Fierce Little Thing

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  I felt Sarah’s gaze on us. The girl did, too—she hid her hand quickly, with a startled look my way. I felt a rise of panic. “Teresa needed more soup. You’re Sarah, right? She said it would be okay to ask for more soup.”

  Sarah patted the little girl’s head, whose eyes closed like a satisfied cat’s. “Little Nora flip you off?” She shook her head but a smile hid there, too. “She’s a beast.”

  Relief flushed my limbs; I’d been so sure Sarah was going to smack Nora that I hadn’t even considered there was another way. My hands were shaking. Sarah took the bowl and sloshed a full serving into it. She waited until my hands stilled, then placed the pottery, newly warmed, back into them.

  11

  I’m scrambling away from Xavier before I know it, into the hallway, up the stairs. Halfway up, I realize I’m making the same quaking shriek that Mother did, when Daddy stepped toward me into the foyer. “Don’t you touch her,” she cried, wrapping her arms around him from behind. Blood garbled her words.

  Into the first bedroom I go again, the pink bedroom, Mother’s bedroom. I latch closed the door. Around me fall all those stupid books, an avalanche of words. It’s only morning but I’m in for the night. Thank goodness I fed the Mother, though there will be no bread tomorrow.

  Xavier bangs the door. He calls my name.

  12

  On the other end of the Main Lodge, the front door slammed shut. The tinny sound cut through the cacophony of voices and clattering spoons, the sneezes, Tomas’s throaty cry as Teresa unlatched him, and the weight of Sarah’s gaze. The room quieted as I turned to look.

  An old woman had come in. Small, but not delicate like Sarah; she moved with a swagger I’d only seen in men. She might have been Grandmother’s age, but she had a short crop of white hair, wore a fisherman’s sweater with rolled up sleeves, and carried a faded L.L. Bean backpack. Even across the great room I knew she’d smell of wood smoke instead of talcum powder.

  She held a handful of green; plants harvested from the forest floor. She strode to Abraham, who was deep in consultation with Philip, picked up his glass of water, and plonked the plant’s dirty roots right in. Abraham held up the muddied glass, first to Philip in a toast, then to the old woman, and laughed.

  A boy and girl had come in with her. They were the only other people there about our age. Their presence in the old woman’s company seemed a point of interest for many of the Homesteaders. The girl was tall and ample and dressed like a lumberjack, and aside from the Black woman who’d been in the song circle and now sat at Abraham’s other hand, the only person of color I’d seen at Home. She towered over the old woman, but she looked like she didn’t mean to.

  “So they were foraging,” one of the women in line said to Sarah.

  The boy had a round face and a nose pressed in like a bulldog. He was dressed old-fashioned to match Sarah and Nora—white starched shirt, black suspenders. He was small like his mother, and compact and strong like his father, who was watching from across the room. When Sarah gestured to the boy, the man went back to his soup. The boy loped our way. “Hey, Ma.”

  “Your father needed help today.” Sarah filled a bowl for him.

  “Can I have more?”

  She pressed what was already there into his hands. “Ben, I’d like you to meet Saskia.”

  “Pleasure,” he said, but he didn’t even look at me.

  “Saskia is from the city,” Sarah said. “She has flaxen hair and long limbs. She is fiercer than she looks.” It was odd the way she listed these characteristics, as though she was reading a poetic description out loud. Ben drew back, and though I would have described myself as tall and scrawny, with blond, scraggly hair, and a long face, I didn’t think I was quite as bad as the nightmare he apparently saw before him.

  “Why don’t you sit together?” Sarah asked.

  “I bet she’s got a spot,” he mumbled, before striding to the crowded table with his father. An old man with a long beard, sipping his soup like coffee, moved aside with a grimace. Ben teetered uncomfortably at the edge of the bench.

  My cheeks burned. I turned back into the dining room. The soup stuttered in the bowl.

  “’Tis a gift to be simple…” As I walked away, Sarah began to sing. “’Tis a gift to be free.” The single soprano carried into the room, like a bird let out of a cage. “’Tis a gift to come ’round where we ought to be.”

