For the remainder of her senior year, Riley was treated like an unwanted guest. She wished her hearing hadn’t been so acute because she would have preferred not to hear the conversations coming through the wall that separated her bedroom from the master suite.
“I don’t trust her, Michael. What if she changes into that…that wolf thing and kills us one night?”
“Riley wouldn’t hurt us,” he said, trying to offer comfort. “She’s never shown any aggression, Amelia. She’s always been a good kid.”
“A good kid?” Amelia whimpered. “We didn’t adopt a kid. We adopted a werewolf—a werewolf! Oh, Michael,” she lamented, her voice rising to a pitiful pitch. “How can this be happening? How can it? I feel like I’m insane…like we’ve all gone insane. All I ever wanted was a little girl. A perfect little girl. Is that too much to ask for? Is it?” And then she sobbed uncontrollably.
Michael hushed her. “Shh…shh-shh-shh.” Riley imagined him gathering his trophy wife in his protective arms, calming and soothing her. “Don’t worry, darling. She’ll be going off to college in a few months. We’ll find another baby girl,” he promised with the confidence of a high-powered businessman who had the means of obtaining anything her heart desired: too many diamonds, an unnecessary maid, an apartment on Fifth Avenue—and another little girl, if that’s what she wanted. Of course, the irony of Amelia wanting a perfect little girl was that she herself was perfectly incapable of conceiving one on her own.
In retrospect, it was probably a good thing that Riley had shape-shifted before she’d had a chance to come out to them. Knowing they’d adopted not only a werewolf, but a lesbian werewolf, would have pushed Amelia Dawson clear over the edge. But really, Riley felt bad for her. She totally understood her mother not wanting to live with her a moment longer than she had to. Riley didn’t know how much longer she could live with herself.
The change started coming randomly and with increased frequency, but it was less painful and the transformation usually complete—even if it did leave her standing on two feet sometimes. It was more comfortable to be bipedal, but when she wanted to pick up speed, she could drop to all fours like a bear and cover Central Park’s eight hundred acres in no time at all.
Thank God the change didn’t come during the day, in the middle of class, on the soccer field, or at home while the Dawsons entertained friends and business associates. And thank God they lived on Fifth Avenue, directly across from the park, where she could disappear, unseen and hidden from the world.
Riley had no desire for violent thrills or the blood-thirsty killings of fictional werewolves. Canids, like humans, were a social species. All she wanted to do in fur was romp and play…to make friends and connect. And it was just when her sense of isolation and alienation became unbearable that she met the three coyotes in Central Park. Curious but wary, it took weeks before they had anything to do with her. They would approach, then retreat, clearly confused by the incongruous mix of human and canid chemistry. But Riley persisted with a show of submissive gestures and play solicitations. She’d roll on her back, act silly, drop to the ground and wag her tail, until finally they came to trust her and allowed her to run with them. That’s all she wanted—to have fun in the woods like she used to have with Fiona, to be accepted and have this terrible loneliness go away.
Riley named the three of them: Gadget, Fidget, and Widget. Gadget was amazingly dexterous, using his paws like kitchen utensils to dig and pull rodents from under roots. He must have concluded that Riley couldn’t hunt, because one night he carried over a freshly killed mouse and dropped it at her big hairy feet. Riley pretended to be excited, but when he turned away, she kicked it in the direction of the other two. Fidget snapped it up and swallowed it whole. She was the hyper one, always wanting to play and wrestle. And Widget, the clever navigator, found shortcuts through the dense underbrush that helped them traverse the park in secrecy. She showed Riley how to sneak through the shadows from Central Park, up through Columbia University, and across to Riverdale Park without ever being seen.
But one early December evening in the woods that surrounded Bethesda Fountain, Riley heard a woman’s cry. She lifted her nose, catching the mingled scent of fear overpowered by the adrenaline-laced stench of evil, and responded instinctively. Bolting, she reached a speed of what must have been a good thirty miles an hour, before slamming into a man as he forced a woman onto the ground. The impact knocked the air out of the assailant, sending him flying several feet. He rolled, landing on his ass, and looked up in disbelief, terrified eyes scanning the ground for the shiny blade he’d dropped. As Riley watched him crawl to it, she got a whiff of something awful. The guy had shit himself. On his knees, he lunged for the knife, but Riley, embracing for the first time this new and magnificent feeling of physical power, tore into his neck. A little too deeply. A hot spray of blood filled her mouth and she backed away, salivating, shaking her head and tongue to rid her mouth of the vile taste.
The shocked woman, her cheek bleeding, was still on the ground, paralyzed for the moment.
“Go! Get out of here,” Riley shouted, the words leaving her mouth more like a garbled bark. The woman snapped to, scrambling to pick up the spilled items from her purse, then stepped into a shoe she’d lost in the struggle, clutched the front of her coat, and took off running.
Saturday morning Riley awoke to breakfast and breaking news on the television: a woman had been robbed at knifepoint in Central Park last night. Her face had been slashed, and she’d been fighting off a sexual assault when, what was described as a wolf or large coyote, came to her rescue. The woman claimed that the animal spoke to her.
