Wilding

by Melanie Tem

  She righted herself. She didn’t care whether she fell or not, whether she was run over or not. Traffic was heavy. When she reached the opposite curb safely she was aware of a disappointment, a dull resentment, joining with disappointment and resentment from all her life. Where were drunk drivers when you needed them?

  Northbound Speer Boulevard edged the west bank of the Platte, southbound Speer the east bank. Travelers have often become settlers here, awed by the mountains higher and higher on the closing-in horizon, relieved by the confluence of rivers with their trail of green (cottonwoods, even willows) after the long gold-brown prairies. Arapahoe camps and then the gold-hopeful towns of Denver, Auraria, Highland followed the lay of the land, hugged the bluffs and the narrow valley and spread a little way out onto the prairie. Mary and her sisters had settled here, too, at first, in the four big houses from all of whose attics you could still see Confluence Park.

  By now the rivers were encased by the city with its insistent main traffic arteries. The balance of power had shifted, as it does, back and forth, power having to do with relationship and relationship being perpetually in flux. By now the city determined where and how the rivers would flow and what their nature would be, rather than the other way around.

  Lydia found that she had paused on one of the bridges over the Platte and was leaning on the rail. Slightly dizzy already, she suddenly experienced a long moment of dangerous vertigo as she looked down. She kept looking down, kept leaning, and didn’t care whether she fell or not. Didn’t especially want to fall but didn’t much want not to, either. Couldn’t visualize what would happen to her if she did or didn’t fall.

  The earth spun on its axis, tilted one way and then the other, raced around the sun. The earth trembled from earthquakes, volcanoes, sliding tectonic plates. The earth’s atmosphere was wild with storms, transformed by pollution from inside and cosmic debris from outside, constantly shifting its composition and its form. Relationship: in perpetual flux. Lydia couldn’t imagine how anyone lived in this place. She couldn’t imagine why every living creature here wasn’t always dizzy, how any life form managed to maintain equilibrium or predictable shape.

  Pam.

  Pam had been steady, and what she seemed to be. Pam had loved her, had begun to love her. Pam had been firmly who she was, and now she was dead, transformed into something unreachable because Lydia had not been willing to make a choice. Had not been willing to decide, at any given moment, who she was.

  Pam was dead.

  Reflexively, even though she really didn’t care whether she fell or not, Lydia tried to steady herself by holding on to the bridge railing. It was too thick; her hands couldn’t grip, her nails slid off with a faint screak. Her body’s ridiculous instinct to right itself caused her to look up and focus on the safer middle distance. But the vertigo didn’t stop; it merely shifted.

  Everyone she’d ever lost filled her head, made her consciousness swim violently. Pam. Deborah. Jake. My baby boys. But under that loss, providing context and contrast, was a loss far more disorienting: the sudden acknowledgment of everything she’d missed, of all that was not precisely absent from her life because it had never been precisely present. Because she’d never been able to choose.

  It was all too much. It sent her reeling—out of her mind, out of her body and heart.

  She believed the mountains were on her right. She couldn’t see them and she certainly couldn’t feel them the way her mother claimed to be able to. Her mother said she always knew which way the mountains were, even at night or on a low overcast day; therefore, she always knew which way was west, and therefore she could find her way around virtually anywhere in the city. Lydia was always lost. All her life she’d been viscerally convinced that her house faced north, which would mean that her grandmother’s house faced south and the other two family dwellings on the square faced east and west. Even though daily evidence proved that was wrong, her flawed internal compass continued to orient her that way. Every morning she found herself a bit bewildered and angry as she set off from home for work, turning what clearly seemed to her to be all the wrong ways, arriving at her destination utterly despite herself.

  Downtown was not far ahead of her now, just across the other four lanes of Speer, but it was insubstantial and shifting, a mirage. Gray, black, silver buildings reflected each other and each other again, reflected their own distorted and dismembered reflections. Foreground and background blended. Perspective flattened. There were no firm boundaries among sidewalk, building, alley, plaza, parking lot, containered tree. Streets disappeared. Footprints had no chance.

