Fierce Little Thing

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  Now I’m the one laughing. “Easy for you to say.” The laugh turns to grit in my throat. “None of us got fresh starts.”

  “But you did! Don’t you see? You were so young. So brilliant and beautiful and alive. Strong, courageous. So many times, Saskia, I was amazed by you. That day when the sheriff came to interrogate us about the dog attack? How you somehow knew to bring Topsy and cry? It worked like a charm.”

  “I cried because I was sad.”

  He looks down at his hands. “You want me to say I’m not proud of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I am proud of you. I’m not proud of myself. The way I ruined you…” Here he looks into my eyes, for the first time, really looks into them, and I have to tell myself to keep my gaze steady, not to falter. I used to think him so beautiful, every fiber of him, every inch, every cell. I used to think that what I felt for him was devotion.

  “Why now?” he muses. “Why now? Well, I suppose I wanted to give you the chance to punish me. For a time, I thought staying dead was the way to go. Just to give you the gift of believing I was gone.”

  “We wanted you to suffer.”

  “So make me suffer.”

  “I believe you think you’re helping us in your fucked up way, but Abraham, honestly, just go ahead, kill yourself. We’ll watch if you want, I can’t believe I’m saying that. I bet Ben would love to film it in slow motion and watch your suicide every day for the rest of his life. So just do that instead of this. They don’t deserve it.”

  “And you?”

  “And poor Teresa and Tomas. They think they matter.”

  “I needed someone to get you here. You wouldn’t have come without the others. And the others wouldn’t have come if they’d known, for sure, it was me.”

  So it is about me, then. Finally, he has said it, without knowing he’s given it away. It’s all my fault we’re here.

  “I know you,” he says. “I know you need to punish me. I know it’s the only way you’ll be done with me. But you won’t do it unless I make you.”

  I shake my head, but my words are gone.

  “You deserve to be free, Saskia.”

  I am already moving into the night.

  134

  “Remorse?” That word meant feeling bad for something you had done. That word meant she knew.

  Her eyes danced over my face. “Saskia, what if you told a different story about yourself? To yourself, I mean? I think you think…” She stopped. “If you could say one word to describe yourself, what would it be?”

  The question called up a feeling—dark, ugly, sickening. Regret. Shame. Tears were coming, hot.

  “Tell me.”

  I shook my head. The word thundered in my chest, trapped, refusing to release itself: “Bad.”

  Her eyes dazzled with tears. “Honey, why don’t you just tell me what really happened to your brother? Let it out.”

  Before I could, she was coughing again, crouching. The thing inside her was ravenous. She squirmed with it. I almost placed my hand on her back, but then I didn’t. Then I watched her cough, grateful for the chance to observe her untamed. She had gotten me to say so much. She wanted me to tell her everything. I almost had. She was in love with the sheriff. She could tell him anything. She would. She was down there on the ground, sick and small, and I was part of the Unthinged World. I could see, now, how dangerous it had been to come up to the ridge with her.

  This time, the handkerchief didn’t make it out of her pocket. Blood splattered onto the dirt. I peered down at those red splotches as they soaked into the earth. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and looked up at me. She saw my face was closed. She said: “You reminded me of my son for so long that I forgot to notice the ways you’re different.”

  From her pocket, she pulled a feather—small and brown. She tickled it across the palm of her hand.

  “Clever. Aware. Always watching other children. Always … studying them. I say ‘study’ because he was like a student. It was as though he didn’t exactly know how to act on his own, and he was clever enough to know it shouldn’t necessarily be like that, and it scared him. He hid it very well. But a mother knows.”

