Here There Are Monsters

by Amelinda Bérubé

  I’m easier. Straightforward, dependable. When they told me we were moving, I said “great!” It was a no-brainer; somewhere nobody knew either of us. Somewhere to start over. Not that things were likely to be any different for Deirdre across the country—or anywhere, really, no matter what our parents told themselves. It doesn’t matter how hard you dig your heels in and refuse to grow up; time marches on with or without you. At thirteen, she’s almost as tall as Mom, all elbows and knees. She refuses to wear anything but dresses, and she leaves her hair unwashed until it’s hanging in lank strings and Mom finally orders her into the shower. She owns a bra, but after the one time last year some loser snapped one of its straps at school, she’s insisted on going without.

  We’ve always been at the same school before. Not this year. Here, middle and high school are firmly separated: Deirdre at Hillcrest, me at Lanark Centennial. Mostly, it’s been a relief. But though I never let it show, I was afraid for her. She doesn’t know how to put on a brave face. Instead of bending in the wind, she snaps like chalk or a flower stem. I’m not exactly a master of camouflage myself, but I can get by. Or at least I can now, since I’ve kicked loose from having to ride to her rescue all the time. I didn’t know how to teach her how to blend in. I never have.

  If I wanted to cross to the other side of the street and pretend we weren’t related, it’s not like it would have been hard. I’m dark and quiet compared to her. Practical, undramatic. I keep my hair cut close to my ears because it’s easier, and maybe because she’s always refused to cut hers. I’ve never had much patience for fashion, but at least I wear jeans. On good days it’s a family joke, how opposite we are, and we laugh together at the teachers who claim to see a sisterly resemblance.

  Our names are about the only things tying us together. My parents’ attempt at instilling some sense of family heritage. When you hear Skye, the first thing you think about is the clouds—insubstantial, wispy. Moody and changeable, like my sister. When I was younger, I got so many vapid compliments that I was annoyed at them for picking it. But Dad explained that Skye is a place, an island. If you google it, you see a place full of crags and stony slopes, rocks that stand unmoved as the sea breaks over them. The green slopes are a thin veneer over hard bone.

  * * *

  Riding to her rescue was my job before I ever had to do it in real life. In the kingdoms Deirdre invented, I was the Queen of Swords. All the kingdoms were ruled by queens. Deirdre was the first, of course—originally she was just the Queen, which always made me complain because I got stuck being her subservient knight. But then she discovered tarot cards and adopted the figures from the deck: Queen of Swords, Queen of Wands, Queen of Cups, Queen of Coins. But even those weren’t enough to contain her stories, and they spilled over into monarchs visiting from faraway lands, outlines blooming on her map. Queen of Feathers. Queen of Leaves. Queen of Fire. Queen of the Sea. There were too many kingdoms to keep track of. Even if we stuck to the ones we knew best, the ones where we’d named the roads, the ones with magic systems and long-standing feuds, there were more than a dozen. The others branched off them—not incomplete so much as undiscovered. Places we hadn’t gotten around to exploring yet.

  I preferred to play in big, acting everything out. That way I got to wield my sword in fight scenes. She loved playing in small just as much. Barbies made pretty good queens, with their elaborate dresses, but Deirdre found them limiting. The most magical they got was plastic fairy wings.

  She preferred to make the denizens of the kingdoms herself. Clay, Popsicle sticks, feathers, felt, whatever. Construction paper silhouettes would do in a pinch, adorned with crowns of tinfoil or pipe cleaner. If the results were misshapen, so much the better. Monsters were way more interesting to Deirdre than animals, even talking ones.

  She built dioramas to house them, decorated with scraps of the river valley—smooth gray stones painted with nail polish, sprigs of pussy willows, peeling sticks glued together to make branching trees or bridges or limbs for magical creatures. Disney princesses and little ceramic figurines vied for space with the monstrosities she made herself. Plastic spiders sat on webs woven from acrylic yarn. Pieces from a broken mirror winked out from unexpected corners. Her walls were covered in long scrolls written in a language she’d invented, papier mâché masks bedecked with feathers and ribbons, painted maps—some of them corresponding to the places in the dioramas, others a world removed.