  Lydia knew from her mother that Denver’s streets had been laid out on a neat western grid, north-south streets named and east-west avenues numbered. Even downtown, where streets ran diagonal to prime directions because the original city planners had wanted to be able to sight southeast down Seventeenth Street all the way to Pikes Peak, was laid out on a grid. But they might instead have been the narrow, winding, purposefully obtuse pathways of a medieval city or a modern suburban housing development, intended to keep outsiders out and insiders in. To foster a sense of community. To repel the invaders.

  Pam.

  Lydia swayed, gasped, trembled. She found herself obsessively visualizing the body of Pam’s dog Friedrich, warm and freshly eviscerated, dark brown fur and red-brown blood on the golden-brown wooden floor. The image of Pam’s body, throat cut and heart removed, would not stay in her mind.

  From up here, the Platte was a median for Speer Boulevard. The greenbelt along its narrowed valley was brown in this semiarid autumn, except for two thin stripes directly adjacent to the water, which were brilliant green. Startling, sparkling green. Painful green, so bright. The river itself was brown, blue, white.

  Lydia had been weeping for days, and would never stop. Of course, she had no tears to shed. (What an odd figure of speech, she thought, as though tears were a dead layer of skin or a winter undercoat needing to be sloughed off.) But she sobbed. Her throat was raw. Sometimes from an enormous, flattened distance and sometimes as if she actually were inside her own body, she heard herself emitting the ceaseless, rasping, wailing noise that was, apparently, to take the place of breathing, since she could scarcely breathe, could trap almost no air in her lungs and then was afraid to let any of it go.

  Looking down, leaning so far out over the railing that some objects were upside down, Lydia thought she saw Deborah. She caught her breath, but wouldn’t have called out even if it had been her daughter. Which, of course, it wasn’t—this was a city of half a million people. The figure that wasn’t her daughter had vanished now anyway, had gone on its own way.

  Lydia crouched on the concrete bridge bed, lost her balance, and struck her chin on the rail.

  Lightly, but her temples jarred and her teeth bit into her tongue. No blood, though. No real pain.

  She thought Deborah and tried to imagine throwing herself through the rail, into the river, onto the rocks that in places turned the river white. Maybe then the girl would be sorry. Maybe then she’d understand how much her mother loved her, how much she’d given up for her.

  But Lydia couldn’t hold in her head the complicated series of steps that throwing herself through the rail would require. She thought Pam. Pam had never known she loved her. Lydia had never known it herself until she’d allowed Pam to be murdered. Sacrificed. Had not had the courage either to stop it or to do it herself; had simply turned away and let it happen by default.

  Deliberately, Lydia thought about all the things she’d done for her daughter all these years, things she’d still be doing if she could, and still getting no credit from Deborah. Bringing Deborah’s clothes upstairs from the dryer, for instance—partly, it was true, because she was annoyed not to have any space on the folding table for days at a time, but also to save Deborah a trip up and down the basement stairs. Lydia herself probably made a dozen such trips a day. Sweat-shirts, nightshirts, T-shirts warm and soft, the zippers of jeans and fasteners of bras hot
enough to burn. Folding the clothes in neat piles on the dining-room table. A little gift. A message: I love you so much. I’m so afraid for you, and there’s nothing I can do except this. Unacknowledged.

  Uninterpreted. Every time, without comment, Deborah just took the clothes up to her room.

  Cooking. Cooking for her child, food persistently and foolishly a gift of love even though Deborah hated to eat. Deborah’s thinness proof of Lydia’s maternal failure. Hours spent sneaking bran into biscuits, bananas into pancakes, half-and-half into stroganoff sauce. Disproportionate pleasure and relief, inordinate pride when Deborah ate; gut-wrenching guilt and fear when, much more often, she took a mouthful or two and pushed the plate away, or wouldn’t come to a meal at all, or afterward locked herself in the bathroom and vomited, threw up every little bit she’d eaten and then some.

