The hawthorn leaves shook, and the whole forest seemed to pause, listening — even Miranda held herself still, waiting for the universe to prove itself unpredictable and unknowable for the second time today.
And out ran . . . a squirrel.
Alison was kind enough to send one of her crew to the nearest gas station. He returned with a can of gasoline, two water bottles, and two club sandwiches, a day away from expiring. Kat and Miranda didn’t care. They gobbled them up.
At some point Miranda saw herself in the rearview mirror of the white production van — a hollow-cheeked, dirt-smudged, sunken-eyed wild girl with snarled hair the color of glitter.
“Student body president.” Miranda pointed to her reflection, and Kat snorted.
“Let’s get a photo for the yearbook,” she said.
While the crew had packed up their production van, Kat signed all of Alison’s paperwork with her own green sparkly flower pen from her cat bag.
“We don’t choose the segments for the show until we’ve reviewed them,” Alison said, “but I’ll tell you now — you can plan on being featured. This is good stuff.”
“Yes,” Kat said in a dreamy voice that wasn’t completely hers, “we were so close.”
Miranda couldn’t miss the cruel laugh in Alison’s eye. “Yes. Absolutely. So close.” She shook Kat’s hand. “We’ll let you know the airdate. Oh, and your checks will be processed and mailed out within two weeks.”
“Checks?” Kat looked at Miranda, but Miranda had no idea.
“All our cast receives a small compensation for your time,” Alison said, pointing to the provision in the contract. “If your segment turns out to be longer than a minute, you get a bonus.”
And then they left.
Kat could count on that bonus — her footage was going to be a season highlight.
Miranda couldn’t believe it; perhaps they’d be able to save their house after all. All thanks to Bigfoot.
After the squirrel had popped out of the bushes, chattered angrily at the humans, and scampered to a snag in a nearby cedar, Alison had breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay. I think we’ve got everything we need.”
She’d wrapped up their session with a quick interview against the Critter Mobile, where she asked Kat if she would ever give up the search.
“How could I stop now? He’s out there,” Kat had said, and her star-eyes glittered beneath her smudged, cracked glasses. “He’s just waiting until the time is right. Then he’ll show himself.”
“What about the overwhelming lack of evidence?” Alison had prompted.
Kat had furrowed her eyebrows. “What are you talking about, ‘lack of evidence?’ ” she’d said. “There are hundreds of eyewitnesses every year. People see Bigfoot dashing through trees, walking through their campsites, spying on their farms —”
“But that isn’t reliable scientific evidence,” Alison had said. “That’s just people.”
Kat had looked right at Miranda, and smiled her same old Kat smile. “If you can’t trust people, then what can you trust?”
Exhaustion now gnawed at Miranda’s bones. She climbed into the front seat of the Critter Mobile, in a daze as Kat poured the gas in the tank and checked the rest of the fluids, tasks she hadn’t known her mom knew how to do.
Miranda decided this would be the last thing she ever assumed about her mother.
Kat got in the car. “Well, what do you know.” She angled their copies of the contract so Miranda could see her swirling signature. “Looks like I finally earned some money with my Bigfoot nonsense.”
“Mom,” Miranda said. “Why did you do that?”
Kat adjusted her mirrors. “Isn’t that exactly what you wanted me to do?”
Miranda’s cheeks flushed, and her eyes burned, ashamed.
Kat took Miranda’s hand. “You said you need proof to believe. So anytime you start to have doubts, I want you to watch that episode of Bigfoot Bozos.”
“Mom,” Miranda said, “after what happened behind the waterfall, there’s no way I’ll —”
“I’m not talking about believing in Bigfoot,” Kat said. “I’m talking about believing in me.”
Something inside Miranda collapsed, folding in on herself.
“Anytime you have doubts about how much I love you,” Kat went on, “I want you to watch that episode. Watch me make a fool of myself. And remember that I would throw it all away for you. All of it. You wanted evidence, you got it.”
