What Should Be Wild

by Julia Fine

“I’m grateful for the offer,” I told her, “but I think it might be good for me to spoon it in myself. Stretch the muscles, you know.”

  Avalee nodded, chattering to me while I ate. She regaled me with tales of her school friends, her family, a horse she had spotted at a stable two towns over that she’d set her sights on buying, once her doctoring money came through. Her brother mostly listened, occasionally piping in to correct some embellished detail. The domesticity, the ease—I knew I did not deserve these creature comforts, but I was grateful. As Avalee spoke, my time imprisoned, in the cargo van, Rafe’s death, seemed memories from another world.

  I wondered where Peter must be at that very moment, whether he had someone looking after him, to bring him soup and gossip and to help him feel at ease. I hoped that he did.

  MATTHEW RETURNED WHILE I was napping. When I next opened my eyes, he was settled into a chair in the corner of my room with a book and a hot cup of tea. I could hear the younger Harevens chasing one another around the rooms below us, the dull thumps of their bodies careening into furniture, Mrs. Hareven hushing them. Listening, I felt safe and serene, a pearl protected by iridescent shell. I watched Matthew from under half-closed eyes, awash in the midmorning sun.

  He had cut his hair quite short during my capture. The severe style made him look older. He was thinner, quieter, more serious than I remembered him, as if his body had struggled to absorb his recent experience. I wondered how I must look, ragged and gaunt, bled, as I’d been, like a stuck pig. My bandaged arm throbbed, and I shifted to relieve some of the pain. Matthew heard me, and looked up.

  He was unusually shy with me, pursing his mouth several times before speaking. A flush rose in his cheeks.

  “Hello,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine,” I said automatically. He raised a brow and I shrugged, irritating my arm even more.

  Matthew marked his place in his book with a pen and set it down on the end table beside him. He stood, stretched, and moved closer.

  “May I take a look?” he asked.

  I nodded, and he retrieved a pair of latex gloves from his book bag, snapping them onto his wrists. I flinched unintentionally, a vision of Coulton doing the same flashing through my mind. I tried to pretend it away as an itch or a cough, scratching my ear awkwardly while clearing my throat. Matthew saw my reaction, understood. His eyes were serious and gentle. “It’s all right,” he said softly, “you’re all right now.”

  I held out my arm. There was something sensual about the care with which he unwound the white bandage, the tenderness with which he touched my skin despite the barrier of the gloves. The wound was still raw, but the redness had softened, the angry inflammation somewhat calmed.

  “You may want to look away,” Matthew said. “I mean, you don’t have to,” he stuttered. “Just . . . might want to.” But I was fascinated by the unknown inner parts of myself. I watched the whole way through, as he discarded the used bandage, spread salve across the wound, rewrapped my arm in soft, fresh gauze. “It’s healing well,” he told me.

  I thanked him, also newly shy. I imagined what might happen were he to remove the gloves, tend to the rest of me with the same intense precision.

  “If you want to go back to sleep,” he began. “If you want me to go to another . . . move into a different—”

  “No.” I blushed at my own sureness. “I want you to stay.”

  IN THE DAYS that followed, I thought myself recovering impressively, although I’d startle at the sound of a car outside the window, a loud crash from the living room below. Matthew assured me all was well, though I did once catch what I thought was a glimpse of anxiety in his eyes as he peered out my open window.

  “What is it?” I asked him. “Who’s out there?”

  Matthew pulled the curtains shut. “It’s nothing to worry about. Everything is just fine.”

  “I wish I could believe that.” I forced myself to smile, hoping to show him I was on his side, that for once I appreciated his protectiveness.

  “Focus on getting well,” Matthew said. “Try to think of happier things.”

  “Talk to me, then,” I said. “Distract me. Tell me about . . . yourself.”

  And so, over the next few days, he did. I learned about his sister’s marriage, of which his mother firmly disapproved, the little niece who was expected several months hence. He told me about university, his lifelong interest in medicine. He told me about his first visit to Urizon.

  When Matthew was eight, the Harevens had come to Coeurs Crossing. Gerald, his father, was away on business, a six-month trip that would mean money for the family on the back end, but innumerable headaches for his wife on the front. Charlie, the oldest, was recovering from a terrible accident, a fall that had taken his leg below the knee.

