Red Hood

by Elana K. Arnold

  —RUSSIAN PROVERB

  The years that followed were laced with death. There were wolves to kill, yes, but also other deaths—I got news first that Frank had died, and then Gennie, and then, a few years later, my brother John died, too.

  The farm was mine, but what did I need with a farm? I hired a private detective to find Garland, and I wrote to him to say that our daughter, Clara, was now, at twelve—for that was how old she was by then—the owner of a sheep farm in Canada. Of course, the sheep were sold off and the house closed up, but it was Clara’s. I signed it over to her.

  My letter got no response. I did not expect one. And that, dearest, was the end of the story as far as I knew.

  Now, of course, there is much more that I know—I know your mother’s story, though, as you know, that chapter is not a happy one, either. The first I heard of Clara again, a dozen years after John died, was from a phone call. The number had a Canadian area code; it was a doctor, Laurence Waterman, who sounded very old, and I realized almost immediately that he must have been—he had seemed an old man years ago when I had known him, before leaving the farm, over thirty years ago. He must have been at least ninety that evening when he called. He said that he was sorry to bother me, but he had gone through some trouble finding my phone number, and did I know that a young woman and a small child were living in my family’s farmhouse? He thought they might be squatters, but he didn’t want to call the police until he checked with me.

  “Describe them,” I asked.

  He told me that the young woman was in her early twenties, maybe twenty-five. The child seemed to be her daughter, no more than four or five years old, and they both had long brown curls. “Like yours used to be, come to think of it,” he said.

  I told him that it sounded as though Clara, my daughter, had decided to make use of her early inheritance, and I didn’t let on my surprise at hearing that she was a mother, and I, a grandmother.

  “Oh, I see,” Dr. Waterhouse said, but he didn’t sound settled, and I didn’t remember him to be a busybody.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  And that is when he said, “Well, I don’t mean to upset you, Sybil, but your daughter’s face looks . . . pretty bad. It’s getting better now, but it looks to me like either she was in an accident, or maybe someone beat her.” And he told me that he’d only seen them leave the house once or twice in the months they’d been there.

  He didn’t need to say more to get me to my car, to send me on the road to the airport. It was the end of February, my darling, nearly dusk. And it was a full moon—I remember that moon well. It was a blood moon that night. Have I told you that before? I was in an airplane, you know, on my way to her—to both of you—and I saw it when we took off, huge and strange in the sky. I felt ill, and nervous, like I should be on the ground, not trapped and jittery on a plane. I told myself that I had no reason to fear that she was in any sort of immediate danger. I tried to calm myself with thoughts of what you might be like, the granddaughter I hadn’t known existed until that very day. I decided, on that long plane ride, that if Clara allowed me to be part of your life, I’d ask you to call me Mémé. But I was restless. I had no cause to worry, not exactly. Just . . . I needed to be there. Suddenly, and certainly. And the moon was so huge, and so red.

  I did everything I could. I need you to know that. I took the first available flight. I booked a rental car and ran straight from the gate to the rental lot. I drove as fast as I could, dear one, faster than was safe on those unfamiliar Quebec roads.

  But still, when I got to the farm, I saw both a long green car and a brown sedan parked in the driveway, the sedan dusted in snow as if it hadn’t been driven in days, the green car parked at an angle, boxing it in.

  I knew, even before I found the front door ajar, that I was too late. I knew.

  But what I found in that room, your mother . . . and you, curled at the foot of the bed, her blood everywhere . . . I thought I had lost you both, I was sure you were dead, too, and then, when I stepped toward you, you moved—oh, thank goodness, you moved. It was your mother’s blood everywhere. Not a drop of yours.

  It’s all right, darling, you can cry. Don’t hold it in. You can cry. Ah, my dear girl.

  We stayed at Dr. Waterhouse’s home for two nights before I brought you here. Do you remember? No? Well, that’s no surprise. Sometimes it’s a blessing, the things a mind can forget . . . though I think the body never does.

