Lovely Wild

by Megan Hart

  The inside of the car had been cold enough for her to need a sweatshirt, but out here within seconds her armpits started sweating. The sun was bright enough that she had to put up a hand to shield her eyes—monkeybrat had totally wrecked her favorite sunglasses and she hadn’t gotten to the mall to replace them before Dad packed them up to bring them here. Kendra blinked against tears she blamed on the sun, even though maybe it was really because of something else. Her vision blurred, and she blinked hard to clear it, trying to see what had caught her eye.

  Ethan made a face. “I don’t like it here.”

  “Shut up, monkeybrat.”

  Ethan sighed heavily and kicked at the dirt under the toe of his sneakers. “I don’t have to.”

  Kendra looked over her shoulder. Her mom and dad were still next to the car, their heads bent in conversation. Neither of them looking this way. “I saw something in the woods.”

  “Like what?” Ethan looked up. “Dad said we could get a dog.”

  “You don’t want a dog, not really. You’ll have to clean up its poop and stuff.” Kendra took a few steps away from the car toward the field and the woods beyond it, not really paying attention to her brother.

  “Not out here, I won’t. He can poop in the yard or in the field. I want to call him Zipper.”

  At this, she looked at him. “Zipper? Why would you want to name the dog that?”

  Ethan shrugged. “I just like it. And you’d like a dog, Kiki. I bet you would, anyway.”

  Kendra looked again at the car, where her parents were leaning toward each other, faces serious. Her father’s mouth moved while her mom stayed as silent as she had for the entire trip. Her dad’s hand went out to caress her mom’s hair.

  It felt sort of creepy to watch them like that, like maybe they might start to make out again or something, so Kendra looked once more at the house. It sat at the end of a really long lane, the trees so close on either side that it had been like driving through a tunnel. Only one other house on the lane, and it had been much closer to the main road. To the side of the driveway was a crumbling sort of garage or barn off to the right, and beyond that the field of tall grass and wildflowers. The trees came right up to the edge of the field, and beyond that, a mountainside littered with scrubby pines.

  “I don’t like this place,” Ethan muttered again, scuffing at the driveway and sending up a small cloud of dust.

  “It’s only for the summer. Dad said.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, right. I bet we have to live here forever.”

  A shiver tickled down her spine at that. Being the new girl in a new school was the sort of thing they made movies about, but something about this place told Kendra she wasn’t going to meet some super hot jock who’d totally fall in love with her even though she didn’t fit in with the rest of the cool kids. The problem was, at her own school she already was one of the cool kids. At least cool enough. She really didn’t want to start over. Not out here in the middle of nowhere.

  Nothing moved in the field or in the trees beyond but a couple of birds that took off into the sky. Kendra shaded her eyes again to follow them. Her dad came up behind her to squeeze her shoulders until she pulled away.

  “Isn’t this great?”

  “Mom, are you okay?”

  Her mom was also looking toward the woods, and when Kendra spoke to her, it took her a few seconds to turn. “Fine.”

  She moved closer to Kendra and put an arm around her shoulders. Together they looked across the field, into the trees. Lots of shadows there. Whatever she’d seen moving could still be in there, just hidden.

  Something shivered inside her.

  THIRTEEN

  HERE IS THE house where everything happened.

  This is what Mari thinks as she glides on bare feet over floors that have been covered in unfamiliar carpet, tile, even laminate wood. She seeks out the places she knew best.

  The closet beneath the stairs is painted brightly now and not hung with veils of tattered cobwebs. Inside is a bucket, mop, broom, vacuum cleaner. Cleaning supplies hang neatly on pegs and wire shelving.

  The space beneath the sink is impossibly tiny. She could fit one leg inside it, maybe. Certainly not her whole body the way she used to. She traces the glimmer of curving silver pipes with her fingertip. This, like the gleaming stainless steel sink above, is new. At least to her.

