Bats or Swallows

by Teri Vlassopoulos

  I expected Mary to laugh at me, but I could see that she was genuinely considering the question.

  “I can’t explain it,” she said. “You can just do things I can’t do.” She meant it in terms of freedom, permission. For some reason she thought my whiteness was what justified my actions.

  “It’s a free country,” I said to her. “You can do whatever you want.”

  “It’s different,” she said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  But I did understand. Kind of. She didn’t believe she could make the choices I made, I guess, whatever she perceived those choices to be. The only problem was that I didn’t know if I agreed with her. Our mothers came from the same background, were raised the same way and left their families at the same time, and yet had ended up leading completely different lives. I wasn’t sure if it had anything to do with their heritage or race or non-whiteness.

  Lydia called us and we reluctantly went downstairs. Everyone else was already eating. My aunt was convinced she had a fish bone lodged in her throat until my mother got out of her seat and touched her neck and then pretended to throttle it.

  “It’s a miracle!” Lydia exclaimed, swallowing for us vigorously. “I know you have powers. It’s gone!”

  “If only miracles were always that easy,” my father said, scratching his baldhead. Normally Mary and I would join in the teasing, but that night we kept quiet.

  Back at home I couldn’t sleep. I tried writing a letter to Laura and then one to Nick, but I ripped both of them up and wrote one to Mary instead. When I read it over it sounded all wrong, more like my Gatsby essay than something sincere. I threw it out and wondered why it was so hard to say the things that should be said, the things that actually counted for something.

  WHEN I EMERGED FROM THE FOREST I WAS SIX YEARS OLD, all tangled hair and scabby legs. Skinny. Everything had been so blurry, a wash of murky colours and shadowy landscapes that when I saw the sun, my eyes teared up.

  The old woman that found me was small, papery and greying, but she bent down and picked me up and carried me into her house. I looked up at her face and thought she looked like a cartoon. She had deep wrinkles and black eyes and when she opened her mouth a stream of question marks poured out.

  I refused to sit at her kitchen table, so I sat underneath it. It seemed safer. And I didn’t drink the water from the glass she gave me. I turned my head and saw her little grey dog lap at his bowl. When the woman left the room I scooted over to the bowl, held my mouth to it and drank deeply. The woman caught me in this position and in an instant the rumour started that I’d been raised by wolves, that she’d rescued this wild thing that couldn’t speak or hold cutlery or sit upright.

  The story was proven false as soon as she called the police, but the old woman was stubborn and told her version anyway, and too many people listened. I don’t blame them. There are always people clamouring for a good story or for something otherworldly to believe in. I didn’t speak for a week and it was as if I’d never had any human vocabulary. I’ve seen pictures of myself from that time and I have the wild-eyed and frightened look of a captured beast.

  Here’s another story: a mother leaves her two-year-old with a babysitter. Her six-year-old is supposed to stay with the babysitter too, but on the way over she’d started complaining. I miss you, Mommy, I never see you. Let me go with you. Please? The mother faltered. Fine. After the youngest has been dropped off, they stop at a grocery store and buy a bag of food. And then they drive for a long time. We’re going on a hike, the girl is told. Before the two of them go into the forest the mother shows her daughter what’s in the bag: juice boxes, a package of processed cheese slices, apples, animal crackers. The two of them set out into the forest. Sometimes the mother cries and the girl doesn’t know what to do. Finally they stop walking. The mother tells her daughter to go back to the car. Just follow the path, it’s not far away. If you get hungry, eat. She gives her the grocery bag and kisses her on the head. Okay. Bye bye. The little girl starts walking. It’s like they’re playing hide-and-go-seek. Her mother goes in the opposite direction.

  After I was found and before I started talking again, sometimes at night in the hospital I’d whisper to myself or sing. From my room I could see thin lines of light from the hallway seeping under the door. I held my breath and strained to hear the reassuring hum of machines, the faint elevator pings. I would inhale and the antiseptic smell of the hospital burned my nostrils in a way I liked. It was different, sharper than the fetid, earthy smell of the forest. I knew my mother wasn’t coming back.