  “It was all my fault,” Matthew said, squeezing his eyes shut. “I was stupid. I dared him to climb up a tree with heart rot. The whole thing came down on top of him.”

  The twins had just been born, and her own mother was indisposed, so Elodie Hareven packed up her motley brood of six and moved them temporarily to Aunt Abigail’s cottage. It was crowded, and noisy, but Matthew thought it must be a treat for Mrs. Blott, who had been lonely in the years since her husband’s passing. She told neither me nor Peter of her guests. In turn, she told her niece nothing of my existence, the nature of Peter’s work, the reality of her days at Urizon. The older Hareven children attended the local school, the younger ones played at the cottage.

  “I was never alone,” Matthew said. “Either busy with schoolwork or helping Mother with the babies, or with Charlie.” He chewed on a thumbnail between sentences, uncomfortable, it seemed, with sharing personal details. “I don’t remember much of it. I shared a double bed with my brother Ben, and I remember that his feet were always cold. Charlie was past the worst of his injuries, and milking it for all he was worth—he used to call us to his room, then say never mind, he’d forgotten what he wanted, we could leave, then call us back. And so on, you know.” I smiled at the thought of young Matthew scuttling to and from his brother’s bedside, stiffening his face to hide his mounting frustration.

  “He thought it all very funny, though I wasn’t entertained. I felt so guilty for my part in the accident, and Charlie clearly knew it. I decided I’d become a doctor someday. Running up and down the stairs, bringing him snacks and books and adjusting his window just so—I tried to see it all as practice. And as penance, I guess.”

  “And do you still see it as penance?” I asked. Matthew shrugged. “You’ve been so good to me. So good at taking care of me. You shouldn’t feel bad about what you said or did before you knew better, back when you were young.”

  Matthew smiled. “I’m sure you know that’s easier said than done.”

  Most of that school term was a blur of busywork and simple mathematics, but Matthew did clearly remember one excursion: the Year Threes on a school trip to the forest, led by the new art teacher, who carried a bag of sharpened pencils with which her students would sketch.

  “It was my first time in the wood,” he said, “though Ben, who was seven, had gone exploring and come back with tales of chattering voices, tree trunks that spanned caverns you could walk across like bridges, mangy wild boars. Mother spanked him and sent him to bed without supper as a warning to the rest of us. She told us that the forest wasn’t safe.”

  “But the art teacher didn’t know that?” I asked, anxious. I had a sudden sense that I knew where his story led.

  The art teacher had arrived along with the Harevens at the beginning of the school term and was unaware of the wood’s dangers. She had the students hold hands as they walked down a back road to a clearing she had come across one weekend and thought perfect for artistic inspiration.

  “It went well,” Matthew said. “No one was eaten by animals. No one was lost. My sketching, if you don’t mind my saying, was quite accurate for age eight, and earned me full marks. I was the last in the line of children walking down the road, retu
rning to the schoolhouse, when our group walked past Urizon.”

  I bit my lip.

  “There was a girl there, in the bushes. A girl in a sun hat and overly large gloves.”

  I had been six, then. Wrestling with the ivy. I’d come over to watch the children passing.

  “I remember,” I whispered. “I remember you. You spoke to me.”

  “I think I said hello, and I let go of the girl’s hand that I’d been holding. She went ahead, then called out for me to catch up. We were not, under any circumstances, to let go of our partners.”

  “You ran after her.”

  “I did. But that night, after my bath, once I was squeezed in bed with Ben, I asked Mother about you. She passed the question on to Aunt Abigail, who said you were a fantasy, that you must have been imagined. There was a little girl who lived at the house, but she had gone into the city for the season and would not be back for months. There was no way I could have seen her.”

  Mrs. Blott would not have wanted her nephew exposed to my condition. She would not have wanted me exposed to what I now knew was a harsh, carnivorous world. I could see why she might squelch his curiosity by saying that the girl Matthew saw was a trick of his mind, that the girl at Urizon was off traveling. I understood, but her words hurt me.

