What Big Teeth

by Rose Szabo

  “I need you to undo what you did to Father,” I said.

  She snaked out a hand and patted the covers beside her. I didn’t move.

  “My darling,” she said. “I cannot undo what I have done. And if I could, I would not. I have done so little, after all.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “All I did was change him a little,” she said. “He can still walk around and speak to you, and he is very friendly. He can do everything he did before.”

  “He’s just sitting in the living room,” I said. “He’s not moving. I tried to talk to him and he just said the same things over and over again. That’s not the same. What did you do?”

  “Nothing you cannot do,” she said. “Would you like me to show you how to do it? Would that make you feel better?”

  “No,” I said. “I want to know how to fix him. I want him to be able to do whatever he wants.”

  “Whatever he wants?” she said. “Whatever he wants? He cannot be trusted, Eleanor. I heard the way that he spoke to you last night.”

  “He was sorry!”

  “He didn’t seem sorry to me.” She was upset, I could tell. “I could not bear to hear anyone speak to you like that. Telling you that you do not belong, that you are the one who is wrong, when he himself has—” She shuddered, and a ripple ran under the skin of her neck, as though some other shape swam beneath it. “When he himself has done such hideous things. He and your cousin are things that should never have been. There is no place in the world for men like them. What purpose do they serve?”

  Why did people have to have a purpose? Weren’t they enough? I nodded along, though; I felt ashamed of it, but I had to buy myself time to think. What was I going to do about her?

  “I did not want for you to have to see this so soon,” she said. “But I suppose you have to grow up sometime. I am glad you finally understand why I did what I must.”

  I nodded again, swallowed hard. I remembered what Grandma Persephone had said. My eyes had adjusted; it was like looking at one of those pictures that can either be two young women or a skull. Grandmere had become something else now, in my eyes. And I was afraid of her.

  “So, how often do you have to … do that?” I asked. “To keep him this way?” I hoped I sounded helpful, eager to learn.

  “Oh, it is done,” she said. “He will never again be as he was. He is a good father now. Obedient and friendly. I think in time you will get quite used to him this way. And…” She watched my face tentatively as she went on. “I thought perhaps you and I could practice, and in a little while, you may be ready to help your cousin in the same way.”

  I forced a smile onto my face. I was a good liar; I hoped it bore up against someone who had known me so well, whose arms I’d cried in.

  “Thank you, Grandmere,” I said. “I’m glad I understand now.”

  She beckoned me closer. I took a slow step toward her, and she reached up and stroked my cheek with her hand.

  “We will start tomorrow,” she said. “Today, I am tired from my efforts. Please, leave me alone to rest.”

  I felt my body turn to leave. “Sleep well, Grandmere,” I said, as my legs walked me to the hall.

  Downstairs in the empty kitchen, I grabbed a knife from the block. I started back up the stairs, moving faster and faster as I climbed. I had to get this over with. I had to do it now, while she was tired.

  When I reached her door I stopped. I didn’t mean to. I swung my arm as hard as I could toward the knob, but it stopped short. I couldn’t even bring myself to knock. I lifted my foot to kick at the door. Nothing. Nothing at all. I wanted to scream, but the sound died in my throat. I laughed a little. Of course I couldn’t scream. She’d told me to let her rest.

  I needed help, I realized. I needed someone who could act when I couldn’t.

  And then I thought of Luma, of all the times she’d disobeyed Grandmere. She was impervious where I was not. She was, after all, Grandmere’s granddaughter, too.

  I ran to Luma’s door and threw it open. It looked as though a bomb had gone off in it; makeup tubes lay strewn everywhere, and her dresser drawers had been ripped out. Things were missing, I realized. Had she run away, like Lusitania? Was she gone for good?

  And then I heard the howl from the woods. Luma’s high pure cry, and Grandpa Miklos’s. They were calling for Rhys. But he couldn’t call back. Grandmere had told him to stay put and be quiet, after all.