A sob escaped Miranda’s chest.
“Miranda,” Kat said. “I love you. More than anything. More than Bigfoot. Believe it.”
“What’s that thing you always say?” Miranda said. “Some things are true, whether you believe in them or not.”
Kat smiled. “Let’s get home.”
“If we still have a home.” Miranda was only half joking. The other half of her pictured cruising down their street, pulling into their driveway, and seeing a terrifying sign across the front door — a foreclosure notice — relinquished to the bank.
She pictured searching for solace in Kat’s eyes, and finding it.
She pictured stripping their possessions down to the essentials, packing the Critter Mobile to its limits, and driving away to . . . somewhere. Anywhere.
The truth was it didn’t matter where they ended up.
Home was wherever Kat was, and that could be near the shapeshifters in New Mexico, or the wendigo in Canada or the lake monsters of the north. Sleeping under the stars in a different forest every night.
Or it could be in their same old house with their same old gnomes and their same old stack of bills and their same old problems. It didn’t matter.
“All right. Time to hit the road. Just you and me, Bean.”
As Kat pulled the Critter Mobile off the shoulder, Miranda’s eyes followed a bizarre bug darting across the windshield — what was it, a thrum? Or a moth? Or something else entirely?
Miranda thought she knew so much — but this was a better way to view the world. Full of possibilities, instead of certainties.
It took going all the way through the forest — looping down a river, through a mountain, and into the old growth of a national park — to be able to admit she was wrong.
“Just you and me, Bean.” The first time Kat had ever said that was the day her dad left, when Miranda stood in the driveway and her mother had wrapped her up in a hug so tight, she couldn’t breathe.
But as they drove out of the forest, she imagined a different scene.
A stormy morning, her mother sitting in a hospital bed holding a tiny daughter swaddled in a white blanket, little heart-face staring up at her helplessly, curiously. “It’s just you and me, Bean,” Miranda imagined her mother saying, and the baby is silent, studying the mother’s face, searching it for evidence of love.
Somewhere out there, Bigfoot might be tromping back to his nest. Somewhere else, another creature — unknown yet even to the cryptozoologists — might be crouched between a pair of trees, watching through pine needles as a group of humans set up a tent for a night of s’mores and stargazing.
And somewhere even farther out there, her father might be thinking of the daughter he’d left behind.
Or he might not ever think of her again.
But here, right here, was the mother who loved her, the mother who’d fight for her, the mother who would always help her fly when she needed to take a blind leap into darkness.
Just me and her.
A hot summer night in Humboldt County, where the water in Bluff Creek whispers over the logjams and debris like a child with secrets, and an eight o’clock sun finally began its somewhat stubborn descent, letting the moon have its share of the hours, and the cryptozoologists gathered around the fire.
It was a familiar lull, one that happened every night during these hunts — there reached a time when the light was too drained to search by, but it was still too early for the infrareds or the night-vision goggles.
Somewhere out there, the cryptozool
ogists declared, the creatures were doing their twilight dozing before they would venture back out into the world, and so the humans might as well make merry and eat s’mores.
“Is Bigfoot nocturnal?” Miranda had asked this on more than one occasion, and everyone gave her a different answer. “Yes, definitely, there’s too many reports of night knocking.” “No, absolutely not! Think of all the eyewitnesses who’ve seen him in stark sunlight.” And, her favorite answer: “I sure hope not. No one’s gonna believe us if the only photo we have is some dark, blurry shot of him with glowing red eyes — they’ll just say it’s an oversize possum.”
Her own mother had thought the question was delicious. “All these little details, Bean . . . Don’t they make you all the more excited for when we finally find him?”
