What Should Be Wild

by Julia Fine

  I was afraid. And I was angry. Who was Matthew to belittle my feelings? To sweep me up in some attempt at (was it?) romance in his symptomatic need to have his way? I stopped finally, panting, at the edge of the moor, a stitch in my side, limbs jittery from exercise and hunger. The world stretched silently around me. For a moment I thought that I had gone the wrong direction, I would sicken, I would starve.

  And then I spotted Matthew walking leisurely behind me, a speck on the horizon, his yellow hair distinct.

  I let him join me, though I did not have the energy to continue our discussion. We walked the main road without speaking, and kept several feet between us. By the time we were in view of the garage, I could almost convince myself it all had been imagined, were it not for the dull pain in my elbow, the redness visible under Matthew’s chin. We met eyes before walking the final few feet, and I felt that we were tacitly agreeing to ignore what had happened.

  WHEN WE RETURNED to the garage, the parts needed for Matthew’s car had, by some providence, arrived. Ginny was hidden under the carriage, and did not emerge to ask us about the success of our trip. I sat in one corner of the garage waiting area, thumbing through a magazine, picking at the blisters on my heels, while Matthew flopped down in another, staring at a wall. At one point he got up to microwave a frozen pizza, and silently offered me a slice. I let it sit on the coffee table, crust hardening, too stubborn to sate my growing hunger.

  Rafe did not return until late in the evening. He rushed through the swinging doors with a paper bag of goodies in hand, leaping across the waiting room to reach me.

  “Those girls saw Cothay just a week ago, passing through their town for research,” he said breathlessly. “We’re on the right track. They said he was headed to the city. Even left word where he’d be staying—the address of a hotel. Said he’d be there for two weeks at the least.”

  “Did he?” Matthew frowned. “Why would he tell them that?”

  “In case they thought of more to tell him. The spirals, anthropology, you know.”

  I nodded, heart racing, though I did not know.

  “Not very specific . . . ,” muttered Matthew. “And I thought you’d said earlier he’d gone through to a different world, the door . . .”

  “Oh, give it up,” I told him, pushing the paper plate he’d set down earlier, now flimsy with grease, in his direction. I turned to Rafe. “I hope you wrote down this address.”

  The Cycling of the Seasons

  Lucy helps the black-eyed girl stand, walks with her around the clearing, brushes her hair from her eyes. The woodland birds have abandoned the glade, and, songs conspicuously absent, their two footfalls are the only nearby sounds: Lucy’s firm and patient, the black-eyed girl’s coltish and weak. They are on their seventh lap when the black-eyed girl falls forward. Her chest tightens. Again she feels as though she’s gone deep underwater. The blue seeps out of the sky, replaced by a glowing, celestial green. A burst of lightning. The distant sound of city traffic: car horns honking, sirens’ screams. The black-eyed girl laughs, and her own voice is of a higher pitch than she would have imagined. She lifts her chin to see a full, starlit sky.

  Then the scene recedes, and the black-eyed girl is back in the clearing, aware of her breasts, a sparkling below her stomach. A new sort of wanting, urgent and deep. A hunger that starts in her groin and rises upward: a commandment to take all that she desires. To lap blood from her fingers and suck marrow from bone. To nibble earlobes, guzzle sweat from skin. To feast.

  Lucy, frozen where she stands, is unable to hide her anxiety.

  “Hello,” says the black-eyed girl, licking her wet lips.

  17

  Imagine all your life the world is green and brown and quiet. Your days pass slowly. You celebrate the sun. All magic is of trees and dappled shadows, all mountains peaked eruptions from an old ancestral earth, a ground so sacred there has been no cause to name it. The old story, told to me by Mother Farrow in the months before her death, is that in ancient times when a passerby peeled a ring of bark from a tree, his punishment was to be nailed to the stripped spot by his navel, walked around and around until his organs all uncoiled and wrapped about the trunk as its new skin.

  The closer we got to the city, the stronger the signs of those ancient times’ decay. Trees had been cleared to make way for identical square houses, long paved highways, domed monstrosities that Rafe explained were factories and labs. At the first glimpse of these outskirts, it felt silly to think of my own village’s rites for early spring. Here were confident assertions of progress in action. Here steel was king, and science, and the sense that modern man might conquer all with his behest.