  The last guy I met at a bar had blue eyes, clear and pale and icy. He asked me to tell him something about myself. I told him that there are people in the world who believe I was raised by wolves.

  “Are you really that wild?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “A little.”

  My sister and I lived with my aunt and uncle. They had wanted to stay in town, but when I started speaking again, when my mother’s body was found, when the stories started spreading in newspapers, at water coolers, across kitchen tables, passing from person to person like a game of broken telephone, they realized there was too much to hide, so we moved to a different city, a different province. In the new city I was aware of how normal we appeared. We looked like a regular family: two lovely girls and a young, married couple. People assumed we belonged to my aunt and uncle and we didn’t correct them. They changed our last names.

  At school my class did a unit on the metric system and we stood in a long chain from shortest to tallest. I was right in the middle and our teacher gave me a red flag to hold up and wave. Since what had happened to me had happened to the most average person in the class, I worried that it could happen again. I would sometimes hear my aunt crying at night and it reminded me of the sounds my mother made when she cried, a soft crescendo of tears and gasps. I remembered my mother’s cries more clearly than anything else about her.

  I learned early on that things don’t come out of nowhere. There is always a buildup. You just have to be attuned to it, like how sailors study the shapes of clouds to determine when they should set out to sea. I knew the significance of those dark circles under my aunt’s eyes and I knew what it meant for her to be sad. So, as I got older I read books on survival. I wanted to be prepared for something bad, something sudden.

  This is what you should keep in a survival kit: two boxes of waterproof matches, a Swiss Army knife, a good length of nylon rope, two garbage bags, a small mirror, some fishing line and hooks, dental floss (handy for repairs or fishing line if you run out), Band-Aids, a few flat packets of anti-bacterial lotion, instant soup, hard candy. And water, of course. All of this, minus the water, can be folded together and stuffed into a small bag or pouch. The average human being can get by without food for up to two weeks, so it’s not a necessity. At age nine I kept my survival kit in my school bag. I didn’t have a Swiss Army knife so I wrapped a small steak knife in a piece of gauze that could also be used in an emergency situation. I gave a kit to my sister and she ran around the house unravelling the dental floss. Our cat ate it and when the threads started hanging from his ass I got in trouble.

  The day my mother brought me with her to the forest, she’d told the babysitter that she was bringing me to the mall for school clothes. When the stores closed and we still hadn’t returned the babysitter got worried. There was no list of emergency contacts, no father mentioned. My mother had found the babysitter through an ad pinned to the corkboard at the grocery store. The babysitter called the police when it got dark.

  I’ve never had a good sense of direction, but I know some tricks, like how to find Polaris using the Big Dipper as a guide or how, if you visualize a straight line grazing each tip of a crescent moon, the imaginary line that extends to the horizon is due south. These rules of thumb are useful, but when I was in the forest, I didn’t know any of this. I was too young and everything seemed too dark. I felt as though I was a foreign object introduced to the land as a science e
xperiment. I bobbed along and ate apples and cheese slices. I walked and then backtracked. Once I thought I saw my mother weaving through the trees, running, so I went in that direction. I sprinted and ended up at the edge of the forest, in a field near a house. I walked towards it, and saw the old woman weeding her garden.

  That night at the bar, the blue-eyed man kept buying me gin and tonics and asking me questions. I told him about the old woman, how she looked for me and took photos and sent them to at tabloid magazine based out of Atlanta, Georgia. There were sensational, nonsense headlines like, WOLF GIRL FOUND IN NORTHERN CANADA or REFORMED SHE-WOLF GOES TO SCHOOL. I wrote a letter to the woman once when I was seventeen. I wish I had never found you. I wish I had torn your fucking head off with my baby teeth. She must have been dead by then because the letter was returned to me, unopened and unread.

  “So what really happened?” the guy asked, “You got lost on a Girl Guide trip?”

  “My mother hung herself from a tree and brought me along.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I was abandoned in the forest.”

