Pet

by Akwaeke Emezi

  “Where you put your bonnet?” Bitter asked as Jam climbed into the bed and slid her legs between the cotton sheets. She patted under her pillows, then looked around the room and pointed to a small puddle of satin lying on the floor. Bitter picked it up and stretched the elastic to fit it over Jam’s afro. She adjusted it against her forehead and Jam lay back against her pillow, watching her mother watching her. Bitter looked so worried.

  “You could sleep, Jam-jam?” she asked.

  Don’t worry, Jam signed. I’m good. It was almost a convincing lie.

  Her mother sighed. “I real sorry about the painting. Wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  Jam shrugged and managed a smile. “It’s not that scary.”

  Bitter gave her a sad smile back. “My brave girl,” she murmured. For a moment it looked like she wanted to stay with Jam, make sure she really was okay. There was a time when she would sit beside Jam’s bed and read her N. K. Jemisin books until Jam drifted off, only leaving when sleep wrapped heavy around the room. But this time Jam could see how Pet’s presence was bothering her, how Bitter needed to go and handle that. Jam knew that her mother would want answers, explanations, things unraveled into a pattern that she could accept as rational. Bitter always needed to organize, to tidy up, and right then Pet was an explosion of loose ends she couldn’t ignore. Jam decided to forgive her for leaving.

  “Goodnight, darling.” Bitter switched off the light and shut the door behind her. Ever since she was a child, Jam had hated having the hallway light spilling into her room; she’d always preferred the night to enfold her in its full black. As the song of her mother’s footsteps faded through the floorboards, Jam let out a breath that had been choked in her chest and stared up at the ceiling, air spooling out from her mouth into the nothingness around her. Her lungs felt unstable, jittery. She tried to imagine Bitter and Aloe alone with Pet, Pet’s bulk filling up their bedroom, Aloe’s scared anger bouncing helplessly off it. They would be fine; she knew they would be fine. Pet wasn’t going to hurt them. It didn’t hurt anything it wasn’t hunting, somehow she already knew and trusted and believed that, and besides…what it was hunting was in Redemption’s house.

  A vision of her best friend floated across Jam’s mind: his smile, his wrapped hands after fight training. Was he being hurt right now by the monster? Why hadn’t he said anything to her? Or maybe nothing had happened yet, maybe Pet was there to stop something from happening. That loosened Jam’s anxiety, but not by much. Redemption could take care of himself, she hoped. He’d been a fighter since he was little; he was fast and strong, and who could hurt him? Who would even want to hurt him? He was threaded with nothing but gentleness. Even when he fought, Redemption fought for the beauty of what his body could do, for the frailty of being human, the power and vulnerability tangled up in being flesh. It wasn’t personal; it wasn’t about his ego. It was about being alive. She remembered when he’d explained this to her, when she’d asked him why he loved something so violent.

  “I don’t hold violence in my hands,” he’d answered, holding them up in front of his face. He and Jam had been lying on a grassy hill behind the school, one they liked to roll down, watching the sky bump and skip in hiccuped blue as gravity played with them. Jam had her head on his shoulder, and Redemption smelled like cut grass and salt and himself. When his voice had started deepening and his shoulders grew broader, his throat ridged, Jam had been fascinated—it was what would have happened to her in another time, another life. She watched as he rotated his wrists to look at his palms and then the backs of his hands, a few nicked scars marking his knuckles.

  You fight, she’d said. Of course you hold violence in your hands, she meant.

  Redemption heard what she hadn’t said out loud, and shook his head. “Here,” he said, tapping his chest. “Here is where I hold it, and I look at it and I fold it into something else. Even when I fight, it’s not about letting it out. Especially when I fight.”

  Jam frowned and he took her hand in his, running his fingers over the tendons that traced to her fingers.

  “We think we’re so strong,” he explained. “Some people want to show how strong they are when they fight, they want to prove it by grinding the other person down.”

  You don’t?