  So much is new. Looking at it is like seeing two photos, one transparent and laid atop the other so that both can be seen but neither clearly. She blinks and blinks again, shaking her head against this feeling. She clutches the sink, her head bent, eyes closed. She listens for the sound of chair legs scraping on worn linoleum and the mutter of voices speaking above and around but never to her. The clatter of the dogs’ nails and their soft woofing, begging for scraps or fighting over what fell from the table.

  She turns to see the table, also new. She can crouch beneath this one, though it’s round with a pedestal center and has no knitted afghan thrown on top of it. It’s not a cave, and the cool tile floors hurt her butt and knees when she crawls beneath. Still, Mari draws her knees to her chest and presses her forehead to the bare flesh. She listens.

  And this, she knows. She remembers. The creak of an old house settling doesn’t change, even if you paint the walls and replace the flooring. Even if you clean it, the memory of all the dirt still remains.

  Under the table, Mari draws in breath after breath. No longer small, she’s been made tiny again by this place. A little wild.

  “Mama?”

  “Yeah, honey.” She looks up to give her boy a smile.

  Ethan crawls under the table with her. “Whatcha doing?”

  “When I was a little girl in this house, I used to hide under the kitchen table. I was just remembering it, that’s all.”

  “Oh.” Ethan is silent for a moment, his pose mimicking hers. Small knees drawn up to small chest, small chin digging into the tops of them. “Why did you hide?”

  Mari opens her mouth to answer, but Kendra has entered the kitchen. She doesn’t see them immediately the way Ethan spotted his mother. Together, Mari and Ethan watch Kendra’s feet turn in a half circle. She’s wearing battered Converse sneakers just like the ones Mari had always wanted but had been denied as a teen, and something tight and tense unwinds a bit in Mari’s chest at the sight.

  “Mom?”

  Ethan clamps a hand over his mouth against a flurry of giggles. Mari knows Kendra will be angry if she looks under the table and sees them. She’ll think they’re hiding from her. But Mari can’t help laughing, either.

  “What—” Kendra bends to look under the table. “Oh, God. What are you guys doing? Weirdos!”

  “Come in, Kiki, there’s room.” Mari holds out a hand.

  And maybe because it’s late and they’re in a new place or because Kendra’s in a good mood or for some reason Mari can’t figure, her daughter takes her hand and crawls beneath the table. There’s not enough room under there for all of them, but they scootch in close enough to make it work. Their knees bump. They grip each other’s hands and make a circle.

  “Mama used to hide under the table when she was a little girl,” Ethan explains.

  Kendra’s eyes are wide and blue. Her father’s eyes, though, not Mari’s. But they look at Mari with an awareness Ryan hasn’t had in a while, if ever. “How come?”

  “Oh...” Mari shrugs. “My grandmother had a long old wooden table. A trestle table, I think they call it. With benches along the sides instead of chairs. Instead of tablecloths, she always had it covered with a few afghans she’d knitted herself. Orange, green, yellow.”

  She can remember the stripes, the zigzag pattern of holes in the yarn that let in the light. If there’s one thing she could’ve taken with her from this house, it might have been one of those blankets.

  “Like a fort,” Ethan offers.

  “Yes. Something like that.”

  Kendra looks upward, then around this table’s center leg at her mother. “But why
did you hide?”

  There is so much to be said, if only Mari could find the words, but they don’t come easily. They never have for her, and here in this house they seem to be slipping from her brain even faster. She doesn’t lie to her kids, but they’ve spent a lifetime not knowing everything there is to know about her. How can that be changed in a few minutes beneath a kitchen table in the house of her childhood, especially when she’s so uncertain of what really happened here, herself?

  “Sometimes, people came,” Mari manages to say without fumbling. She breathes, remembering how Leon taught her to think the sounds of the words before saying them, so they wouldn’t stick in her throat. “My grandmother thought they’d take me away from her if they knew I was there. So, I hid.”

  Kendra’s brow furrows. There are days she looks far older than her age, but now is not one of those times. “Would they have? Taken you from her?”

  “Yes.”