  Deirdre’s role wasn’t fixed; with just the two of us to direct, she spun all the characters out around me. The Queen of Swords was still more like a knight of the realm, really, protecting her from villainy, following her on her epic quests. But since I got to be a queen and still be a fighter, I accepted that position without dispute. I became sort of a queen-errant, too restless for the throne, lending my peerless martial skills to worthy causes wherever I found them. My kingdom had been attacked and overrun in my absence, I think. It was very tragic. Most of Deirdre’s stories turned out that way in the end.

  Sometimes she’d accept my contributions—take an idea and run with it, unwinding all the consequences. But the kingdoms were hers, unquestionably and forever. I liked being the Queen of Swords: towering, fierce, unconquerable. But I was always traveling in Deirdre’s country. She was all the queens and none of them. She belonged there.

  And where I belonged? That was more complicated.

  * * *

  For two months I crossed days off the calendar with big red Xs. Counting down to a fresh start. I wouldn’t be Psycho Skye after we moved. Away from Deirdre, at a different school, I wouldn’t have to be.

  It was a grueling three-day drive, and we pulled into the neighborhood past ten o’clock, all of us tired and frazzled, Mog yowling in her carrier, Mom yelling at the GPS. The new house was only a year old, and it stood alone on its street, an island of welcoming yellow light.

  We ricocheted through it, running from room to room to take it all in. It didn’t take long. Deirdre and I would be sharing a room, a prospect she claimed to be excited about. I wasn’t so sure. I smiled and nodded for Dad’s benefit when he showed me the dank little corner room in the basement that he planned to transform for me. The floor was bare concrete, a low opening in the far wall revealing a dark, spiderwebby crawl space. A ragged rectangle, traced in marker across the plastic skin of the insulation, would be a window. It looked like something Deirdre might have drawn there, pretending it was a magical secret passage.

  “Nothing to it,” Dad said, hugging my shoulders and giving me a reassuring little shake. “Right?”

  Deirdre kept coming back to the tall windows that filled the back wall of the living and dining rooms. The light from the house vanished across a long, grassy slope, and beyond that the woods were an undifferentiated wall of shadow, darker than the sky. She sat there looking hungrily out at them even after Mom and Dad went to bed.

  While Deirdre sat perched by the window, I made midnight fries. Cooking was only going to make the heat more oppressive, but rituals were rituals, and she insisted. The sticky dark pressed up against the glass, and a fan purred in the corner, pushing the air around. I was pulling the tray from the oven when she flapped a hand at me suddenly, her voice an urgent half whisper.

  “Turn off the light!”

  “Why?”

  “You have to see this!”

  I shut the oven door, scraped my bangs off my forehead.

  “Is it something real?” I demanded. “I’m not budging for one of your—”

  “Yes,” she hissed impatiently, her nose pressed up against the screen. “Come on!”

  I left the fries sizzling on the stove top—too hot to eat yet anyway—and snapped the light off, feeling my way carefully around the haphazard mountains of moving boxes. Deirdre was a spare shadow in the luminous oblong of the window, her hair lifting a little as the fan rotated away from her.

  “Look,” she whispered. Outside, a point of p
ale green light winked on and off, on and off, bobbing erratically. And there—another. And another. As my eyes adjusted, the yard became full of them, like a bowl full of stars, stirred and left slowly revolving. Beside me, Deirdre’s smile was the faintest gleam.

  “Fairies,” she said, and I snorted.

  “What, fireflies aren’t cool enough for you?”

  “Come on, they’re obviously magic.” She didn’t see me roll my eyes, too caught up in the dancing lights outside. “They’re totally fairies.”

  Even after she reluctantly agreed we should go to bed, it was hard to sleep. Without streetlights to dilute it, night here was dense and deep, and it was full of sounds I didn’t know. I hadn’t expected the air to be different—sluggish, clingy. Hot breath on your neck. A room for me was only part of Dad’s grand plans for the basement, so at least there would be somewhere cool to retreat to eventually. But the room I shared with Deirdre was stifling, even with the windows flung wide open.

