Miranda watched the flicker of the flames against the dirt. It was funny. The harder she tried not to think of something, the sharper it formed in her mind — and the more a dozen other things just like it splintered off, memories glowing bright like a tree strung with lights, each branch searing —
“Just grew out of it.” She paired her answer with a shrug, and hoped her mother wouldn’t see the way her eyes blinked extra blinks, her hands tugged on her fingers.
It wasn’t a complete lie. Even before the catastrophe with Emma, the doubts had been boring holes, eating her heart from the inside out. Her box of dress-ups had grown dusty long before they’d grown too small. Her stuffed animals had long been retired to the basement, her bookshelf rotated — mythologies and fairy tales weeded out, replanted with simple novels and useful books like atlases and history. Books grounded in reality.
“You really don’t think there’s a Bigfoot?” Kat’s voice was tiny. A little girl speaking.
Miranda couldn’t believe it — this was it.
The conversation she’d been waiting to have, the moment she’d been building toward this entire weekend, and her mother had just unlocked the door and swung it open.
All Miranda had to do was to walk through.
But Kat’s voice . . . that little-girl Kat speaking, that music box melody of wistfulness in her words — Miranda’s appetite for being right weakened. Her need to shatter everything Kat believed in waned and quieted as she looked across the fire at her mother.
“I’m not sure,” she said gently. “If there is a Bigfoot, I’ll need a lot more proof — not footprints, not stray hairs, not shadows. Something real. Something scientific.”
That word again. If.
She’d said if.
Miranda was not supposed to be saying if.
“You know how sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night,” she said, “and you think you see a monster in your closet? But then you turn on the light, and you see that it’s just a sweater, draped over a chair.”
Kat said nothing, but kept listening.
“When it’s dark again, it’s hard to see the monster. Because now you know the truth. Now you know it’s a sweater — and no matter how much you want to, you can’t make yourself see it for anything but what it really is. You can’t make yourself believe.”
Kat pressed her lips together, but still didn’t say anything. She poked at a flame-eaten log, and it collapsed into ash.
The howl came again. Miranda snuggled close to her mother and ran her hands along the sleeves of her windbreaker.
What if that was a wolf?
What if there’s a whole pack?
What if they come to our clearing in the middle of the night and tear us apart?
“Don’t worry.” Kat saw her daughter’s face. “It won’t bother us.”
And Miranda believed her.
They munched their berries and roots and stared at the fire, Kat prodding it back to full strength whenever it dimmed. Miranda’s head tilted back; above them, the night sky unfolded, glorious without the pollution of the city. The light from the millions and millions of stars in the Milky Way created a faint glowing cloud, hazy pink against the glittering blue.
Eventually Kat broke the silence. “If you didn’t come on this trip to help me find Bigfoot, why did you come? You were pretty upset about missing school.”
To-do list:
Come on Mom’s trip and let her search for evidence
Let her search and search and search and find nothing
Show her the bills
Demand that she answer for them. Demand that she stop the wild goose chase. Demand that she give up Bigfoot and become a new, responsible version of herself with a real job —
“I wanted to be supportive.” Another truth that was also a lie. I won’t let her fall, she’d been telling herself — but she’d wanted to push, hadn’t she? Push her mother until she fell, so that Miranda could catch her.
“What about you?” she asked her mother, shining the attention back on her like a spotlight. “Why’d you let me tag along if you knew I don’t believe?”
Now Kat tilted her head sideways, the closest thing Miranda had ever seen her mother get to being sheepish. “You’re going to get into that leadership camp,” she said, “and be gone for the whole summer. Then in a year, it’s high school. And after that, college. I wanted one last weekend with you, where it was just you and me. Before you are too busy or too — too — not here.”
Miranda’s entire face prickled, her ears burning. Hers was a mother who pulled the ridiculous Critter Mobile to the side of the road in order to climb a giant tree, just because it looked friendly. Hers was a mother who let Miranda — skeptic, doubter, unbeliever — come on a trip of dreams, because she was already missing her, even before she was gone.
And Miranda had come with her so she could open her duffel bag and throw those dreams into the fire and watch them burn.
She suddenly couldn’t stand to be here, sharing a space with her mother — not without imagining how Kat would look when Miranda made her big, cruel, dream-burning move. All this time, she’d expected her mother to thank her. Now, she couldn’t stop picturing that moment with tears. With Kat’s tears.
“I’m thirsty,” she told Kat. “I’m going to go refill the bottle.”
“Don’t wander off,” Kat said, and it was the wrong thing for Miranda to hear her say — the type of thing a responsible mother would say.
Miranda’s hands twitched.
She walked through the mulberry bushes, eyes locked on the silhouette of Mount Draco, silver against the night. Her chest was open and heavy, a thousand stones weighing her down as she knelt at the water’s edge.
Her fingers were supposed to be dipping the bottle into the stream; instead they were in her hair, plucking out strands while she tried to think of some way to fix it all — some way to save them both, save the house, but without having to make her mother turn on the light and see the sweater draped over the chair. Without ever having to see that look on Kat’s face.