  So afraid. So afraid, from the moment of Deborah’s birth, from the moment of her conception. And so angry with this child, whose very life inspired such fear and such love.

  But Lydia was ashamed of everything she’d ever felt, especially everything she’d ever felt toward her child. Ashamed of the fear and anger, ashamed mostly of the love. Enraged by the anger, terrified by the fear. All her life—mother, daughter, granddaughter—so nearly overwhelmed by fury, terror, love that she disowned all of it, by a vast sustained effort of will held herself closed (closed to her own heart, to her own nature), so that she was never transformed into one thing or another.

  Thought now of Pam and sank to all fours, pulled her knees and elbows together, sobbed.

  Someone passing on the sidewalk behind her asked was she all right, should he call an ambulance or the police or something. Lydia managed to nod yes and shake her head no, and that was all it took for the kind but unaffiliated stranger to go on his way. But she knew she couldn’t stay here. They wouldn’t help her, and they wouldn’t leave her alone.

  Still bent nearly double from the clear memory and clearer anticipation of agony in her heart and belly, Lydia made her way around the end of the bridge and found the stairs and bike ramp that led down into the greenbelt, connecting to the path along the river. Doubting she could manage stairs, she took the ramp. Its incline made her dizziness worse, and her knuckles brushed the concrete with every swinging step, scraping the skin, pushing the little bones apart. Almost immediately the city skyline sank below the imminent horizon created by the riverbank. It seemed a very long way down.

  She found herself running. Dully, it surprised her that she could do that, but there was relief in it, and when the fleshy pads of her palms were abraded by the rapidly passing ground it felt good, a deep itch momentarily assuaged.

  It was very dark down here. There were a few pole lights arcing intermittently across the path, but their amber light didn’t penetrate very far and didn’t much bother her eyes. The charcoal-gray city sky, a lid, was several distinct shades lighter than the narrow valley, where Lydia raced with increasingly dangerous abandon.

  Under another bridge. Echoes of her quick footsteps, a four-footed staccato, and of a truck crossing overhead. The eye of a campfire up underneath, and someone’s drunken exclamation as she sped by.

  Across a series of small organized rapids and careful waterfalls, her feet and legs cold and wet but drying almost immediately when she lifted them out of the water. A little current, a minuscule undertow; she lay down in the water for a few minutes, hoping it might sweep her away, but it had no power against her.

  Here in a bend of the river, in a section of the bank higher than the rest and thickened with grass and bushes, was a cave. She felt it long before she saw it, heard it. The hollowing out of the river’s confines, extension of the boundary.

  Narrow enough at the entrance that she had to squeeze herself through, shoulders and hips dislodging rocks and clumps of soil that slid past her and into the river with very small plops. Then, abruptly, wider and high enough that her head and shoulders cleared easily as she crawled farther and farther into the riverbank, under the city. A den, maybe originally dug by an otter but empty now, teeming with odors but uninhabited.

  Familiar odors. Lydia moaned. Flung her head from side to side frantically trying to escape them or to draw them in. The odor of the daughter, but Deborah, Deborah was not here. The odor of her grandmother. Who was. Who had come to find her, as Lydia had hoped she would.

  The enormous wolf lay across the back of the den, growling a low steady greeting and warning. The soft growl and the smell stopped Lydia before she really saw her, but then she saw her, and was dully glad, and dully afraid.

  The huge front paws, each as big as a woman’s face, extended almost to her. The toes flexed, the thick black claws glittering, the thumbs in chillingly efficient opposition. The head stretched out along the paws—massive, eyes gleaming yellow, long mouth and long red tongue and fangs protruding down over the lower lip when the lips were drawn back. As they were now, in warning and in greeting.

