What Should Be Wild

by Julia Fine

  Rafe returned quickly with a new hospital gown and a blanket, which he wrapped around me. Though I was still feigning unconsciousness, he spoke to me as he unbolted my chain, scooped me in his arms, and angled me up the stairs.

  “I’m going to take you to a friend of mine. He’ll make it all better. You’ll be fine. In just no time at all. Like nothing ever happened. It’s going to be fine. Maisie, I’ve got you. You’ll see.”

  In answer, I squeezed my rag harder, my blood dripping down my arm onto Rafe’s jacket.

  “Go get the cot!” he yelled to Coulton. “We’ll strap her to it, strap her in the van.” While Coulton did, Rafe carried me outside to where a cargo van, the same one I had seen in Coeurs Crossing, sat waiting. I inhaled my first fresh air in months. The action quickly set me coughing: the van was still running, exhaust fugging from its tail.

  “She’s moving!” said Rafe. “Thank God.”

  The inside of the van was clean and quiet. My cot was secured to several ropes against the walls, and I was strapped in with a belt, tightened so that I would not jostle. After conferring, they decided that Rafe would be the one to drive me, while Coulton stayed to clean my mess and any sign of my captivity, on the chance Rafe’s doctor friend could not be trusted.

  Then we were off. I counted the van’s turns, unsure of how far we’d be going, afraid to put my plan in action too soon and have it all come to naught. After we’d been driving smoothly for a bit on what I thought to be a highway, I wiggled my good arm out from its strap, and with all of the strength I could summon, I banged on the side of the van.

  “Maisie?” Rafe turned briefly, twice, to see me.

  “Rafe,” I moaned. “Rafe, the straps are too tight. My hand, Rafe, I think it might . . .”

  “Thank God you’re up, I’m going to get you to—”

  “Please, the straps . . .” I let my voice trail off, needing him to think me even weaker and more tired than I was. “Can we please?”

  Rafe pulled over to the side of the road, got out of the van, and came around to the back door. A burst of energy shot through me, nerves and anticipation combatting my pain. I let out a moan of desperation, at first calculated and then all too real as the immensity of what I was about to do finally hit me.

  I felt Rafe’s weight as he climbed into the van, could smell his aftershave and sweat as he knelt over me. “Let’s see here . . .” His breath was hot. “Where does it—” Rafe began, but before he could finish, my hand darted out to brush his neck.

  He keeled forward and I tried to squirm away, but there was nowhere to go. His corpse fell over me, his eyes open wide, moving, glassy, toward my own. Fighting a scream, I bit down on my lower lip. Rafe’s chin touched my jawline. He twitched, was still, twitched again.

  It was as if Rafe knew, in his constant resurrection, what was happening. His hand grasped my throat, choking me, tightening, it seemed, as his life flowed and ebbed. I coughed. I couldn’t breathe.

  And then, as failure flashed through me, I found one last burst of strength. With a roar, I thrust my bony knee into his groin, then bit down hard on the arm, which had jerked from my neck to my jaw in surprise. I tasted blood through the canvas of his jumpsuit. Taking advantage of the distraction caused by this fresh pain, I pressed my hand to his neck, rolling him off me.

  And then Rafe was finished, fully dead, his body slumped across the floor.

  I knew I had to move quickly. I undid my straps and relieved Rafe of his jacket, which was thankfully long enough to fall just past my knees. I took the sheet that I’d been lying on, stiff with dried blood, and draped it over Rafe’s body. I was about to jump out of the van, onto the gravel of the road that we’d been traveling, but could not resist a last look at my captor. I turned back. One of Rafe’s shoes was visible, not quite covered by the sheet, a glob of chewing gum stuck between the treads of the sole. The adrenaline propelling me fell away. I sank to my knees in the back of the van.

  As a little girl I’d tripped and fallen in the dirt and a rock had lodged itself in my shin. I was on the back terrace. I stood and went inside, certain I was fine. Perhaps I felt a trickle of wet against my calf, and thought it was water. It was not until Mrs. Blott gasped and told me to move off the carpet that I looked down to see the injury, the black stone under the skin, the rivulets of blood. I screamed, and it was as if my scream unleashed the pain I’d been holding at bay. I still remembered it, the glance, the rock, the onslaught. I stood and took several, shaky steps toward Rafe’s body.