  I hated to leave you that first night, dear one, but the moon, you see, is only full for two nights in a cycle, and there was hunting to be done.

  I wandered in the wood that edged the farmland. Snow fell, but softly. I crashed through bushes, I whacked my arms against the sides of trees, I cleared my throat and whistled and hummed. I made myself a target—and I drew the wolf.

  Dun brown. Black eyes. I had seen bigger wolves. I had killed bigger wolves.

  I had my claw in my fist. I had never wanted it more, to kill. I wanted it so intensely, so much, so passionately—to tell the truth, I wanted that kill more than I had ever wanted anything before, more than I have wanted anything since.

  And perhaps that is why I failed.

  He attacked, and I parried with a thrust of my claw. I caught him in his face—his left cheek—and flayed it open. He yelped and fell back. The fur split; yellow fat and red blood oozed out, and he shook his head, spraying red across the white snow.

  His eyes narrowed and he stepped forward, and I did, too, tasting the kill on the back of my tongue.

  He recognized it, I think—my desire. My need. And so, he turned and ran.

  This, I had not expected. I chased, but he was faster. There were droplets of his blood and there were his tracks, and I followed until the snowfall thickened and he was lost to me.

  I searched until the moon was gone and the sun about to rise. The next night, the moon began to wane, and I knew he was gone.

  I had no choice but to bundle you up and to bring you back here, to my house, to our home, and here I have kept you and loved you the best I know how.

  It had been years, so many years, that I had lived alone. I had accepted it, the loneliness. But then, you were here. It broke my heart open, Bisou. And I kept watch by the moon, and I hunted when hunting needed to be done, and always I have kept special watch for the wolf who killed your mother, always I have been tortured by my failure to find him. Then, last summer, in July, with my birthday, the thing I had worried about for many years—since first I’d realized that my strengths were tied to my moon flow—it happened. I am lucky, I suppose. I bled longer than most women, until I was sixty-one.

  I saved many lives, dear girl, but I could not save them all. I could not save your mother’s.

  Later, after I’d brought you home, I learned that Garland had died, too, when your mother was just eighteen, of leukemia. I learned about your father as well—not much, just a few details about their relationship. Neighbors told me they had suspicions that he didn’t treat her well. That he hit her. One said there had been yelling once, not long before you and your mother disappeared, that he had said he would make her pay if she ever left him.

  And he did. He made her pay. I wanted to make him pay, too, but even if I had caught and killed him, his life would not be worth a fraction of hers, and his debts could never be canceled, never, never. Some debts, dearest, cannot be paid.

  I watched you grow, and heal as best you could, and I waited as you changed from girl to woman, and I wondered if you might be like me, if you too might cycle with the moon. And, to be honest, I didn’t know whether to hope that you would or pray that you wouldn’t. Can one wish for two opposing things at the same time?

  Now, here we are, the truth between us plain and bare.

  Tell me, Bisou. Tell me. What do you make of it?

  III

  Over and Through

  To Hear You With

  Sunrise pinkens the sky as Mémé finishes telling her story. You watch it through the window above the kit
chen sink.

  Mémé asks, “Tell me, Bisou. Tell me. What do you make of it?”

  You close your eyes. You blink them open. There is Mémé, across from you, her empty tea cup between her hands. Her hands look like your hands will look in forty years. Her hair, over her shoulder, steely gray and white around the temples, looks like your hair will look in forty years. Her face, thoughtful, lined, serious, concerned—it is the face you will see one day, in forty years, in a mirror. Her eyes, brown and green, have seen the same things your eyes have seen. Wolves, and their blood. Mothers, and their daughters. Moons, and love.

  You close your eyes again. The story Mémé has told you beats against the backs of your eyelids. You open them. There is Mémé, waiting for you to speak.

  What do you make of it?

