On Sundays, Mary was usually gone all day. I didn’t used to worry about how long she was gone because she usually had a lot of deliveries to make, but not lately. Not since W. had been buying up my stock. She made her 5:00 A.M. delivery to him; then I didn’t see her until nine or ten at night. I asked her what she did all day, and she said she and her friends rode bikes together. I tried to imagine her with other girls her age riding around town with a meat cooler hitched to the back of her bike. She was probably lying, but she would come home smiling carelessly like kids are supposed to, the way she had before MaryAnn died, so I didn’t ask questions. I did silently count any bruises she had, just in case they multiplied.
Mary didn’t really need me to protect her. She’s way smarter than me. Once, when she was eight, I took her on a bike ride in the woods, and we got lost. After I led us in circles for an hour, she noticed a crow she had seen feeding its young on our way in. We followed it to its nest, and she led us the rest of the way. That girl has great instincts.
It was almost midnight, and she still wasn’t home. I tried reading a book, a forgettable mystery novel that my wife must have bought. Every time I picked it up, I had to reread the previous three pages just to remember who died last. I sat in my chair in the front room so I would hear Mary when she came in.
I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew, it was three in the morning. Mary wasn’t in her room, and her bike wasn’t in the garage, so I did something she would probably hate me for: I called the police. I waited on the front steps, gulping fresh air and trying not to throw up. I pictured Mary following that crow and sang “Bye Bye Blackbird” to myself until the cops showed up.
5
MARY PENLORE
I ran away from home.
It’s hard to say exactly why. I was a kid, and kids do stupid things sometimes. What I do know is that Weylyn made me feel good in a way that I hadn’t felt since my mom died. He talked to me. He made me laugh. I had never kissed a boy before, but I imagined what it might be like to kiss him. I pictured us sitting in the boughs of an oak tree, barefoot, watching a light summer rain stir the leaves.
He’d kiss me gently, just once; then I’d close my eyes and imagine when our next kiss might be. I suppose if I’m being honest, I ran away because I liked a boy.
So I packed a few things I might need: a change of clothes, a few of my dad’s knives, some books, and a magazine cutout of Scott Baio—I was eleven, after all—and I met Weylyn at the Howling Cave.
“If you’re gonna be part of the pack, there are a few things you’re gonna have to learn,” Weylyn said as we started our journey north.
“That’s okay. I’m a fast learner.” In school, I was a year ahead in math and English, but somehow, I didn’t think he was going to ask me to solve any equations or write a poem.
“Mostly, you just gotta know when you’re in danger and the best way to get out of it.”
“What kind of danger?”
“Wolves aren’t the only things in the forest that bite, Mary Jane.”
Jane wasn’t my middle name. I think he was thinking of the kind of shoe.
Suddenly, he stopped me with his arm. A fierce-looking snake slithered past a foot ahead of us.
“Copperhead. They don’t like it when you step on them.”
Snakes. I hadn’t thought about snakes. Why hadn’t I thought about snakes? Or bears? Or mountain lions? I imagined myself being mauled to death by a lion and decided that it wasn’t my imagination but the first premonition in my short-lived career as a psychic.
Weylyn must have seen the fear in my face, because he said, “Don’t worry. Most of the time they won’t bother you.” I think he thought the word most would offer me more comfort than it did.
For the rest of the morning, I kept my eyes on my feet.
We went searching for rabbit holes, which turned out to be easier than I thought it would be. I used to think that rabbits burrow in fields, but Weylyn explained that they make their dens by trees where the earth is soft enough to dig and elevated enough not to flood. They also live under thorny blackberry bushes, which are harder for predators to maneuver through, and they provide a delicious snack.
None of the dens we found had any rabbits in them. Either they were abandoned, or the rabbits were all out to lunch. I hate to say it, but I was kind of relieved. I had helped my dad butcher hundreds of rabbits and had no desire to do it again, but I knew that was something I was going to have to get used to if I was going to be part of the pack.