  He put down his drink. “Shut up.”

  “It’s true.”

  “So you saw your mother hang herself?”

  “No, she left me before doing it.”

  “Why did she do it?”

  “The usual reasons.”

  “Bullshit.”

  I’ve told this story to a few people, only late at night after they’ve had enough alcohol to numb the shock. Some of them believe me, some of them don’t. I like the ones who don’t believe me best and I always end up going home with them. But I never remember anything important about them, like their names or phone numbers, just some distinguishing features instead. Their eyes, maybe. Or their smell.

  I’ve been reading about babies recently—how they grow, how they latch on to you, how they burst into the world, a squelchy mass of blood and tissue and soft, unfused bones. The bond between a mother and her baby starts so early, the baby growing in rhythm with her heartbeat, the same blood shooting through their shared veins.

  I don’t carry survival kits anymore, but I still firmly believe in Being Prepared, of steeling yourself for what will happen next. These days I find myself removing bags of milk from the fridge and cradling them to my breast. The cold plastic makes my nipples harden, the way I imagine they might when you’re breast-feeding.

  When I was younger I wished I’d been raised by wolves. I would burrow under my sheets and blankets, surround myself in pillows and imagine they were wolf pups, that I was one of them. I imagined being nudged to sleep by a warm, wet snout. I dreamt of animals with sharp teeth circling me and keeping others away.

  Lately it’s been the other way around: I’m the wolf. I see myself walking through city streets holding a naked baby by the scruff of its neck, in my mouth. The baby, a girl, squirms but then goes limp. She has blue eyes, like the guy I met at the bar.

  With my free arms I carry shopping bags, my purse, a bottle. I hail a cab and climb in. I’m not sure where the cab is taking us, but I don’t really care because what matters most is that I have my baby in my mouth, that she’s with me, and I won’t let her go.

  MY FATHER DROWNED IN THE AEGEAN SEA, fifty nautical miles northeast of the port of the Piraeus. When it happened, my mother and I were at home in Toronto. It was early evening in Greece, afternoon for us, and I was at school when my mother found out. She didn’t tell me right away. After class I went to swim practice and then I walked home and made myself a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner. I can hardly believe I didn’t notice anything was wrong. That evening our phone kept ringing and I only saw my mother in passing, but I was always pleasantly weary after swim practice and associated the lingering smell of chlorine and shampoo with a kind of deep, sweet exhaustion, so I ignored the phone calls, didn’t say goodnight and fell asleep early.

  My mother, in those few hours after she found out there’d been an accident, hoped that a sailor in a passing ship would find my father and pull him on-board. At the very least she thought he could’ve been clinging to a piece of driftwood or a mermaid, anything, treading water and waiting to be rescued. Her hope finally waned, and at dawn she woke me up. She didn’t bother getting me out of bed, and I was still lying on my side when she knelt down and rested her head on the mattress close to mine. I sat up, bleary-eyed, and looked around my room. Yellow-grey morning light filtering through the curtains, my mother on her knees at my bed, my bathing suit a damp lump on the floor from where I’d discarded it the night before.

  Sometimes I wonder about those twenty-four hours, how it was possible that I could’ve lived through them without sensing some kind of overarching and fundamental change. Wasn’t there a strong breeze or a sudden, quick rainstorm? Did I bite my tongue or feel my ears ring? I couldn’t remember anything out of the ordinary. I mean I was thirteen when it happened. My father was in Greece taking care of some family business; it didn’t occur to me to pay attention to cosmic signs to make sure he was okay. Afterwards I imagined that on the day he died, his ghost must’ve flown through our hallways, waved his hands in my face and tried to tell me that something was wrong. The electromagnetic forces in our house must have been off the charts, and I didn’t even notice. When I got older I stopped believing in ghosts, but I still stubbornly berated myself for not figuring it out sooner on my own.

  Hugo was the first person I told about this residual guilt, but it wasn’t until years later. He said he’d felt the same way when his sister was killed and I felt a surge of love for him when he told me this, grateful that he understood, that he didn’t tell me that my guilt was misplaced.

