What Should Be Wild

by Julia Fine

  “We all pass on, in the end,” said Mrs. Blott. “After a long, full life, we all want peace.”

  I WAS NOT consoled by Mrs. Blott’s words. Mother Farrow’s death had been an omen, I was certain. Whatever force was watching me was telling me, Take care. I knew my guilt, I wore it as my skin. For weeks I could not close my eyes without seeing that sparrow, its guts protruding, its feathers matted with blood. While waiting for sleep I’d be accosted by an image of a horse’s legs nailed to a woman’s body, Mother Farrow’s gruesome feet. I did not think I’d replaced her life with the sparrow’s. I knew that the rules were not so simple, the logic not so clean. But I had interfered with something. The bird’s new life timed so exactly to the news of Mother Farrow’s death was no accident. It could not be. Of this I was certain.

  “What you do,” Peter had told me, “who you are, goes against nature. You must be vigilant. Be cautious. Take care.”

  Chastened, I took care for five years straight.

  My Shadowed Double

  At the start of the first new millennium for all except Alys—although how could they know it? Why would they care?—Lucy spots a sparrow tripping through the forest. The bird’s chest is mangled, exposing a sagging crop heavy with predigested food, a tattered purple liver, a pulsating heart. Its gruesomeness fascinates her.

  Lucy follows as the sparrow hops a bloody trail; she tracks it over hills, through undergrowth, past groves and under roots, until it leads her to the base of an old oak tree, where a single slender finger rises like a sapling from the dirt, pointing toward the trees above, the sky. Lucy stoops and grasps, expecting some ingredient for enchantment, a dried-up digit, the severed finger of a birth-strangled babe. She is surprised to realize that her discovery has roots. Digging, Lucy finds that it attaches to a hand, the hand to an arm, the arm to a young girl, approximately eleven, pale but miraculously breathing.

  “Emma,” pants Lucy, “come and help me.”

  Her young cohort, eternally age five, has followed both Lucy and bird, then tried to hide behind an oak tree. Emma steps cautiously out to where Lucy is kneeling, raking her hands through the soil.

  “It’s dirty,” Emma says through the thumb stuck in her mouth, positioned so that her closed fist nearly covers her large birthmark. Her other hand twists the tarnished locket that she wears around her neck. “Mother said not to get dirty.”

  Lucy looks Emma over, taking in the ripped tiers of her skirt, her mud-caked hemline, her twig-ravaged sleeves. She resists an exasperated sigh. “Go fetch the others, then,” she orders. “Quickly!”

  Alone with the buried child—the sparrow having achieved its goal and fallen into a sleep suspiciously like death, Emma off to seek assistance—Lucy looks on her discovery. The girl, as yet, is just a dirty face, a bit of bare chest, an arm and elbow, but Lucy has every reason to believe that the rest of her is there under the clod, equally pale, equally motionless. Lucy is already staking her claim to the girl—to her mind, discovery is tantamount to birthing. But this girl has spent years waiting. She has grown here in the forest’s rich earth. Lucy reaches a long-nailed finger toward a cheek, removing an unhappy earthworm, the traces of fungus. The girl’s skin is quite cold, but electric.

  IS THIS WOODLAND girl alive? The women hear her breathing as they carefully unearth her, the same slow and steady rhythms of the breathing of the trees. A heart is beating. But the eyes remain closed; the body does not twitch.

  “Careful not to let her neck drop,” instructs Lucy, having stepped back to direct her companions. Kathryn rolls her eyes at Helen, who shrugs and positions her hand at the base of the girl’s skull, as if she were a newborn. Alys takes one arm, massaging the small fingers, and Imogen carefully takes the other. Emma wrinkles her nose as she brushes clumps of dirt off the girl’s icy body. Mary struggles to lift her unshod feet.

  The women set their newfound treasure on a makeshift wooden dais in the center of a glen, position her hands atop her chest, comb out her dark hair. The frozen girl’s nose is narrow, her veined eyelids large and far apart, so that once opened they will overcome the rest of her small face, those permanently pursed lips, her high, pronounced cheekbones.

  “She looks like my sister Marian,” mumbles Emma.

  “She looks like an evil spirit.” Imogen crosses herself quickly.