  I felt that perhaps if I held quite still, I could both listen to her and pretend I didn’t care that she was describing me how Mother would have, if Mother had been kind:

  At the Natural History Museum, under the shadow of the big whale, little Xavier had run toward me, a smile on his pudgy face. I picked up the shoe he’d removed and left beside me—a dress shoe, since it was our joint birthday celebration—and threw it as hard as I could at his head. Not because I wanted to hurt him. Not because I didn’t know that it would hurt him. But because I wanted to see him react. I wanted to observe the shock, the pain, the chin quiver, the startled hastening away from me, the howling filling that massive hall, the tears cascading down his face, his flushed cheeks, Jane running to sweep him up, Mother coming to scold me, the other mothers who’d seen what I did pulling their children close. So much movement out of one simple act—letting go of a piece of leather at just the right moment.

  I didn’t want to hurt Xavier.

  But if I wanted to see what hurting him would do, I would have to hurt him. So I did.

  “He tried to hurt his younger sister,” Marta said, startling me out of my memory. “Multiple times, in different ways. Pushing her backwards off the swing. Putting his own hand in boiling water to try to convince her it wasn’t a big deal. A hacksaw to her finger—don’t worry, I caught him before he did real damage. Would have cut it clean off, though, if I hadn’t run across the yard and pulled the saw from his hand. It was as though he didn’t hear me when I called to him. Or didn’t want to hear me. He was too interested in the cutting to stop himself. And he loved her—that’s what the world gets wrong. He loved her so much. But it was as though the loving and the hurting did not exist in conflict to each other.”

  I was nodding.

  “Of course I thought it was my fault. He was my firstborn. I was older. His father was preoccupied with work, and didn’t think I should keep the pregnancy, and when I did, was very much of the opinion that the kids were my responsibility. I didn’t think I could have kids, frankly, until my son came along, and my daughter, right after. Boom, boom. It seemed wrong to have harbored a secret skill like that—the secret of fertility—and not to take it up on its offer, do you understand? I hadn’t much considered what it would be like to be a mother; I had spent so long in laboratories and classrooms. And then, I saw that he was like me—observing, watching, waiting. Well, that’s a scientist. Just like me. It took me a while to understand that he lacked … perhaps compassion isn’t the right word. That he lacked something most humans possess—a sense of grace, you might call it?

  “By the time I realized that, I believed it was a maternal lack that had made him that way. I say that like it’s in the past, but some part of me still believes it. My daughter certainly does. She left home the moment she was able and hasn’t looked back. I can’t say that I blame her. But I couldn’t reject him. I couldn’t be like your mother. I couldn’t leave him. How can you leave someone who you know has the potential to hurt someone terribly, but hasn’t done it yet? Are you really supposed to abandon them to the world? I knew she would be all right. It was him I worried for.” Then her eyes glimmered. “She says I love him better and maybe there’s some truth to that. I made him, in my very body, when I didn’t know my body could do that. That seemed a miracle. I bound myself to him. I would stay close. I believed I could protect the world from him and protect him from what he wanted to do to the world. I believed I could stop him from being his worst self. I could advise. I could observe. I could pull the hacksaws away before he did real damage.”

  She was unreachable now, her gaze distant.

  “My husband wanted to name him Abraham because he liked the strength in that name. That story in the Old Testament, Abraham on the mountain, ready to slit his son’s throat because God command
ed it. Resolve. But every day I think, what if we had named him after someone who couldn’t manage that? Should we have named him Isaac?” She shook her head. “I see what I was supposed to do, all along. I was wrong, all along. I was supposed to stop him, wasn’t I? I’m his mother. All along, I’ve been gathering those plants, and he considers it a nice little hobby. But he has no idea which ones are poisonous.” She turned to me then. “I can stop him, right? Tell me I’m brave enough to stop him.”

  135

  In the Unthinged World, the night isn’t silent—Pseudacris crucifer peeping away, Lasiurus borealis chirping, the far-off, barking call of a Strix varia. Ben is where I left him. I sense him there, at the edge of the water, without needing to ask.

  “He’s not going to let us off the hook.”

  “You thought he would?”

  The water is broad, open, alive. It’s our last night with it, no matter what. “I thought I might talk him out of it.”