  “Skye.” Deirdre’s whisper slid across the room. “Are you asleep?”

  “Not anymore,” I growled, although I hadn’t been.

  “Oh. Sorry.” She rolled over, the blankets rustling. Sighed.

  “Are you okay?” I relented.

  “It’s just so dark. You know? It’s so different.”

  “Yeah.” Outside the window, beyond the black overhang of the roof, the Milky Way threw a long arm across the sky. “Look. You can see the stars.”

  She wrestled with the blankets for a long minute, flopped down with her pillow at the foot of the bed, making me snort.

  “There,” she said. “Now I can. D’you think they should be fairies too? From another kingdom, maybe?”

  I ignored her question. “You can’t sleep like that.”

  “Sure I can.” She lifted her feet, waved them in the air for emphasis. “Why not?”

  I rolled over, feeling for a cooler spot on the pillow, sticking a leg outside my thin quilt.

  “Did we move to the Amazon?” I muttered. “It’s like breathing soup.”

  “Maybe it’ll get better if it rains. Is that crickets, do you think? That sound?”

  “I guess. Or frogs, maybe.” I’d never heard them before either. “I guess it was too cold for them back home.”

  We listened to the singing night in silence for a little while, until I started to think Deirdre had gone to sleep, but then she spoke again.

  “The creek can be the gate to the kingdoms.” I could hear her smile in the words. “We could even fish for algae. Remember that?”

  One time we’d found a stick wedged upright among the river stones, the water chattering around it. Deirdre had declared that it marked the way from the ordinary world to ours. She’d twisted it in place—like you’d turn a key—and pulled it free to use as a scepter, since I already had a sword. After a long morning successfully beating back the invading hordes, she’d insisted we leave it behind, a testament to our reign. And after that, we found a new key at every visit and left it pointing skyward from the river. Layers of ritual accumulated around it: you had to walk around it three times; you had to swear undying loyalty by wood, stone, water, and bone. Anything done more than once becomes a ritual for Deirdre. It’s as if she’s trying to make reality cooperate through sheer, stubborn force. Wearing it down with repetition.

  “I remember the gate,” I said eventually, when she made an impatient noise, “but fishing for—what? How do you fish for algae? That doesn’t even make sense.”

  Deirdre sprang upright, the pillow falling to the floor unheeded.

  “You don’t remember that?” she cried.

  “Shhh,” I hissed. She ignored me and jumped over to my bed, curled up at its end, shoving my feet out of her way.

  “How can you not remember this? I was, like, six years old and I remember this. Look. You know when we went walking in the valley? That little piece of the river that came under the bridge?”

  Under the blanket I went tense, something pressing its way up through my memory, rolling over in its sleep. “You mean the lagoon?”

  “No, no.” Deirdre thumped her head back against the footboard. “It was part of the river. Just slower. And really shallow. There was all that tall grass, remember? And it froze solid in the winter.”

  “Right.” I rolled my shoulders, forced myself to relax. That chattering tributary was the scene of a hundred memories, after all, most of them benign. We’d gotten in the worst trouble one time for walking on the ice there. We hadn’t been in any danger—we’d punched through the ice with rocks to see how thick it was, and found just the slick riverbed underneath, the barest trickle of water. Though, of course, it had been no use telling Mom that.

  “We used to try to catch water bugs there. But it was too hard, because they were so fast and tiny. And so Dad gave us sticks and told us to fish for algae. Remember? It came up in these long, gross strings, like—” She pulled her hand away from her nose and giggled, snorting. “Remember?”

  I smiled back in the dark, unevenly. It sounded like something we would do.

  “This is going to be great,” Deirdre said with a sigh of satisfaction. Her upturned face was a faint, pale oval in the starlight. “Imagine. It’ll be like if we had the valley all to ourselves, just for us.”

