Kat peered up at the sky, too. “Darn. Too cloudy,” she tut-tutted.
“Too cloudy for what, checking the stars like a mountain man?” Miranda’s shrill voice echoed off the trees. “Follow the Big Dipper south, then take a left at the giant rock shaped like a fox’s head?”
“Bean, listen to me.” Her mother’s intensity stopped Miranda mid-spiral. “We’re out in forests like this ten times a year.”
“I know, but —”
“You think Uncle Bob does the trailblazing?” Kat said. “He wouldn’t know the North Star from a fairy light.”
“I —”
“You’re usually too busy sulking to notice,” Kat finished, “but I’m actually very, very good at my job.”
Miranda turned, peeling the pine needles off a branch, one by one. If you’re so good at your job, why haven’t you ever found anything real? Unbidden, she thought of the day they’d spent at the reservoir, the giant branch that wasn’t a branch, the smell of dirty feathers in the air. “Okay, then,” she said after a deep breath. “What do you suggest?”
“I know you want a step-by-step game plan, Bean,” Kat said, “but I need to think for a second.”
The sweat on Miranda’s neck and back had dried cold. She untied her windbreaker from around her waist and put it on. But it was thin and drafty, and the forest was deep and long and cold. She rubbed her hands along her arms, trying to warm them through the nylon, trying not to think of the sweatshirt draped across her seat in the Critter Mobile. Or her sleeping bag at the campsite, or the extra blankets she’d packed.
As she gave her mother time and space to think, the bear resurfaced in her mind, pacing — its shining eyes, its growls, its stinky, oily musk. Where was it now? How long until it finally smelled them out? She strained her ears, and suddenly a thousand noises were magnified around her. Noises she couldn’t identify. A hoot — was that an owl? Or a giant owlet? And was that the breeze rustling in the leaves, or the sound of something chewing?
“All right,” Kat said. “This is what we’re going to do: We’re going to wait.”
“Wait?” Miranda said. “For what?”
“We’re going to climb up into that tree,” Kat pointed, her plastic bracelets clacking together, “and stay there until the clouds move.”
“So that’s your brilliant plan?” Anger sent a flash of fire through Miranda, heating her up. “We perch in the tree like squirrels and wait for the wind to blow?”
“Just until I can see which way to go,” Kat said. “We’ll be back on our Bigfoot hunt in no time.”
Lost in the middle of a national forest with no cell phone service, no car, and no light — and yet her mother still had a singular mind for Bigfoot.
This wasn’t how this evening was supposed to turn out. It was seven o’clock — their schedule had her roasting kabobs right now, her eyes burning from watching the campfire’s flicker. She was supposed to be relishing in the day’s strivings and failures. She was supposed to be counting down to the big moment tomorrow morning when she would finally tell Kat everything. That she knew all about Kat’s money troubles, but everything would be okay, because Miranda had a plan. They would abandon their impossible search for Bigfoot and begin rebuilding.
“Okay,” Miranda said. “We can wait for one hour. But if the clouds don’t change by then, we start walking back . . .” She looked around and chose the direction that looked the most promising. “That way.”
Her mother shook her head. “Absolutely not.”
“I’m the one who printed out the paper map . . .” Miranda started. She wanted so badly to be the one in charge, even though she knew she wasn’t sure, any more than Kat was, where they were.
She was just so used to carrying the weight of responsibility, she couldn’t stand the idea of handing it over to her mother. Surely Kat would drop it.
“We are not walking aimlessly into the trees,” Kat said. “Do you have any idea how big this park is?”
“One thousand four hundred and forty-two square miles,” Miranda said, and Kat laughed — she laughed, and Miranda burned.
“I’m sorry, Bean,” Kat said with a shrug unbefitting someone who was lost among trees and creeks and moss. “I’ve got to put my foot down and be the mom.”
For once, Miranda added in her mind. But she trailed behind her mother to the trunk of a pine where Kat laced her hands together in a cradle. “Here. I’ll give you a boost.”