  The wolf’s body formed the back wall of the cave. Lydia had the impression that the cave actually continued much farther both ahead of her and behind her, all the way under the city and out the other side, back under the river and up through the mountains to timberline, past timberline. From the core of the earth to the edge of it, and under all its surfaces.

  Now her grandmother Mary blocked her way. Said, “Stop.” Said, “Here.” Lydia stopped. Mary said, “Come,” and at once Lydia crawled the short distance between them and flattened herself against the floor, where loose, damp dirt smelled of the river and the city and of her grandmother.

  She knew her grandmother would kill her. Her weakness had, finally, been too much, too overt.

  Moving toward the matriarch, she was, at last, claiming something that belonged to her, slightly less passively than usual allowing it to happen.

  Suddenly Lydia realized that she was covered with fur. That had never happened to her before, and for a moment she was tremendously moved that she hadn’t felt it happening, that there were forces at work inside her of which she had no inkling. For a moment, horrified and invigorated, she thought she had at last passed over into the power.

  But it was her grandmother’s fur. She should have known. Growing into her rather than out of her, penetrating her from the outside, from beyond the porous barrier of her skin and flesh. Thick, rough, slightly greasy in her nose and mouth. Itching painfully along her bared throat and chest and upper arms. Wrapping her, enveloping her, suffocating her. Drawing her in.

  The paws drew her in. The claws clicked together as they met behind her head. She knew she was going to die now. Her eyes stung and her breath came hard with relief.

  At the same time, to her amazement and disgust, there was a tiny hot flash of resistance. She did not fully want to die. At this moment, insanely, there seemed to be something still worth living for.

  Purposely, she thought: Pam.

  Thought: Deborah.

  She cried out, howled. She buried herself more deeply in her grandmother’s fur, burrowed toward the steady thudding of her grandmother’s heart and the growl of words in her grandmother’s warm throat. “It’s time.”

  Lydia struggled free of the clinging fur enough to roll over and bare her throat and belly. She waited, thinking in a panic-stricken litany the names of all those she’d lost: Jake Deborah Pam baby boys baby. But the names didn’t come close to filling her mind or heart; there was still plenty of space reverberating with terror and with rage.

  The claw of the wolf pierced the hollow under her chin. Lydia cried out, then held her breath. There was hardly any pain, and she felt very little blood.

  The wolf’s claw drew a line down her granddaughter’s body, making a very shallow slit between her breasts, through her navel, through her mons and clitoris to her vaginal opening. Lydia lay very still. Fury and fear had been overpowered now by an exquisite intimacy.

  She was closer to her grandmother than she’d ever thought it possible for her to be. The alien consciousness of the creature w
as no more accessible to her now than ever, but she knew, at last, what was expected of her, and that she would be able to do it right.

  She was expected to die. To allow herself to be sacrificed.

  Having lost Pam, that didn’t seem like much. “No,” the wolf said, and withdrew.

  At once, Lydia shivered violently, and the pain that halved her body was sharp, vivid. Desperately she tried to cover herself again with the wolf’s fur, but her grandmother moved away, pulled farther back into the cave, and raised herself to her haunches.

  “Please,” Lydia breathed.

  “No,” said the wolf. “You do it.”

  Lydia whimpered, “I can’t.”

  The wolf roared. The cave trembled, swelled. Lydia tried to cover her ears. Her blood flowed thin and cold down her body. Her grandmother roared, turned, and was going away. Was going away.

  “No! Wait! Stay with me!” Lydia shrieked. Was going away.

  Lydia raised her left hand and, with the long, curved black nail now grown on her little finger, slashed into her own left breast.

  The pain was immediate and immense. The blood flow was fierce. Lydia’s consciousness exploded. Another incision, another probe, and she felt the wild beating half inside and half outside her body, the wild breath. She roared. She laughed. Her heart beat and bled into her hand. The wolf lay down beside her, so close, lay in the spreading cavity of her body, fur inside her, long red tongue inside her, eager to accept the great gift. Lydia screamed in transforming rage and release, and then tore out her own heart.