Red Hood

by Elana K. Arnold

  Maggie, Keisha, Mémé. You love them so much that you feel you might break. What a risk it is, loving.

  I will do anything, you vow, anything to keep them safe.

  The next day at school, fingers everywhere are tipped with black. Girls on the bus. Girls in the hallway.

  “Bisou,” James calls, when he sees you near the doorway to first period. He’s standing with Caleb, Landon, and Big Mac. And though they’ve done a terrible job of it, each of them has black-painted nails.

  James grins, that tender sweet smile you love.

  It’s not enough, all these black nails. The polish will chip, the moment will fade. But it’s something, and there can be more somethings, a sea of somethings. For now, for this moment, you go to James, you tilt back your head, and you kiss.

  You are right that the nail polish chips. But you are wrong about the moment fading. If anything, over the next few weeks, it grows, it spreads, it waxes like the moon, shining light into dark corners.

  In whispered circles, in shared glances, and on the wall in the bathroom, in black ink, girls begin to share.

  Graham texted me for six months last year and only stopped when my brother threatened to beat him up.

  I never told but Tucker cornered me at a party once and showed me his dick.

  When I was a kid, my gymnastics coach kept touching my chest. I finally quit the team.

  When I was little, you write, my father murdered my mother.

  Then you say it out loud, to James. He sits with you in the front seat of his car. He holds your hands, and listens.

  “I don’t know why I never told you,” you say. “It felt like a secret I was supposed to keep.”

  James pulls you close. The soft flannel of his shirt brushes your cheek. “It’s okay,” he says into your hair, and his intentions are good, his intentions are so very good. But it’s not okay, it’s never going to be okay. Some things can’t be fixed. Some wounds won’t heal. That is the truth.

  But this is okay, sitting here with James, together. You can’t share everything with him—not now, maybe not ever, not because you can’t trust him but because you want to keep him safe.

  Then, you tell him about all the things the girls are writing in the bathroom in black ink. And James says that guys are talking, too. Or they’re starting to. “One of the seniors was talking in the locker room, and he kinda broke down, told us about this time he had sex with a girl at a party, a girl who was really drunk. Too drunk, probably.”

  A whole world exists in those three words—too drunk, probably.

  Incels. Gymnastic coaches grabbing little girls. Wolves in the woods. “What is wrong with people?” you say.

  “Something,” James says. “I don’t know. Something.”

  N’Oublie Pas

  Just for an hour, you tell yourself as you gently close your front door and jog into the misty velvet darkness. It’s a Saturday morning, after midnight, and sleep has evaded you. Mémé won’t even notice you’ve been gone, you promise yourself as you jog out of your neighborhood and toward James’s. And, you remind yourself, you left a note on your pillow, just in case she pokes her head into your room. You slip around the side of his house and maneuver between the thorny bushes beneath his window to tap against the glass. She won’t even worry.

  And then he pushes aside the curtain, and he sees you there, and he grins and lifts the sash, and he leans out the window and helps you climb through, into his room. He’s dressed in loose pajama bottoms, and his chest is warm when he pulls you against it, and quietly, quietly, almost silently, the two of you strip naked and slip together into his narrow single bed, him behind you, his arm beneath your head. You feel him shift to open his bedside table and you hear him rustle around, find a condom and tear it open, and his hand slips between you to unroll it before the two of you fit together, his breath in your hair, his blankets up to your chins, and you move together, together, together, until you shiver with pleasure and his breath catches, his hips tighten, and he moans into your hair.

  “Shh,” you whisper. “Shh.”

  He moves to take off the condom, and then you lie there together in his bed. Your eyes close. His body fits against the back of yours, chest on your back, hips pressed against your butt, legs bent to nestle just exactly against yours. Your feet are on his feet. His arms wrap around you and his breath slows, deepens, and you lie there, just like that, perfectly held and perfectly safe, and you listen to the rain starting to fall,

  He falls asleep. You are tired now, too, and you feel sleep pulling at you like an undertow, but you do not want to be asleep. You want to be awake, surrounded by James’s arms, tucked into his bed. You want to feel everything.