  “Yeah.” His voice carries a touch of apology, as though he wishes he could protect me from myself.

  “Want to go out on the water?”

  We find the canoes below the deck of the outermost cabin. They’ve been waiting like big-bodied mammals for someone to let them out to pasture. The top one flips at our touch.

  By now our eyes are adjusted, but that’s not why we turn the canoe so easily. We share a knowing, out in the dark we once called ours. I know the smile that jumps to his lips unbidden, when the stern of the canoe smatters back into the lip of the water, splashing his ankles. I am the weathered handle of the varnished oar he pulls from inside the old vessel, priding under his open hand. What lies between us is beyond words, or under them, or away from them, somehow, and we stand on either side of the boat and thrust it away from us, the slide of needles beneath the keel, hands bucking as the canoe jitters from the land until the hull is bolstered by the lifting waters.

  He stops. He kicks off his shoes. I know I’m blushing, I can’t help it, it’s such a silly thought, but he is undressing now, even if it’s only his legs: socks off, pants rolled. There’s a quickness there, a desperation. I remove mine too, steadying myself on the gunwale, first the left, then right. I imagine what it would be to keep going, to remove everything under the cover of this night. I could go to him, and let my heat bring him surprise, and feel his lips along my collarbone.

  He clears his throat. No words, then. I’m grateful. I’m grateful to the others to have left us to this, no matter what they think. Even Tomas and Teresa, and Jenny, sweet Jenny, down toward town, tending to a toddler she barely knows, knowing only that we have done something bad enough to keep us trapped up here, trusting us—trusting Ben, trusting, yes, me—to do what is right, trusting that we know what is right.

  So, then, I brace my hands along the bow, feel the thrust of his foot as he steps onto the flooring, then the rocking, tipsy, back and forth as each of his feet carry him away down the keel, over the bow seat, over the thwart, hands searching the vessel’s wooden parts, all the way back to the stern seat, where he’ll steer. He settles down onto the bench and becomes a slightly darker shadow against the night. He faces me. He waits. Every inch of me recalls the sensation of climbing into bed for a man. (How many times has that happened? Not many. Not many, if I’m being honest, and none of them mattered as much as that night with him, as long as honesty is the measuring stick, but they did happen, those hungry gazes along my body, the twist of lust in my low belly as I neared their touch.)

  I put my left foot in. With my right foot, I push. The boat judders its last gasp along the shore, then finds its way home. The draft glides through the surface of the lake. Ben’s oar parts the water, dip and dip and dip. I sit down. The canoe obeys. Ben turns us, around, around, until we are facing the dark lake, and then my oar joins his, and we pull together, out, efficient, racing into the span of night.

  There are stars, I knew this, but what escaped my notice was how still the water lies tonight, and how cloudless the sky is, and what the arithmetic of those two elements means about the reflection of the sky upon the water. As we make our way to the center of the lake, away from the cover of the trees, a globe of dotted light surrounds us; above, below. We find ourselves suspended inside the sky.

  Ben’s head tips back in awe, in resignation, and humility.

  When he speaks, his voice is much quieter than expected. Husky with affection. “That fucking prophecy.”

  He’s all around me by then—not his body, but the feeling of him, his Ben-ness—all that I honor in him, all that I wish I could touch. This has happened before, hasn’t it? His mind inside mine, even if I haven’t earned it, haven’t worked for it the way I’ve had to work for other loves. Is it even love? It just feels as though it is supposed to be this way.

  Then I know: you.

  Sharing this globe of stars with him resembles the bliss of finding you. Even a glimpse, even a touch of you in the air urges the reminder that you once walked the earth beside me, and it’s enough—knowing you’re still somewhere even if you can’t be touched. That you forgive me. The gift of the world can ease the agony of missing. How did Issy put it? “You really think some ghost of a child is more important than my son?” They arrive then, they circle us: Nora and Ephraim; Mother and Father; Cornelia’s matched set of girls; her husband, even (why not throw him in?); Billy, and the babies—the one who was supposed to join Xavier’s family, and the one who someday might; and Philip and Jane; Sarah; Butterfly; Amos; Marta; Gabby; Ben’s daughters; his wife; sweet Jenny; and Sekou, held, right now, in Jenny’s arms.