What if Kat finds a decent job that pays the bills and keeps creature hunting on the weekends?
What if you let her still have this?
What if you let her still believe?
She could do it. She could find a way to make it work — to make Kat face the music about their financial situation, while still letting her have her monsters. Of course she could. She was Miranda Cho.
And the truth was out now. It felt like a different forest than the one they’d entered on Friday. A different world. Now that Kat knew how Miranda felt about all of it, about Bigfoot and the weekly trips and the cryptozoology work — things could be different. They could live in a different household, one where reality sat at the table. No need to help Mom sort scat samples, no need to pretend to be impressed by a footprint. Kat could indulge in her hobby while Miranda did her homework, studied for tests, applied for college . . .
Just get back to the Critter Mobile, get back to camp, and show Kat the bills.
Then go home and start the new life.
She looked down at the stream, a handful of pale evening stars rippling in the water, and her eyes caught something on the bank.
Something pressed into the damp soil, its outline only visible as the distant light from the campfire flickered across it.
She blinked.
Her entire body seized.
A giant footprint.
Bean? Is everything okay?” Kat pushed through the mulberry bush as Miranda jetted to standing. “You said you’d be right back —”
Before Miranda could block her view, Kat spotted it.
As if she had a radar for this type of thing.
“Is that —?” The violet night reflected in her glasses, making her truly starry-eyed. “Oh, Bean, it is! You’ve done it!”
“It’s just a footprint,” Miranda said when she finally found her voice. Footprints were nothing. So many people had found footprints, ta
ken photos, had plaster molds created. They were nothing.
Not even a footprint larger than any possible human foot, something inside her whispered.
“Hind was elevated when the foot made contact,” Kat murmured as she hunched over it. “Look, here — the mud is deeper here in the middle. That points to a significant flexibility in the midtarsal joint.” She looked at Miranda and stopped. “What?”
Miranda was hypnotized by Kat’s use of words like midtarsal, the way Kat inspected this footprint like it was a readable map. For a moment, she had forgotten who her mother was — forgotten that they’d found footprints just like this every couple of months for the last five years.
No. Not like this.
Calm down, she told herself. This was just another footprint. Another coincidental indent in the mud — it could be anything.
(Not like this.)
The empty imprint where a rock used to be.
(Not like this.)
A hiker who jumped down from a tree and landed, improbably, with one foot directly in front of the other.
(Not like this.)
“A hoax,” Miranda said. Yes, that was it. Some prankster with a mold was leaving prints in the forest, just to play around — that had to be it. What else could it be?
(Not like this.)
Her mother held her hand next to the footprint — it was a kitten’s paw in comparison. “I don’t think so. Dammit! I wish I could put this on the blog.” Her smile was so giddy, her teeth white against the smears of dirt on her cheeks. “Wait here,” she said, “I think I have a tape measure in my cat bag.”
Alone with the footprint, Miranda shivered. Above her, a streak of light pulsed across the dark sky — the world was full of wondrous things, indeed, but not everywhere. Not everything. This was only a hole in the mud, and yet when Kat saw it, she immediately jumped to the most far-fetched, ridiculous conclusion — that this was absolutely created by an eight-foot-tall biped ape hybrid living in the woods.
It was an almost enviable gift, Miranda thought, to be able to see such magic wherever you looked. The more Miranda studied this mud, the more she could see its irregularities, the way the sides of the divot curved up and out, making it look bigger than it actually was.
And yet.
Maybe it was the way the moonlight glinted off the water pooled in the footprint’s heel.
Maybe it was the subtle ridges in the mud, which reminded Miranda of the ridges found on human toes.
Maybe it was the obvious bone spur on the outside of the foot, the strange bulge that told of a life trudging through forests, stomping over logs.
All of it, convincing.
Convince me, she’d said to her mother yesterday by the reservoir.
Please.
Miranda’s heart was a hummingbird now, frantic against the cage of her ribs — no. No, this was never part of the plan.
Finding something like this was never part of the plan.
Miranda’s legs moved. She lifted her boot and sank it deep into the mud, swiveling until only the big toe remained, flooding with water and washing itself away.
There.
Nothing to see.
Nothing to believe.
When Kat came back to the stream, a piece of yarn in her hand to measure the footprint and bring home verification of its length, she stopped when she saw the mud.
“Bean!” Kat crumpled the yarn into a wad. “What did you do?”
Miranda shifted under her scrutiny. “I slipped. I’m sorry!”
She was not sorry. Smashing the footprint felt like a victory, addicting and sweet.
“I know you think I’m chasing air, Miranda, but you ruined one of the most perfectly complete footprints we’ve ever seen.”
“I said I was sorry.” If Miranda couldn’t see it, she didn’t have to think about it. She didn’t have to feel the struggle between her eyes and her brain to reconcile what she’d found here — and it already felt impossible. Comfortably impossible. They were exhausted. The moonlight had been playing tricks on their eyes.
Kat’s nostrils flared. Above, the stars flinched.
Here it comes, Miranda thought. The breaking of the fuse, the fireworks, the battle of the Chos, and this time Miranda was ready. She would win.
Miranda Cho always wins.