  Before anyone can ask her another question, a heavier tread sounds in the hall outside. They all look and go silent together. Ryan’s feet appear in the kitchen. His are bare, his ankles covered by the hems of his favorite pajama bottoms. His feet move toward the fridge, which opens.

  Nobody laughs.

  They listen as husband and father pulls something from the fridge, a can of cola or maybe a beer by the sound of the crack and hiss. They’d brought only a few supplies with them, but he’d made sure to include a couple six packs of his favorites. Ryan drinks, the sound of his gulping very loud.

  Only when he leaves the kitchen do the children let themselves dissolve into giggles. Mari wishes she could join them, but this act of hiding is no longer a comfort and certainly not funny. It is too uncomfortably close to those old days. There’s a lot that’s gone fuzzy with time, but some memories can never fade. She unfolds herself, legs already stiff and reminding her she is no longer a child.

  “C’mon, guys. It’s late. You should go to bed.” It’s a motherly and normal thing to say, even in the summer when there should be no such thing as bedtime.

  They don’t protest, though. Her darlings. They hug and kiss her good-night and climb the stairs to the rooms they managed to pick out without squabbling earlier.

  After they’ve gone, Mari looks at the kitchen and tries to see it with new eyes. She blinks and blinks, but beneath the clean and shiny cupboards, the new appliances, the new table, she can see the ghosts of what it was before.

  Mari goes upstairs. All of this is new to her. The narrow hall with the bathroom at one end, a doorway with stairs to the attic next to it. Doors line the hall. Three bedrooms and a hall bath with a claw-foot tub and old-fashioned shower. There used to be four bedrooms, but someone, sometime, turned what must’ve been an excruciatingly small bedroom into a master bath she knows she’ll appreciate.

  It’s all strange to her not just because of that change, but because she never came up here as a child. The door at the bottom of the back stairs into the kitchen had always been locked with a simple hook-and-eye fixture set up way too high for little fingers to reach. And as for the front stairs, the ones leading from the living room with its fireplace and heavy wooden mantel, well...she hadn’t been allowed in the living room.

  The kitchen had been her place, and the woods outside. The stream and the mountain beyond. But never the front room. Hell, today was only the second time in her life she’d been through the front door and the first had been when she left this house through it.

  She pauses in Kendra’s doorway. A curved iron bedstead, painted white, has been made up with Kendra’s sheets and comforter from home. The dresser, also painted white, is already laden with combs, jewelry, the miscellaneous detritus of a teenage girl’s life. Kendra’s phone’s plugged in to the charger, and Kendra is curled up on the bed with her iPad on her lap. Under much protest and with the assurance that password-protecting it would keep “her stuff” safe, she’d left her desktop computer at home.

  “Mom, when will we get the internet?” she says without looking up. Her fingers glide across the touch screen faster than Mari can type on a regular keyboard.

  “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask your dad. He was supposed to take care of all that stuff.”

  Kendra groans. “Ugh. That means never.”

  “Kiki.” Mari shakes her head, but she can’t exactly deny that what her daughter says is probably true.

  “And no signal on my phone!”

  Mari can’t help it. She laughs. “You won’t die, Kendra!”

  Kendra scowls and sets the tablet aside. “What am I supposed to do without the internet, without my phone?”

  “We’ll head into town tomorrow, okay? Find the library. Maybe there’s a mall.”

  Kendra gives her a look of such scorn that Mari wishes she’d said nothing.

  “Probably not a mall,” she amends. “But something. And I’ll see if we can’t get your dad to work on the internet. Okay? It’s going to be fine. Really.”

  “You really grew up in this house?” Kendra sits up, crossing her legs and plucking absently at the soft fabric of her summer pajamas. When she was a little girl, it had been almost impossible to keep her in clothes. Much the way it had been for Mari herself.

  Mari stops herself from crossing to her daughter, hugging and kissing her, holding on to her so tight both of them would lose their breath. “Yes.”

  Kendra looks around. “Was this your room?”