  I gave Teresa her soup as she joined in—“And when we find ourselves in the place that is right”—and soon the whole room was singing along—“We will be in the valley of love and delight.”

  Their voices braided together. Sarah’s notes were like bells. Teresa sang with more confidence for lyrics than for melody. Jim sang, too, but all the while he was watching, watching. Tomas dented a spoon upon the table, and Ben chewed as he mumbled the words, and Nora gobbled the last of the frittata. Abraham hummed along, closing his eyes at the top of the room. All the other’s voices joined, too, all the others whose names I was yet to know: the old man with the beard; Ben’s serious father; the girl who had come in with Ben. Even Philip joined in, even Xavier, who met my gaze with an ironic lift of his eyebrows.

  I did not sing; I did not know the words. At the other end of the room, the old woman stood at the mantelpiece, her mouth clamped shut. She knew the words, I could tell, but she did not care to sing them.

  13

  Xavier’s need is a train of language.

  “Saskia.

  “Abraham can’t hurt you.

  “It probably isn’t even him.

  “Please.

  “There’s some reasonable explanation.

  “You don’t need to be afraid of him.”

  As if that’s why I’m hiding.

  14

  At dawn the next day, Xavier and I awoke on the floor of the Main Lodge to the old man who’d moved aside for Ben standing above us. His Calvinist beard hung bluish in the dawn. He waved the piece of paper that had borne us to Home. “Take it back.”

  Xavier propped himself on his elbows. “It’s not even morning.”

  The old man dropped the map onto Xavier’s chest. Philip wasn’t beside us anymore, if he’d come to bed in the first place. My back ached.

  From the kitchen came the gentle clack of a mixing spoon against a bowl. A humid, herbal sweetness clouded the room. Sarah’s back was turned to us, but I knew she’d been listening.

  15

  Xavier’s fists, relentless, rattle the door in its frame.

  The therapists say to open one’s toolbox when something is broken.

  So, five things I can see: the tops of Acer rubrum, the red maple; Betula lenta, the black birch; Fagus grandifolia, the American beech; Acer saccharum, the sugar maple; and Carya glabra, the pignut hickory.

  Four things I can hear: Cardinalis cardinalis boasting; Spizella passerina trilling; Poecile atricapillus, the black-capped chickadee, whistling its two tones; and Tamiasciurus hudsonicus, the red squirrel, chastising us all.

  Three things I can touch: coverlet, eyelids, heart.

  Two things I can smell: man, breath.

  One thing I can taste: terror.

  The sun hasn’t moved that far when Xavier gives up. His feet pad down the stairs. The door clicks shut behind him. The house exhales.

  16

  Over a bowl of porridge sprinkled with plump blueberries, the grizzled man—whose name, Amos, came out in a low growl—explained that Home was shrouded from the Thinged World, but could be reached by those who quested for it. If someone who knew of Home thought you were ready to experience the life it offered, they would tell you where to find this map, hidden from the wind and rain in the depths of JimBob’s, and you’d have to muster faith until you found the road in.

  “Is that how you got here?” Xavier asked. “Stealing a map from a convenience store?” I thought Amos might be Abraham’s father; he was tall like him, and lean—although his cheeks were almost hollow—but it didn’t seem polite to ask.

  “Put
the directions back,” Amos said, pulling out a hunting knife, “so the next journeyman may find us.”

  “Why does it have to be us?”

  I put my hand on Xavier’s arm. That knife looked sharp.

  Out of his other pocket, Amos drew a piece of driftwood, with the face of an owl carved into one end. He began to whittle. “Your father has been seen.” Splinters scattered over the table.

  “But it’s like three miles away.”

  Amos stabbed the knife into the table. “I warned Abraham about children.”

  On Bushrow Road, dust kicked up from my Keds. Birds chirped from the dense forest on both sides. There were probably frogs and squirrels and ferns and mushrooms in there, too, but I didn’t know anything about them, didn’t know their names or habits. We walked in silence, sun winking through the tops of the impossibly tall trees. I wish I’d brought a water bottle. The hard-boiled egg Sarah had slipped into my pocket thudded with every step.