Yes, they did. It had filled Miranda with firecrackers to think of it. It had made her too excited, too twitchy to stand without pacing. And so she sat, cross-legged, bouncing her knees in the dirt where she was, beneath her mom’s chair. She had already roasted her marshmallows to gooeyness — then she had sandwiched them between two chocolate cookies and bit into sticky, sugary bliss. Her mother pushed another log on the fire, the flames belching, then settling
At eight years old Miranda was usually the youngest one. A few of the other cryptozoologists brought their kids sometimes, when weekend visitations coincided with creature hunts, but most of the time, she was the only one. These adults never asked about school. They never asked what she wanted to be when she grew up. As far as they were concerned, she was the same as them, only shorter. The very fact that she was out there with them equalized her.
The search equalized them all.
As soon as everyone had turned into silhouettes, the sky on fire behind them, Uncle Bob had started.
“I was eighteen,” he said, “walking home from a girl’s house. Decided to cut through the neighbor’s farmlands. This was down past Twin Falls, by an offshoot of the Snake, and I shuffled through their cornstalks and the hairs on the back of my neck stood right up. I turned around, and there it was, right across the river, staring at me in the moonlight.” Uncle Bob widened his eyes when he looked at Miranda, as if he had been possessed, made to relive the very moment. “Something slimy, something on all fours. I remember it had a frill around its neck, like one of those old-fashioned Shakespeare collars — and it shook itself, like a dog gone swimming, and cold river water flew off the frills in little drops.” The fire hissed. “By the time I realized what I was seeing, it took off. I came back with a flashlight and a camcorder, but I only found tracks frozen in the mud.”
A newer addition to the group, a woman with dreadlocks, went next. “I heard magpies fighting one morning, right before my twins were born. The birds would do this, squabble over the rights to the watermelon rinds and coffee grounds that spilled out of my neighbor’s garbage cans. I rolled myself out of bed and opened the window to yell at them, and — and I saw this little leathery thing, the size of a squirrel, crouched on the top of my fence posts, shoving all the food from the bird feeder into its gob as quick as it could, which made the magpies screech —” She shook her head. “Then it scampered up the tree and I stood there, gaping, wondering if I was still dreaming.”
One by one, they had all shared their tales — their origin stories — and Miranda’s eyes burned as the campfire brightened against the darkness. The circle had been sacred, it had been unbreakable, made of the deepest secrets and the darkest fears and shames and doubts, cruel as Mondays, and hopes as blue as the planet. It had been a setting, this circle, like any other — as palpable to be inside as a school or a car or a living room. Miranda had clung to that feeling with all her heart — this feeling that she was in the midst of something special — something that all the mainstream outlets had rejected, but that was how it was, wasn’t it? The world sometimes took a bit longer to catch the things that were the most true.
“What about you?” someone had prompted Miranda’s mother. “Why are you here?”
Miranda had shifted. Had her mother ever made such a confession here, in this group? The moment split, as if with lightning, into another thought: Had Miranda ever even heard such a story from her mother? She’d heard so many tales of her mother’s creature sightings, she couldn’t pinpoint which one was first. Couldn’t line them up in a timeline, her mother’s oldest monster with her newest. Usually her mother found other things to do during the confessionals, Miranda realized now — making cocoa, fussing with supplies, standing guard while subtly listening, starry-eyed.
But tonight, the magic must have overwhelmed her. Holding a cup of cocoa close to her lips, blowing across the rim so the steam wafted up in clouds, Miranda’s mother spoke.
“I was little — I don’t know how old exactly. Four or five?— young enough that I shouldn’t have gone off alone, but I did. Vacationing with my family here in California — not far from here, actually — and I snuck off to the lake, where I waded in, only up to my knees at first, and then I took one more step and slipped right in.” She laughed at the shock of such a memory — at the fact that she almost drowned. “I fought to keep my head above water, but I’d walked right off a ledge and my feet couldn’t find the lake floor beneath me. When I looked up through the water, up past the beach and the rocks, to the tree line, and — I saw him.”
Even Miranda had been silent. She knew her mother had once fallen into a lake as a kid — which was why her mother made her take a course of basic swimming lessons one summer. But she had no idea that the story of the lake was this story.