  The road curved around to reveal the city before us—hulking, unreal, gray with smoke. I clenched the sticky edges of my seat. The land itself seemed at once barren and productive, spiked with towering buildings the likes of which I’d never seen before. Silver smokestacks coughed brown clouds into the sky. Cable-wired bridges crossed rainbow-oiled water. Pedicabs transported streams of people to and fro. I could not help but gawk. The air smelled like tar and burned biscuits.

  Rafe turned back to grin at me. “The city,” he said proudly, holding out his open palms.

  I supposed I saw its beauty, although it was a different sort than I had ever known. My fascination lay in all the elements behind it—the markets and machinery, the grinding gears, the cranes—more than the brick or steel or stonework of the buildings’ stern facades. I wondered what was hidden inside all those outer casings. What soft center was so precious that a steel structure was needed to protect it from the earth and air and sky? At home, I felt you saw the heart of something simply by looking; here, mystery prevailed. Like Matthew’s stoic face, the city’s harsh exterior hid its true intentions.

  People were everywhere, caught up in eddies of their own collective making, carrying one another in waves across the pavement. They seemed a collection of various species: one genus of neckties and umbrellas and suits; another of sneakers and visors, sporting fold-out maps and mobile phones, weaving in and out of the more assured crowd.

  We moved from the shiny, slick center of the city to an area filled with warehouses and vans making deliveries, through a neighborhood of shops and pubs and churches, to another lined with single-family homes. I was overwhelmed with the sheer amount of city there was to discover: the slivers of public parks and railways we could just see from the road, the number of stores that we drove past, mere blocks from their identical brothers, covered in neon advertisements. Eventually Rafe told Matthew to park in a crowded public lot in an older area, less glossy than those earlier streets and skyscrapers, but equally bustling. I got out of the car as if setting foot on land after a long journey at sea, my body tentative and shaking.

  It did not take us long to find the last spiral’s location. We slipped through side streets and alleys, at one point even passing through the lobby of a building that Rafe told me was a bank—a cold, high-ceilinged space that smelled of grubby boots and iron—and dodged cars with angry drivers when our coordinates coincided with traffic-filled streets. I drew into myself, wrapping my arms across my chest, at times closing my eyes when the crowds around us were too dense, as if I could make myself invisible and thus escape the overwhelming press of bodies. Matthew noticed and shielded me as best he could, his eyes constantly alert to incoming throngs of people, his elbows wide to give us space. At one point his hand guided the small of my back through my jacket. I was grateful, but once we were through the worst of the crowds I shook him off. I had not forgotten our encounter by the river; the awkwardness still palpable between us.

  The center of the final spiral proved to be another river, as Rafe had suspected. The last point of the triangle, south and east from the first. We stood under a bridge, toxic water lapping at our toes, and at Rafe’s explicit direction I plunged a stick into the silt, mimicking the actions of the ritual I’d recently envisioned on the moors. It sizzled, as if frying in oil, and dissolved almost in
stantly.

  Matthew’s skepticism, never quite masked, had reached its peak, and he sighed all the way through Rafe’s recitations, which neither of us understood, but which I at least tried to honor with reverent attention.

  I felt uneasy, but could not say why. Was it a result of our performance, the change in aura that Rafe claimed we had ignited? Or was it merely my continued discomfort with Matthew, the intensity of being in the city? Again, we saw no sign of my father.

  “He must be at his hotel,” said Rafe once we’d returned to the car, tapping a hand against the dashboard, jiggling his leg as we stalled in the slowly oozing traffic. He repeated the address he had been given, the location where the girls by the river had promised we’d find Peter.

  THE HOTEL WAS a small and unassuming building, a wedge of plain gray stone the same as others all around it, with a row of shaded windows and a weather-worn sign freshly painted to spell out the word LODGING. It didn’t seem the sort of place Peter would choose on his own—too nondescript, lacking history or character. Matthew pulled the car into a neighboring alley.