  I could close my eyes, I knew, succumb to lack of sleep and blood loss, put this moment away as if it had been a dream. Keep walking—as I might have on that carpet, ignoring Mrs. Blott’s shock—and laugh and say that what I could not see couldn’t hurt me. If I did not dwell on the damage, I could ignore it. Only acknowledgment would break the wall that blockaded my pain. I might feel Rafe just as a twinge in stormy weather, a phantom passing through my thoughts before sleep.

  But I had killed him. I had killed him on purpose. It hardly mattered what Rafe had done: he was a man who had been living, and now wasn’t. All life, despite the workings of the consciousness it harbored, had its own intrinsic value: Rafe’s heart pumped on oblivious to its master’s intentions, its beat a force of beauty. Peter had not raised me with religion, but he’d taught me that much. I owed Rafe’s life my memory, I owed it my pain. I stretched my bandaged arm back, the gesture futile, as Rafe was too far away for me to touch him, as I knew I could not touch him even if he had been closer. Whatever slight scab had begun to form on my arm ripped free, and two careful drops of blood fell onto the floor. I pulled myself away, tripping out of the van, my arm bleeding freely, and blinked out at the limp countryside, the hazy sheet of summer sky.

  SOMEHOW, I FOUND a phone booth. Somehow, I found the proper change in the pocket of Rafe’s stolen jacket. Aware of the strange glances I was getting from the few people who passed me, I quickly dialed the first number that came into my mind, catching myself just before I pressed the final digit, saving myself a wasted call. Mrs. Blott would not be home to answer, Abingdon the cat was not home to mew suspiciously at the old-fashioned wall telephone that rang in her kitchen.

  There was only one phone number, other than my own, I’d committed to memory. I’d seen it taped to the refrigerator, IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, for four days at Urizon. I’d seen it written in black marker on a little girl’s lone glove.

  I MADE THE call and then sat on the curb beside the phone booth to wait. I was half naked and shaking, covered in blood, passing in and out of consciousness. A woman knelt next to me, offering help, and I waved her off, my words incomprehensible. Matthew pulled up just as I heard the first murmur of police sirens.

  I slumped into the front seat, no mind to the mess I brought with me, the cool plastic a relief against my bare legs.

  “Where is he?” Matthew growled.

  I shook my head, unable to keep my eyes open.

  “Rafe will pay for this, I promise.” Matthew slammed the door shut and we sped off, away from the blinking lights, the gathering crowd. “I’ll make him pay.”

  Before I fell asleep, I whispered, “Rafe is gone.”

  Part

  V

  Symmetry and Balance

  The black-eyed girl wanders. Birds converse in the canopies above her, out of sight but ruffling the trees as they land and take flight. Small creatures scurry from one patch of undergrowth to another, disappearing into tangled bowers of barberry and thorn. The scent of blood travels on the breeze.

  The black-eyed girl stomps through the brushwood and scrub, tracking the odor to a long-abandoned clearing, the apron to a cluster of elders, where a curtain of cobweb hangs stretched between dark-berried trees. Some strands are patchy, barely strung together, others thick and full and white. It is a home built long ago, a place of refuge for the spider at its center, which hangs roughly the size of the black-eyed girl’s fist. The creature seems to have a wise face, bright and whiskered, its m
any eyes as ancient as her own. Its spinnerets shiver. Its web holds one gossamer-clad casualty: a man smothered entirely in silk, with just a small sliver of space through which to breathe.

  The black-eyed girl approaches, and deftly stills the spider with a finger. She pulls one of its crisp, freckled legs, stretching until she can hear cracking, see the phlegmy rush of innards as they spill. She lifts the limb to her mouth and slurps its contents. After completing this ritual with all eight of the legs, the black-eyed girl discards the shorn abdomen.

  Sensing her, the netted man wriggles in his cobweb, knowing even as he does that he’s already met his fate. With a broken branch, the black-eyed girl severs the silk holding him. She takes a fingernail and slices through his packaging, pulling away the webbing until she can see his face, his hooked nose, his eyes wide with terror. Gripping his arm below the shoulder, the black-eyed girl twists until the heavy limb snaps free. She inhales. The meat is bursting and blood-black.