  And you do. You stay right there and feel everything—James’s body, his soft sheets, the press of the blankets. You feel his heart, beating against your back. You feel each of his fingers, woven through yours. You feel him loving you, even in sleep.

  Did Mémé feel this way in Garland’s arms? You hope so. You hope she felt this way—this exact way. You hope she will again.

  And your mother. Did she ever experience this? Did she ever feel safe, and secure, and loved? Nothing in the scraps she’s left for you, nothing in her poems, or in your memories, would indicate that she did. Imagine that. A whole life lived, too short, and without this.

  You hope you are wrong. You hope your mother did not die without this. You hope she had other parts to her life than the moments you remember.

  You breathe in deeply, until your chest is full, and you hold that breath as tight and as long as you can. At last, you let it go.

  James breathes heavy into the hair at the nape of your neck. His arms tighten, as if he is holding you in his dream. You wish you could meet him there, in a dream, you wish you could tell him the whole truth of you in the liminal dream-space of sleep. And, perhaps, in real life, too.

  Will you one day? You wonder.

  And then you must fall asleep, because you wake with a jolt to the loud voices of James’s sisters in the hallway outside his bedroom door, arguing about who gets to use the bathroom first, and for how long.

  Your eyes open. It’s just past seven, his clock reads. You kiss James’s hands, crossed around your body, and you climb from that warm perfect nest. You pull on clothes, you tighten boots, you zip your red sweatshirt and turn up its hood against the rain.

  “Were you going to leave without saying goodbye?” James’s voice is sleepy, and when you turn to him, you see that he’s rolled over and he’s watching you, his head propped up on his arm.

  You go to him in his bed. You kneel beside it and you kiss him, slowly, on his warm full lips.

  Then you stand and go to the window. You push it open; a cold wet wind blows inside.

  And you say, “Goodbye.”

  Before you step through the door, you know that something is different. The house lacks something—the particular energy of Mémé’s presence. You sit on the mud bench to unlace your boots, then go to the kitchen. There, you find a single sheet of Mémé’s stationery, gilded with an S at the top, on the table. She has weighted it with the saltshaker.

  Bisou, dear one,

  Something has come up. It is nothing to concern you. Simply a problem to which I must attend. I will be gone for a few days, no more than a week. Please, my darling, stay put. Invite your friends to keep you company, maybe see about rearranging the pantry while I’m away. It’s been years since it had a good scrubbing!

  There is money for groceries in the tin by the sink; be a good girl and finish the bread, won’t you? The leaven is in the bowl and should be ready for flour and water by the time you are home.

  N’oublie pas, dear one. Maggie loves fresh bread and will be so disappointed if you don’t finish what I’ve started.

  With love,

  M

  You read the note slowly. Don’t forget, she says. The opposite of what your mother wanted from you, all those years ago: n’oublie pas d’oublier.

  In
all the years you have lived with Mémé, she has never left you. Never. What could have happened to call her away now?

  Nothing good.

  You imagine her peeking into your room, looking for you. And finding your empty bed. Your stomach turns as you pull your phone from your pocket. There is no answer—it doesn’t even ring before Mémé’s voice speaks to you—“I am unable to take your call. Please leave a message.” There is the tone, and then blankness, nothingness. It takes you a moment to find your voice.

  “Mémé?” You feel your throat tighten, you feel the sting of tears. “Where are you? Where did you go?”

  There is no answer, of course, but still, you hesitate to disconnect. This tenuous connection is all you have right now. At last, though, you press End.

  You open the garage door. Her car is gone.

  Then you send a text to Keisha—Call me. I need you.

  She doesn’t respond; she must still be asleep. It’s Saturday morning, after all.

  You wander through the empty house in stockinged feet. You run your hand along the mantel, you flick on the table lamp near the couch, then flick it off again. You sit on the couch, and then lie down, and cover your eyes with your arm.