  “It’s a cult,” Xavier said, at the bottom of the hill.

  “They’re just a bunch of weirdos.”

  Xavier lengthened his stride until he was ahead of me. He thought I liked Home. But “like” wasn’t a word I’d use to describe the gratitude called up in me when Sarah hadn’t smacked her child. The closest I’d felt to that unnamed feeling had been with Xavier, back on the day I’d decided not to put my lips on his: a bruised hunger that even kissing wouldn’t satiate.

  Only the day before, JimBob’s had seemed a haven, filled with the trappings of the known world: orange chips, waxy chocolate, frigid lockers of soda. But by the time we went in, past a lady in a down vest ringing up a customer, the idea of a convenience store already seemed foreign. We returned the paper to its proper hiding spot, below a stack of cooking oil. This was stealing’s opposite: giving something we hadn’t even known we had to give. Xavier plopped a pack of Big Red onto the empty counter. The cashier glared. Probably we smelled like cabbage.

  17

  Now that Xavier’s gone, the Mother will require extra feeds and a hum or two. She’ll be sludgy, shy, but I’ll coax her back with flour and the tiger maple spoon. I’ll put her in the window, spill her in sunlight. But not yet, not yet. On the inside of my door, Mother’s brass hook and eye clasp each other. The bed calls. The books kick away, leaves on an autumnal stroll. Head finally on the pillow, I listen for the motor. Xavier will be back again, surely, but I’ve won this round.

  It’s just some cute boy playing games with him.

  Any minute now, the motor.

  But then, instead, the front door moans open. And there are voices. Voices? Surely not. It’s just Xavier on the phone. I rise to my elbows.

  The stairs cry out. His step is louder. Perhaps he’s carrying something heavy. But no. There, between his steps lies another set, hiding.

  He’s brought someone in.

  18

  We deserved a dip in the lake after bald noon on the gravel road. I would wear the turquoise bikini Jane got me at the Barney’s warehouse sale. But once back at the Main Lodge, we discovered that our suitcases—which we’d put beside the fireplace—were nowhere to be found.

  “Did someone move our stuff?” Xavier asked Teresa, who was hunched over a basket of receipts. Her curly hair blanketed her broad back as she added, subtracted, multiplied with a worn pencil on the back of an envelope. She smelled of goat manure and sandalwood. She waved us toward the kitchen. “Have to get these numbers crunched before Jim heads to town.”

  In the kitchen, onions sizzled in a cast iron skillet the size of a tire. Leftover soup bubbled, the tang of curry on the air. A dozen sourdough loaves cooled on the counter. The sight of them made my stomach rumble for the first time that day. Sarah washed dishes before the open window; pinned up on either side of it were sketches of the forest and the lake, of birds darting from branches, of porcupines, of moose. The drawings—all made on the backs of envelopes—quivered in the breeze.

  “Do you know where our bags are?” I asked.

  Tomas was crouched outside, below the window, digging with a stick. A clod of dirt sailed through the air. He went back to digging. Another brown chunk emerged from the bushes, hitting the boy’s arm with a thwack, which he ignored. But when a third hunk sailed from the undergrowth to smack Tomas’s cheek, the little boy sprang up like a wild dog. Nora, braids unkempt, pinafore filthy, emerged from the bushes, roared, and took off down the hill, Tomas at her tail. Sarah’s small hands worked a wet rag along the inside of a mixing bowl.

  “My suitcase is red,” I said.

  Sarah’s metal bowl rattled into the sink. She turned toward me. She offered a smile, which made her face a different country. Her blue eyes held mine much longer than was comfortable. This look gave me over to something strange and powerful that slowly, surely, filled me with a giddy understanding: what I was asking about—the suitcase, the swimsuit—didn’t matter. Here she was, here they all were, with work in their hands. It wasn’t that it was selfish to be thinking of swimming while the rest of them worked; but why would I want to do anything but join in? Sarah watched me understand. She pulled my gaze, with hers, back toward the outside: a bumblebee lobbing from tuft to tuft of purple clover; a woodpecker rattling a dead tree; a motorboat growling a fine line across the lake. There were cabins below us, and people I had yet to meet, and land I did not know.

