What Should Be Wild

by Julia Fine

  After all, Mary has the most to wish for. The others in the forest are preserved in youthful beauty, their skin forever smooth and tight, their hair never to gray. Mary remains middle-aged, fleshy and afraid, reminded of mortality even while she knows she’ll live forever. She’d sacrifice the centuries to come for one more year at two and twenty, for invisible pores, for knees that do not creak. She stands frozen between fear and longing, hoping to summon a courage that has failed her before.

  Ask, Mary commands herself, go ask it.

  It, the wish, or it, the wish-giver? Much easier to crush sympathy with words stripped of their meaning, to be forceful with a creature known as it, rather than she. To use language to devalue a body.

  Mary steps out from her shelter, inches toward the girl. She sniffs, and wipes her nose against a sleeve.

  One black eye winks.

  Mary flees the clearing as quickly as her clumsy feet allow.

  14

  When we stopped the car at early evening to relieve our bladders by some blossoming elders, Matthew took advantage of my sudden separation from Rafe. Twilight had risen and the sky was now a fading purple-blue, spread wider above us than I had ever seen it, prickled with emergent bursts of stars. The rising land swelled like a mother with child.

  “Stop mooning over him,” Matthew said quietly to me once Rafe was out of hearing. “Nothing good will come of it.”

  “What do you mean?” I knew exactly what he meant.

  “This thing with Rafe. Just end it now.”

  “I cannot imagine of what you might be speaking,” I said, thrilled to confirm that our flirtation had been more than just my fancy.

  “He can’t touch you. You can’t touch him. What kind of love affair does that make? And besides, he’s so much older. If you have any sense, you’ll stop this before you expose yourself.”

  I made a face at Matthew. I did not need his warning to know it was a dangerous game I played with Rafe. I could not hide the desire that emanated off my skin. I wondered how close I could get, how close I could bring him, how much I could make him want my body before pulling it away. Did I want him to reach for me, to press my flesh to his? My body seemed to want it, but my body could never be trusted. My body was a wild thing I had tamed into submission, and yet part of me knew at any second it might lash out, it might fight me. I knew that Matthew was right, and I hated him for it.

  And what if the intimacy Rafe wanted was more than the physical? Perhaps, as Matthew claimed, his motivations were not as transparent as they seemed. Perhaps he’d want to know me underneath the skin, the secret of my feelings toward my body, rather than the flesh itself. This thought was even more intimate, even more frightening, than imagining him tangled up inside me. I was caught up in these thoughts as the boys shuffled back into the car, as Matthew tried to turn the engine, as it gave an awful squeak.

  “Dammit,” he said softly, one of the few times I had ever heard him swear, “the ignition won’t catch.”

  “Let me have at it.” Rafe hopped back out the side and bent down to examine the front of the car, which even in the growing darkness released a visible hiss of steam. Matthew moved to join him, lifted its hood. I scrambled out so as not to be excluded, for the moment setting aside my questions about Rafe.

  The various gears and wires that comprised the car’s engine looked to me like a monster, one who’d come out at the wrong end of a fight, with small steel grommets freckling its complexion, hair like oily gray noodles, big black bulging eyes. I reached out to touch it.

  “Careful,” said Rafe, his arm stopping mine. He’d only touched my shirtsleeve, but the pressure of his palm made me shiver.

  “I see the problem, I think,” Matthew said, brushing his hair back from his brow, leaving a small streak of grease across his forehead. He frowned and bent over the engine, his torso disappearing into the monster’s maw.

  “We should call for a mechanic,” said Rafe, “get it towed.”

  “We’ve been out of range of mobile service for the past hour.” Matthew’s voice echoed from the inside of the car. He resurfaced to cough loudly, then dove back into the wreckage.

  “I’ll walk back to the turnoff for the town we passed,” said Rafe. “If they don’t have someone there who can help us, I can at the very least ask to use a phone.” He turned to look at me. “Maisie, why don’t you come with me?”

  At this Matthew sprang so quickly from under the hood that he slammed his head against it.

  “No,” he said, “Maisie stays here. You can move faster on your own.”

