Lovely Wild

by Megan Hart

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s not supposed to mean anything. It’s a fact.” Mom shrugged and got up from the table to put her dishes in the sink.

  Dad stabbed at the eggs and chewed. Swallowed. “You’re full of facts, all of a sudden?”

  Other parents fought. Some more than others, but they all did. Sammy’s parents practically killed each other over who’d forgotten to take out the trash. But Kendra’s parents never fought, not ever.

  “C’mon, Ethan,” she murmured. She yanked him by the wrist when he sat there like an asshat, staring with a wide-open, sausage-stuffed mouth. “Let’s go.”

  “You sit right there and finish your breakfast.” Her dad scowled and dumped eggs on her plate, three times as many as she’d ever eat even if she liked eggs.

  “But I don’t—”

  “Don’t back talk me!” Dad shouted.

  Mom turned from the sink, her hands clenched. “Don’t you yell at her!”

  Shit, shit, shit, Kendra thought, miserable, wishing she could fall through the floor. She scooped up some eggs on her fork, opening her mouth and trying to breathe through her nose so she wouldn’t puke if she ate them.

  Her mom slapped the fork from her hands.

  Eggs splattered onto the tabletop. The fork clattered to the floor and went spinning under the table. Ethan let out a small cry, but all Kendra could do was stare.

  “You don’t have to eat anything you don’t want to.” Mom’s voice shook, but she kept her gaze on Dad’s. “Ever. Do you understand?”

  Sudden silence made Kendra’s stomach hurt. Ethan started to cry, a bubble of snot in one nostril. Under the table, she grabbed his hand and squeezed it.

  “My children,” Mom said in a low, rasping voice nothing like her own, “will never be forced to eat something just because it’s there. Do you understand that, Ryan? Never.”

  Dad nodded slowly. He still had that angry look on his face, but there was something else in his eyes, too. Something that scared Kendra more than his anger.

  Her dad looked scared, too.

  Mom looked at all of them, her expression fierce but fading immediately into the same calm look she almost always had. She cleared her throat and visibly relaxed her posture. Normally she’d have comforted Ethan, but now she only looked at him swipe at his eyes. Then at Kendra.

  “Go outside,” Mom told them both. “Find something to do.”

  Kendra took Ethan by the hand and away from the table. She had no idea what they were going to do outside, just that they had to get out of the kitchen. By the time they got into the front yard, her stomach had stopped cramping, but Ethan was still sniffling.

  “I’ll watch you at the creek, if you want,” she said.

  Since the day there’d been mud all over the house, Ethan had been banned from playing in the water without someone to watch him. In fifteen minutes they were settled by the water, Kendra in a soft patch of grass with her back propped against a rock and far enough from the water that she wasn’t going to get muddy or even wet. Ethan on the other hand, jumped right in, both feet.

  She bent to her book while her brother happily began gathering sticks and small rocks to block off one of the creek’s small side streams. She’d picked something sort of at random from one of the library’s back shelves in the fiction section. Soon she’d lost herself in the story, not paying too much attention to Ethan’s chatter. Every so often he’d say “look, Kiki,” and she’d mumble a response, so it wasn’t until she’d made it through two whole chapters without hearing from him that she looked up.

  “Ethan?” Kendra put the book aside and got to her feet. “Where’d you go?”

  She heard a faint answer from beyond the two biggest rocks, where the creek took a bend. Following it meant splashing through the small pond Ethan’s dam had made. Mud squelched around her flip-flops, but the water felt good. Even here in the trees, the summer heat had started to press down on her.

  “Ethan!”

  “I’m here.” Covered in mud and wearing a huge grin, Ethan turned to show her a double fistful of some kind of water grass.

  “What the...” Kendra sighed. “Why are you doing that?”

  Ethan shrugged and looked surprised that she’d even asked. “Because?”

  “You’re going to get in trouble for being messy. You’d better wash all that off,” she warned, then stretched and looked up at the sky. The trees were thinner here. She could see clouds and sun. “It looks like it’s going to rain.”