  “No.” Mari’s tongue sticks and unhinges on a truth that is a lot like a lie. “My room’s not here. They changed a lot about this house.”

  Kendra accepts this without question and settles back against her pillow. “Why did dad bring us here? It’s going to suck.”

  “It’s going to be all right. Think of it as...” Mari fights to think of the word she means. “What people do when they have something exciting and different, sometimes they go someplace...”

  “An adventure?”

  “An adventure,” she says, relieved, curling her fingers tight against her palms because they’d been trying to speak for her.

  Kendra shakes her head. “Yeah. Right. Here in the middle of nowhere.”

  “You never know,” Mary says and again wants to hold her daughter close.

  She settles for a murmured good-night and pulls Kendra’s door closed, but her daughter stops her.

  “No. Can you...leave it open, just a little?”

  Kendra has never been afraid of the dark, not even as a little girl. Ethan’s the one who insists on the night-light in the hall, his cracked-open closet door. But now Mari nods and leaves the door open just enough for the hall light to peek inside.

  “Thanks, Mom. Love you.”

  “I love you, too, honey.” A small taste of bitterness forces Mari to leave the room without embarrassing her daughter with too much affection.

  Ethan, on the other hand, is ready for snuggles and cuddles. He’s grown again. His ankles stick out a full two inches below the hem of his pajamas, and his bare feet look impossibly huge. Man-sized, almost, though she knows that’s impossible. He’s reading when she comes in, but puts the book aside to give her a solemn look.

  “Daddy says there are chickens.”

  “Are there?” Mari’s surprised. Ryan hadn’t mentioned them, though of course, there were always chickens. A peacock or two. A few goats. A least six dogs and countless mewling, sidling cats.

  “He says the lady from down the road will come to take care of them, but I can help. And we can eat the eggs.”

  Mari doesn’t stop herself from reaching to brush away the hair on Ethan’s forehead. “That’ll be fun. You’ll like it. Chickens are fun.”

  “Did you...” Ethan hesitates. “Did you have chickens when you were a kid?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “Oh...” She tries to think, but the words for numbers escape her, replaced by the vague idea of “many.” More than the fingers on one hand, that was many. “A lot.”

  “Did you eat th
e eggs?”

  “Yes. The chickens, too, sometimes.”

  Ethan’s eyes go wide. “You did?”

  “Sure.” She smiles. “Fried chicken. You love it.”

  “But...your own chickens? How did you do that, Mama?”

  Mari settles onto the bed beside him. This room is painted with dark blue walls and a wallpaper border of “folksy” Americana stars and stripes. More white-painted furniture. It’s not Ethan’s style, but it was the less girly room. She puts her arm around him and he turns toward her to rest his head on her shoulder.

  “They weren’t pets,” Mari says. “And we were hungry.”

  “I don’t want to eat these chickens,” Ethan says firmly.

  “You won’t have to. I promise. Just the eggs, and only if you want to.”

  He yawns. Their legs are stretched out along each other’s, and she notices with another pang that his feet reach to just past her knees. She remembers when his tiny toes barely reached her thighs.

  “It’s going to be okay here. Right, Mama?”

  “Yes, honey.”

  “Daddy’s writing a book, huh?”

  “Yes. That’s what he says.”

  Ethan is silent for the span of one breath in, one breath out. “It’s not a storybook.”

  “No.”

  He looks up at her, that sweet face so much like her own that Mari has to blink and blink again. “But...you’re okay?”

  “Oh, yes. Don’t worry. I’m okay. Your daddy just thought it would be good to get away from the city for a while. Give him some space and quiet to write the book. He thought maybe it would be good for you kids to live in the country for a little while.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Do you think it’ll be good for us to live in the country?”

  She smiles, able to answer honestly. “Sure. Why not? It’ll be different for you, but it should be fun. And it’s not forever, remember. It’s like a vacation, that’s all.”

  This seems to satisfy him. He yawns again. He doesn’t protest when she kisses his forehead or holds him close. His arms go around her, holding her back.