  “She looks like the girl at Urizon,” says Helen. “The girl with the powers. The one that they hide.”

  4

  Mrs. Blott died on a Sunday evening. I was sixteen. She was eighty years of age. Because she never came to us on Mondays (those were her days, and hers alone), it wasn’t until Tuesday at approximately ten in the morning that I knocked on the door of Peter’s study. He was seated at his massive fir desk, his back curved downward at an uncomfortable angle so that he could examine whatever was laid out before him, a magnifying apparatus strapped over his glasses and extended such that its rotating lenses practically touched the yellowed paper. He was muttering something to himself about inaccurate translations and pigheaded students.

  He hadn’t heard me. I cleared my throat. When he looked up, the magnifier covering his eyes spun and retracted.

  “Maisie,” said Peter, “have you come with my tea?”

  It was obvious that I was not holding anything remotely tea-like, so I ignored his question and walked a few feet into the room, dodging piles of books and a sad, sticky plate with the remainder of last night’s dinner.

  “Mrs. Blott hasn’t been by yet,” I said. “It’s three hours after her usual time.” I think he blinked at me, but it was difficult to tell behind the goggles.

  “Well, then”—Peter stifled a yawn—“might you start the kettle?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I will. But the point is that I’m worried about her.”

  “I’m sure you’ve no cause to be worried,” said my father, who rarely was, “but if it makes you feel better, you could pop round. After the tea.”

  Peter had recently extended me the privilege of walking to Mrs. Blott’s house, so long as I took the main road, called ahead to tell her I was coming, avoided conversation if I came across a traveler, and brought Marlowe. It was a gesture of his faith in me. He and Mrs. Blott had taken me on occasional chaperoned outings, to her house, to Mother Farrow’s, once a picnic by the sea, but only lately could I set out on my own.

  I was not yet a woman, in the scientific sense, and several months prior I had brought this to Peter’s attention, having realized that my own biological progression was delayed after finishing a remarkably dry essay on anatomy. Did this mean that I would never be grown, was condemned to always be my father’s child? Flustered at first, Peter had rerouted my questioning to a more general discussion of adulthood, and together we’d determined my new boundaries. His was a sort of illusionist’s trick, loosening my lead so that I might not notice the bit in my mouth. And it worked; I was elated. I forgot the subtle swelling of my breasts, stopped searching for the blood that would mark me as grown. I ignored the dreams, those scarce remembered snatches, in which my body became liquid with desire.

  I brought Peter his tea and bundled into my raincoat and wellies, for it was raining that day, a persistent sort of drool. I called Mrs. Blott’s house, and when she did not answer I left a quick message: I was concerned. I’d be there soon. I walked for twenty minutes on the road and rang her buzzer when I got there, my fingers stiff and purplish from the cold. I shook droplets of water off my boots and the hood of my jacket. After a minute, when Mrs. Blott still hadn’t come, I rang again.

  By this time the foreboding indigestion in my chest had sunk into my stomach. It wasn’t like Mrs. Blott to sleep this late into the morning. It wasn’t like her to be tardy. I fished in my pocket for her key, a little silver thing that she had given Peter years ago in case of emergency, and that we’d never had cause to use before. It felt strange to be letting myself in. I felt dizzy and intrusive as I twisted the key in the lock and the door opened inward with a pleasant creak.

/>   The house was dark. It was a cottage, really, two levels with five small rooms and uneven flooring. She’d decorated in pastel florals, each room curtained and cushioned in a different muted bloom. It had been sixteen years since her husband passed, but Mrs. Blott had not replaced him, her only companion a mottled brown-and-orange tabby cat named Abingdon, who mewed when I entered and sauntered up to greet me. The entrance was dark. I stepped back.

  “Hello?” I whispered. Abingdon hissed at Marlowe, who followed me through the kitchen and up the stairs to Mrs. Blott’s bedroom door. “Hello?” It was slightly cracked, and so I pushed it open.

  There was Mrs. Blott, slumped in her rocker. Her face had swollen into something alien and doughy. A blanket lay draped across one side of her body, covering one of her legs, but had slipped down to expose her flannel nightgown, her pasty ankle, a bouquet of plump veins curdling up under her skin. Her eyes were still open.

