Nightbitch

by Rachel Yoder

  Add to this her anxiety over a quietly forming theory that she violently pushed from her mind each time it managed to whisper itself inside her: that the golden retriever and Big Blonde—both immaculately groomed, both exhibiting the same vitality and excitement for life, both inexplicably smelling of strawberries—were one and the same.

  Look, call Animal Control if they come back, her husband said, his mouth full of something—a late-night room-service order, perhaps. She saw a warm brownie topped with a perfect scoop of vanilla ice cream and cascading hot fudge.

  Are you eating? she asked.

  Don’t play with them, he said. For god’s sake, don’t encourage them.

  Fine, she said, and then didn’t say anything else for a while.

  Are you mad now? he asked.

  I just need to go to bed, she said, and hung up a bit too quickly, but not so quickly that she didn’t retain plausible deniability that it was accidental.

  She brushed her teeth and washed her face, willing herself to stop crying, to pull herself together. You are an adult, she told herself as she flossed, the most adult thing she could think to do to reinforce said adultness. This is life. Deal with it. But she could not push from her mind the simple questions that plagued her: Why couldn’t her husband say something kind or comforting, I’m so sorry or Thank you for all you do? Why did he not grasp the transactional emotional norms of customary human interaction? Was he able to empathize, or was he actually, as they sometimes joked, a sociopath who had had a very stable and loving upbringing and thus did not kill people but, rather, couldn’t recognize emotions and hurt her feelings some/all of the time?

  She lay in bed beside the boy and stared at the indistinct shapes of darkness, the softly pixelated ceiling, the charcoal maw of her closet. She wished she hadn’t cried on the phone. Perhaps her husband would have taken her more seriously. To be understood by him, she needed a different approach, but she hadn’t been able to maintain her composure at such a late hour, after such a peculiar day that occurred amid a run of peculiar days.

  He didn’t understand anything, not her sadness or her anger, not why the dogs had been so oddly disturbing. And she hadn’t even begun to try to explain how she had felt called by the retriever, how it had somehow spoken to her, how it had been so alluring, so comforting, as if it understood all her woes, all her innermost urges and struggles. No, she would never try to explain such a thing to her husband. It would ruin whatever small bit of credibility she had left. Her intuition, her feelings didn’t matter to him—they were unbelievable, in fact. That was the precise word—unbelievable—in the manner of tall tales, urban legends, folk remedies, aliens, mythical creatures rumored to roam the woods, and so her feelings were immediately discounted, even though she knew them to be the truest things in her human experience, a light to show the way.

  She dug through the pile of storybooks beside the bed until she uncovered, by the faint glow of the nightlight, her Field Guide, which she flipped open despite her exhaustion, for Wanda White always seemed to have the precise passage to soothe the mother’s soul.

  Wanda. Wanda. How she yearned to meet Wanda, to weep into her powdery-smelling chest and have this older woman stroke her hair as her own mother never had. To be babied inside the softness and warmth of a cardiganed embrace. A morsel of tenderness…Oh, dear Wanda.

  “After all,” the mother read, her night vision honed more now than ever, “what is more unbelievable than pushing a small human from a small hole between your legs, or having a masked, robed stranger slice open your belly and pull from it a mewling, bloodied babe? Both are absolutely preposterous propositions, not able to be believed and yet undeniable in the presence of the child, a factual reality.”

  She paused, tears in her eyes, which she harshly rubbed away.

  As if the book itself was her most cherished friend. As if its pages knew her heart. She kept reading.

  …the unbelievable is not only credible but essential, and has a very real place in the world. I will go so far as to attest that the unbelievable is another way of knowing, an organizing principle that does not run in contradiction to but, rather, in communion with the organizing paradigms of science. The unbelievable, while perhaps not communicating straightforward truths, can communicate deeper truths if a person is willing to be patient, to listen, to contemplate.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, SHE woke with the unbelievable still alive inside her, under what felt like a spell. She rose to make the boy breakfast, and as her son attempted to eat a bowl of yogurt—spreading most of it across his face and pulling it through his hair—the mother absently washed dishes. Who is Wanda White? she obsessed. She imagined Wanda White’s office on a sun-dappled campus, the many tweed jackets and skirts hung in an uncluttered line in her closet. She picked at a spot of hardened egg yolk on a plate and positively knew that Wanda White wasn’t married and was in very good health. She always wore sunscreen and liked to eat vegetables. She was happy and fulfilled, traveling the world to study creatures in which no one else believed, then coming back to campus to spend long quiet hours in her office poring over her notes and turning them into something smart and useful. Perhaps she was the campus kook, her scholarship considered unserious and hoaxlike by others in the department. Well, then, why had they hired her? Her work was more interesting than the rest of the university’s combined, more groundbreaking. Then why have I never heard of her? the mother wondered as the boy screamed and clapped, flinging yogurt droplets that landed on the already dirty kitchen floor. Why has she never been on a morning show? On NPR? In the newsfeed on the mother’s phone?