  “I wish she’d let you see me,” I whispered. “Let me meet you. Your hands . . . you and the others . . . I didn’t know that children’s hands could touch. I didn’t know I was alone until that day, when I first saw you all together.”

  Matthew looked at me solemnly, giving my confession its due.

  Four months after our encounter, he and the rest of the Harevens had returned to the city. Upon leaving, he had asked if they might see me there, invite me for a visit, but Mrs. Blott claimed, by coincidence, that I would be returning to Urizon on the very day they left. The next time that he visited, she promised she would make an introduction. Of course, this was not to be.

  Matthew did not return to Mrs. Blott’s cottage until he’d turned eighteen, and had begun his studies at the university. When pressed, Elodie declared the family too busy for a visit to Aunt Abby, or reasoned that their holidays should be to places they’d not yet explored. But she’d discovered something, thought Matthew, during that six-month stay in Coeurs Crossing, though he never knew just what. Something worrisome. Something that scared her.

  “Likely the men who went missing in the wood for several days and lost their minds. I’d imagine your mother wouldn’t want that fate for her children.”

  “Perhaps,” Matthew mused.

  By now I was two weeks into my recovery. Matthew had spread his story over the hours I was not feverish or sleeping. His armchair was pulled close next to my bed. We could hear the household bustling below, the children stomping through the Hareven home, which, I’d learned that morning on my first trip outside, looked exactly as I had imagined from my bed: comfortable red brick, clean white shutters, flowers adorning every window, a well-manicured lawn. It sat on a cul-de-sac with six other homes, also brick, similar in style but not so close as to be copies. Predictable, suburban. The sight had left me longing for Urizon.

  “I knew from the first moment I saw you in the cottage,” Matthew said, “that you were the girl that I’d encountered. I never believed I’d imagined you.”

  “Adults must not think much of children,” I said, “to suppose you could deny such a meeting. To call it a dream.”

  “Adults see a world that suits them. So as long as I didn’t bother them about it, both my mother and my aunt decided the matter was closed.”

  “Well, I will not be denied,” I announced, attempting a smile.

  Matthew remained solemn. “No, you won’t.”

  I waited for him to continue, but instead he stared at the hands he had clasped in his lap. I wondered what other fantastic parts of childhood had been denied him. I wondered how much of the reality of my own upbringing had been denied me. Were there clues I had missed back at Urizon? I’d always assumed Peter to be truthful, that our work together demanded transparency. How could it be otherwise when so much of its outcome was immediately determined, our experiments’ effects established right before my eyes? Peter never coddled me, for as long I remembered had addressed me with the same language he used with his peers. But now he’d disappeared, leaving me no answers to the questions that had crested in his wake.

  When, growing up, I had asked about my mother, Peter told me small things: she drank too much coffee, she loved to garden, she had been an only child. They gave me pieces of a life, but not enough to really know her. He’d never talked about himself, his youth, his tastes. I’d never asked, childishly assuming that his life had only truly begun once I was born.

  “Do you think,” I said slowly, “that perhaps we cannot really know our parents until they have gone?”

  Matthew said nothing.

  “Do you think we will find Peter in the city?”

  “If he’s there, he’s done a very good job hiding it.”

  “Do you think he’s safe?” I bit down on my lip, “Could he be hurt?”

  “I don’t know. I looked for him. I was mad at you when I left the hotel—for pushing me away, for ignoring me. But then it seemed so off. Rafe had seemed off the whole time, and you just wouldn’t see it. I got halfway home before deciding that I couldn’t leave you until I was sure you’d met up with your father, but by then I couldn’t remember what route I had taken. I drove around for almost an hour, but I couldn’t find the building. Couldn’t find any trace of you. I was worried. I asked around the universities for Peter, showed his picture at all the libraries I could think of, even the museums. Right up until you called the other day I was canvassing the places that the two of you might be. No one had any information.”

  “But I would know if he were in danger, wouldn’t I?” I pressed. “I’d sense it somehow . . .” My cheeks reddened as I mumbled, “Just like you knew with me.”

  Matthew shrugged. “I know it’s the last thing you’d want, the last thing either of us do, but still our best bet could be going back for Rafe. He had all of those notes, all Peter’s letters . . .”