  “I’m actually—”

  “No.” It was the tone Peter used when he would not be persuaded, the vowel extended, punctuated with a strong purse of the lips. Matthew was not my father, had no legal power over me, but the similar force of his denial made me see myself a child. Tired and decidedly uninterested in the prospect of another long walk, I decided that I wouldn’t press the issue. I shrugged.

  “I guess that’s settled, then.” Rafe met my eyes. “But I’ll be back soon. Don’t worry, Maisie, this will all be fine. Probably best not to mess with things until we get word from the experts.”

  Matthew emerged once more to scowl. Rafe grinned, patted the pockets of his jacket, and set off down the road, walking quickly. When he was out of sight, Matthew returned to the engine.

  “Rafe just said not to—” I started, but was silenced by the steely expression on Matthew’s face when he looked up at me.

  So I sat on the side of the road and watched him fiddle about, unsure of how he could see clearly in the fast-dying twilight. What if another car needed to pass us, I wondered, with Matthew elbow-deep in gears and wires? What if Rafe did not return before true darkness? I chewed my fingernails as Matthew traveled from driver’s seat to hood, testing his handiwork, finding it lacking. Again and again, attempt and fail, another tweak, the pitiful sputter of whatever would not catch.

  Eventually I curled into myself, hugging my knees, drowsy.

  I WAS WRENCHED from my nap by the hack of Matthew’s cough, the crash of his body against metal, the slither of his jacket as he slid from the car’s hood to the road. I jumped up, hobbling toward him on stiff legs.

  The night had settled into variegated darkness, a full moon and clear sky casting thin shafts of light. Matthew’s body was crumpled on the ground in front of the car. A steady hiss came from below the car’s hood, and as I rushed over I caught the whiff of a sour heady smell, burning and rotten. Had Matthew inhaled some sort of gas that made him dizzy? Instinctively, I grabbed Matthew by his uninjured arm, using my sleeve to shield him from my touch, and dragged him off the road. I knelt to examine him further and found a raw red burn at his elbow and a blossoming blister, the size and color of a plum, upon his palm. I pushed with knees and elbows, trying to turn his body over, and saw his eyes were open, pupils huge. He started convulsing, his head slapping irregularly, hard against the ground.

  I took my jacket and rested it atop him to keep warm, but Matthew continued to toss about as if lost in some nightmare, his gray eyes open and glazed, their veins red and spindly. I tried to hold him still, but it was useless. His neck whipped one way, then the next, in rapid succession.

  Sitting cross-legged next to him, I spread my skirt over my knees. I slid the fabric under Matthew’s head, taking care not to touch him, and eventually shimmied it up into my lap.

  “There,” I whispered, my lips so close that had he been in his right mind I’m sure he would have felt my breath. “That’s more comfortable, isn’t it?”

  Confined by my folded legs, the head thrashing slowed, then ceased altogether. Some hair had jostled out over Matthew’s forehead, prickling up against his eye, and I regretted not having had the presence of mind to grab gloves from my bag before going to him.

  “Rafe?” I let out a hoarse whisper, the loudest I could manage without using my full voice. Unsure of how long I had slept, I didn’t know how long we’d been out here, how long Rafe had been gon
e. I heard no response. I called again, and louder. Still nothing.

  Matthew’s breath was slowing, the moaning stopped.

  “We told you to let the mechanic take care of it,” I whispered. That wayward lock of hair was sopping, more brown than it was gold.

  Dread settled as a weight in my chest, making my limbs heavy, pulling me down. I felt that we were sinking, that the sky was widening and growing ever farther away.

  “Rafe!” I called out, almost screaming. “Rafe!”

  Then Matthew was no longer breathing at all. A reddish liquid dribbled from the corner of his mouth. His eyes rolled back, showing just their moony whites. His forehead shone with sweat. His jaw was clenched, his shoulders shuddering, each seizure striking my body as I tried to hold him still.

  And so I did the only thing I could. Steeling myself, feeling an aching in my chest, I swept my fingertips across Matthew’s forehead, combing the hair back from his face. At my touch I felt his body cool, grow stiff. I took a breath.