Begrudgingly Miranda let her mom help her up and settled on the branch. She bunched her windbreaker around herself to little avail — she was freezing. The wind was stronger up here; it bit, and Miranda’s teeth clacked loud as a jackhammer. She was starving, too. And tired. Her legs hurt, her joints still twitching from their impromptu sprint through the trees.
Kat nuzzled next to her, slipping off her capelette and draping it over both of them like a threadbare blanket. The pine’s bark was thick as corkboard, and its needles dug into Miranda’s scalp in a strange head massage.
“They’re moving, Bean.” Kat pointed up to the sky, and sure enough, the clouds were shifting. Not quickly, not enough to produce any stars, but enough to let in a sliver of moonlight, which cast the trees around them in a pale, ghostly shimmer. With the heat of her mother’s body beside her, Miranda’s bones thawed.
Since when had Kat become so . . . sensible? Miranda hated this feeling most of all — feeling needful of her mother.
How long had it been since Kat had packed her a lunch, or washed her laundry? How long had it been since Kat last tucked her in at bedtime? Miranda had been saying good night at the end of the hallway for years. If her mother ever creaked the door open after that to check on her, Miranda always pretended to be asleep; Kat didn’t get to take credit for tucking her in when Miranda put herself to bed. Miranda parented herself.
Her anger flickered back to life. Kat wasn’t being sensible — it was her fault they were in this whole situation!
“You’re not supposed to run from bears,” Miranda said, for the third time that night. Her eyelids drooped, but she forced them open.
Kat shifted. “That wasn’t a bear.”
“Then what was it?” Miranda knew her lines, but she hated saying them.
“That was a werebear.”
“A what?”
“Werebears are like werewolves,” Kat explained, “but they shift into bears during certain times — maybe the moon changes them, too, or some other environmental trigger. There hasn’t been substantial research, and the folklore about them is spotty . . .”
Miranda made a sound in the back of her throat. “Mom, no! That was just a bear. A regular old black bear.”
“His elixir was right there on the table,” Kat said.
“What elixir? What table?” Miranda said.
“On Ranger Pat’s coffee table. Surely you saw it?”
Miranda reimagined the ranger’s lodge, all the details she’d unintentionally gathered. “You mean the Alka-Seltzer?” If she rolled her eyes any harder, she’d fall out of the tree. “He had indigestion!”
“It was the special mix werebears have to drink to keep from transforming,” her mother said. “If they don’t have their nightly cup, they cross over —”
And Miranda, vessel of patience, liar of liars, nearly bubbled over with the truth. All the truth within her, boiling and bursting and ready to flow like lava, like some awakened volcano, over Kat and her weirdness. “Mom?” she said instead. “I’m too tired for this.”
Kat paused. “Okay, Bean.”
Miranda turned onto her other side, the new gasp of air between them making her shiver again. “Wake me when the clouds move.”
Two weeks in Washington, D.C., she recited to herself to take her mind off her frozen fingers. A meet and greet with twelve senators. An all-you-can-eat bagel and schmear buffet. An impressive leadership camp on her résumé for every Ivy League university to see.
Miranda yanked out a hair, picturing the moment when she’d step on
to the plane for the leadership camp; she pictured every detail, every part of the journey away from her mother.
Instead the trees handed her another memory.
A memory of the time Ms. Palmer had caught her pulling her hair once. Right before the election results for student body president were announced, when she plastered a smile on her face to hide the nerves coiling inside her belly like a knot of snakes.
“Bobby pin?” the counselor had asked, her huge brown eyes pinning Miranda to her chair.
“Oh.” Miranda had tucked her hair behind her ears. “No, thanks.”
“Your hair seemed like it was bothering you.” Like Miranda’s hair was a creature capable of pestering, like it was one of her mother’s monsters.
Ms. Palmer didn’t look away. She knew. They both knew that she knew.
But before Miranda could dream up an acceptable excuse, the intercom crackled, and the vice principal shared the big news.