  He bent her fingers one by one, cracking the knuckles. “For what? We’re both alive when we fight. We’re magnificent; we’re testing our aliveness against each other. How fast is your alive? How smooth is your alive? How hard, how resilient? We’re alive because we can be hurt; we’re alive because we can heal. I think it’s beautiful. It’s why I fight.”

  Jam smiled. Uncle Hibiscus teach you that?

  Hibiscus was Redemption’s trainer, a tall man with muscles like jerky, tough and lean, faster than a snakestrike, and most of all, one of the angels of Lucille. He was a rare example of someone who had been key to the revolution but chose not to get involved in leadership when it was all over. “I just wanted us to get free,” he always said. “I was useful for the time.” When people asked him if he’d ever get involved again, he would shrug. “Call me when we need to fight,” he’d say.

  Hibiscus also didn’t like talking about the revolution; he wasn’t interested in reliving the old days. “We left them behind for a reason,” he said. There were rumors about where he’d learned to fight like that, what he’d done during the revolution, why he didn’t want to talk about it. When Bitter told Jam that the angels must have had to do dark things, hard things, Jam had thought of Hibiscus and the way his eyes sometimes looked like sad stones embedded in his head. He had no children, just a wife, Glass, who ran a small healing spa next to the gym Hibiscus owned, where he trained Redemption and a couple of other kids.

  “Hibiscus is teaching me many things,” Redemption answered. “What to bring into the ring, what to leave out of it. It’s a good way to think about life.” The two of them had remained on the grass until the chill of evening started to set in, then they’d gone home—Jam to her whispering floorboards and Redemption to what Jam now saw as a sweetlaced trap, his home that was a monster harbor.

  She turned over in her bed and draped an arm off the edge, her fingers skimming the wood of the floor. It was another way of listening to the house, touching it directly, fine-tuning the vibrations that were coming from her parents’ bedroom. They were faint, deliberately so; her parents were probably trying not to wake her up or alarm her. But Jam could still feel the anxiety and fear like a spilled sourness soaked up by the floor, circulating through the house. She could feel Pet’s cool weight, indifferent to Bitter’s distress and Aloe’s anger. It was calm even as her parents’ emotions spiked and ebbed, twisted and spat. Pet remained one steady, humming, unmoved line.

  Eventually, when Bitter’s and Aloe’s sounds became tired, pleading even, Pet stirred, but only to fade. Jam could feel that it was gone. No, not gone…it had moved. She pressed her fingers harder against the floor. Ah, to the studio. Maybe it was pretending to be a painting again. Jam wanted to stay awake and think about what to do, what they had talked about once she’d left, but she was tired, as if a blanket made of world was pressing down on her. She pulled her hand up and slipped it into the cool under her pillow, sleep diving over her like a wave.

  * * *

  —

  Bitter and Aloe were in the kitchen when Jam came down in the morning, still wearing her pajamas. She’d brushed her teeth and put her hair in four rough braids after dampening it with water, little things to delay coming downstairs and facing the conversation she knew was lurking, waiting. It was rare that Jam felt distinct from her parents—those moments when she was reminded that while in some ways they were a unit of three, in other and older ways, Bitter and Aloe were a unit of two and she, Jam, was an addendum. A loved and cherished addendum, sure, but still an addendum. This morning felt like such a moment.

  Jam knew they’d talked and come to some
sort of decision while she was asleep—the house was faintly anxious but firm underneath, mirroring their loud emotions—so Jam had braced herself for whatever they wanted to tell her about Pet. She was hoping they weren’t upset with her for what had happened in the night, for cutting herself on the canvas and not telling them, for having a creature shock them out of sleep. She stepped into the kitchen, frowning when she saw her parents. They both looked too brittle; she didn’t like it, the way fatigue was ringing their eyes in dark circles. Bitter was refilling her cup with coffee, wearing a tank top and gray shorts, her legs wild lengths extending out. Leafy plants lined the walls, and the skylight bathed the table in the center of the room in morning sun. It was always crowded with succulents that Bitter kept buying at the farmers’ market and Jam kept trying to relocate into other parts of the house so they could actually use the table. Aloe was standing at the stove, barefoot and in a rumpled jalabiya, stirring a pan. A chopping board lay on the counter next to him, littered with onion skins, chili ends, and squeezed limes. Jam could smell the saltfish buljol he was making, and as they heard her enter, they both turned and smiled in a way that was designed to hide their worry but failed terribly.

