  Darlene looked away. It broke her heart to consider how little she knew about what had happened to Cora—how little she might ever know. Gone for months. A wide-open landscape. A summer wind heavy with the smell of rain.

  Darlene imagined her brother and sister on a dirt road, strolling unhurriedly, both carrying bindles like hobos on TV. She pictured them hopping aboard a freight train, waiting until the engine hit a curve and slowed down, the wheels shuddering, the brakes screeching in protest, Tucker flinging Cora’s little body onto the bed of a boxcar and clambering up after her, both of them tumbling onto their backs, breathless. Darlene imagined them sleeping in fields and lonely barns, cushioned on bales of hay. Stealing food for their supper. Breaking into other people’s kitchens to swipe a loaf of bread or a jug of milk. She was aware that her imagination was somewhat muddled—a mixture of old movies and childhood chapter books—but the picture was so clear in her mind that it felt true.

  Yet it wasn’t true, because of the violence. Two counts of arson, some petty vandalism, one murder, and the assault on the Pacific Zoo—and those were just the things Darlene knew about. For the hundredth time, she wondered about her sister’s level of involvement. Multiple witnesses had mentioned seeing a child at the various crime scenes. Had Cora been Tucker’s righthand girl, helping him of her own volition? Had she converted to the cause, a true believer in his two-person cult, a child soldier in his war? Or had she merely been there in the background? Watching against her will, refusing to participate, present only because she had no other choice?

  Cora no longer looked like a boy. The doppelgänger who stole a candy bar and appeared in stark black and white on that long-ago security footage was slipping away, replaced by a child who was neither here nor there. In her slow, terrible healing, Cora inhabited a liminal state that affected every aspect of her poor little body: neither sick nor well, neither awake nor sleeping, neither male nor female.

  Eventually Cora would be well enough to answer questions, but Darlene knew better than to expect anything comprehensive from a traumatized nine-year-old. Her sister might be able to address the basics (who, what, where), but the more intricate concepts (how, why) would elude her. She might never be able to fully articulate what happened during her time away. She might not want to.

  More than anything, Darlene wondered how her brother ended up dead in an alley, her sister unconscious in a dumpster. But this, above all, would have to remain a mystery. When Tucker died, Cora was already feverish and delirious, perhaps even unconscious. Surely she had not seen what happened to him. Surely.

  Maybe Tucker tried to play dead. Maybe he flapped his arms, making himself seem bigger. The coroner had listed the cause of death as blood loss. Hemorrhagic shock. Some animal tore Tucker apart; the attack was so violent that half his leg ended up severed in the gutter. Darlene could not imagine a worse way to die.

  She did not know what kind of creature killed her brother. An apex predator—Tucker taught her this term. Once, long ago, he had explained the Trophic Scale. Eventually the coroner would be able to match the bite marks and offer a definitive answer. A tiger, perhaps, or a grizzly bear. All teeth and claws and instinct.

  Darlene didn’t blame the animal. At least it did not eat Tucker’s flesh. At least it left Cora alone afterward. Darlene suspected that the beast was neither hungry nor hunting. It was probably lost and scared, under tremendous strain, out of its element, loose in a brand-new realm of unfamiliar smells and sounds. It perceived her brother as a threat—which, of course, he was—and in the manner of its kind, the animal dispatched him, brutally and efficiently, without conscience or compunction.

  46

  Over the next few days, Darlene did not sleep much. Roy found an inexpensive hotel a few blocks away from the hospital and took two rooms, one for Jane and one for him and Darlene to share. He scoped out the local restaurants. He urged Darlene to take breaks, to go for a walk or visit the beach. He reminded her that Cora was in the best possible hands. They should see something of California, he said. Her presence would not make her sister heal any faster, he said.

  Still, Darlene remained at Cora’s side. She shooed Roy and Jane off to the hotel each evening, then slept upright in an armchair. The hospital was always busy. Nurses bustled in and out of Cora’s room at all hours, checking her temperature, listening to her lung function, and making illegible marks on her chart. There was little natural light in the room; the only window faced the wall of another wing of the hospital. Darlene could never see the sun. At night, the fluorescent lights in the corridor dimmed, but the flurry of activity was unabated. Mechanical noises floated down the hall. The nurses would examine Cora’s IV and cluck their tongues. After a week, it became necessary to move the needle to her other arm. The caustic medication had eaten away at her vein, leaving a messy green bruise.

  All the while, beneath the TV, the buzz of the overhead lights, and the footsteps in the hall, Cora breathed. The wet, hoarse rhythm filled the room like a tide. Darlene felt herself drifting back and forth on the current. She watched her sister shift in her sleep. Cora often brushed at her own face, flicking away her straggling, uneven locks. Now and then she muttered, “Where’s Tucker?” She never stayed awake long enough to get an answer.

  Gradually Darlene learned the layout of the hospital. She knew which staircase led to the roof and which alley the nurses used for their smoke breaks. She visited the tiny office where a witchy woman—her kindly disposition belied by her ferocious eyebrows—explained the complexities of Medicaid.

  More than once, it occurred to Darlene that this could have been her life. Long ago, in another phase of her existence, she planned o
n becoming a nurse too. She had imagined herself far from Mercy, working in a hospital like this one, shiny and sterile, filled with state-of-the-art equipment. She had pictured herself caring for people in need, people in danger, people like Cora.

  Yet it was impossible to feel regret just now. Indeed, with Tucker gone and her baby sister within arm’s reach, Darlene was almost at peace.

  Most mornings Roy turned up just after dawn, bearing coffee and breakfast. Sometimes he brought Jane with him, sometimes not; she was apparently reveling in the glamour of being in California, staying in her own room at a hotel where the outdoor pool had a view of the ocean.

  On the tenth day of their visit, Roy strode through the door and handed Darlene a newspaper without comment. Cora slept in a thicket of shadows. Roy took a seat and pulled out his phone. Darlene could smell the musk of his skin, untempered now by the stench of cigarettes.

  She unfolded the newspaper and spread it open across her lap. Every article was about the zoo, of course. On the front page, a vulture rode atop a city bus, perched above the windshield like a hood ornament, its bald head gleaming in the sunshine as it commuted downtown. In another snapshot, a pack of wolves prowled in black and white across a tennis court, their haggard forms blurred against the netting.

  As Darlene read, she tallied up the numbers. In all, one hundred and eleven animals had been released. Forty-two cages opened. Three security guards fired. Hundreds of thousands of dollars would have to be spent to repair the damage, collect the animals, and make the public feel safe again. The assault on the Pacific Zoo would go down in history as the worst account of environmental activism on American soil.

  So far, there was only one human casualty.

  Tucker’s name had not yet been mentioned. Roy was instrumental in this, acting as the family’s liaison with the police, and by proxy, the media. He spent hours on his phone most afternoons, gesturing and holding forth. Darlene was vaguely aware that he had taken more than a few meetings around the city, speaking on her behalf, protecting her. Every few days, the police would release another official statement, doling the story out in careful increments. Piece by piece, they offered enough information to sate the media while withholding the perpetrator’s identity. For now.