  You listen to the ticking of the clock. Minutes later—hours later—you wake with a gasp, your heart clenching and pounding. The quality of light has shifted; it’s midmorning now, and you are still alone. You check your phone, but Keisha still hasn’t texted back. You feel heavy and awkward from the strange, broken sleep and the strangeness of Mémé’s absence, and you make your way to the kitchen for a cup of tea. There, on the table, is the blue ceramic bowl Mémé uses to rise bread, draped in the blue checked cloth. You stare at it stupidly.

  N’oublie pas, dear one, her note had read. Maggie loves fresh bread and will be so disappointed if you don’t finish what I’ve started.

  You pull away the cloth and look at the shiny damp mixture.

  Thunder rolls, and the kitchen darkens with gathering clouds.

  You lower yourself into a chair and stare at the leaven. The storm gathers outside, and inside, within the walls of your own body, something is gathering, as well. Pinpricks of fear; a constellation of awareness; an answer to a question unasked, just out of your reach. You sit very still, waiting for the answer to come.

  But a knock at the kitchen door scatters the constellation, the cursory knock of someone who knows she’s welcome anytime, and then the handle turns, and the door pushes open.

  It’s Maggie, holding a basket, her cheeks red from the cold, and shaking raindrops from her hair.

  “Wow, it’s getting wild out there!” She’s smiling until she sees you sitting at the table, until she sees your face, and then her expression shifts, too, her smile dropping away. “Bisou, are you okay?”

  “I don’t know,” you say, more to yourself than Maggie. “Mémé is gone.”

  “Gone? What do you mean?” She sets her basket on the table. “Where did she go?”

  You open your mouth, but nothing comes out. What can you tell Maggie, without telling her everything?

  She asks, “Does this have something to do with your mom?”

  “My mother?”

  She nods. “It’s just—well, I wasn’t sure if I should say anything, and maybe you weren’t even aware, but this week, this full moon that’s coming is going to be an eclipse—a blood moon. And I remembered how you told me about when your mom died, how it happened during a blood moon . . . so I did a chart, see?”

  Out of the basket comes a square folded piece of paper, which Maggie spreads flat. It’s a circle, rimmed with symbols and crossed over with lines in a rainbow of colors, all of it annotated in Maggie’s neat script.

  She continues, “So it turns out that this coming moon is the first blood moon in Virgo since the year your mother died. And I thought, I don’t know, I thought maybe the energy with that might be kind of hard on you, you know? So here, look . . . ,” and Maggie pulls more things from her basket. “I brought you this crystal for clarity, and here, I brought this stone for stillness, and this sage, for clearing. I thought maybe we could get together, the four of us, and we could do a ceremony, you know, to honor your mom? And to ward off anything dark that might come with the Virgo blood moon. Since, you know, Virgo is a truth teller, and this blood moon that’s coming, people say it’s a time that will force us to do our shadow work, you know, and deal with truths, even the uncomfortable ones. And, Bisou, I know you don’t really believe in astrology like I do, but I figured, it can’t hurt, right?”

  “A blood moon.” Your voice sounds like you are speaking from very far away, from through a tunnel, and you remember your mother sitting by the window, stroking the bump on the bridge of her nose and saying, “Look, Bisou, it’s the blood moon.”

  You remember your mother, minutes later, when twin full moons—headlights—filled the front room. The way she looked at you with unveiled fear. The way she said, “Hide.”

  “But now,” Maggie says, “Sybil isn’t here? Where did she go, Bisou?”

  You sit very still at the table, eyes closed, feeling as if a memory is just out of your reach, as if life depends on your grasping it.

  But it doesn’t come; the taste of it fades from the back of your tongue.

  You open your eyes. Maggie’s hair sparkles with raindrops, her beautiful face slightly quizzical, like she’s working out a problem. There on the table is the chart, and the stone, and the crystal, and the sage, all gifts for you, from your wonderful friend.

  “Maggie,” you say, just that word, just her name.