  My instinct was to touch her: just the pad of a finger, a gentle stroke upon the cheek. My hand drifted toward her, and I let it linger until the knock of a tree branch against the upstairs window startled me back to my senses. Peter would not like it if I touched her, not without his permission. I’d disobeyed him in the past, but never so directly, never to such momentous effect. I lowered my arm.

  Abingdon mewed again, and I jumped to avoid his slinking across me. I realized that his food and water bowls must be empty. I closed Mrs. Blott’s door and in the drizzly morning light proceeded down the stairs to feed him. Once Abingdon was gleefully crunching away, I went to the telephone by the window and called my father.

  Peter didn’t use a mobile phone, having neglected to ever recharge the old model he’d gotten when I was a child, which meant he had to tear himself from his desk and make the walk into the hallway to answer. Not until my third time dialing did he pick up, and then he sounded confused, as if he couldn’t fathom why on earth someone should be trying to reach him through such a ridiculous contraption.

  “It’s me,” I said, and his nerves seemed to settle. “I think that Mrs. Blott is dead.”

  It will seem strange, I’m sure, that I, at sixteen, should speak so nonchalantly. Mrs. Blott was the closest thing I’d had to a mother; her loss would bring repercussions I could not foresee. But I’d grown in death. We were bedfellows, friends. Though I’d not yet called in for collection, I was certain that we owed each other favors.

  Surely, I thought, I would revive Mrs. Blott, once Peter came and gave permission. And he would give permission—in that first hour of shock and denial, I could not imagine otherwise. Peter’s rules explicitly forbid me from touching a dead thing, not a dead person. Not someone with a name we knew, a purpose. I had touched her before, as a baby and at seven when I reached to get a toy and brushed her ankle. It did not seem to me that this particular circumstance was any different, that my life would change at all, save the excitements of the day. For all of my informal education, I had lived in an experimental bubble where cause and effect were entirely reversible. Mrs. Blott had always been there, so to me it seemed she always would be.

  I HUNG UP the phone to discover Marlowe and Abingdon the cat circling each other warily, sizing each other up. Marlowe was attempting to nuzzle poor Abingdon, who wanted none of it and bared both teeth and claws. I watched them with amused detachment as I waited for Peter, who’d said he would come promptly. I knew that even if he took the car or his bicycle it would still be some time before he’d gathered himself and made it out the door.

  My eyes fell on Mrs. Blott’s bookshelf. At age twelve I had discovered that by placing a pile of heavy textbooks atop an ottoman in Urizon’s library, I could see the books that Peter had deliberately shelved out of my reach, a rather comical selection, including recent children’s literature and school stories that might give me too great an understanding of a more conventional childhood. Most were books I had outgrown by the time that I found them, but the right angle and a careful stretch might bring one down, upon which the contraband nature of its content would excite me far more than a tale of young Bill’s boarding school days should. Some of them were marked with initials, and I imagined they’d been paged through by my mother. I pictured her as a child, devouring these stories, setting aside her favorites in the hope she’d someday share them with her daughter. I pretended she was reading them aloud to me. But I had never heard her voice, and could not settle on its tone: sometimes I heard her sweet and lilting, sometimes throaty and mysterious. This became yet another reminder of my loss.

  I had not inspected Mrs. Blott’s library on previous visits, and now that I did I saw that it had little in common with ours. I sidestepped Marlowe and Abingdon to scan it: mostly novels with lovers gazing lustily across their tattered covers, many of which I recognized, having taken them from Mrs. Blott’s handbag to read by flashlight under my covers and then guiltily returned, eager to research the difference between viscount and duke, the finer points of male circumcision. Among these familiar titles I now noticed that the lowest shelf held new ones, the novels double-shelved to make room for experimental manifestos, books of mathematical proofs, a massive tome titled Principles of Genetics. I looked at these with curiosity. Something was afoot.

  Abingdon’s purrs revved like an engine, and he padded closer toward the kitchen door, where a key turned in the lock.

  Peter, I knew, did not have a key, as our copy sat snug on the key ring in my pocket. I froze, my left hand reaching toward Principles of Genetics. I listened as the door squealed open and some heavy bags were dropped. A throat cleared.