  Well, she’d said to stay put. I’d told him to shut up. My face burned just thinking about it.

  He was scratching at the wall. I was forbidden to let him out, I knew that much. But then I looked at the dresser. Grandmere had said nothing about going in.

  It took some shoving to get the dresser out of the way. But when I moved it, there was the hole: torn wallpaper, crumbling plaster, and Rhys’s face as he crouched on the other side, snarling, his mouth full of long yellow teeth.

  “Shh,” I said. “Rhys, it’s me. It’s just me. You can talk to me.”

  “You did this to us,” he hissed under his breath.

  “I didn’t!” I said. The words stung; I knew they were at least half true. “I didn’t want it to end up like this!”

  “Come in here so I can tear you in half.”

  “No,” I said. “You can’t do that. You need me to get rid of her.”

  “How?”

  “I can make you do things, remember? Maybe I can help you fight her.”

  “Then let me out,” he said.

  “I can’t,” I said. “She told me not to.”

  “Then what good are you?”

  “I have to come in,” I said. “I have to whisper so she doesn’t hear. But I’m not going to tell you not to hurt me, because I want you to decide. I’m trusting you. So maybe you can trust me.”

  He tilted his head to one side but didn’t try to lunge at me. I climbed through the hole into his room. Crouched half inside the wall, I pulled his head close to mine. It turned into a wolf’s head in my hands. I flinched, but I didn’t pull away. I leaned close to his ear.

  “She’s done something to my father,” I said. “I think she killed him. He’s not himself anymore. He acts like … a puppet.”

  The mouth of the wolf that was my cousin growled in my ear. I could feel his rancid breath on my neck. I held as still as I could. He took after Miklos; I knew if I flinched, he’d tear me to pieces. But then I felt his head change in my hands, and he whispered back.

  “She’s made him like that thing she brought to the house,” he said. “She looked like a person but she smelled like nothing.”

  As soon as he said it, I realized he was right. I’d never seen the woman with the sharp teeth arrive or leave. And she hadn’t said anything that Grandmere would have disapproved of. She’d felt like nobody at all.

  “How does she do it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe the way you did it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The way you did to that boy,” Rhys said. “In the woods. Before Grandma sent you away.”

  I froze.

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said. “I didn’t. He disappeared.”

  “No, you swallowed him.” Rhys looked at me. “Is that what she did to Uncle Miles?”

  “No! I don’t know.” I found myself scrambling backward out of the hole.

  “Wait,” he said. “Wait, is she going to do it to me? You won’t let her, right?”

  “Of course not,” I said. I knew at least that much, even though right now it felt like I knew nothing at all. What had I done? “I have to go think. I’ll be back.”

  “Promise?” he asked, but I was already pushing the dresser back over the hole in the wall. I leaned against it, panting.

  He was wrong, I told myself. I couldn’t possibly have done that. That boy had gotten lost in the woods, or Rhys or Luma had killed him by mistake, or maybe I wasn’t remembering right. Maybe he’d gotten away from us and run out of the woods and into his father’s ar
ms.

  Maybe, maybe. I had to be sure, though. I sat down on the floor and sobbed into my hands, straining to remember. I cried quietly, not sure whether I was doing it out of habit or because I couldn’t wake up Grandmere.

  The moon had been shining through the birch trees that night. I remembered my cousin Charlie and his shiny black dress shoes. When had Charlie lived with us? Had he been there for the summer? No, this was back before Lusitania had left. She’d left that night. It was all coming back to me now.

  I made myself remember the banker’s boy. Fast, but unsure on the rough terrain. Gasping with the exertion, his breath so loud we could have followed that sound alone, even if he hadn’t been crashing through the undergrowth like a truck. And the cool wind whipping at my face, the brightness of the moon, and the ecstatic joy as Rhys and Luma and I sprang onto him in a single motion.

  I didn’t like remembering this. I didn’t want to remember. But there I was, bright and happy and very, very hungry. I tipped my head down toward the boy, feeling like if only I could kiss him, I could engulf him, and he’d be with me forever, and I would always feel this way.