  I met Hugo on a melty, early winter afternoon soon after I’d moved to Montreal to attend university. There had been a snowstorm in November, but most of the snow had melted, so I was sitting at a lone picnic table in Parc Lafontaine wearing fingerless gloves, trying to ignore the cold seeping through my jeans and into my bones. I had my journal open, but instead of writing I was doodling a picture of the man-made pond in the middle of the park. It had been drained, but the skating rink wasn’t yet set up for the season, so it was just a big, gravelly basin.

  Hugo looked over my shoulder. “Isn’t it too cold to draw outside?”

  My fingers were bright pink from the wind and my nose was running. “Not really,” I said.

  “Are you an artist or something?”

  I shook my head. “I’m Zoe.”

  He walked away, but returned a few minutes later holding two small stones.

  “You should use these to weigh down the corners of the pages.” He handed them to me and they were round and heavy for their size, like overripe lemons, still warm from his hands.

  On our first date I took the bus to his apartment and instead of going anywhere we sat in his living room and drank a bottle of wine. We got drunk quickly, and he turned sweet and started calling me a rotation of names. Baby, honey, darling, but with the G dropped and a Southern accent. Darlin’. I was Zoe only once and that was when we were in bed, his eyes first closed and later open. He said my name and then he came and we fell asleep tangled up, damp and sticky.

  I woke up in the middle of the night, his lanky body sprawled out beside mine. Hugo was tall and skinny, six foot five, all bowed legs and noodly arms, more than a foot taller than me. His curly hair billowed around his head like a golden halo. He was snoring and I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I went to the bathroom. I opened the medicine cabinet half expecting to find a stockpile of pills, but instead of drugs, I found hair products. Aerosol cans of hairspray. Pump bottles of two different kinds of gel. I opened a jar of moulding mud and smoothed its creamy contents onto my own hair. It smelled like flowers, like a manufactured spring breeze. I looked at myself in the mirror and my cheeks were flushed and my hair looked shiny, not in a greasy way, but in a styled, pretty way.

  Hugo told me about his sister the next morning. Marie had been kicked in the head by a horse at a sugar shack when she was eight
years old. She’d been on a school trip and the kids were fooling around while they waited for their hayride. Marie was tough, a tomboy, and she’d decided she wanted to ride a horse on her own when no one was looking. She approached one from behind, tried to swing herself up, but it got spooked and somehow kicked her in the forehead. She died from the impact.

  Hugo, sixteen at the time, had been at school writing a history test. He hadn’t studied and spent most of the class trying to peek at the answers of the girl beside him, but she noticed and blocked her paper. Instead of muddling through the remaining questions on his own he just sat there and looked out the window. He said it was snowing, so he watched the tumbling flakes and, right before the class ended, he was called to the principal’s office. He thought he was getting in trouble for cheating.

  When Hugo brought up Marie, he had no idea about my father. He told me about her because, he said, he’d gotten a good vibe from me the day he saw me at the park. Hugo was interested in energy and described people according to it the same way someone might point out a hair colour or height. He said my energy was warm and gentle and because of it he could confide in me easily.

  I rarely spoke about my father, and one of the things I liked about leaving home for university was that no one knew anything about my background. My father drowned when a sudden storm blew over the small sailboat he’d only recently learned how to sail. He hadn’t even told us that he was learning to sail while he was on what was supposed to be a month-long trip to Greece. It was the kind of story that was easy to spread, students sitting idly in the cafeteria, eating pizza and talking about the weirdest things closest to their real lives. My story was weird and real, and it was my defining characteristic. For years, people would see my picture in the yearbook and remember me only as that girl: the one with the father, the dead one.

  As much as I hated to admit it, my father’s death had gone on to shape my life in a permanent and irreversible way, altering my personality. It was an important part of me and laying beside Hugo, I was overcome with a desire for him to know my important parts, every single one of them. So I started by telling him about my dad.