  “Why hello,” a voice said.

  I turned around. The voice belonged to a young man, a boy, really, barely older or taller than me. It was a surprisingly deep voice for such a body. It did not match the curling, unkempt hair, the anorak dripping on the carpet, certainly not the puzzled expression wrinkling the ruddy, blond-browed face.

  “Hello,” I said in turn. “And who are you?”

  It happened he was Mrs. Blott’s great-nephew.

  “Mrs. Blott doesn’t have a great-nephew,” I told him.

  “I regret to inform you, she does, as evidenced by my standing here.”

  “I regret to inform you that even if you are who you claim to be, she doesn’t anymore,” I said. “Mrs. Blott is dead.”

  At this the nephew’s jaw fell open, so that I could see into the abyss that was his moist and pinkish mouth. His face contorted, first falling slack, then wrinkling and contracting, finally settling on a perplexed, pursed sort of frown. His chin was trembling. Would he cry, I wondered? As a result of what I’d told him? I regretted my rash choice of words, and I decided that I’d better make amends.

  “She’s upstairs, if you’d like to see her.”

  My thinking was that I could guide this great-nephew to Mrs. Blott’s bedroom. Once there I would casually reach out and touch her hand, to find, in fact, that she was not dead after all, but simply sleeping. What a stupid, scared little girl I had been. I was sorry for the trouble.

  I thought myself quite clever.

  I said, “I can take you, if you’d like.”

  “You can take me,” the nephew repeated, still stunned. “You can take me up the stairs. Have you called the police?”

  “I’ve spoken with my father.”

  “And he’s called them then, has he?”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  He moved toward the telephone in the kitchen, in his dazed state almost tripping on a hand-woven rug.

  “Stop!” I shouted, rather louder than intended. From upstairs, Marlowe heard me and came tapping down to join us, growling at the stranger. He was sluicing something in his mouth, and I was aware that he smelled very much like wet animal. I rooted my fingers in his coat. “Stop,” I said again, this time more restrained. “We don’t need to call the police. My father is on his way.”

  “Your father is on his way,” the nephew repeated.

  “You don’t have to keep mimicking me,” I said. “I
n fact, I’d rather that you didn’t.”

  “Would you?” His brows raised. “And who are you?”

  “Who am I?” The question offended me. “I’m . . .” I paused, suddenly aware that there was no easy way to explain who I was, my relationship to Mrs. Blott, what I was doing in her cottage in the dark on this very wet Tuesday, and why it was vital to not phone the police. I settled on my name. “I’m Maisie Cothay.”

  “Ah.” The nephew nodded. He shrugged off his coat and draped it on a kitchen chair, coming closer to where I was standing. The immediate shock of his great-aunt’s death had begun to dissipate, leaving him still solemn, but now competent.

  “You know me?”

  “From the family she works for. She’s mentioned you.”

  “She doesn’t work for us,” I scoffed. “And she never mentioned you.”

  Speaking warily, his words seemingly rote, he told me that his mother was the daughter of Mrs. Blott’s estranged sister. He had visited her in Coeurs Crossing once when he was small, and then again for a longer stretch of time when he was older. Upon deciding to enroll at the university nearby, it had seemed prudent to avoid the cost of housing on its campus and move in with Mrs. Blott for his first term. He had now been living with her for several happy months and was just returning from a weekend-long trip to the city.

  “Matthew Hareven,” he said, and he held out his hand. I shied away.

  His forthrightness made me uncomfortable. He was the first person near my own age I had ever encountered, and I found it odd that Mrs. Blott had never brought him up. Surely it wouldn’t have been difficult for her to slip him into casual conversation, to let me know she had a nephew, to let me know that he was here. And why did he want to stay here with her anyway, so far from his fellow students? I was suspicious. I looked around for Marlowe, to find he’d disappeared back up the stairs.

  “So,” said Matthew, “Maisie Cothay. What do you intend to do next?” He was looking at me drily. I sensed that he might be having me on, and said as much. “Not in the least,” said Matthew, face still drained of color, seeming infinitely more tired than he had in that first moment that we’d met. “If we aren’t going to call the police, I’m simply curious as to what you suggest we do next.”