But Kat exhaled, and softened. “Try to be more careful, Bean.” With that, she headed back to the fire’s warmth, her usually peppy steps seeming somewhat weary.
Kat knew that Miranda had ruined the footprint on purpose — and yet she didn’t yell, didn’t punish, didn’t do any of the things that Miranda would have done.
How could Miranda feel so much like an adult — the responsible one, the one seeing things clearly — and so much like an impatient, frightened, tantrum-throwing child at the same time?
As she trudged back to the fire, the thought cartwheeled back into her mind — that was a really, really big footprint. Had it really been so large — so much larger than any human’s foot that she’d ever seen or heard of?
What if —
But Miranda smothered the question like a flame.
Night pulled a blanket over the forest, old and dark.
Dark enough that it was no longer safe to leave the clearing. The fire’s glow was their bounds.
The mulberries and chicory that Kat had gathered actually filled them up. Not a pizza, by any means, but Miranda was one good night’s sleep away from feeling refreshed and ready for another full day of walking.
Unlike Kat, who glowered at the fire, slumped down against a log, pinkie nail in her mouth, as if things inside her brain were churning too quickly for her to do anything but stare.
If Miranda dug down, deep inside herself, she found a smidgen of regret for stomping out the footprint.
What was the harm, a part of her asked again quietly, in letting her believe?
But there was harm. She knew it the second Kat set eyes on the footprint — which was arguably a persuasive one, much bigger and more detailed than any they’d ever found before. Kat would never be content to limit her creature hunts to the weekends, to toil away at a desk job while others were free to make miraculous discoveries, to chase down dreams. She’d quit her last job for this very reason. Any so-called evidence she found would be used to justify spending more time in the woods and mountains and wild places of the world, more money on fancy equipment — always more, more, more.
Kat was no better than a little girl who thinks she’s a real superhero, or a real princess. A little girl who thinks that all those presents really do appear under the tree courtesy of a red-suited, white-bearded man who magicks himself around the world in a single evening. A little girl who thinks that fairies will come bathe in the saucer of milk she’s left on the windowsill, and kiss her human cheek while she’s pretending to be sleeping, and perhaps let her catch a glimpse of their wings.
But all games of pretend must end. Including this one.
Because Miranda was not the parent. She was the child.
Kat was the parent. And Miranda needed her to grow up.
Believing was dangerous. Miranda knew this now more than ever after seeing the footprint.
Believe in one impossible thing and more will follow, until you are living in a reality of your own choosing.
Until you are alone in that reality, too busy trying to hold on to your nonsense theories and your hollow feelings and your footprints.
Another howl punctuated the air.
It sounded closer this time.
“We’re fine,” Kat reminded Miranda when she tried to rub the goose bumps through her windbreaker. “Moon dogs won’t come near the fire. Not at this stage of the lunar cycle.”
Miranda felt like a wrung-out dishrag, her aching body flung onto a log before the fire, and so she didn’t argue. She didn’t say, “Do you hear yourself? Moon dogs?” She let Kat’s babble wash over her, a hateful lullaby soothing her to troubled sleep. “They don’t have corporeal bodies like regular fera
l dogs. They’re just vapor and mist — that’s why they run so fast. They can go right through the trees. They’re called ‘moon dogs’ because they reflect the moon’s phases — when the moon waxes, they grow more and more real, and they hate this. It’s painful to them to be real, to have a body, and bones, and flesh, and fur.”
Miranda sat up a little, her eyelids a tad less heavy. She’d forgotten what a good storyteller Kat was.
“They hate that they can’t just run through everything,” Kat went on. “Hate that they have to move around things, hate that they feel so ugly and heavy — so they howl the night of the full moon, and every night after until the moon starts to wane. They wane, too, until they’re back to their usual invisible selves.”
The memories fell from the branches above Miranda like leaves, fluttering over her. Memories of when she was little, years before she renegotiated her entire bedtime routine and cut the tall tales out of her evening. Back when every day ended with one of her mother’s fantastic accountings.
Before Kat decided her own imagination was so potent, she could actually find these made-up beasts in real life.
“Tell me a monster,” Miranda used to beg, “tell me a creature.”
Kat seemed to recall this, too. “I guess this is just a bedtime story for you,” she said, “since you don’t believe.”
It was dark, but not too dark to see the hurt on Kat’s face as she planted thorns in her words, which Miranda thought was something only she did.
Something she made up.
It stings, she thought, to be on the receiving end of such words.
The howl again, a sad, stretched-out sound, and it had a primal effect on Miranda — shivers down her spine, hair spiking up, an urge to run for cover.
Kat pursed her lips before she said, “Your dad actually saw one once.”
Miranda’s heart slammed into her rib cage.
No, she thought right away, he would never believe in that nonsense.
He’s like me, and I’m like him.
“We were camping. Right before I got pregnant with you.” Kat smiled warmly; Miranda had never seen her respond to a memory of her father with anything other than a carefully curated neutrality. “Your dad left the tent in the middle of the night to pee, and the moon dog walked through a tree right in front of him.”
The Bigfoot Files Page 18
