What Should Be Wild

by Julia Fine

  I imagined him at a local bar, laughing with Coulton, bragging about how easy it would be to seduce me. I’ll tell her there’s a prophecy. The calls he had made nightly throughout our travels were likely updating Coulton on his progress. There was no worried family to check in on. There were no spirals. He must have overheard Matthew asking about the map at the Holzmeiers’ store, and known precisely how to fool us. Were the letters from Peter even real? I told her I was also trying to find her father, and she bought the whole thing. What a simpleton. How easy. I replayed the scene in my head, looping over and over: Rafe guffawing, the foam of his drink frothing as they toasted my naïveté, the rest of the pub’s patrons judging me, vastly entertained. Rafe had been mocking me from the moment that we’d met, once he had realized I was careless. And I, silly girl, conceited as I was, thought he had wanted me. That, maybe, he could love me.

  But all Rafe wanted was my blood, though I could not guess what he did with it. Clearly from their precautions, Rafe and Coulton were aware of my curse. “How?” I yelled at the shut door. “How did you know? What are you doing?” I kicked at the toilet in the corner until my toes bruised green and purple. I overturned my mattress, wailing until my throat was raw. Nobody came; no one was listening.

  I CLOSED MY eyes and envisioned that strange day in the forest, how the tree bark had felt against my fingers, how the birdsong had been beckoning me, how afterward I’d dreamed of the wood calling me home. Frightened, I had thought those dreams the danger. How I wished now I was trapped there, amid soil and buds, tangled in thorn-bushes, my wrists cuffed by vines instead of metal. A bitter part of me whispered that I could have been exploring that wood freely, had I not let the impossible desire for Rafe overcome all my good sense.

  The thought that pained me most as I stared at the bare ceiling or picked at the meager stuffing of my cot, the truth that was worse than any stab of Coulton’s needle, was the flagrance of my own culpability. Rafe had no doubt played his part, but I’d embraced mine without question, eagerly casting myself as the gullible fool. As I’d proven since my dangerous gestation, from the moment that my mother’s heart stopped beating I was capable of only destruction. I’d been careless, out of control, I had followed my desires too blithely. My father had been right to hide me away for so long. Despite a lifetime of warning, I had placed my trust where I clearly should not have, and, as Peter had predicted, was undone.

  Mrs. Blott’s romance novels had taught as gospel that some men would break girls’ hearts. I had always thought them simple, the ingénues blinded by their handsome, ill-intentioned suitors, those who gave the men their whole lives and got heartache in return. Yet here I’d done precisely this, let long-lashed eyes and a chiseled jaw lead me far from the path of Peter’s instruction.

  And where was Peter? What had happened to my father? I knew even less of his whereabouts than I had before leaving Urizon. Had he taken sick somewhere? Was he waiting for me to come to him, to nurse him? Had he died? Had he willfully abandoned me to live a life unburdened by my care, by my questions, my curse? Could he have any inkling I was stuck here in this airless room, no way to seek him out? That not even my body was my own? My stupid body, whose lusts and night imaginings had gotten the better of my judgment, despite what I now realized were warnings, despite Matthew’s direct doubts.

  How it hurt to think of Matthew, who’d tried so hard to protect me. My only ally, who I’d ordered out the door when his advice ran counter to my desires. Matthew, who had left without a farewell, on such poor terms that he would not turn to face me, would not watch me stumble into what he knew to be a trap.

  An Ink of Her Own Blood

  In the outside world it is the height of summer—the evening when darkness appears almost fully banished, when children are tucked into bed in awe of a sun that has conquered the sky. Here in the forest, it is eternally the same slow summer evening as the Blakely women go about their business—Emma trying to catch a wood mouse, Mary picking her teeth with a twig—not realizing that it is one of only two nights a year the veil will lower without a sacrifice from those who would enter, one of two nights when villagers will stumble in, the trees claiming their bodies, altering their minds.