  Perhaps she was just a charlatan, but if so, why was she employed by the university? Obviously, her work was dubious. Bird Women of Peru, though they sounded lovely, did not sound altogether factual.

  Wanda White was housed within the Philosophy Department, which did indeed seem the wrong place. Shouldn’t she be in some science department? Anthropology, perhaps? That her discipline fell under the umbrella of philosophy made the mother wonder if her book and scholarship might pointedly have been crafted so as to make a reader consider whether it could be true.

  After breakfast, she sat on the living-room floor with the boy, rolling a cement truck back and forth to him as he cackled with delight. On her phone, she scrolled through the University of Sacramento website to find Wanda White’s faculty page. No picture. Only the scantest of information. An e-mail address, though, which she pasted into a new e-mail and then closed, still blank, saved to a draft. She would collect all her questions and thoughts, all her many ideas about White, and write them down tonight, after the boy was asleep. She watched him as he now put marble after marble into the plastic tubes he had fit together there in the living room, awestruck and delighted as they slid from top to bottom, spinning whirligigs and dropping through chutes with a satisfying, crisp plink. He squealed with delight, clapping his hands or placing them on the floor and jumping into an astoundingly vertical donkey kick. This boy. Her boy.

  She took him to the park a few blocks from their house, because the day was gorgeous and the park near. Really, they should be going there more frequently, probably every day. It was the perfect sort of afternoon in the warm summer shade, the boy climbing and squealing and putting wood chips in his mouth and then taking them out, and the mother alone with her thoughts about White and magic and women and whatnot, until she heard what sounded to be a pack of jackals, and turned her head, and there they were. She recognized them from her infrequent trips to Book Babies. They were the mommies. The Book Mommies. A nausea overtook her, though she could not have specified exactly why. What even were the chances, the Big Blonde in the lead with an all-terrain side-by-side stroller that the mother knew for a fact cost well over a thousand dollars, and her sidekicks in tow, the mommy with the mopey little boy whose nose was always running, and the mommy with a hyperac
tive three-year old prone to throwing pebbles. The mother collected her son as quickly as she could, for she did not want to make small talk, did not actually have any interest in selling herbs, did not want to be polite about the weather or naps or potty training, for she didn’t care and did not want her communion with White, with the day, and with this lovely afternoon, to be broken by these women and their children and their wretched contentment.

  Oh, hiiii! the Big Blonde said and waved, and the mother said, Hi! We were just leaving!

  Even in her haste to collect the diaper bag and sundry toys strewn about in the grass, to retrieve the blue sippy cup and wayward bag of dry cereal, she couldn’t help but notice the women accompanying the Big Blonde, the same two always at her side during any activity. The mother of the mopey boy was short, with stubby legs and arms, ponderous eyes framed by extravagantly lush lashes, and straight hair that hung in hanks just to her shoulders. The other woman was all athleticism and yoga pants, her dark eyes exuding an alert intelligence echoed by the pert, sharp features of her poreless face. She twitched her head to and fro to track her ward’s erratic movements, and in the process emphasized the volume of her thick, flat-ironed hair.

  The mother could not avoid passing in close proximity to this little group, for the park was fenced and the mommies surrounded the only exit.

  Hi! the mother said as she neared the group, but what she really hoped to communicate was Bye! We have such a full day! Really need to get to it! Not a moment to be wasted!

  I don’t think I ever properly introduced myself, the Big Blonde said as she positioned herself in front of the park gate—purposefully blocking it, one might even say—and shook her head in feigned exasperation at herself.

  What a silly! she squeaked to her twins in their stroller, as mothers sometimes do, having entire conversations with their children which actually are directed at other sentient adults nearby.

  Oh, that’s fine, the mother said, looking to the gate in a silent and what she felt was very polite request to pass.

  I’m Jen, the Big Blonde said, and this is Babs and Poppy. Here she gestured in the direction of the short woman, who tipped her head to one side and offered a sad little smile, and the athletic mom, who nodded and displayed her recently whitened teeth.

  So nice to meet you! the mother offered hurriedly as she eased between the strollers and, for perhaps the first and last time ever, softened with relief upon hearing her son’s wail of pain, for she had accidentally knocked his little shins up against another stroller in her haste and, as such, simply had to attend to him and get him home to lunch quickly, for certainly he was famished, and now it was an emergency, a meltdown, and she must reasonably exit this situation immediately, which she did.

  Okay, sorry, the mother said. Oh my god, so nice to meet you, but I just have to…She gestured to the weeping boy, then glanced at the three women, who were considering her, not meanly exactly, but skeptically, no longer warm, as they had been moments ago, but hands on hips and eyes just narrowing, as if to ask, What is your problem?, which was a very fair question indeed.

  She had been a bit rude, she decided later, when she thought about it. She must be more polite the next time. She could have at least introduced herself. Asked about herbs. What was her problem? That evening, as she began a letter to Wanda White, she believed earnestly that White was her only hope, though of precisely what, she did not know. She had convinced herself, at least a bit, that the Field Guide had magical properties, that it was in conversation with her thoughts, that she had a psychic bond with White. She realized there was no rhyme or reason to these conclusions. But still.