The story.
“A figure, dark — even against the dark brown of the tree trunks — and taller than any person I’d ever seen,” her mother went on, “walking parallel to the lake’s edge. But I sank all the way down and lost sight of it, my arms flailing, and I probably would have drowned.” The firelight was golden in her eyes, filling in where the pupil was black. “But something pulled me out. Something strong — something with massive hands. It reached down into the water and dragged me back to the shallows. When I finally came up, when I swallowed air, it was gone. There was a pathway of trampled bushes, a quiet in the sky after the birds settled. A smell.”
The others had murmured; they all knew that smell, the scent of muted skunk, of mountains, of leaf grit and matted fur and sulfur.
“And footprints. In the mud. Footprints leading down into the water, and footprints leading out.”
Miranda shivered.
“No one believed me,” her mother went on. “Not a single person. When I told my parents, they dismissed it. ‘You were underwater,’ they said. ‘The lake distorted what you saw.’ ”
Again, the others had whispered to themselves — they all knew those kinds of comments, those kinds of dismissals.
“‘It was only a tree branch, blowing in the wind, it was only a bird, or a bear, or a shadow.’ ” Her mother smiled. “That must have been a huge bird, then. And they still couldn’t explain what pulled me out of the water. But you know what? I didn’t know the lake dropped from a foot deep to four — the water wasn’t dark or murky. Clear water, and there was still something unknowable. Something hidden.”
The fire crackled, and she finished with, “It seems wrong to think we know everything. There are things all around us — things we see, things we don’t. That’s why I’m here.”
All else slunk away, and Miranda was left with only the reverberation of her mother’s words on her vertebrae, trickling down her spine like raw egg. It was a story of a sighting, but it was more than that — it was testimony.
In the reverence, no one dared speak. No one would for some time, to let the stories that had been told float up past the trees like smoke, into the atmosphere to join the stars.
Eventually Uncle Bob pursed his lips against the ocarina he kept on a string around his neck, his tinny, ghostly tune chasing after the stories, blowing over the creek, and the valley, and possibly even over Bigfoot himself.
Miranda nestle
d close to her mother, warm and snug and sleepy, and also wide-eyed at the wonder of this world, this wonder that she shared with everyone here like a giant blanket.
“I didn’t know that,” she raised her face to tell her mother. “About that day at the lake.”
“Well, Bean,” her mother said, cupping Miranda’s face in her hand, “that’s the whole point, isn’t it? There’s so much we don’t know.”
Miranda tilted back against her mother’s shins. Soon the coziness would dissipate, and the evening would shift into gear. The cryptozoologists would break into groups to set up for their night detections — armed with infrared tools and cameras, they would hide in the trees and bushes like soldiers. Even after a full day of scouting and hiking, their hope would keep them awake and fed.
“Tell me a monster,” Miranda murmured, her eyelids falling like heavy velvet, the taste of marshmallows faint in her mouth.
And her mother wrapped them both in a crocheted quilt, the cool night air still finding its way into Miranda’s skin through the holes in the links — but it was welcome. Everything about this night was welcome.
Her mother’s voice was part lullaby as she started, “There is one — some say he has antlers the size of an eagle’s wingspan . . .”
The last thing Miranda saw before she surrendered to her dozing was a shadow, dark against the distant green of the trees that bordered the mountain’s rocky exposure, lumbering between the trunks, and she fell asleep with a smile on her lips and a secret of her own.
A strange shadow lurked down the road and stopped with a noxious belch in front of the house with the gnomes on the porch.
It was the Critter Mobile, its antlers on the roof rack draped in moss, its bumper tongue disheveled and stuck with burrs. Miranda couldn’t tell if her mother had pressed the brakes or if the car had died right as they drifted into their driveway, but either way, she sank back into the seat, four days’ worth of relief coming into her body at once.
“We’re home,” she breathed. The sun was setting, the light rosy and clear.
The Bigfoot Files Page 24