  All the ones who have been here, either at Home when it was called Home, or when we carried them here, in our minds or bodies.

  All the ones we have loved.

  All the ones who are gone.

  Issy’s plaint rings through me: “You really think some ghost of a child is more important than my son?”

  I climb through an opening to understanding: what I feel for you, and for Ben, for these friend loves of mine who have their own loves, is that we are not alone, not in this loving, not even if we love our people differently, not even if they are dead or living, or divorced from us, or rivals to each other. Not even when they hurt us. Not even if they hate us. Not even if we will never speak another word to them again.

  How is it that, being suspended in the stars sharing a vessel with someone I have loved, and wept over, someone who makes me understand myself and yet who I will never hold again, gives me to understand that my loss of you is not, in fact, the most unusual part of me, but the most mundane?

  I find that I am crying. I find I know what must be done.

  136

  I left Marta up on the ridgeline. She called my name but I became the wind, tearing down through the Pinus strobus, racing back up past our cabin, where, from the porch, Issy lifted her head, and Cornelia called out. But I didn’t stop. I didn’t bother to knock.

  Abraham was lying on the couch, feet up on the armrest.

  “Marta’s your mother?”

  He lifted one hand from behind his head. He stroked his scraggly beard. “You saw her?”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “Why does it matter whose mother she is?”

  Because he had turned us against her. Because he had made us believe that the reason to turn against her was based on philosophy, or principles, when all along, she was his mother. “Because.”

  “When Marta heard about Home, when I first told her about it, when it was just Issy and me and Gabby, she said she wanted to learn about it. She wanted to see it with her own eyes. I hosted her here for a time, under the condition that she would tell no one about our biological tie.” He smiled his impish smile. “I wanted her to see my project, like a schoolboy with an award-winning science experiment. But I didn’t want her to take it over. She kept to the pledge. Gabby knew she was special to me, but if she suspected Marta was my mother, she never once said as much. We don’t look much alike, do we?”

  Out t
he window, a Cardinalis cardinalis, red and upright, bragged its chipper melody. A solemn expression had replaced Abraham’s smile. “Marta liked it here. She liked Gabby. She loved Issy. She said she wanted to stay, but she cut me off when she saw my look—the look sons give their mothers—and said, no, not here. She would buy land nearby. Well, what could I say? My mother wanted to be near me. This was a compliment. Mothers love their children—even yours, Saskia. But she wasn’t telling me something, something it took a long time to understand: the real reason she wanted to stay so close was because she doubted me.”

  What she had said up on the ridgeline: “I can stop him, right? Tell me I’m brave enough to stop him.” How far would she be willing to go?

  He frowned. “Have I ever made you feel that I doubt you?”

  I was still standing in the open doorway, but now it felt awkward and strange, to expose this conversation to whomever stumbled by. I took a step inside. I closed the door behind me. “No.”

  He moved his feet from the end of the couch to offer me a spot to sit. It seemed odd, to have spent all that energy flying over here, to have come in ready to fight, to stand over him in a way I never had before, demanding answers, only to find myself now moved to his side, sitting reasonably and hearing him out. He was like his mother in ways I hadn’t noticed. They shared an influence that was obvious now that I knew to see it.

  “Doubt does terrible things to the mind,” he said. “You know that, better than most. When you were out there, in the Thinged World, they doubted you, didn’t they? Your mother. Your father.” He listed them on his fingers. “Nannies. Teachers. The other kids in school. Your grandmother.”

  You didn’t. You were so small and so smart. You forgave me for my curiosity—more than forgave me. You trusted me.