  “I don’t want to go home,” Ethan said at once. “Kiki, do you think Mama and Daddy are still fighting?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I hope not,” she added. “But if they are, we’ll just ignore them, okay?”

  Something caught her attention as she pulled him upward from the creek. Indentations in the mud, too big to be from Ethan. Bare footprints.

  From far away, thunder rumbled. Kendra looked to the sky but could see little of it through the trees. What she did see looked dark. She looked again at the ground, but Ethan had stepped all over the place, blurring the lines.

  “I thought I saw something,” she said. “Like footprints.”

  Ethan shrugged, looking down at the mud. “Oh, yeah. I saw those the other day.”

  “And you didn’t tell anyone?”

  He shrugged. Typical. Kendra pushed him to the side to look more closely at the mud, but all she could see were the marks left by Ethan’s feet.

  Something rustled in the trees behind them.

  Kendra turned, but could see nothing beyond the shrubbery. “C’mon. Let’s go home.”

  “I don’t want to,” Ethan protested, but the sudden, closer rumbling of thunder stopped him.

  “C’mon, brat.” With barely a backward glance, Kendra stalked back to the rock where she’d been sitting just as the trees began to rustle with first drops of rain.

  “But, Kiki, I saw—”

  “I don’t care!” she shouted. “It’s starting to rain, let’s go! Or else I’m not playing any games with you, nothing.”

  That at last got him moving. They made it back to the house just as lightning split the now-dark sky. The rain came a few minutes later. The house inside was dark, no lights on except at the back where their Dad had locked himself away inside his office, complete with the door he’d hung back up so nobody would bother him.

  “Where’s Mama?”

  “Upstairs? I don’t know.” Kendra, annoyed and wet, didn’t really care.

  It wasn’t until later that night that she realized she’d forgotten her library book. And shit, it would be ruined out there in the storm still raging. Kendra went to the window to look out at the backyard. Her mom would scold her gently, which was worse than if her dad yelled about having to replace it, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it now.

  The storm lashed the trees, though the lightning and thunder had moved away so there was only an occasional faint flash in the sky. She watched it for a while, wanting to kick herself for forgetting all about the book. But then, she thought, brow furrowed and concentrating, she hadn’t even seen it.

  That was right. Kendra hopped back into bed, and pulled the covers over her bare legs. She’d gone back to the rock where she’d been sitting, but there was no book there. She remembered putting it down in the grass beside her, but when she’d gone back, there was nothing. She hadn’t forgotten the book.

  It had simply disappeared.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE SMALL GIRL with tangled dark hair crouched in a wooden chair sized for her. A woman in a navy blue pantsuit stood behind her, while Leon sat in the in the tiny chair opposite, looking comically oversize.

  “Are you getting this, Lois?” Leon Calder leaned toward the child.

  Little Mari. Seeing his wife as a child had become easier the longer Ryan watched. Maybe it was being able to see his children in her, or maybe it was being able to see the woman she was now that helped to make the scenes of
her in tattered clothes, biting and kicking and fighting to get free, less uncomfortable. It was okay to see her that way, because he knew what she’d been able to become.

  She would always be petite, but not freakishly so. If anything, he knew other women envied her ability to say slim without much effort. Her teeth had required a lot of work over the years, but she’d developed an almost obsessive dental hygiene habit, so though she wore caps to cover the damage of years of neglect, nobody would ever know by looking at her.

  In the video, she gestured, the same patterns over and over. Lois scribbled notes while Leon watched quietly, occasionally attempting to repeat them. Whatever he was doing didn’t resonate with the little girl, who shook her head furiously.

  “Mariposa. Are you hungry?” Leon tapped one hand against his mouth, then looked at Lois. “You see that?”

  “It’s not sign language. Not American Sign Language, anyway.”

  Ryan remembered Lois. She’d smelled of oranges and had had several cats. Her husband had died young. She’d worked with his dad for years.

  “No. Mariposa. Are you hungry?” Leon gestured again.