I had a pet rabbit when I was five. Lucky, I called him. He had escaped a crate of rabbits that had been delivered to my dad from Dietrich’s Meat Supplier. There was some mix-up, because the rabbits were supposed to already be dead, and while my dad had no issue with hacking off their limbs, he wasn’t in the business of breaking their necks. So he sent them back, except for Lucky, who hid in a box of saltines until I found him later that day.
My mom got a crate for him that she lined with newspaper, and although it was thoughtful of her to give him reading material, I thought he’d appreciate the fresh air more. When my mom and dad were at work, I tethered him to the leg of a chair and let him hop around the vegetable garden. I’m sure my mom noticed the bite marks in her lettuce leaves, but she never said anything. It was a rabbit’s paradise, so what prompted Lucky’s escape attempt, I don’t know. All I know is that I should have measured the rope before I tied him to it, because when he jumped the fence, it was neither short enough to stop him nor long enough for him to stick the landing on the other side. Needless to say, I found him too late and never asked for another pet.
* * *
Arrow eventually caught a wild turkey, and I lent Weylyn my knives in place of the sharpened piece of stone he usually used to skin the meat. We built a fire and threw the drumsticks on a spit for Weylyn and me while the wolves fought over the rest.
“So, how does it feel?” Weylyn said with a mouthful of turkey.
“How does what feel?”
“This.” He waved his turkey leg, but I knew he meant more than just what I thought about lunch.
“I feel like … before, I had one way of looking at things, and now, I have a million possibilities, and I get to choose.”
Weylyn cocked his head slightly to the side. “You talk like a book.”
I couldn’t tell whether he was making fun of me or not—the turkey in his mouth took all the subtleties out of his intonation—but I took it as a compliment. I had brought one book with me, my favorite. “It’s called To Kill a Mockingbird,” I told Weylyn as I pulled it out of my backpack to show him.
“Why would you want to kill a mockingbird?” he said, confused. “There’s barely any meat on them.”
“It’s not about killing birds. It’s a metaphor.” Weylyn didn’t know what a metaphor was. He barely knew how to read. He remembered learning a little in kindergarten but had forgotten most of it. That’s why he signed his orders with W, because he was only 60 percent certain that his name had a Y in it, and he didn’t want to go through the humiliation of spelling his own name wrong.
“You spelled just fine on that order you sent my dad,” I said.
“I had help with that one. A jogger. He mailed it for me, too.”
“That was nice of him.”
“Yeah. I wish I could have done it myself, though. I have this dream sometimes that I’m in school and the teacher asks me to read out of a book and I’m really bad at it and everyone is laughing,” he said as he traced the letters of my book with his fingers. For someone who had only spent four months in kindergarten, he had painted a pretty accurate picture of public school.
“I’ll teach you,” I said.
“How?”
“With this.” I pointed to the book.
Weylyn looked skeptical. “I don’t know…”
“Just think about it.”
He nodded and threw his bone to Moon for her to gnaw on.
* * *
North. That’
s the direction we were traveling, and when I asked, “Why not south? Or east? The settlers seemed to think west was a pretty good idea,” Weylyn shrugged.
“We had to pick one,” was his answer.
“So, we’re not following tracks or a scent or anything? We just head north and see what happens?”
“If there was a scent, we missed our chance. The deer disappeared almost three months ago, and we waited too long. It’s my fault. I didn’t wanna leave.”
I could tell Weylyn was homesick. Twelve Pines had been his home for five years, and his parents’ house lay just on the edge of the wood. To me, one tree was just as good as any other, but I didn’t tell him that. At that moment, I wished I had my mom’s sense of smell, so I could at least get us going in a deliberate direction.
Some of the wolves had lost a lot of weight. Arrow’s shoulder blades looked like they could cut glass. Weylyn sometimes gave up his portion for them. “It’s okay. I’m still stuffed from breakfast.” He had only a handful of berries that morning. “I wish we still had some of that cake left.”