  I’d fallen through the place he had been and landed in the bed of pine needles that had been under him. And he was nowhere. And I’d felt tired, a heavy ache lingering in my jaw.

  “You’re going to get in trouble,” Charlie had said, from just behind my left shoulder. And I’d turned and screamed at him, because I knew it was true, and I deserved it, and at the same time, I hadn’t done anything. At least, nothing I’d meant to do.

  Back in the bedroom, I realized I wasn’t breathing. I gasped a few times, catching up. I crawled into Luma’s bed and bundled myself up in her blankets, just to hold on to something real. Anything was better than this. And so I let myself think about Lucy.

  * * *

  When I was twelve, Lucy Spencer was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. She had red bouncy hair she pulled back with a headband. Her skin was starred with freckles. She moved gracefully and slowly, except when she played sports or got in fights, when she was suddenly animated with fury. Looking at her felt complete. She was all one piece of art.

  She had come from another school so, at first, we were friends. She didn’t yet know where she fell in the order, so she fell in with me. I had given up on having real friends and had been waiting like the dead, seeing only what was in front of me and doing only what I was told.

  She changed that for a while.

  We told jokes. I learned how to comb her curly hair. I went to her parents’ house one Christmas and met her family: her older brother, who teased her about our constant studying for spring exams; her mother, who did embroidery; her father, who was the vice president of a bank. Her grandmother, who stared in shock when I asked her if she read tarot.

  One night in her room I told her that I loved her. It came out so suddenly that it surprised me. I thought about ways to take it back: to say “like a sister,” or to say “I mean, you’re my best friend.” But I didn’t. I let it float out over the darkness, and in response, she climbed across the gap between our twin beds and wrapped her arms around me from behind and slept next to me like that. I stayed awake the whole night, my body stiff as cordwood, not daring to breathe in case she woke up and changed her mind.

  When we went back to school in January, people started to make fun of how much she liked me. At first, she said we just couldn’t be friends in front of other people. Then she started making jokes about me. Soon it was like we had never been friends at all.

  She grew two inches over the summer and was suddenly tall. When she came back to school she wore lipstick. She started talking about how in love with her I was. How the one time she tried to be nice to me and have me over to her house, I’d tried to sleep in bed with her, and how she couldn’t tell if it was because I was trying something, or if my family was so poor we only had one bed.

  “My family’s richer than yours,” I said, which was a stupid thing to say.

  The way it blew over was like this: on the day I punched her in the stomach, while she was staring at me in shock and pain, I realized that the only way to escape the trap I was in was to stop existing, to become someone else.

  So I turned myself inside out, and that was who I stayed until the day Lucy tripped me on the stairs. On that day I snapped back in midair, although my body stayed the same. There was more than one way to perform my family’s trick, the inversion of selves, the different skin.

  I was a wild, unthinking thing when I tripped her and brought her down as easily as Luma would fell a deer in the forest. When I wrapped my arms and legs around her body it had felt like coming home, the way she smelled like Christmas spices, and when I sank my teeth into her soft freckled neck it was like that calm, empty-headed joy that comes sometimes when falling asleep.

  * * *

  I woke up in Luma’s bed in the middle of the night. I sat up, not knowing at first where I was. In the dark, the familiar shapes of Luma’s dresser and makeup table looked like wild beasts. I got to my feet and startled myself by kicking something across the floor: a tube of lipstick. I reached for the light, and then thought better of it. I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone to know where I was.

  I crept down through a house as still as a stopped clock. I didn’t know what time of night it was, or where anyone was, or, I realized, if any of them were still alive. The only sound I could hear was the creak of the stair treads under my feet.

  I glanced into the parlor, where an odd shape startled me—and then I realized it was Father, sitting in an armchair, a newspaper blocking his face and body. His hands didn’t move, but I watched them intently. I didn’t want him to lower the newspaper; I didn’t want to look into his blank eyes and wonder if Grandmere was watching me through them.