  Ryan watched his wife as a child make the same gesture, adding a flick of her fingers and a low, chuffing growl that sent shivers through him, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. He swallowed uncomfortably, looking at the notes in the folder in front of him. The same notes Lois had taken, was taking in that video. The time-travel, topsy-turvy aspect of all this kind of twisted his stomach, but so did the anticipation of what he was going to make this into.

  Ryan paused the video to tap a few sentences into his open document. So far he was only fleshing out some notes and putting things in chronological order. He had a vague idea that he was going to tell this story anecdotally. To appeal to the mass audience, not academia. So far, it wasn’t going that well. Writing was a lot harder than he’d expected.

  He played some more of the videotape, watching as his father and Lois worked with Mari, marking down her gestures as they tried to interpret them into something they could translate. The notes in front of him listed seven signs they’d been able to figure out at that point in working with her.

  Hungry, a rub of the stomach and tap to the mouth with two fingers.

  Tired, a rub of the eyes, very subtle.

  Dog, fingers hooked to each side of the head to make ears, and a low bark, eerily accurate.

  Quiet, a finger to the lips in the standard “shh” gesture.

  Run, two fingers “running” against the other palm.

  Hide, palms over the eyes, usually accompanied by her actual attempt to hide.

  Scared, wide eyes and open mouth with fingers made into claws.

  Watching the video tape now, with the bulk of his dad’s notes to work from, Ryan could easily see that there were more than those seven signs showing in Mari’s communication, right from the start. That was all they’d seen, the obvious ones.

  He was jumping ahead, but Ryan plucked out another videotape and slipped it into the creaking VCR just to compare. In this one, Mari’s hair and clothes were tidy, her face clean. She sat straight and spoke in clear tones, her vocabulary limited but precise. Most markedly, she barely used her hands to speak. When she’d learned to talk with her mouth, she’d stopped signing.

  Except...she remembered it, didn’t she? Ryan thought of the flutter of his wife’s fingers when she dreamed. The way she sometimes hesitated before replying to something she wasn’t sure how to say, and how her hands twisted or turned for the barest second before she found the words. He thought of her at the sink the other day, gesturing in the air in front of her. Just as his father and Lois hadn’t noticed Mari’s full repertoire of hand signs in the beginning, so had Ryan not noticed any of them all these years. At least not enough to understand what they were.

  A chill sweat trickled down his spine, despite the rising heat that threatened to turn the porch into a sauna before the end of the day. He swallowed the final sips of his now-warm beer, the taste of it sour. From the kitchen came the clatter of pots and pans, Mari making lunch. Then the soft shuffle of feet and the rap of knuckles.

  He switched off the video and closed the folder, not that she’d ask him any questions or try to see what he was doing. Thank God for the door, he thought, stuttering like a kid caught with his hand in his pants when he told her to come in.

  “Do you want another beer?” she asked as though the fight they’d had this morning had never happened.

  He thought of the way they’d made up while the kids were out. His wife, naked and warm beneath him, her body moving. Her fingers digging into his back. This was the woman he knew. And yet...

  “Sure, babe. Thanks.” And then, before he could stop himself, Ryan tapped his mouth with two fingers of his left hand.

  “Lunch will be ready soon,” Mari replied without missing a beat. “I can bring you a snack if you’re really that hungry.”

  “No. I can wait.”

  She tilted her head. “You sure?”

  “Yeah.” He wasn’t actually very hungry at all. “Come here.”

  She came and let him kiss her. He held her close, stroking her hair while she perched sort of awkwardly on his lap. She didn’t protest or say anything, but when she pulled away, she looked bemused.

  “What?” she said, touching his face for a moment.

  Ryan gathered her close, burying his face against her breasts. Breathing in the scent of her. He’d known who she was when he met her, but he hadn’t known anything about her. Nothing.

  “I love you,” he said helplessly, voice muffled against her.

  Mari cupped the back of his neck for a moment. “I believe you.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “SHAVING CREAM, BE nice and clean!” Ethan sang as he marched. He had a long stick he’d found early in the hike, and he used it to stab at the ground. “Shave every day and you’ll always be clean!”