I wished the same thing. I had only been living in the woods for two weeks, and I had never wanted something so badly in my life as I wanted cake. I had a dream where I licked the batter from a wooden spoon the size of a Cadillac while Weylyn bounced on top of the finished sponge cake like it was a trampoline.
Cake wasn’t the only thing I missed. I missed showers—senselessly long with water so hot it was almost uncomfortable. And soap! Dense, bubbly, wonderful soap. I made do with a paste of crushed alyssum flowers and sunflower seeds that I rubbed under my arms and feet. Mom once used it as a deodorant when we went camping together and had forgotten hers at home.
I bathed in rivers, but the water was cold, and I had no way of drying myself. Weylyn dried himself the old-fashioned way. He would strut around, naked and unashamed, until the last drop of water had evaporated from his skin. I, on the other hand, would hide behind a bush and clumsily pull my clothes over my wet body like ground sausage trying to squeeze back into its skin, then walk five miles in squishy shoes. “You’re gonna give yourself blisters,” Weylyn said as he walked beside me, naked as a newborn.
“No, I’m not.” I already had two on my heels and one on my big toe.
“Why are you so scared to take your clothes off?”
“Because I’m a girl!”
“So?”
“So … it’s embarrassing.”
“Why is it embarrassing?”
“Because you’re not supposed to see a girl naked until you’re married.”
Weylyn considered this. “That’s stupid.”
“You’re stupid.” My shy rash spread like wildfire. I was glad I wasn’t naked because I was pretty sure it was on my butt, like a baby with diaper rash.
“That was mean.” Weylyn’s big smile made for an even bigger frown. “Is it because I’m a bad reader?”
“No!”
“Just because I’m not any good yet doesn’t mean I can’t learn.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
Weylyn stopped and started putting his clothes back on. I turned away while he changed, a completely unnecessary courtesy, seeing as I’d just seen him naked. When he had finished, he said, “I want to learn how to kill a mockingbird.”
* * *
I was one of those freakishly smart babies, the kind that spoke in full sentences at the age of two and was able to craft convincing lies as to why I was going through Mommy’s kitchen cabinets. My mother compared it to talking to a tiny alien whose ship had crashed on Earth, and who was now trying to reconstruct it with her pots and pans.
Some of my mother’s friends found it unnerving. I wasn’t even three yet and my mom’s friend Cynthia was babysitting me when, in her most patronizing voice, she asked me if I’d like Tater Tots for lunch. I said, “I’d like to hear the specials first.” Of course, I had no idea what that even meant. I’d obviously heard my mom say it at restaurants and was just mimicking her, but it scared poor Cynthia so much that she never babysat me again.
Needless to say, I was a natural when it came to learning to read. My kindergarten teacher even sometimes let me lead story time while the other kids gawked at me and picked their noses. I thought I was the queen of the English language until my first lesson with Weylyn.
After one day, Weylyn was able to read the first chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird aloud. I told myself most of that was just memorization, but I knew it wasn’t. “Is that good?” he asked. “For a beginner?”
I swallowed my pride along with a dandelion I had been reluctantly munching on. “It’s really good. For anyone.”
He closed the book and held it out to me.
“No.” I pushed it back toward him. “You keep it.”
“Thank you,” he said, holding the book against his heart, his face beaming with gratitude. “I need to give you something in return.”
“You don’t have to get me anything,” I insisted, but Weylyn didn’t listen.
His gaze darted around the forest floor. Eventually, he spotted a barely bloomed daffodil peeking out from behind a mossy rock. He plucked the flower from the wet earth and handed it to me. Then he leaned his back against a tree, opened his book, and read out loud, “Chuh-ap-ter … two.”
I carried that flower around with me for days. It didn’t wilt or turn brown. A week later, it still looked as fresh as the moment it was picked. Tiny roots began to sprout from the bottom of its stem, so I replanted it in a grove of maple trees. As I packed dirt around it, I remembered the day Weylyn and I watched the sun set on the hill. I remembered how the tree line had seemed to rise like dough under the hot sun, and I could swear that from the time I placed that daffodil in the soil to the time I walked away, it was taller by at least two inches.