  The black-eyed girl blinks at the women—Imogen kneeling in prayer, Kathryn attempting to pleasure herself upon a tree stump—fascinated by all that they do not see, despite the many years they’ve had to hone their vision. These trapped Blakely women are no different from the villagers outside the wood, performing their antiquated rituals. Thinking the earth moves as a result of their actions, rather than prompting them. Thinking that walking in a spiral has significance, that tales are told more for their listeners than their tellers.

  The black-eyed girl watches Lucy attempting a potion of berries and bark, Helen braiding a noose out of vines. She returns to her clearing, sits cross-legged on her pallet, where she digs her fingernails into the wood, scraping perfectly curled shavings of the sort Lucy is unable to summon. She smiles when the splinters pierce her palms, holding her hands to the light. She does not try to remove the shards of wood.

  When the men come, only two this season—one pimply and hairless, the other so tall that he struggles to navigate the trees—the black-eyed girl closes her eyes and tilts her head to listen. She hears Kathryn’s delight, her heavy breathing as she tells the younger, Come. She hears the other become tangled in a spiderweb, a thousand-year-old net of sticky fibers that sweeps from ancient tree to tree. His breath is also quick and heavy, his moan of fear not so different from his neighbor’s moan of pleasure. But when the evening ends, this man will not go free.

  ALYS STANDS IN the black-eyed girl’s clearing, her mouth tight with memory. The way the black-eyed girl is seated with her legs tucked in, head cocked so that her hair falls just so. Her eyes fully closed, but faintly fluttering. Alys pictures her young cousin Madenn in communion with the wood, buried deep in a vision. The glow of the firelight, the gold of her hair. The wonder in her eyes once they opened.

  The black-eyed girl does not need grandmothers and mothers to teach her the ways of the forest. She does not need books to tell her how to commune with the trees. The black-eyed girl is a part of the forest that made her; she is the shift, the difference, the element of randomness requisite for any evolution. Even now she can open the wood at her will, as she did for Peter Cothay. Soon, once she knows her womanhood, the wood will open for all the Blakely women. The season will finally change.

  When she is ready, the black-eyed girl opens her dark eyes. She greets Alys with a slow and knowing nod.

  21

  In the days that followed, hours of anger interspersed with monotony: the dullness of the colorless room, the endless boredom. The weightlessness of my drugged body. The sound of my blood drip-dripping down into Coulton’s jars. A song stuck in my head, an old lullaby that Mrs. Blott once sang me, the same two lines of melody repeated. The thrum of the plastic-bladed fan. I paced the room, crouched in its corners, searching for some means of escape. I waited for Rafe.

  One morning a mouse scampered out from a crack in a wall. I pounced, freezing the creature at my touch. Coulton kicked it out the open door before I could revive it. But the mouse had to have come from somewhere, and, excited, I spent the next few hours trying to peel back the plaster and paint in search of its nest. I used my elbow to make the hole larger, and after what felt like decades of work had made a small opening the size of my fist. I pushed my cot to the side, trying to hide my plan from Coulton when he returned the next morning.

  Upon opening the door, Coulton looked from my torn fingernails to the rearranged cot, to the dusty motes of plaster I’d been unable to sweep into the toilet. With his boot, he kicked the cot aside, revealing my means of escape. I thought that he might punish me. Instead he just laughed.

  “It’s several feet of concrete past the drywall. Good luck clawing your way through that. You’re more likely to squeeze yourself through the pipes or find a way up to the window.”
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  I followed his gaze. The windows were at least ten feet above us and not even large enough to fit my emaciated arms. I could not hide my disappointment, my exhaustion. I gave an elbow to the effort, punching the plaster in an attempt at defiance, but as I watched my blood pour into Coulton’s cup, I felt my spirit spill out with it.

  TOO AFRAID TO contemplate my future, I tried to maintain hope by retelling the stories of my childhood. I could track each stage of my life by the stories I’d been told. Stories were blueprints for selfhood, ways to mold myself and my surroundings into what I needed them to be. Stories had taught me what to want, and how to want it. Maybe now they’d help to set me free.