Miranda didn’t clap, or cheer, or jump up and down — she sat on her hands and beamed, basking in the excitement and congratulations around her, ignoring the suspicion radiating from Ms. Palmer like a spotlight.
It was only a matter of time before the counselor would bring it up again, Miranda knew, and she still didn’t know what she would say — how could she explain that sometimes her fingers found their way up to her head, and she didn’t always notice what they were doing until the deed was done? Or how sometimes she felt tight, like an overpacked suitcase trying to buckle shut, and how yanking out a hair made her feel loose and open? How could she explain that sometimes she couldn’t breathe until she felt that little bite of pain that reminded her she was alive?
How could she tell her counselor that the worst moments were when she was alone with her mother?
She yawned. With some force, she pushed this memory out of her mind and went back to the happy daydream of the leadership camp, the White House, the hive of people just like her, buzzing as one, the brightness of her future glowing like the sun.
The clouds shifted again, extinguishing all light. There was no longer any difference between her eyes being open and her eyes being closed.
Five minutes and a dozen hairs later, she was asleep.
The day, the one she should have seen coming — the one she should have smelled as it crept along the sidewalk toward her, beneath the blossoms of the apricot trees and the spring sun, hanging low above her house like a beacon — started out the same as a normal day, with a conversation over breakfast about Bigfoot.
“Two separate sightings in Parley’s Canyon!” Kat poured and sugared her third coffee of the morning, already plotting a route for them down to Utah. “I’m still waiting to hear from Uncle Bob, but I think we’ll meet him in Boise just after sundown . . .”
Cereal sprinkled down from the box, jingling as it hit Miranda’s bowl. “It was a real, corporeal sighting? Not just a shadow?”
“The real deal, Bean. They tried to get their camera, but —”
In her head, Miranda finished the sentence along with her mother: “but by the time they pulled it out, the creature was gone.”
“Maybe we should wait,” she said.
Kat set down her cat mug. “Wait for what?”
Miranda played the diplomat, selecting her words carefully. “Remember last time? We raced off to get to Bozeman and there was nothing. Only footprints — which are exciting,” she hurried, plunked down that word, “but what if this time we wait until we’re really sure? Until we know that we’ll find him?”
“We don’t find Bigfoot, Bean. Bigfoot finds us. All we can do is try to be in the right place at the right time.” She had circled the canyon on her map with her favorite green glitter pen, and Miranda had eaten the rest of her arguments with her cereal. They would be wasted on Kat — once there was an official sighting, reported through the back channels of the cryptozoology community, Kat could listen to little else but that pulse, that thrumming sound in the air — what if, what if, what if?
At least it was Friday. She wouldn’t miss much school if they weren’t driving down to the canyon until later.
Homework from absences had started to stack up like a dammed river. Miranda sometimes felt like she was trying to run on ice, her feet sprinting and sliding and failing to propel her forward, no matter how fast she moved. And with this load of never-ending makeup work came a feeling, a new one that had been showing up more and more lately — a crumbling, a wavering, as if something she thought were made from hard marble was actually sand, and she could feel it disintegrating beneath her.
Something was coming — a wave — and it would crush everything flat.
Perhaps that’s why she smiled and nodded for her mother that morning, because it felt less destructive than arguing.
The humdrum of the normal day filled Miranda like air in a balloon; it buoyed her above those feelings of uncertainty as she went to her classes, where she was praised by her teachers for being right — of course she was right (she had to be right). It buoyed her as she came home after a meeting for student council candidates, prickly with the thrill of the impending election — and then it deflated when she opened her door and found Emma, sitting on her couch next to her mom.
“Bean!” Kat was happy as a puppy with a new rear to sniff. “Finally — where were you?”
“I — I had to stay after.” Miranda couldn’t stop staring — it was like a nightmare come true, the sight of Emma beside her mother. Her friend among the things on the walls, the fossils, the footprints, the rocks and the clutches of hairs and the fragments of bone.
Miranda knew her house was a weird one, but she hadn’t been aware of the extent of its weirdness until Emma was here for contrast.