  Secrets, secrets, everyone has secrets. Mémé kept her full-moon life a secret from you for a dozen years. Tucker hid his sexual past from Maggie; Phillip never told the truth about what happened with Cara Lee, or the girl at Berkeley. James is keeping your secret about what happened in the back of his car, and how you ran away from him, through the woods. You’re not telling him what happened after you left.

  Your mother didn’t tell anyone what your father did to her; she ran and hid, with just four-year-old you and no one else. And now your grandmother has let a secret carry her away. A dangerous secret, you are sure of it, and one she shouldn’t keep from you.

  Maggie once said, I’m getting pretty tired of keeping secrets. And she was brave, braver than you, brave enough to say her secrets out loud.

  Maggie is your friend, and you want no secrets between you. You are full to the brim with secrets, and now they spill. “Maggie,” you begin, “there’s something I need to tell you.”

  She lowers herself into her seat at the table, and her face is open, and she listens.

  You hold nothing back—you start at the beginning, with homecoming night, with the way it felt when James put his mouth on you, how good it felt, and Maggie nods like she knows.

  You tell her about the full moon and how James looked up from between your legs. When you tell her about the blood on his chin—your blood—Maggie gasps a little and brings her hand up to her mouth, and then she pulls you into a hug and squeezes you, rocks you side to side.

  You tell her about running away from James. You tell her about the wolf. And then you tell her who the wolf was—that the wolf was Tucker, and Tucker was the wolf.

  Her eyes grow as wide and round as moons.

  “Oh,” she says.

  You tell her about Phillip, and Keisha. You tell her how Mémé cleaned the car and burned your clothes. You tell her Mémé’s story, too, almost all of it, all the way from the beginning, up to when she came to you that morning to find you in your mother’s bloody bed. The broken window.

  “A wolf killed your mom,” Maggie says, her voice breathy. “Bisou, was your father a wolf?”

  You nod. “Mémé wanted to kill him. She fought with him, she cut his face, but he ran, and he got away. Then she brought me here, and she’s taken care of me all this time. She’s kept our woods safe.” You feel better telling Maggie all of this, opening up to her. “I’m so glad you know now,
Maggie,” you say. “I’m so glad you’re here, and that we’re friends, and that we have each other.”

  You pick up the stone that Maggie has brought, and as you rub your thumb across it, you think of stones, skipping stones, you think of you and your mother standing by the edge of the pond as she showed you how to curl one finger over the top of the stone, how to bring back your arm, how to flick your wrist, and how to let go. “More stones when the ice thaws,” she had promised, but for your mother the ice never thawed.

  Your phone vibrates. It’s a text from Keisha, at last—I’m on my way—and you and Maggie sit together, the stone between you, and you wait.

  When Keisha arrives, backpack slung across her shoulder, she finds you and Maggie still sitting at the kitchen table. Her expression is wary. “Hey, Maggie,” she says. “I didn’t know you would be here.”

  “No more secrets,” you say. “Not between us.”

  There is a pause before Keisha nods, but she does nod.

  “I think I have a problem,” you tell her. “I think Mémé needs my help.”

  “If you have a problem,” says Keisha, sliding into her seat at the table, “then we have a problem.”

  “And if Sybil needs your help,” says Maggie, “she needs our help.”

  You take a deep breath. “Okay,” you say, and your voice is stronger now. “Listen.”

  And you tell them how you came home this morning to find Mémé disappeared, which she has never done, leaving you like that. You show them the note that she left behind.

  Even before you’ve finished, Keisha is on her feet, pulling open drawers, looking for something. Anything that could tell her something about where Mémé could have gone.

  “Have you looked in her room? Have you checked her computer?”

  “No,” you say. It hasn’t occurred to you to do this.

  Keisha must read your distaste in your expression; “There’s no time to worry about that,” she says. “Maggie, you go through the kitchen. I’ll do her office. Bisou, you look through her bedroom. Okay?”

  Mémé’s room feels as though she has just stepped out for a moment. You stand outside its door, hand on the doorframe. Her bed is neatly made. The drawers to her highboy and bedside table are pushed all the way in. There is no disorder, no suggestion that she might have left in a hurry. You cross the threshold.