  I told myself the tale of the woodcutter’s wife, lost in the forest. Fantasies of fairy princesses fooling their captors. Sudden storms that swept evil tyrants from their reigns. I rehearsed Mother Farrow’s old yarn about a village mother rescuing her daughter with a foolish and fervent insistence, as if it would save me. As if my mother, even now, would save me. But for every story of a mother’s love, there was a tale of blood-drained bodies, of a dumbfounded prince. A story of a disobedient child.

  One of our village rumors, a tale no one could place but all insisted must be true, I had heard first from our solicitor, Tom Pepper, during one of his annual trips to Urizon to discuss the Blakely estate. Mr. Pepper, I knew, hoped to frighten me into politeness with his telling, scare away what misbehaviors I had planned. I was never disobedient, always treated his visits with the respect that I felt they—the only regular outside contact I received at the house other than Mrs. Blott and Peter—deserved. Still, he told me this:

  There once was a mischievous little girl who was too curious by half, picking the locks of cupboards, eavesdropping, muddying her dresses, throwing massive tantrums that could be heard far from her home. She belched loudly in company. She uprooted garden flowers. She’d run, in the nude, down the main street of the village, her mother chasing after, trying to put her in the bath. This was a common sight to see, said Mr. Pepper, and the village butcher soon learned to time his closing shop with the slap of the girl’s footfalls, the moaning of her poor, flustered mother, bath towel flapping in the breeze.

  What to do about the child? How to teach her to obey? The slap of a birch switch could not calm her, nor a stern telling-off from her father, not even a prayer of expulsion to release whatever demon had her heart. All advice was empty, the child could not be tamed. The parents, especially the mother, were at their wits’ end.

  There was, at the time, an old wisewoman living by the river, and to her the distressed mother finally crawled.

  “What to do about my child?” the mother cawed, once she’d arrived. (Cawed, I imagined, because the voice Mr. Pepper put on for her was high-pitched and crackly, not convincing in the slightest, but distinctive enough to stick in the craw of my memory.)

  “Hmm,” said the old wisewoman (in a breathy falsetto, punctuated every so often by manly Pepper throat-clearings and coughs). “A child who will not heed her elders. That is bad news, indeed.”

  “But what is to be done?” the mother asked. “I have tried everything.”

  The wisewoman gave her a beady-eyed smile. “Take the girl out to the forest,” she said. “Give her a blanket to rest on, and a knife.”

  The wisewoman gave the mother a charm to call the wolves close enough to scare the girl, but not so close to hurt her. “Wait at the edge of the clearing,” she instructed, “and when you hear the child scream you must not go to her. Wait, wait, until you hear nothing. You will find her asleep. You can carry her home, and she will never trouble you again.”

  The mother found this a strange tactic, but she had exhausted all other options. She took the girl to the wood, gave her a blanket and a penknife, then retreated some distance away, where she would wait. She followed the wisewoman’s instructions, muttered the wolf spell, and listened to the child’s screams until they ceased. Then back she went, to collect her sleeping daughter.

  But the girl was not sleeping. The girl was angry, waiting, ready to pounce. She ran full force at her mother, penknife in hand, sounding an otherworldly yawp. She slashed her mother’s right cheek, then the left. With another long cry, she leaped a log and disappeared into the trees.

  The mother returned to the village, blood coating her face. In time, the wounds healed into perfectly symmetrical scars, constant reminders of her guilt and of her failure, of her wild little girl lost to the wood. The villagers assured her there was nothing else she might have done, nothing else one could do with such a disobedient daughter, though when she was out of earshot they blamed her for having birthed the demon child in the first place. At times, woodsmen or hunters would remark upon a fearsome forest sight: a small child jumping out from bushes before scurrying away. An angry, feral sprite.

  THE MORE TIME passed, the more my rotten core seemed obvious, my complicity clear. My captors knew that I was guilty. “If it hurts, you have only yourself to blame,” Coulton would tell me if I yanked my arm away because my veins were too swollen for his needle. “Almost as if you’re asking for it,” he remarked when he saw I had yet again tried to peel the plaster from the wall. My punishment for this was a quick slap to the cheek; his gloved hands scorched my skin. When he returned to find me itching, my nails drawing blood, he clucked his tongue as Mrs. Blott had when I came in late for dinner. “You’re a menace to yourself, my girl. Can’t imagine what harm you’d do to other folks around you. Lucky you’re here with us, where we can help you. Good thing you had Rafe looking out for you.” Coulton’s words struck me harder than the burn of his gloved palm.