  “Good morning, my daughter.” Aloe spooned out some buljol on a plate, sprinkled finely chopped shadowbeni as a garnish, and handed it to Jam. There was also sliced avocado drizzled with lime juice and three triangles of toast, already buttered. “If you want more, come and take,” he said. Jam signed a quick thank-you and sat down at the table, moving a few tiny, bright cacti out of the way. Bitter joined her, cupping her long fingers around the curve of the coffee mug.

  “You sleep okay, doux-doux?”

  Jam nodded, arranging buljol and avocado on her toast. She could still feel Pet faintly from the studio.

  Aloe sat down as well, leaving his plate empty on the counter. “We want to talk to you about what happened last night,” he said.

  Bitter glared at him. “Relax yourself. Let the child eat she food first.”

  I’m okay, Jam said. She just wanted to get it over with.

  Her father put a hand on her shoulder. His panic from the previous night was gone, replaced by a worried resolve. Jam knew the expression well; she’d seen it on his face at enough doctor appointments. It was the look he wore when he’d channeled his fear about everything into the singular focus of protecting her, when he had made decisions that could soothe his anxiety with their firmness, their surety.

  “We have something to tell you,” he said, then glanced at Bitter and back to Jam, before taking a deep breath. “This isn’t the first time something like this has happened with your mother’s work.” He paused, gathering his voice to say more. It seemed difficult. “A long time ago, when we were maybe a little older than you or around your age,” he continued, “something came through a painting.” Jam watched her father’s face drift into a twisted but soft sadness. “It’s strange how we can remember so much of it after all this time, how it felt, what happened afterward,” he said, his words getting quieter. “I wish still, every day, that we could forget.”

  Jam bit down on her toast and looked at her mother with wide eyes, unwilling to break the spell of her father’s remembering. Their reaction last night had told some of this story plainly enough, but still, hearing it said outright was something else. Bitter caught the curiosity leafing out from Jam’s eyes and shook her head.

  “The details aren’t important,” she said. The sadness was in her eyes too, but she was armoring it away, locking it into a box even as she spoke. “Just know many bad things came from that. Plenty people got hurt. I don’t want you forced into the kinds of decisions I had to face.”

  “It was a different time,” Aloe interjected quickly. “There were monsters to hunt; that part was understandable. But Lucille has changed. This one has to have the wrong place.”

  Bitter nodded. “We think the creature must be mistaken, you see.”

  “A dangerous mistake.”

  “It came out into the wrong time, that’s all.”

  “It just needs to go back now,” Aloe said. “It’s all a misunderstanding.”

  Jam turned her head from one to the other, waiting for the rest of it. Her parents exchanged looks stuffed with silent words; then Bitter put down her coffee mug and leaned forward.

  “You know how the creature came out of the painting, Jam-jam?”

  Jam dusted crumbs off one hand and signed a correction: Pet.

  Bitter paused, her eyebrows knotting. “What?”

  Jam almost rolled her eyes, spelling it more slowly. P. E. T.

  “What do you mean, ‘pet’?” Aloe leaned forward as well. “You tried to pet it, or what?”

  “That’s its name,” Jam said, her voice unexpected in the kitchen’s air.

  Both her parents jerked back in surprise, then looked at each other again. Jam sighed and went back to her food. They had such loud conversations around her even when they weren’t using their words, as if she couldn’t understand all the other kinds of languages that didn’t need sound. This one, the one they were speaking with their eyes, was saying that they were now even more worried than they had been before, now that they knew Pet had a name. So there had to be something about the name that bothered them. Maybe it made Pet seem more like an individual, not just a random creature popping out of a painting. Maybe it had something to do with whenever this had happened before with Bitter’s work. Jam had no idea, and she could tell that her parents were busy thinking in a small, separate bubble that was about protecting her but didn’t actually include her, the bubble that was their relationship, their marriage, somehow none of her business. She didn’t try to interfere. The buljol was salty in her mouth, smeared smooth with avocado, small crunches of onion and toast fragments. Jam focused on that and waited till they decided what they were or were not going to tell her.