  There had been very few times in my life that I had touched another person. In recent memory, there was nothing: Matthew was the first since I’d been made to understand my father’s rules. I waited several long seconds before reaching back down, savoring the sweet anticipation, knowing I might never touch bare skin again. Finally I pressed two of my fingers to a lymph node in his neck, holding them there until I felt his pulse.

  Matthew’s eyes fluttered closed. His chest rose with breath.

  My body was numb; I felt as if the blood had all drained out of me. “Thank goodness,” I whispered. I tucked the jacket around Matthew, whose color had softened, who mumbled in his sleep. Strange, I thought, that I could see him so clearly. Had a cloud unleashed the moon?

  It had not. I turned and found myself in the beam of a truck’s headlights, saw Rafe climbing down from the passenger’s-side door. A woman sat in the driver’s seat, her face in shadow.

  “Maisie!” Rafe ran to me. “What happened? When we pulled up, I could have sworn Matthew had . . . it looked like he was . . .”

  I could have kissed him, and squeezed my fingers to fists to keep from reaching for his hand.

  “The engine sparked,” I said slowly. “There was a small electrocution. It was frightening, but I think he’ll be all right.”

  The woman came to join us, surveying Matthew and his car.

  “Not much to do out here, tonight,” she said. “In the morning we can call and get you towed, find out what we’ll have to do to fix you. I can bring you three back with me, give you a place to pass the night, but if you need a hospital, that’s different. Have to push on toward the city, several hours.”

  “We don’t,” Matthew croaked, sitting up blearily.

  I considered protesting, insisting we get Matthew to a doctor, but I knew that I had cured him, and to press the issue further would raise questions that I did not want unearthed. Unless he already suspected, there was no way for Rafe to know what he had seen, to understand what had happened with Matthew. Still, I felt suddenly exposed.

  Matthew was stretching, yawning, circling his right wrist. I caught a flash of his confusion, saw the moment that he brushed it away. When he stood, he lacked balance, and Rafe offered his arm. I stayed put.

  “Can we keep the car here, overnight?” Matthew asked, accepting Rafe’s arm without acknowledging its source. “No harm will come to it?”

  “Not with the hood still smoking. Not if you lock it up tight.”

  Matthew nodded. His eyes shot again to his wrist as he flexed it, then to the woman.

  “I’ll have an estimate tomorrow,” she said. “Find out how much repairs will cost you, how long repairs will be.”

  The Ceremonials

  This is what we’ll do,” says Lucy. The other women gather around her, looking every so often in the direction of the black-eyed girl’s clearing, some hundred yards away. Equally nervous and excited. “There is a ritual,” says Lucy. “A drowning. I learned of it in a sacred book—an old tradition from the east, a way to end the winter, welcome summer and spring. Perhaps a way to let the wood know that we’re ready to end our long season here. A way to strengthen our daughter.”

  Mary, focused, nodding. Emma curious. Imogen frightened. Kathryn sucking on an index finger. Helen, perpetually dazed.

  “The drowning of death,” says Alys. All turn to her, surprised to hear her speak. Lucy’s eyes widen. She cannot know her sacred book was authored by Alys’s cousin Madenn, that the ritual she speaks of was carried thousands of miles across mountains and sea by great-grandmothers, brought south with settlers, north with Alys’s mother’s marriage.

  “The drowning of death,” Lucy repeats. “We make an effigy, immerse it, and in doing so we bid farewell to old seasons, we welcome in the new.”

  “A poppet?” asks Imogen, shuddering at the word, the mere mention of which, in her former life, led women to the pyre. “Of the girl?”

  “A poppet of death.” Lucy frowns at her. “Not of the child.”

  But Imogen knows that death and the black-eyed girl are one and the same.

  “What about the other girl?” asks Kathryn. “The living one. Will we be drowning her too?”

  “We aren’t drowning anyone,” says Lucy. “It’s symbolic.”

  “Well, if it’s just symbolic, then what will it do?” Helen asks.