  WHEN SHE HAS finished with him, sucking her fingers to lap up the last of the juices, the black-eyed girl turns to find the child, Emma, watching her. One dirty thumb is jammed into the girl’s mouth, a gesture that might seem lewd were it not for her size.

  “I saw you,” says Emma, voice muffled by her hand.

  Emma is not a conventionally pleasing child to look at. One brown eye cannot face forward, remains permanently pointed at the bridge of her large nose. That splotchy pink birthmark runs from neck to earlobe, over jaw and left cheek. Her lips form the shape of a small heart. Her slender fingers are flaked with hangnails and crusted with mud.

  “Saw what?” the black-eyed girl asks her.

  Emma shrugs, sucks her thumb louder and harder, lets escape a pink slip of her tongue. In some ways, Emma is more than a child; in others, as childlike as ever one could be. She spent just five years in the world, and then lost lifetimes in the forest, without mother or father to guide her, without synaptogenesis, or growth. As in the old fable, the grass snake that opens its mouth to let its little ones hide in its gullet, the forest saved Emma from early demise. Unlike the grass snake, it did not let her slither back out of its wide maw once danger had passed.

  “You ate the dead man,” Emma says, pointing at the remains, the clean bones that litter the clearing.

  “I did,” the black-eyed girl agrees.

  “Did he taste good?” Emma fingers the remnants of the thick cobweb. A cluster of five-pointed elder flowers has been caught, nearly camouflaged in the white of the web, and she picks at the stamens, releasing chalky bursts of pollen. When she wipes her runny nose, she leaves fine yellow streaks across its peak.

  “What does good mean?” the black-eyed girl asks her.

  “Tasty.” Emma shrugs. “Like marzipan. Or veal chops.” She smiles. Her eyes widen with the memory of the chops the cook at Urizon made for her fifth birthday, browned in egg and breadcrumbs, dripping with fat, just days before her mother took her out into the forest. A fitting final meal: a calf bred for slaughter, its limbs tied with string so that its muscle could not grow.

  “Have you had veal chops?” Emma asks. “I haven’t in such a long while.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Oh.” Emma’s hands are knotted in cobweb. “None of the others have ever tried them either. Though Miss Lucy didn’t answer when I asked her, so she might have, I suppose.” Small fingers weave musty strands. “You aren’t like the others.”

  “No.”

  “Not like them at all.”

  The black-eyed girl waits.

  “So you can help us.”

  “Help you, how?” the black-eyed girl asks Emma.

  “Help us leave the forest. To escape. I think my mother must be very, very worried,” Emma continues. “Wherever she is. Even if she’s old and after.”

  “After?” the black-eyed girl repeats.

  “After death,” Emma says clearly, removing her thumb, which is red-raw and dimpled from the pressure of her teeth. “I’m very tired of being here,” says Emma. “Can you help me?”

  The black-eyed girl nods.

  She kisses Emma at the center of the strawberry birthmark. The grass snake opens its pink mouth, letting the little girl crawl between the prongs of its forked black tongue. Emma shudders, smiles, is still.

  ONCE THE BODY is an empty husk, the black-eyed girl breaks its bones to drink. These bits of Emma make the black-eyed girl grow strong. The rest will crumble, the immortal little girl a meal for scavengers, a heady fertilizer for the trees. Fuel for the forest, now shifting, its ritual begun.

  Branches rustle in new rhythm. The ever-present midday sun loses its heat. It peaks with seven sharp rays, lustrous and blinding, and begins its long-awaited descent.

  A forest hog grunts approval. A nest of red squirrels chatter. Birds sing louder and faster, excited to share news—

  The snake’s mouth remains wide. The wood is open.

  25

  I awoke in a clean room to the sound of someone fiddling with a window frame at the side of my bed. Coulton, I thought at first, my muscles tight. Then I remembered my escape. This must be Matthew, I realized. I fell back into the pillows of the king bed with relief. But when I opened my eyes, I realized it wasn’t Matthew—this boy’s hair was darker, he was taller, he walked with a cane.

  “Don’t mind me,” he said, “just tightening the frame, here. Draft was coming in, didn’t want you getting sicker than you already are.”