  I thought, for the millionth time, on the events that had preceded my capture, but this time I replayed them with a crucial narrative difference. Matthew had been scared to let me go with the girls by the river. For all his talk of camping, I knew we’d spent nights in his car because he worried what would happen if he let me in a house. Peter had held me at Urizon, forbidding me the simplest sorts of travel. It was clear I needed guidance, that everyone I knew and loved had constantly been trying to keep me in line. Rafe’s efforts now were unconventional, were painful. And yet what if his intentions were another thing that I had gotten wrong?

  I hadn’t seen Rafe since my arrival, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t thinking of me, watching me. Perhaps, I thought suddenly, the only way to free myself was to prove myself docile. Perhaps I had been set on a path to perdition that Rafe was now trying to counter. Perhaps, in my imprisonment, I really had been saved.

  I had spent hours with Rafe, falling asleep beside him, sharing stories. I knew Rafe, and Rafe was no monster. Could all this be for my own good? This bloodletting a cousin to the remedy used for centuries when a patient displayed misaligned humors? Was Rafe using my blood in a way Peter had never imagined, to understand my failings, to cure me? Rafe had told me to trust him, that he knew what he was doing. Was there any way this work was for the best? It fit as well as, if not better than, every other explanation I had previously arrived at to explain my current condition and Rafe’s role in it.

  I knew my power to be dangerous, my existence to be a source of shame. I’d killed my mother, driven my father, now Rafe, to what appeared obsessive madness. The trouble, I began to see, was never Rafe, was never Coulton. The trouble was that in the hour that I needed them most I had bristled at the rules Peter imposed, thinking my defiance brave, my disobedience something special. I’d been selfish and stupid. I despised myself.

  I deserved this treatment. Maybe it would wash me clean.

  I STOPPED STRUGGLING, I stopped sneering. I sat meekly when Coulton came to me.

  “She’s a changed woman,” said Coulton, crouching to come level with my seat on the floor, straightening a straw so I could drink the cloudy water he’d provided. “Seems we’ve tamed the beast, eh?”

  Tamed. A word for a wild girl made obedient. A word for a hawk with clipped wings, a declawed tiger. A word that made me safe.

  One e
vening a violent storm sent rain leaking in through the windows, and I used a bowl left over from my breakfast to catch the drops. I watched the beads of water as they raced down the wall, chasing each other at first, and then combining as they reached their destination.

  “Resourceful. Your boy Rafe would be proud,” Coulton told me when he saw my jerry-rigging. He nodded and brought me a larger bucket and a mop with which to clean up the rest.

  I shuffled awkwardly in my chains, but sopped up most of the water. I tidied the mess I had made of the plaster, brushing the chips of paint into a pile. I washed myself, wiping my armpits, rinsing the sweat between my thighs. I ate my bitter soups, swallowed my crackers, forced down boiled potatoes and cold gruel and stale breads. I held my arm out when Coulton reached for me, unflinching at the prick of the needle, steady when he gave my head a pat before he left.

  Each time I heard the locks click into place, I thought that surely Rafe would be next to unbolt them. Each time I looked up to see Coulton, I felt my hope shrink. I became the pit of the fruit that had once been me, my meat eaten slowly, bite by fleshy bite.

  RAFE DID NOT come.

  He was not coming.

  Perhaps he had decided I could not be cured. Perhaps he’d sold me. Perhaps my life would end here in this basement room, with Coulton. Perhaps I was to be the body drained of blood.

  Please just kill me, I prayed silently, as I did now every time Coulton came to check my temperature, stick me with his needles. Kill me now and make it quick. If you aren’t going to set me free, just kill me. For wasn’t this already a sort of living death? Nothing to look at, nothing to listen to, nothing to touch. The sunlight that crept in through the basement windows was weakened by the frosted glass, and though I could move myself into its clouded beams I could not feel its power.