  Helen is the last of the women from whom Lucy expects argument. She squeezes her eyes shut, exasperated, and speaks very slowly, as if addressing a child.

  “It’s a sign, like a prayer, to the gods or to nature. We banish death, we banish winter, we banish whatever force has kept our woodland daughter silent and still for so long.”

  “But just the other day Mary saw her take that—” Emma begins.

  “Enough,” says Lucy. “Will you join me?”

  Helen looks to Alys, who is silent. Mary will, of course; the steady spaniel always loyal to her mistress. Kathryn loves change, any excitement. Emma likes the idea of crafting a doll. Imogen likes the idea of destroying a doll, the possibility that this could be the black-eyed girl’s destruction. Helen waits to see what Alys will say before deciding.

  It stirs a strange melancholy for Alys to hear her family’s rituals distilled thus by Lucy. The spring before the soldiers took the river—that spring which, centuries ago, preceded this eternal summer—Alys and the women of her clan had brought their own effigy to the water, welcoming the changing season, celebrating the turn from death to rebirth. What that ritual actually did now seems irrelevant—whether it was Alys impacting the river and the season, or the season indelibly marking Alys, does not matter. That she took action, that she noticed and honored each differing sensation, that she loved the land, her body—that was the resurrection. That was what the land desired, what it deserved.

  Alys nods. She’ll follow Lucy. She’ll make communion with her family one last time.

  15

  I must have drifted off in the back of the mechanic’s truck, for I had no recollection of arriving at any destination, nor of being carried into the foreign room in which I found myself the next morning. Venturing down a flight of narrow stairs, I discovered my companions gathered at the center of an open garage, and right away I understood why the mechanic, Ginny Ranke, had gone to such trouble to solicit our business. The place was outfitted for at least ten other cars, but Matthew’s sat alone in a back corner. The other ready spaces showed no sign of recent use. In a far corner, a generator buzzed with monotonous static. A mountain of tires emitted a chemical smell.

  “At least four hours to fix the engine,” said Ginny, “and another few days or so to get in all the parts.” The shelves lining the garage were filled with car parts, so I did not understand why we couldn’t be en route by evening. “Not much around nearby,” Ginny told us, “but for extra cost I’ll take care of your meals.”

  WE PASSED SEVERAL days with no deliveries in sight, though we did have a roof to sleep under, and a freezer’s worth of sustenance to
heat at our leisure, which Matthew claimed put us in a much better spot than we might otherwise have found ourselves. Ginny told us to be patient, that she’d put in all the orders, that deliveries weren’t as prompt out here on the moors as we were used to in the cities. I was not used to any deliveries, prompt or no, and was surprised to learn that people made careers of couriering, were paid to transport packages, left always to wonder what might be inside.

  “What if they’re bringing something dangerous?” I asked, “or something uniquely wonderful? Don’t they want to open up the boxes and find out what they’re carrying?”

  “They’re used to not knowing,” said Matthew. “And it’s illegal to tamper with other people’s mail.”

  “Maybe they did tamper, this time,” said Rafe. “Maybe some deliveryman needed a new battery. Maybe that’s why our order is taking so long.”

  Rafe was restless—he spent almost an hour outside, pacing while talking on his mobile, and when he returned to the garage he seemed unsettled. I understood his anxiety. We both knew that each delayed day meant we fell farther behind Peter, who must be long ahead of us, perhaps even already in the wood. Matthew studied his anatomy textbooks while Rafe and I twiddled our thumbs waiting, every so often offering a quick glance up to let me know he was not totally engaged in his studies and at least halfway listening to the stories that Rafe told me to pass time.

  Rafe claimed that these were tales he’d come across during his work, and that each was of vital importance to the legend of the enchanted wood that we hoped to enter. In one, a father killed his child in an attempt to seek out magic. In another, a young doctor gave up his fiancée in exchange for secret words. In a third, a man’s body was bled slowly, until he appeared to be a ghost.

  “Impossible,” Matthew broke in at the close of that one. “A person can’t survive without blood. Slicing an artery would mean the man died instantly. If the witch was going to take that much blood it would have to be done slowly, letting the body replenish before she took more.”