  I slipped around to the kitchen door. Margaret wasn’t there. I told myself that she was probably just in bed. Through the kitchen, past the closed door to the laundry, and down the hall to the greenhouse. I knew something bad was waiting there, but I wasn’t sure yet. I wanted to be wrong.

  I found the snake lilies trampled.

  They were scattered around the ground, their bodies ripped from the soil, their flowers broken off and torn to ribbons, their leaves ground up and oozing the sap that I was supposed to harvest in only a few days. The door to the greenhouse stood wide open, blowing back and forth a little in the wind.

  I felt numb. Had Luma done this, on the way out, to spite me? I got down on the ground and started picking up pieces, cleaning up. I gathered up the long stalks and started laying them in a pile.

  It was then that I spotted it, half buried in dirt. A large black feather, gleaming with a blue sheen when I held it up in the faint moonlight. I realized that it was the same thing that had been on Grandmere’s floor earlier.

  The crows flew backward, Grandpa Miklos had said, into the mouth of a woman.

  I had to be sure. I stood up, and that was when I saw that the floor was littered with paper.

  The tarot cards and the journal had both been ripped to tiny shreds, scattered across the floor of the greenhouse, buried under bits of dirt, but I felt I’d recognize them anywhere. She’d destroyed them so I couldn’t use them, and she wanted me to blame it on someone else. Maybe Margaret, maybe Luma. She wanted me to distrust everyone but her.

  I felt like crying. I picked up little bits of cards, holding them up to one another, trying to see if there was enough left that I could piece them back together. Nothing. I sank to my knees.

  And then, I felt a breeze on my back, the one that blew colder than the air outside.

  “Help me,” I whispered. “I need to know what she is.”

  And the little bits of paper began to slide and jostle across the floor, skittering on some invisible breath. They came from every corner of the room, until they were piled in a heap: little bits of colored paper, fragments of words or images. When they came together, they stopped. I stared at them, tears welling in the corners of my eyes.
<
br />   “What do I do?” I asked. “They’re all ripped up.”

  Silence. Nothing moved.

  I bit my lip. What had Grandma Persephone said? Metaphors. The cards didn’t have to be cards, did they? They could be stones. They could be guts. They could be scraps.

  I shut my eyes and picked through the pile. I tried to hold my question in my mind. What is she? Rough torn edges caught at my fingers and I pushed them around, and ripped them up smaller, until I knew they were where they should be, until at last I opened my eyes.

  The little bits of cards overlapped to make a new picture. A picture that was hard to look at, that seemed to move in the little breeze coming through the open greenhouse door. Arms and outstretched hands from the Ace of Blood, the circling dogs from The Moon, fish tails and wings and in the middle, eyes torn from every card in the deck, and then in the center of that every little bit of black paper, piled up on itself until it looked deeper and denser than black. A swirling hole of nothing. A mouth that could swallow the world.

  I stared at it until I became aware of a sound from somewhere in the house. The creak of the great main staircase. I froze. The footsteps reached the bottom and turned toward the kitchen.

  “Eleanor?”

  Through the kitchen into the laundry. Then it would only be a matter of time until she found me here. “Eleanor, did you call me?”

  With a whoosh, the bits of cards scattered, strewing themselves across the floor, back to wherever they’d been thrown before. I felt an icy hand push at the small of my back, and I ran out the back door of the greenhouse, still open, still creaking back and forth in the wind. Down the little steps until I was in the grass. And then I realized if I sprinted across the lawn now, she’d see me. I huddled up against the foundation of the greenhouse, in the shadow between the wall and the stone steps.

  I could hear her then, up there, treading on the floorboards of the greenhouse. I pressed myself more tightly into the shadowy corner and held my breath, and willed my heart to stop beating so loudly, and squeezed my eyes shut. In the quiet dark I could feel everything: the damp from the grass seeping into my clothes, every ridge of the brick foundation, every shift of the wind.