No doubt the police attributed the talking-animal part to the victim’s hysteria, and passersby interviewed were all rooting for the coyote who had saved the woman and killed the bad guy. One less evil person to worry about, right? But the New York City Parks Department didn’t think so. Wolves hadn’t inhabited Central Park since the 1800s, and vagrant coyotes—healthy coyotes—would never attack people. The public was cautioned about entering the park after dusk. According to the reporter, cage traps were being set to catch the four-legged vigilante that, judging from its unusual behavior, might be rabid.
Mrs. Dawson, who was sitting across the table from Riley, eating scrambled eggs and reading The New York Times when the news caught her attention, seemed instantly to lose both her appetite and composure. She knew Riley had been out past her curfew last night. Not that anyone enforced it. The less time Riley spent in the apartment, the happier everyone was.
“Dear God, Riley! What have you done? What have you done?” Amelia dropped her fork in her plate, and with trembling hands patted her lips with a cloth napkin. Without another word she stood, ran to her bedroom, and slammed the door.
Riley shrugged and poked at her scrambled eggs. Why were people being cautioned about an altruistic coyote? Why weren’t they more concerned about psychopaths running loose in the park? And why was she being chided for saving a life? Oh, stop with the theatrics, she wanted to shout after her mother. Go take another pill, Amelia. Get a grip! But Riley kept her mouth shut. If she was learning anything about her lycanthropic condition, it was that becoming too excited, angry, or sexually aroused seemed to trigger the change.
Upsetting her mother didn’t matter anymore. Mrs. Dawson had been living in a perpetual state of distress since August. All Riley cared about were the coyotes.
She got to school extra early on Monday morning to question her science teacher, Mr. Burg, about the attack in the park and what would happen if they caught the coyote.
“They’ll sample brain tissue. Test for rabies,” he said.
“And if it doesn’t have rabies…they’ll let it go?”
He chortled, apparently amused by her naïveté. “Uh, well, let’s see, Riley. They’ll have to remove the head to get to the brain so…no, they won’t be releasing it. Except maybe to the Department of Sanitation.”
Horrified, Riley suddenly found it har
d to breathe. She ran out of the science room, cut out of school, and spent the day sitting in the park, thinking of how best to protect her three buddies. She felt terrible remorse for what she’d done—not for ripping the man’s throat out, but for leaving the coyotes to take the blame. The thought that one might die for her heroism made her sick to her stomach. For the next week, after school let out and dusk blanketed the city in winter shadows, she frantically scoured the woods for baited cages. In Central Park’s southeast corner, not far from the Plaza Hotel, she discovered two such traps and tripped them both. And in a final attempt to save the animals, she turned on them in fur, claiming the area as her own and driving them out.
Confused by her betrayal and sudden territorial aggression, Fidget and Gadget reluctantly retreated. She chased them up through the university and into Riverside Park, and they didn’t return. But Gadget, the young, hardheaded male outcast from his birth territory to establish his own, kept sneaking back. And it wasn’t long before he was caught. The sight of him on the eleven o’clock news, caged and cowering as he was loaded into a truck, drove Riley to a state of despair. The image would haunt her the rest of her life. How could she ever forgive herself for his capture and inevitable demise? That night she vowed never to attack a human again, lest an innocent animal be hunted down and forced to pay the price of death for her crimes.
* * *
By late winter it was time to fill out college applications. Her father pushed her to apply to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, about thirty miles from their old cabin in the Berkshires. It was one of the Seven Sisters colleges, and Riley was familiar with the town. Over the past few summers the Dawsons had driven there to see exhibits at Smith’s impressive art museum, or to catch dinner and a comedy show. Michael wouldn’t elaborate, but he said Smith should be her first pick. Riley would soon discover that Northampton happened to comprise one the largest lesbian communities in the country, a quite fortuitous bonus for a lesbian looking for love—albeit a lesbian werewolf with serious abandonment and intimacy issues.
Most parents would have waited until August to help their kids settle into college dorms. But by the end of June, her parents had all her belongings loaded into the brand-new Subaru she’d received for her high school graduation. “Your mother thinks it’s better to head up now,” her father said. “This way you can spend the summer familiarizing yourself with the area before school starts.”
All Riley had to do was get in and follow her father’s Porsche one hundred and seventy miles from Manhattan. Her mother didn’t make the trip. She disappeared into the bedroom when it came time to leave and never said good-bye.
When they arrived in Northampton, Riley and Michael stopped at a café for lunch, then picked up a few groceries and headed to what would be Riley’s new home for the next six years. Mr. Dawson had found the rental online, and Riley was pleasantly surprised. Set back from the road on an acre of land, it was a cute one-bedroom cottage, painted gray with white trim. A key had been left under a pot of red geraniums on the porch.
The inside was clean and furnished, and Michael nodded his approval as he did a walk-through, inspecting the bathroom and kitchen, and picking up the phone to make sure the service had been turned on. “It could stand some decorating,” he said, “but I’m sure you’ll have fun shopping and making it your own.”
“Yeah, Dad. I can do that.”