  “Mom. Make him stop.” Kendra rolled her eyes, though she didn’t really mind. “He keeps singing the same verse over and over.”

  “So make up one of your own,” her mom suggested.

  Her mom had tied her hair back under a flowered bandanna. She also carried a walking stick and a backpack stuffed with food for the picnic. Kendra had the water jug. Ethan, the little monkeybrat, didn’t have to carry anything because Mom and Kendra both knew he’d just drop it, anyway.

  “Oh, right,” Kendra said. “Like I’m gonna do that.”

  They’d started from behind the barn, then crossed the field and into the woods, angling upward on the mountain. There was no path there any more than there’d been one behind the house, but Mom seemed to know where she was going. She said there was something up there in the woods the kids would like.

  “It’ll be fun,” Mom said.

  “You do it, then.”

  Ethan dug his stick into the ground and turned over a rock. Bugs wriggled out, along with a really icky centipede. “Look, Kiki! Look!”

  “Yuck.”

  “When I was out hiking with Kiki,” Mom sang, “she looked for a good place to sit. But instead of a picnic blanket, she sat in a big pile of sh—”

  “Shaving cream!” Ethan hollered.

  Kendra had to laugh at that. “Gross, Mom! Gross!”

  Her mom laughed. “I told you, you should’ve made one.”

  “Which way, Mama? Which way?” Ethan pointed with his walking stick and ran ahead of them.

  “Go to this side...that way.” Mom gestured to the left and tilted her head back, shading her eyes to look up at the sun. “We’re almost there.”

  It wasn’t like the mountain was huge or anything. The path Kendra had taken by herself the other day had actually been steeper, more overgrown and harder to climb. Still, she was glad she’d worn sneakers this time. She wished for a bandanna like her mom had.

  “I can give you one of mine,” her mom said when Kendra told her that. “I didn’t think you’d like it.”

  “I do. I mean,
it’s okay. It’s good, I guess. For out here.”

  “In the middle of nowhere, you mean?”

  Ahead of them, Ethan was yelping and turning over rocks, so it was almost like she and her mom were alone. Kendra nodded. “Yeah. Out here in B.F.E.”

  Her mom’s brows rose. “Do I want to ask what that means?”

  “No. I guess not.” Kendra shrugged and also wished she’d grabbed a long stick like her mom and Ethan had. She might not need it for hiking, but at least it would’ve given her something to do while they walked. She could’ve swatted at the underbrush or something.

  They walked mostly in silence for a few more minutes with Ethan making boy noises up ahead. Her mom asked for the water jug and drank, then handed it back to Kendra. She drank, too.

  “Do you know where we’re going, Mom?”

  “Hmm? Well...” Her mom looked thoughtful. “Not really. Just ahead, up here. There’s something you’ll like. I think.”

  It was totally weird to think about how her mom had lived here as a kid. That this place might’ve once been as familiar to her as Kendra’s neighborhood was to her, except instead of the Wawa and the park, the playground, the swimming pool, her mom had grown up with chickens and forests and mountains and hillbillies. Kendra shot her mom a sideways glance. Maybe she’d been a hillbilly!

  “What was it like here when you were a kid?”

  Her mom stopped, breathing just a little hard, leaning a bit on her walking staff. She looked at Kendra, then up to where the monkeybrat was pretending to fight something off with his stick. “Oh, Kiki.”

  Her mom never talked much about her childhood. Bits and pieces had snuck out over the years, of course. Like the fact she’d been raised by her grandmother. That she’d been adopted by Grandpa Calder and had then married his son, Kendra’s dad. That had made Grandma Calder really mad. They never talked about that part of it, but Kendra had figured it out on her own. It hadn’t seemed too weird when Kendra was younger, though now that she was older and if she thought about it too hard, it did. It wasn’t like Mom had been raised with Daddy as her brother or anything. That would’ve been like Kendra marrying Ethan.