  The valley. Long after Deirdre crawled back into her own bed and finally grew still, her breathing evening into sleep, I lay there listening to the alien chorus in the woods, the memories pulling me along. Down the plunge of the ravine, along the bike path that wound down to the river at the bottom. Beneath the houses perched at the crests of the hills on either side, silhouetted against the thin clouds. I knew when I’d walked there for the last time, past the furry petals of crocuses in the brown grass. But I’d been back in my dreams. Again and again.

  It was as if I left part of myself behind. As if it were still there, walking through all the places I used to know. They wound out like tree roots to unknowable depths. Maybe that’s what it means to put down roots in a place—laying down paths that you can trace with your eyes closed. All the places that make you who you are. All the things you wish you could forget.

  I had no roots here. The forest had its own depth. It was a sinkhole, bottomless. But we floated on its surface like leaves in water, unanchored.

  It didn’t matter, I told myself over and over. Didn’t matter. You could pull up a plant, set it down in new soil. Roots could be severed. I didn’t tell Deirdre about the dreams, the footsteps that dogged me, though she’d have understood.

  I didn’t want Deirdre to be the one who understood.

  I’d help Mom plant a new garden. I’d help Dad finish the basement. Left behind in the dark, those roots would disappear eventually. And I’d grow upward, toward the light.

  Two

  Officer Leduc takes pity on me, trailing uselessly around the kitchen, and puts me in charge of making a page for the search. I set it up as dawn starts to show around the edges of the sky. Mom manages to track down a picture on her thumb drive where Deirdre’s actually smiling. I’m tempted to tell Mom that nobody will recognize her if we post that. She looks so innocent, squinting into the camera in the sun. Her white-blond hair is braided—probably by me—and she’s wearing a blue sundress that makes her look about three years younger than she is. But in the end, I can’t bring myself to say anything, and I post it dutifully. Retweet the police, share posts from the news stations as they start to pick it up.

  The day turns crisp and pumpkin-golden, and the police go on scouring the neighborhood. Knocking on doors, asking questions. Looking under decks, in sheds. Following dogs back and forth across the face of the forest, in and out of the tangle. I close the window but can’t shut out the voices, the barking, the pulse of helicopter blades. Heavy foreign footsteps echo through the house, a counterpoint to Mom’s tearful voice.

  The doorbell rings more cons
tantly than it ever would for trick-or-treaters, heralding a parade of reporters and neighbors bringing food: lasagna, chili, muffins, bread. I’d kind of forgotten that other people live here, that there are actual human beings behind the blank closed faces of the houses scattered up the hill. We’re not even a suburb out here. Exurb, Mom called it once. A tiny constellation of human presence, perched on the edge of the swamp.

  One of the casserole bearers is a boy with long, wheat-colored hair pulled into a messy ponytail, broad-shouldered in a black-and-yellow Lanark Centennial athletic jacket. William Wright. He stands waiting on our doorstep, his hands buried in flowered oven mitts to carry a big white ceramic dish. I should be glad to see him. I could have summoned him by text anytime today, if I wanted a shoulder to cry on. That’s probably what he’s hoping for—a chance to be the hero. The thought makes me want to disappear back down the hall above the foyer, so he’ll have to leave his offering there and go away.

  Before I can act on the impulse, he glances up and meets my eyes through the glass, offers an awkward smile, lifts the casserole apologetically.

  “Hey,” he says when I open the door. “I brought dinner.”

  I don’t tell him that he’s only the latest in our stream of visitors. He’s the first one my age, anyway.

  “Thanks,” I say instead.

  “Do you mind if I come in? This is just, um, kind of hot.Where can I—”

  “Just put it on the stairs, I guess.” I stand back to let him in, and he deposits it on the carpeted step, pulls off the silly oven mitts.

  “I’m really sorry,” he says. “About your sister. I mean, I hope she’s okay.”

  I’m probably giving him the look that makes Deirdre roll her eyes. When I slip into it in front of other people, they get shifty and uncomfortable. But William knows it by now—he’s teased me about my resting bitch face often enough. Anyway, better stone-faced than crying. There’s no way I’m crying in front of William.