  “Where am I?” I managed. “Who are you?”

  “Our house doesn’t have a fancy name like yours does.” He grinned, and I saw a bit of Matthew in the lines of his smile. “Welcome to Le Chateau Hareven. I’m Charlie.” He bowed, and his cane’s rubber tip scraped the floor. “I’ll go and tell my brother you’re awake.”

  Charlie, I thought to myself, before drifting back to sleep.

  MATTHEW HAD TOLD me there were seven Hareven children. Charlie was the eldest, Matthew next, followed by Elizabeth, Ben, the twins Teddy and Avalee, and finally little Tessa. These were far more Harevens than I could have imagined until the bulk of them stood over me, their faces grim, the next time I opened my eyes.

  “They’ve been worried for you.”

  I lifted my gaze above the children to see their mother, Elodie Hareven herself, framed in the doorway, holding a tray of hot liquids, swirls of steam rising to mask her face. Her voice, like Matthew’s, was deeper than I might have expected. Her hair was the same dark gold as Matthew’s, her eyes the same ocean-salted gray.

  “Clear out, you lot, and give the girl some space.”

  A general muddle of Harevens tripping over one another, quickly castrated complaints. The gaggle dispersed, and Mrs. Hareven settled the tray of food beside me on the bed. Moving to reach it, I was hindered by my body. My right hand was quite usual, the fingernails bitten, a few knuckles dry with cracked skin, but the left was weighed down by an arm wrapped in bandages to twice its normal size. All other dirt and blood had been rinsed off me. For the first time in ages, my hair was wet and clean.

  “Our Matthew,” Mrs. Hareven said, “knew what to do with you.” The pride in her voice rang out clear and strong. “Fixed you right up, or at least put you on track. Just like him to want to fix things, as always. He said you might feel fuzzy waking, not to worry, it’s only the drugs.”

  “Is he here, then?”

  “He will be. Went to close out business. Looking for something, for someone, I think. He wouldn’t tell me much. Not that I haven’t gotten used to my boys keeping their business from their mother, but in this case, with your sickness and all . . .” She blinked at me, brow creasing, then cast off any visible sign of frustration and molded her face into a vacant and well-practiced smile.

  I could not tell if Mrs. Hareven approved of her son’s trouble. I wondered what Matthew had told her. I could assume he had at the very least instructed his mother not to touch me. It would have been reckless to leave without such warning; Matthew was anything but reckless. Still,
Mrs. Hareven did not seem afraid. Matthew had picked me up, had brought me to his family, to this warm, fluffy bed, to hot broth and bandages. And I knew, despite his caution, that I should not have expected any less.

  “I’ll leave you to rest,” said Mrs. Hareven, shutting the door.

  My eyes begged for me to close them, and I wanted nothing more than to sink back into sleep. But there was Peter to find, and several months of misdirection to make up for, and to regain my strength I knew I had to eat. An examination of the bowl Mrs. Hareven had brought found it to be simple broth, still too hot to stomach. A shuffling came from just outside the bedroom, a little girl’s giggle, a little boy’s cough.

  “Is someone there?”

  The door cracked open, and two ruddy faces appeared. The twins, Teddy and Avalee, ten-year-old miniature versions of Matthew and their mother. I would learn that there were two strains of Hareven: the stocky blonds who looked like Elodie, and the taller brunettes who took after their father, though when gathered together all were obviously siblings, a certain snub nose repeating across multiple faces, a similar flared nostril when frustrated, a shared shape of the ear. I envied such resemblance, as if it extended past the physical to the bond formed from the time they all had shared. My own childhood seemed even bleaker in comparison.

  “Come in,” I told the twins, who did so eagerly, Teddy standing by the wardrobe and Avalee climbing up to join me on the bed.

  “Be careful not to touch,” Teddy admonished. “Mattie says she’s very weak.”

  Avalee looked at me, wide-eyed. “Are you really?”

  “I suppose.” The conversation was surreal—to be here, wrapped in a cloud, talking with two kind and curious children. I could scarcely believe we existed.

  “Can I feed you your soup? I’m good at taking care of sick things. Mattie thinks that I could be a doctor, just like him!” Avalee straightened her shoulders.