  At this mention of Rafe’s name, I froze. There was no way to tell the story of his death without revealing myself as the monster Mrs. Blott had deemed too dangerous to show to her family. Matthew was all I had left; I didn’t know where I would be if he abandoned me, too.

  “No,” I whispered, staring deliberately above Matthew’s head.

  “If we send someone else, my brother, maybe, to go find him . . . It wouldn’t have to be you. I don’t think I could even see him without . . .” His mouth puckered, cruel in a way I’d never known him to be. That cruelty was my fault.

  “No.” The sheer curtains fluttered in the breeze. I heard Matthew take a long, slow breath.

  I opened my mouth to say more, but stopped as Matthew’s hand reached for mine. He let it rest awkwardly against the comforter atop my knee for just a moment before pulling back and lacing it into his other.

  “You don’t have to explain,” he said. “I saw how you were.” He extended his hand again, this time with purpose, squeezing my leg through the bed sheets. I shivered. “We can talk about it later,” he said, “when you’re ready. For now let’s keep our focus on your father.”

  I nodded, locking my memories away, forcing myself back to the matter at hand. I hadn’t thought, in killing Rafe, that I was losing any final trace of Peter. Was Rafe truly our last clue? I thought of the dreams I’d had, Peter as fodder for the forest, his body wrapped in vines, weeds shooting through. I thought of Peter’s refusal to cross the line of trees. Matthew’s mother frightened of our village. The warnings. The stories. All those women, disappearing. Men forever changed by strange encounters in the wood. The map, the spirals, the quests.

  “I think Peter’s at home,” I said aloud, “or somewhere near it.”

  Matthew considered this, leaned back in his armchair, reached up as if to tug a lock of hai
r, clearly forgetting he had cut it. I ached at the emptiness, the awkward dance of his fingers searching for a curl and finding nothing. He scratched at the fuzz above his ear instead.

  “School starts again in three days,” he said slowly. “I could bring you back with me. But I don’t know that our best course of action would be—”

  “Yes,” I said. “Take me with you. Take me home.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to make a full recovery here? My mother is happy to have you as long as you—”

  “I’m ready to go now.” I pushed off my bed sheet to reveal his sister’s nightgown and my own spindly shin. “Please.”

  “We wouldn’t leave immediately. First, I’d want to—”

  “As soon as we can, then. Please.” I had the strong urge to see Marlowe, to fall asleep in my own bed, to give the house a good cleaning. Urizon called to me, needed my care. Now that I realized, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t felt it before. I could see the house when I closed my eyes, the ivy climbing the trellises, the grass overgrown at the edge of the wood. Every joint and sinew in my body pushed me toward the forest, my stomach twirling as if lengthening with tendrils of its own. To stay at the Harevens’ any longer seemed like infidelity, a denial of the Blakely inheritance I’d only just begun to understand. An insult to Peter, who I felt sure was waiting for me at Urizon.

  My insistence was enough to persuade Matthew.

  “If you think that you’re strong enough, we can set out tomorrow morning,” he said. “And you do think that you’re strong enough?”

  I nodded. I wiggled my toes, then slid my legs over the side of the bed, stepping onto soft woven carpet. My head spun a bit when I stood, but cleared quickly. I stretched.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Then it’s settled,” said Matthew. “I trust you. I’ll go tell my mother the news. Just be careful not to touch the . . .” His voice faded as he caught himself. “Never mind. I know that you will.”

  A Flood

  The forest spools and gathers, holds its breath until evening. In the dark it protracts to take a fuller span of William Blakely’s masterpiece, Urizon, Helen’s home. Mary’s home. Emma’s and Lucy’s. The ivy moves quickest, sneaking in through the cracks in the stone, under the doors, forcing them wider. The roots of the yard oaks crack like cramped legs and extend themselves, sighing as they stretch against floorboards, popping them loose. Tree branches tap windows. Wild roses, sharp-edged and hideously sweet, thorn through and scent the parlors. The outside comes in. Centuries of stagnation have exploded into action; eternal life, an eternal inertia, releasing all the force it’s held at bay.