  “Peter must be inside,” said Rafe, spilling out the side door and coming around to help me carry my belongings. He did not look any worse for his past hours traipsing the city, barely rumpled, certainly not irritable or dirty, as Matthew and I did.

  “I’ll go in with you.” Matthew said from the front seat.

  “Don’t be silly.” I stretched my legs. “You should go home to see your parents. Don’t they live nearby?”

  Matthew ignored me and turned off the engine. I shot Rafe an exasperated look. I did not have time for Matthew and his changing moods, nor the murkiness of my own feelings about what had transpired between us. Was he jealous of Rafe? Had that been the source of his advances? More likely he’d been trying to manipulate me, the gesture by the river meant to placate my frustration, to control me. I shook my head in an effort to forcibly remove all thought that those warnings about Rafe might be founded. Luckily, I would not have to deal with them much longer. Now that we’d reached Peter, Matthew and I would part. This could well be, I thought suddenly, the last time I would see him. The thought made me unexpectedly sad, and I brushed it away.

  The air outside was pleasant, but immediately upon entering the hotel we were met with an oppressive warmth. We walked into a cramped entryway, wires crawling through a patch of unfinished ceiling, the stale smell of industrially washed curtains not quite overpowering a lingering odor of cat. A sloping desk sat unattended beside a row of keys dangling unevenly from hooks in the wall. They reminded me of specimens, each key a neatly labeled bit or bob: Room 7 a fox paw, Room 12 a pinned moth, Room 20 a tagged flower.

  “It doesn’t look as if anyone has stayed here in some time,” muttered Matthew. As if in response, a large cat loped out of the shadows, looked at him disdainfully, and yawned. “Here’s hoping no guests are allergic.”

  I scowled. Matthew had on his expression of derisive incredulity. It was clear he did not trust the path that led us here, which meant that he did not trust Peter. He obviously did not trust me. I widened my eyes to demonstrate my annoyance, and Matthew simply cocked an eyebrow, widening his eyes back at me.

  Rafe leaned over the desk to find a small silver bell, and tapped at it impatiently until we heard a rustling behind a nearby door, from which emerged a heavyset man, bleary-eyed, unshaven, wearing an unbuttoned shirt with an embroidered red logo, like an external heart across his chest. He had a single dead tooth just to the right of his two front ones, bluish black in color. I tried not to stare.

  “What do you want?” the man asked before he’d even looked at us.

  “Poor customer service,” Matthew said under his breath.

  “We are looking for Peter Cothay,” said Rafe slowly, louder, I thought, than was necessary in the small space. “We were told he’s staying here. Do you know which room he’s in?”

  The man scratched the back of his neck. He smiled, rotted tooth on full display.

  “Yes,” he said, “Mr. . . . Yes. Um . . . room sixteen. But he’s gone out. Yes, he’s gone out for the day.”

  “He’ll be back soon?” I asked.

  The man shot Rafe a look—was my question inappropriate?—then turned back to me and shrugged. “How should I know?”

  “Why don’t we get a room as well?” suggested Rafe. “Clean up and have something to eat while we wait. I’m sure he won’t be too long. We’ve found him at last, Maisie!” He could barely contain his excitement.

  “A good idea.” I turned to Matthew. “You can leave now. We’ll be fine.”

  “I’ll wait, too, until you see him.” Matthew crossed his arms over his chest, planting himself in the fusty carpet beside me. I sighed. My back to Rafe and the hotel man, I spoke softly, close to his ear.

  “Stop trying to protect me,” I said through my teeth. “It’s humiliating.” I could feel the heat of the others’ eyes on us. My insides simmered with exasperation. “Rafe will wait with me. Peter will be back soon. As I’ve told you, I can take care of myself. Please leave already. Just go.”

  “You don’t think anything about this is shifty? You don’t have any feeling that maybe something isn’t right?” Matthew took no care to lower his voice.

  “Stop it,” I hissed. “You’re embarrassing me!”