  “How do you know it has a name?” Aloe asked. “Did you give it one?”

  Oh, still on the name, then. Jam shrugged. It told me.

  “It told you it have a name?” Bitter asked.

  Close, but not technically. Told me what to call it, Jam answered. What you were called and what your name was were not the same thing, she knew that much.

  Aloe was frowning, focused on her. “You’re not scared of it?” he asked.

  Jam shrugged again but didn’t say anything past that. It was clear that her parents were scared of Pet in a way that was different from hers. She’d never met anything like it before, never seen a painting burst at its seams in that way, but they had. Maybe that’s why they were more afraid: they knew things she didn’t know, things they didn’t want to share, things that were connected to Pet in patterns Jam couldn’t see yet. But there was something off about it. They were treating Pet as if it was dangerous, and it wasn’t as if it wasn’t—Jam had felt enough of the menace Pet did a good job of concealing to know that, yes, Pet was dangerous. It was just that…she knew it wasn’t dangerous to her. And that seemed to be where she and her parents were diverging.

  Bitter took Jam’s hand and turned it over to expose the bandage on her palm. Jam looked up into the black wells of her mother’s eyes.

  “You cut your hand in the studio, ent?” Bitter asked her gently.

  Jam nodded and her mother patted her hand, releasing it. Aloe was visibly distraught, but he pressed his mouth closed.

  “It’s how it does happen,” Bitter murmured. “Blood calling.”

  What does it mean? Jam asked.

  “It’s what brings them over,” Aloe said. His voice was wound so tight, Jam was surprised it wasn’t shaking. “We never figured out the exact details of how; that first time was enough.”

  But you knew it was blood, Jam said. She watched their eyes slide again into an unfocused memory, the slight wince that shuddered under Bitter’s skin. Whatever they kept remembering, it was painful
.

  “We knew,” her mother said, with a full stop that barricaded any further questions. “But hear me now. You could reverse this. Send it back.”

  “It has to listen to you,” Aloe added.

  Understanding clicked into place in Jam’s mind. Because of the blood, she said.

  They looked back at her sadly. “We don’t like to ask you to do this,” Bitter said. “But once you send it back, everything good, just so, everything nice.”

  Aloe put his hand on Jam’s shoulder again. “All you have to do is tell it, and it has to obey you. It will be all over. Kpọm.” He snapped his fingers, a small bullet of sound breaking against his palm.

  She could feel how badly he wanted that to be true, how badly they both wanted it. They didn’t know the bit about Redemption, but Jam already felt as if it wouldn’t matter. At some point last night, they’d decided that Pet was wrong and that Jam would be safer without it there. They wouldn’t believe Pet, not even for Redemption. Adults were like that so much of the time, inflexible when they thought they had something to protect.

  What if you’re both wrong? she said, her hands flurrying. It said the monster was in Redemption’s house. What if something bad is happening there? She was surprised at herself for telling them that, but she had to try. If Redemption’s safety was at stake, then it was worth it, this desperate attempt to get them to open their eyes and change their minds.

  Jam knew she’d lost when Bitter just smiled back and touched her face like a brief feather. “It knows Redemption means a lot to you,” her mother said. “I’m not surprised it could say something like that, to persuade you to let it stay.”

  “We’ve done this before,” Aloe said. “You have to trust us, my dear.”

  Jam lowered her head under the weight of their blinkered love and pushed her plate away, half her food untouched and the rest of it sour in her stomach. Okay, she signed, and got up from her chair. Bitter stood as well, wringing her hands together. They all knew Jam was going back to the studio, where Pet was waiting, either in the air of the room itself or in the air beyond it, on the other side.