  “I’m so tired,” you say, and Mémé holds her face almost perfectly still. If you did not know her face so well, if you were someone else, you would not recognize the flash of disappointment that appears, then disappears. You do recognize it, both her disappointment and her attempt to mask it. You recognize it because you mirror both the disappointment and its mask, though you are disappointed in different things. Mémé is disappointed at your reaction to her story, shared finally after all this time, and you are disappointed to learn that Mémé has failed to kill your father.

  “Of course you’re tired,” Mémé says. She stands and piles together dishes to take to the sink. She turns on the water and rinses them. “There’s one more thing,” she says, and she goes from the kitchen. You close your eyes and listen as she walks to her room—then silence—then the sound of her returning to you.

  You open your eyes. She is holding your mother’s poems.

  “I found these, among your mother’s things, in the farmhouse. I should have given them to you long ago.”

  There are five poems. Just five, no matter how many times you have read them, always when Mémé was gone from the house, always slipping them from the back of her bedside table drawer, underneath the envelope of cash, always returning them just as you found them.

  “Your mother never knew,” Mémé says, “that poetry was something we shared.”

  You take the poems from Mémé’s hand. It seems she is reluctant to loosen them, but she does, and then you stand, and you turn, and you take the poems to your room, you tuck them in the drawer of your own bedside table. You do not need to read the poems; you know every word by heart. You have known them for years.

  You have tried to piece together a mother who is gone from those few words, scattered across pages. You have wanted to see her, to bring her back, to reshape the black letters into a living breathing person, a mother. Mémé, it seems, wanted the same.

  Keisha is in your bed. She is awake, hands behind her head, staring up at the ceiling.

  “Hey,” she says.

  “Hey.”

  Keisha wants to talk, of course, she wants explanations. But she seems to understand that you’re not yet ready for conversation.

  She flips back the covers, and you climb into your bed, next to her. It’s a double bed, so there is room, and you find yourself feeling grateful that you are not alone in it.

  Alone. That is the word. That is what pressed on you, heavily, with every word of Mémé’s story. How many years did Mémé spend solitary, cut off from her family, from people she could have loved, if she hadn’t had such a secret to bear?

  It’s the word your mother’s poems echo, too—alone.

  You don’t want to be alone. You shiver, cold suddenly beneath the covers, and you imagine your life unspooling before you in a series of full moons and new moons, of hunts and kills.

  You roll onto your side so that Keisha can’t see your face when the tears come.

  When you wake, you are alone. Even before you open your eyes, you can tell from the light outside your window that it is late morning, and that the rain has stopped. The house is fragrant with rosemary and garlic; Mémé is making soup.

  In the kitchen, the big red stockpot is simmering over a low flame. You lift the lid, breathe in the savory steam. There’s a wooden spoon on a rest next to the stove, and you stir the soup before replacing the lid. This stockpot has lived in this house since before you did. This spoon, with the black scorch mark across the handle from the day, years ago, when it fell into the flame, is something you can count on to always be the same. The smell of the soup. The quiet ticking of the kitchen clock. All so normal, so reliable.

  Mémé and Keisha are together in the front room. They are sitting in the low armchairs on either side of the fireplace; between them, the cracking orange flames. Keisha sits forward in her seat, hands palm-up on her thighs. Mémé leans back, arms folded.

  Keisha, you determine, has been asking questions. Mémé, you guess, has been deflecting them.

  “The soup smells good,” you say from the doorway.

  Both Keisha and Mémé turn in your direction.

  “Bisou,” Mémé says.

  “Hey, Bisou.” Keisha looks better. Her glasses are back on.

  “Hey.” You join them by the fire, pulling the ottoman that’s between them back a little before sitting on it.

  “You grandmother was just telling me a little bit about her life,” Keisha says, and your eyes go to Mémé’s face. Her expression is impassive. “I didn’t know your grandmother is a poet. I write poetry sometimes, too.”

  “Huh. I thought your writing was all nonfiction. Like, for the paper.”