  I pulled Xavier outside. Back in the sun, in front of the Main Lodge, he said, “So, where’s our stuff?”

  I shrugged.

  “You didn’t find out? But you said to follow you!” His face was pink now, his forelock dangling with sweat. His mouth was dusted Cheetos orange in each corner. I gave him the hard-boiled egg. He bashed it against his forehead. Brown shell rained over the dirt. You were like this when you got hungry, too.

  I explained that I had come to understand that the suitcases, and what was inside of them, didn’t really matter. “You don’t think underpants are important?” he said. I didn’t know how to explain that we weren’t on the subject of underpants anymore.

  But Xavier was. He gestured over his shoulder at the Main Lodge. “One of those psychos stole our stuff.”

  “Maybe we’re getting a cabin,” I said. “Maybe someone moved our things for us.” I couldn’t say to Xavier that what I wanted, more than anything, now that I’d noticed this world the way Sarah did, was to feel Abraham seeing me the way he had when I’d arrived; that I wanted this much more than any of the things I’d brought from the outside world.

  Before us, at the base of the driveway—where Philip’s Lincoln was parked beside a trusty old pickup—stood the camp’s flagpole, flapping with a red piece of frayed cloth. Fifty yards behind us lay the stinking latrine. I laughed as Xavier glared. I laughed because the latrine was disgusting and yet I’d come back willingly, even knowing it was my only place to shit. To our left lay a handful of cabins. It was hard to imagine calling one of those squat brown squares home, but maybe I’d get to. Xavier made his way up the steps of the closest one, shielding his eyes to peer in the window.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for our stuff.”

  “That’s someone’s home.” Mother’s sharpness spilled out of me. All those walks to and from the park, when you’d dash ahead and let yourself through some stranger’s gate and dally on their limestone stoop. She always called out to slow down; she couldn’t keep up in her high heels. In the half block before we caught up, she’d laugh and call you naughty, but by the time we spotted you again, all you got was the threat of Daddy.

  Xavier and I followed a yellow butterfly down a path to our right. It dipped under tree cover, toward a faint chorus of song.

  19

  “Please open the door, Saskia.” Xavier’s voice coaxes from the hallway.

  There’s another breath out there, filling my home with its stink. How dare he? He’s made my world so small now, so indescribably small—just this bed. Just this room. Just these books. No sourdough even; Mother’s door now anothe
r line I cannot cross.

  20

  Downhill sat a rusty camper that had been repurposed into a chicken coop. Beside it lay a meadow enclosed in wire where a few dozen birds paced jerkily, like dinosaurs. Nora and Tomas tore around the camper and up the hill toward us, the toddler clutching something in his arms. It was wrapped in a piece of familiar turquoise cloth.

  “You little fucker!” the girl screamed.

  Xavier put his hand out to stop Tomas. The toddler dodged him and darted away up the path, but not before Xavier had pulled my bikini top away. I caught a glimpse of what was wrapped inside. I knew that white fur as well as I knew myself, but it was impossible; I’d left Topsy back in Chelsea, telling myself it would be good to try out life without you tethered so close. Except here he was.

  Topsy’s floppy, felted pelt was revealed in Xavier’s palm. Xavier yelped and grimaced, holding the bunny away from his body as though he was real and dead. Nora jumped for him. I scrabbled forward, making a desperate sound, taking him back.

  “Finders keepers,” Nora cried, grabbing Topsy’s arm.

  “Let go!” I must have screamed this. I must have looked terrifying, my mouth fomenting wrath and grief. Xavier and Nora shrunk back. My face buried itself in Topsy; head filling with the dusty smell of him, which was the smell of you.

  “What’s all this?” Abraham was there, too, then. It was impossible to know where he had come from. Nora darted toward me, coming for Topsy, but he held her off. He leaned toward me, requiring my gaze. “This is special to you?”