* * *
Reading lessons helped distract us from the hunger. Even I was aware of the hollowness of my belly. The acoustics were great. Every growl sounded like it was echoing off the walls of Carnegie Hall. Between Weylyn and me, we had a crude symphony.
We hadn’t seen one deer since we left Twelve Pines, and it was seeming less and less likely that we ever would. If only we had gone west, I thought, where the buffalo supposedly roam. I remember the first time I asked my dad where babies came from. He dodged my question and instead sang that song, “Home on the Range.” Between the ages of four and seven, I thought cowboys delivered babies to their parents on the backs of their horses.
“I can read!” Weylyn announced as he finished the last chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird. The dance that followed was free of influence from any sort of cultural context, which made it strange but extremely genuine. Ma grunted, unimpressed, and relieved herself on the alphabet I’d written in the dirt. I guess she didn’t have the same appreciation for education as we did.
I couldn’t blame her. The hungrier I got, the less I cared about the outcome of Tom’s trial and the more I thought of home. I wondered if my dad had noticed I was gone or whether he had been mistaking the coat rack for his daughter for the last few weeks. I pictured him going to hang his coat up and muttering, “Sorry, Mary. Didn’t see you there,” and throwing it on the back of the armchair instead.
The silence in that house was painful, but I had begun to realize that half of it belonged to me. Maybe my dad would have liked nothing better than for his daughter to bake him a birthday cake, but I never had. I didn’t even know what day his birthday was. I suddenly felt hot with shame.
Weylyn started singing a song that didn’t exist and probably shouldn’t have existed. I lay down in the sun with the rest of the pack and hoped the warmth would soothe the aches out of my belly.
6
NELSON PENLORE
“So. Let me make sure I have this correct. You sent your daughter to deliver large quantities of meat to a man with no official address and only one initial?” the officer said, deadpan.
“Well, when you put it that way…”
“Sir, I�
�m not putting it one way or another. I’m just reading your own answers back to you.”
I gritted my teeth.
“How did this Mr. W. place orders? By phone?”
“No. He sent a postcard.”
“A postcard?” Sometimes it takes hearing your own words from another person’s mouth to realize how strange they sound.
“Yeah. I thought it was from one of my relatives on vacation. Then I flipped it over and saw the order.”
“Do you still have it?”
“I think so.”
I went inside and came out with the postcard. “That’s his address on the back.”
The officer plucked it from my hands with tweezers and dropped it into a plastic bag. “Evidence,” he mumbled. I could tell he hated his job, probably because he was always helping idiots like me solve entirely preventable crimes. “Are there any more?”
“No. All other orders went through Mary.”
He nodded and scribbled something in his notebook—probably a doodle of me getting hit by a car.
“What’s next?” I babbled. “Are you gonna go talk to W.?”
“We’ll take it from here.” He flipped his notebook shut. “We’ll call you once we’ve found something.”
“I can’t just sit here. I have to do something.”
“Wait for her here. Half the time they just show back up on their own.”
“And the other half?”
“We’ll call you with any news.”
As soon as his cruiser was out of sight, I jumped in my truck and headed to Twelve Pines Forest to find my daughter.
* * *
I had only been walking for five minutes and I was already lost. I tried to “follow my nose,” per the instructions on the postcard, and had wandered off the path because I smelled what turned out to be bear scat, which was fine until I smelled what turned out to be a bear. Before it could see me, I ran as fast as I could without thought to the direction I was going and ended up losing my bearings completely.
Follow your nose? I wanted to grab W. by the collar and punch him in his nose so hard that he never smelled again. If MaryAnn were here, she’d be darting around like a dog, smelling every tree, bush, and rock until one of them smelled like Mary. If there is a God, it would have made more sense for him to take me instead of MaryAnn; then both of them would have been safe, and I could finally retire.
Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance Page 3