  “You’re embarrassing yourself,” he said. “Come on, Maisie.” Matthew steered me by the shoulder, one hand carefully set atop my jacket, turning me toward the door. “We’re going now.” After two steps I jerked away, the force of my elbow throwing him off balance. He gave me a look of surprise, tinged with hurt. I moved back toward Rafe and pressed myself against the welcome desk.

  “Please stop,” I said, tears swelling in my throat. “If you want to go so much, then just get going. I don’t want you here with me. I never did.”

  Matthew opened his mouth to respond, but again I said, “Please.”

  He looked at me for a long time. I felt a strange ache in my chest. Finally, he nodded.

  “All right,” said Matthew. “All right, then.” He turned away from me, and toward the door. I could see where the bruise I’d made on his chin the day before had begun to yellow. My fingers twitched at my side, wanting, of their own accord, to touch it. I had prevailed; Matthew was leaving. So why did I still think I might cry?

  I assumed that he would turn himself around to say goodbye. He didn’t. I watched him leave, heard the door slam behind him, and felt that tightness in my chest reach an intensity I thought must be its peak. I turned to Rafe.

  “About that room.”

  A Bedeviled Family Line

  The black-eyed girl stretches, twisting her body one way, then the next. She rolls her neck.

  “What can we bring you?” asks Lucy, worrying her fingers, taking a step forward and then falling back as it becomes clear that the black-eyed girl won’t answer. “What comes next? What do we have to do in order to escape?”

  The black-eyed girl raises an eyebrow.

  “You can speak,” Lucy says. “Can’t you?”

  But the black-eyed girl chooses not to speak to Lucy. Instead she cocks an ear, listening to the world outside the forest. She brings a finger to her lips and sucks, lubricating the knuckle, using her teeth to remove the dirty emerald ring long pressed upon it, which she spits to the ground.

  Lucy falls to her knees to retrieve the ring, then scrambles to gather the rest of the jewelry—the iron brooch, the plain gold band, the promise ring—that trails the black-eyed girl as she walks slowly from the clearing. The silver chain torn from the neck. The wire bracelet unwoven. The fallen Blakely crest, pressed facedown in dirt.

  18

  The hotel room was much like the entryway: stuffy and drab. It had two twin beds with copper frames, made up with stiff, flowered bedspreads. These looked even less comfortable than the carpeted floor, which boasted scars from recent vacuuming, uneven stripes like poorly harvested crops across its length. A gray plastic desk held a stack
of brochures with suggestions for what to do while visiting the city. Atop the bureau sat a television, the first I’d seen in person, which displayed only a static snow once turned on.

  At any other time, I would have been excited to explore these new surroundings, bland as they were, but my enthusiasm was tempered by the sour taste left by Matthew’s parting. I felt the anxiety of our lack of resolution, compounded by mounting anticipation of reunion with my father. Had I been unduly short with Matthew? Would Peter be angry with me for pushing him away, for failing to heed his directives of caution?

  I thought of Mrs. Blott, Matthew’s blood relation, and had a sinking premonition that he would suffer a similar fate. Whatever fever I’d abated might return. His exhaustion might lead him to an accident. I wanted to race after him, bolt through the building to apologize, beg him to explain his motives in that moment by the water. I restrained myself.

  “Why don’t you start off in the bathroom?” Rafe offered, opening a door I had not realized led to an attached bath, with a cramped shower stall, a plain white toilet, a streaky mirror in which I could fully examine the toll travel had taken on my face. I thanked him and closed myself in, remembering suddenly that I was in a hotel room, with Rafe. The battle I’d avoided for these past few days had now been thrust upon me.

  There was work to be done if I were to make myself appealing, beginning with the basics of hygiene I’d neglected these past several days. Fortunately, everything in the bathroom was safe for me to touch, and not just after having been refined by human working; these basins were porcelain, faucet heads metal. Nothing here lived, which meant, consequently, that nothing here died. The whole room, and city, too, I realized, was artificial, which I thought even more remarkable than if it had been dead. Dead things became living, by time’s inevitable passing if not by my expediting touch, their decay and dissolution eventually becoming food for their successors, nourishing new life. But these things were the whole extent of what they’d be forever. They had reached the pinnacle of their existence, and I was sad for them.