He took a can of coffee from the grocery bag and put on a pot to brew while they emptied the car. After they’d carried in the last of Riley’s boxes, they sat in the living room with coffee. Michael looked around, seemingly satisfied with the plan he’d put in place for her. “I knew you had the grades to make Smith,” he said. “I pushed for it because it’s a great college and…well, because you were born around here.”
“Around here?”
“Well, not here in Hampden County. You were found in Berkshire County.”
“But the lake house in Lenox was in the Berkshires. Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?”
“Well, Lenox is northwest of here. You were found at the southern end of the county, right where the Appalachian Trail passes through a town called Monterey.” He shrugged and looked away. “I wanted to buy a summer home there, but your mother insisted on being closer to Tanglewood and the theaters.”
Of course she did. Tanglewood was the home of the Boston Symphony, and Amelia adored her classical music. Everything was always about what Amelia wanted.
“Anyway,” he said, “I thought it best to bring you back to your origins in case…I don’t really know, Riley…in case there’s something here for you. Now that you have a car, you can explore, drive around on the weekends, hike some trails. Maybe you’ll feel a connection to something. And it’s good that you’ll be living alone, off-campus, away from other students.” He shrugged and gave a heavy sigh.
Given the fact that he was about to abandon her, he had trouble looking her in the eye. But then he did, a stern and fatherly look. “Whatever you are, Riley…whatever it is you become, it wouldn’t be wise to expose yourself. Don’t start making friends. And no parties. No getting drunk. People lose their better judgment when they drink. If anyone ever witnesses what your mother and I witnessed, well…you’ll end up in a cage, dissected in some government laboratory. You hear me?”
She thought of poor little Gadget in a cage, on his way to his death. The thought of being found out, of being captured, terrified her, and she tried to swallow against the lump in her throat. “I hear you, Dad.” She knew his advice was in her best interest. And she knew this part was hard for him. Somewhere deep down, Riley sensed that he still loved her. But he loved his wife more. And then there was his fear. He never showed it, but he didn’t need to; the scent of it was always there, just beneath the surface of his skin. Maybe fainter than it had been at first, but still there—fear mixed with heartbreak and a ton of guilt.
“I think you’ll like studying at Smith, though. You’re a smart girl, a great student. You’ll do well here.” He gestured toward the large envelope he’d placed on the coffee table in between their coffee cups. They’d gone over everything the night before. It contained debit and charge cards, checkbooks, college-registration papers, and other important documents, including her birth certificate and passport, although she knew they would take no more family trips to Europe. “I stuck a list of contact numbers in there, too,” he said. “You needn’t ever worry about money. It’ll be deposited in your account every month. If any problems or issues arise with this house or anything else, call me at the office.”
“Thanks, Dad.” Riley twiddled her fingers, cleared her throat, and looked down. “And…um…what happens on holidays? Will I come home for Thanksgiving?”
He glanced at her, his expression grave. “I don’t think so, Riley.”
“Oh. Then Christmas?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“Not ever.” Michael rubbed the stubble on his cheeks. “Your mother can’t handle it, Riley. You know that. She’s been hanging by a thread since last summer. Besides…we, uh…have a new baby coming. You know she’d never trust you around a child.”
Riley didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. If she tried to speak, she would have broken down. And really, there was nothing left to say. It was done. She’d been written out of the script. “I understand,” she said through quivering lips.
Michael nodded, and after an awkward moment of silence, he slapped his thighs and stood. “I guess you’re all set.”
Riley walked him out to his Porsche, and he hugged her, something he hadn’t done since before that night on the dock. “Don’t worry. You got this.”
Easy for him to say. He squeezed her tight, and she felt his chest heave, as if he might cry. But then he let go and climbed into the car. “Hard to believe you’re a college girl now,” he said in a staged and cheerful voice. “Call me when the semester begins, okay? Let me know how classes are going.”
That meant she shouldn’t
call until school started, which was two months from now.
“Okay, Dad. Thanks for everything.”
Michael Dawson didn’t linger. He started the car, circled around on the grass, and with a quick wave and a sad smile, he was off. She watched through a blur of tears as the Porsche picked up speed, passing the trees that lined the road, and when it was almost out of sight, she heard the engine open up. Michael must have felt a huge burden lift at that very moment, a tremendous sense of relief and freedom that found its way down to his feet and to the pedal, because he floored it.
Mission accomplished. Reject daughter ejected. Abandonment complete.
Tears streamed down her cheeks, her sharp ears twitching, tracking the sound of the Porsche as it gained distance. For a good mile Riley listened, straining to hang on to the hum of the engine, because when the sound faded she knew she would be all alone in the world.
Chapter One
Smith College
Northampton, Massachusetts
Twenty years later
“Professor Dawson?”
“Yes?” Riley looked at the cute blonde, Madison, in the front row of the class.
“How can you say the narcissist is the victim?” Madison asked, referring to the case study they were reading. “Don’t narcissists manipulate and victimize others?”
“Well, the narcissist here is a person. The victim is just a…” Riley stopped and went to the whiteboard. “We’re almost out of time, and I don’t want to jump ahead—all you psych and social-work majors will study models of communication in the fall—but a quick illustration might help.”
Coyote Blues Page 4