“Hi.” Emma sounded timid. “I’m sorry I didn’t call — I needed help with a geometry problem and I thought —”
“Don’t be silly!” Kat interrupted. “You’re welcome here anytime.”
How much did she know? Miranda did a quick scan of the living room — Kat hadn’t taken down any photographs or newspaper clippings, hadn’t plopped any of her “evidence” down in Emma’s lap. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe Miranda could get Emma out of this house without hearing the word Bigfoot.
“My math book is in my room,” she said, and meant to go fetch it alone. But her shadow in the hallway had a twin.
Emma was following her.
“There’s a bag of spicy Funyuns in the cupboard!” Kat called after them. “And Capri Suns in the fridge! Rot your teeth!”
When Miranda got to her room, she thought, for half a second, she might be brave enough to do it. To say, “No. You can’t come in here. You’ve already seen too much. Let’s go back to your house where everything is normal and pleasant and cozy, where there aren’t unidentified animal body parts lying next to magnifying glasses on the dining room table, where there aren’t strange speckled eggs in a stale nest in your freezer. Where your mother bakes us cookies and your father cuts your lawn, and we are safe.”
But the courage left her quickly as a wink, and so with a bit of recklessness she pushed open the door.
“Wow,” Emma said.
Miranda replied, weakly, “Yeah.”
If the living room was the cramped, cluttered, oddly decorated habitat of a pair of creature hunters, then Miranda’s bedroom was a shrine to the magical and mysterious.
The posters on the wall were so many, they overlapped each other’s corners, a collage of fanged deep-sea serpents and hippo-shaped horses with bony tusks and red-furred carnivorous bats soaring across a pink moon. TOUCH THE ELEPHANT KILLER! one poster said; HAVE YOU SEEN THE GROOTSLANG? said another.
Aside from the painted and plastered monsters, on her desk there were souvenirs from Miranda’s traverses with her mother: a Maine lobster in a snow globe, a stuffed armadillo, an antlered cuckoo clock, a lava lamp with a teeny-tiny mermaid suspended in its purple goo, at least one thing from everywhere they’d been.
And then Miranda spotted the sha
dow box.
A framed box up on the wall, with a glass front, which contained things no kid would ever expect to find in their best friend’s room:
Strands of coarse brown animal hair, gathered into a clump.
A peculiar set of vertebrae.
Two sets of insect wings, purple as violets, pinned to cardboard.
Souvenirs from her first real creature hunt.
It isn’t that weird, Miranda kept telling herself. Lots of kids liked this stuff — they liked creepy tales about lake monsters and centaurs from mythology and dead mice and live snakes and bugs.
But most kids didn’t have a mother like Kat, she concluded. A mother who not only believed in the stories, but chased after them.
“You have a cat?” Emma pointed to the open window, and Miranda nearly died.
On the windowsill, between the two blue curtains curling in the breeze, was the saucer of milk Miranda had forgotten to put away that morning.
“No.” Kat was behind them now, crunching a Funyun. “No cat. That’s for the fairies.”
“Oh,” was all Emma said, and Miranda knew her well enough to know she was being polite — but she also knew Emma well enough to know that when she twisted the silver ring she wore on her thumb, she was feeling awkward, uncomfortable, searching for words.
Miranda prayed for a natural disaster — earthquake, hurricane, anything to distract from the terrible, terrible awkwardness of this moment.
“Hey, girls, can you come look at something out back? I need your opinion.”
Stay here, Miranda mentally pleaded to Emma, though her eyes never stopped tracing the patterns of the rug beneath them, but then her mother added, “You can come, too, Emma. I need all the help I can get,” and Miranda closed her eyes completely.
Emma followed Miranda’s mother back down the hall, so normal was she, so obedient to heed the parent of the household. Dread collected in Miranda’s stomach. She wished she had cut Kat off before she could invite Emma, wished she had said, “Wait here, I’ll be right back,” and then slammed Emma into her room. Her weird, awful room, yes — but it was safer than letting Emma be anywhere near Kat.
The Bigfoot Files Page 12