  WW—

  I’ve recently come across your book A Field Guide to Magical Women and the research you’ve done around the world. I have so many questions, but I’d like to begin by asking—if I may humbly take up just a few minutes of your time—whether your research is, well, “true” in a scientific and rational sense, or whether you’re instead performing scholarship so as to make larger points about, say, the limits of knowing and the failure of science to fully describe the world?

  I realize this is a somewhat philosophical question, but I also saw on the University of Sacramento’s website that you are part of the Philosophy Department and thought that such questions might not be outside your purview and even welcome.

  On a personal note, I’ve recently embarked on a peculiar and unexpectedly fraught era of my life—motherhood, to say it as plainly and simply as I can, though certainly motherhood is in no way plain or simple—and find myself coming up against questions that seem to intersect both philosophically and experientially with your work. All this is to say I look forward very much to hearing from you and thank you for any time you’re able to offer to my queries.

  Yours,

  MM

  The mother read and then reread and then read again her very first note to Wanda White, at the glowing window of her laptop, at the dark kitchen table. She did not want to come on too strong, did not want to sound entirely irrational by bringing up her transformation right off the bat, wanted instead to present herself as a thoughtful and engaged reader interested in the same questions and pursuits. The cursor blinked in the darkness of the kitchen, for it was now late—early morning, really—and her son had been asleep for hours. She would be a wreck in the morning, but she didn’t care. Her thoughts had stretched toward Wanda White all day, and she simply had to remove them from her brain and send them off to the shadowy academic in order to unburden herself.

  As soon as she hit send, her entire body went limp, so limp she found it hard even to get herself up the stairs to the bedroom to tip into bed beside the boy. So relieved was the mother that she was very nearly asleep before she reached the bed, now in a state of sublime relaxation, the likes of which she hadn’t experienced in years.

  Imagine, then, what force of nature or god or magic it must have taken to exhume her from the delicious depths of sleep to which she had descended. Imagine the power it must have required to pull a mother from her first restful night in years—entire body slack and dead, breathing slowed to nearly not even there, her dreams as real as life itself. She moaned as she was achingly pulled from the molasses of sleep to the clickety-clack of her blood and a stomach sick with adrenaline.

  Outside her bedroom window, things scratched and snarled, huffed through wet snouts, gurgled and tongued. She sensed bodies moving in a frenzy, among and over one another, impatient, anxious, on edge, and waiting.

  Jesus, she thought hazily. What in the fuck. What in the fucking fuck.

  She touched the boy’s chest as he snored softly beside her, then rose and threw on sweats. In the kitchen, she grabbed a butcher knife, then thought better of it and instead went to the hall closet and found the baseball bat. She was tired and enraged and would beat to death anything she found out there. She would kill it with her own hands.

  She peered out the high window and in the light of the full moon saw them.

  Dogs. So many dogs. Fifteen? Twenty? She scratched the coarse hair that now covered the back of her neck and her shoulders, then bared her teeth. She could hear every sound, smell every smell. She slowly opened the side door and stood behind the screen, looking out into the night. The mother smelled her before she saw her, the strawberries and soap of the retriever, and there, at the top of the steps, she sat. Beside her, the pudgy basset hound, with her pretty eyelashes, and the collie, her body tensed with energy even in the middle of the night.

  Behind them, scores of other dogs—more even than twenty, she now saw.

  I know you, she growled at the canine trio, not altogether meanly but more like I’ll be damned, waking me up in the middle of the night, I really should have been more polite to you today.

  They had come for her, as she had both feared and hoped they would. They wanted her to join them, to take her, but she wouldn’t go, she wo
uld not. Something inside her quickened despite her resistance, an elation at the thought of joining them, yet not nearly as articulated as that. More a sense that her body might leap forward and tumble down the steps and out into the night without first consulting her. That she would succumb to the delicious buzz of the late-summer cicadas and dewy weight of the pollen-heavy air and be seduced by it, pulled into its warm embrace, were she not careful. Besides, what she was seeing simply could not be real, had to be a waking dream, some sort of hypnopompic hallucination brought on by stress and exhaustion. She shook her head back and forth violently and then shimmied all the way down to her tail, as if she’d just emerged from a pool and was throwing off droplets of water.

  Beneath her sweatpants, her tail twitched instinctively. She suddenly had independent control of each of her ears, which she moved back and forth to listen to each and every breath and whine and gulp of the dogs.

  This is not real, she thought as she ventured out onto the porch, then down the steps, propelled by a guttural longing, the polyphony of night-noise, so many luxuriant smells. What’s to lose? It’s just make-believe—a thing she often told her son—just a game.

  She had left the bat by the door and, once in the driveway, saw that the dogs filled the pavement and spilled out into the street, then back into the pools of shadow darkening her neighbors’ lawns.

  The retriever took her hand as she had yesterday, and led her through the sea of animals, each one of them as alert and still as the night around them.