  “Poetry tells the truth, too,” Keisha says. “Just in a different way.”

  Now Mémé smiles, but she does not unfold her arms. She likes Keisha, you can tell, but you’d bet money that no matter how much Mémé likes her, she hasn’t told Keisha that much about her past. After all, you’re sixteen years old, you’ve lived with Mémé for a dozen years, and she’s just now filled you in on her story. But, you wonder, if she’d told it to you sooner, before you had experienced the wolves for yourself, would you have believed her?

  “I’m going to make a salad to go with the soup,” Mémé says, rising. “Here, Bisou, you can have my chair.”

  Keisha watches Mémé disappear into the kitchen. Then she turns to you. “She didn’t ask me anything about last night,” she whispers to you. “Not about the blood, or my leg, or the flat tire, nothing.” She raises her eyebrows and waits impatiently for you to explain what the hell is happening.

  “Mémé’s pretty good at minding her own business,” you offer, and you slide into her seat.

  Keisha tightens her lips, shakes her head. “What’s going on, Bisou? Last night, after I left the party, I could tell almost as soon as I started driving that there was something wrong with my tire. I wanted to make it home, but the air went out of it fast and I had to pull over. When I got out to look at it, I saw that it was slashed—I hadn’t run over a nail or anything like that. It was slashed. And then I heard something growling at me, and I don’t know, I was filled with dread and felt more afraid than I’ve ever been in my entire life. And I started running, into the forest, and that thing chased me, and then it had me up against a tree, and it clawed my leg, Bisou. It would have killed me if you hadn’t seen my car and stopped, if you hadn’t screamed and distracted it, if you hadn’t shown up like some sort of . . . I don’t know, like a warrior queen, and killed it.”

  You let Keisha talk, even though she’s not telling you anything you didn’t already know. She needs to work through it. She needs to say it out loud.

  “And then,” she says, her voice dropping still lower, “then it changed, and it wasn’t a wolf anymore. It was Phillip. And he was dead.”

  Her cheeks are flushed now, red with remembering.

  You just sit there for a moment, feeling the warmth of the fire on the right side of your body. You could lie. You could tell her she’s remembered it wrong, you could make her question her own brain. But—

  “Yes,” you say. “All that happened.”

  There’s another moment that passes, an
d then Keisha lets out a long, held breath. “Okay,” she says, sounding relieved. “Okay.”

  She feels better, you can tell, with the facts of the matter laid out between you. You think of Mémé, how she spent ten years alone with her secret before she told Garland, and how she lost him anyway. You imagine the long, lonely years between the day Garland took your mother away from Mémé and the day she came to you, the day she found you at the foot of your mother’s bed.

  And then you think of yourself—how all your life, you’ve held yourself to the periphery. You’ve been friendly, but not friends, with the kids at school. You’ve watched others play sports, or form clubs, but never joined. Was it truly your choice to hold yourself apart, or were you acting on Mémé’s unspoken rules?

  Both, you decide, and probably you had other reasons you can’t understand from this moment, this place.

  Keisha is not your friend. Not yet. And if Keisha’s going to bail over this, if she’s going to run to the cops or figure out a way to make this whole thing about you being crazy or whatever, you’d rather know that sooner than later.

  “There’s more,” you say, and Keisha listens.

  You tell her about Tucker—about how you had been running in the woods, and how you heard an animal behind you, and how your body told you not to run, but to turn, to fight. You tell her about driving toward home from Big Mac’s party, and seeing her car, and knowing that something awful was happening. You tell her that you are stronger and better when you’re bleeding. She listens without asking questions as you tell her about the blood and the wolves. But when you’ve finished, she goes straight for the part of the story you’ve omitted, the detail you’ve skipped over.

  “What were you doing in the woods that night, anyway? After homecoming?”

  You can tell her about killing wolf boys. But telling her about the blood on James’s chin . . . you can’t tell her that.

  “James and I had a fight. I got out of the car and cut through the woods toward home.”