Lovely Wild

by Megan Hart

  Yuck.

  Watching her mom’s face now, Kendra wondered if the reason she never talked about her childhood was because Kendra had never asked—or if it had been bad. Really bad.

  “Mom?” She reached for her mom’s hand, something she hadn’t done in a long, long time. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  “No. It’s okay. I just haven’t thought about it for a while.” She paused and scanned the woods ahead for Ethan. He was still there. Her mom looked down at their hands, fingers linked. “No. That’s not true. I think about it all the time.”

  “So...?” Kendra hadn’t walked this way with her mom in forever. She flashed back to a memory of her little self, running after a balloon the wind had taken. She’d almost darted into traffic, but her mom had grabbed her hand. Held her tight. Kept her from getting squished by an oncoming car. “What about it?”

  “It’s not...easy to talk about.”

  Kendra had always known her mom wasn’t like the other moms. All at once, though, she wished for her mom to be the sort to wear khaki shorts and polo shirts, with a blunt bobbed haircut and matching jewelry. A mom like everyone else’s, and not because it would’ve made it easier for Kendra to fit in, but because it would’ve been easier for her mom.

  “Sammy’s granddad is a drunk,” Kendra blurted.

  Ahead of them, Ethan was swatting at something in the grass. Probably a skunk, it would be just their luck. He was doing karate chops, too. Little moron, she thought, but not in a mean way.

  “Is he?”

  Kendra nodded. “Yeah. She says it’s why her mom never talks about him, but sometimes he calls the house and Sammy talks to him. He sends her cards with lots of money in them. Never on her birthday, though. Just random times. Her mom knows about it, but they don’t talk about it.”

  “It must’ve been hard for Sammy’s mother to have a drunk for a father.”

  Another sort of mother would’ve said “an alcoholic” or maybe even “a dad with problems.” But Kendra’s mom never shaded things over.

  “I guess so. Was your mom...a drunk?”

  “I don’t know, Kiki. She could’ve been anything. I didn’t know her.” Her mom looked up ahead, gaze far away. “My grandmother never talked about her, that I can remember, and she’s the one who raised me. If you could call it that. Oh, look. Here we are.”

  The trees had thinned out directly in front of them, like a giant fist had come down from the sky and punched a hole in the forest. One second they were thick in the woods, the next they stood in a field of boulders. Smooth and gray, tumbled together like in the bottom of a dry riverbed. Ahead of them, the trees closed inward again, and behind that, the mountain rose sharply. It was a space maybe as big as their backyard at home, but totally out of place here in the trees.

  Her mom turned to look at her with a broad grin. “This is it.”

  “What is it? A pile of rocks?”

  “Woo!” Ethan hollered, running and jumping on the rocks.

  “C’mon.” Grinning, Kendra’s mom hopped onto the first rock. “Let’s go into the middle.”

  It was hot in the middle of the field, the sun beating down. The rocks were hot, too, and slippery. Kendra’s sneakers didn’t have deep treads, and she almost wiped out a couple times before she caught up to her mom and Ethan. Her mom shrugged off the backpack and fussed with the zippers.

  “Are we eating here? Can’t we find a place in the shade, with some grass or something?”

  “We’re not eating here.” Her mom pulled out two hammers Kendra hadn’t even known she’d packed. “Here. One for you, one for Ethan. Ethan! Come get this.”

  Ethan turned, whacking his stick on the rocks as he leaped them like a goat instead of a monkeybrat. “What’s this?”

  “Hit the rocks.”

  Kendra and Ethan looked at each other. Their mom had them do some weird things sometimes, no doubt, but this...She laughed and waved her hands at them. Ethan did, tentatively. The rock thumped under his hammer, nothing special.

  “You go, Kiki. Hit that one.”

  Kendra did. The rock...rang. A hollow, metallic sound totally unlike the one Ethan’s had just made. A delighted laugh burst from her, and she gave her mom an incredulous look.

  “They’re special,” Mom said. “Go ahead. See which ones you can make sing.”

  They spent a few minutes pounding away at all the rocks. Most of them made dull thumps when hit with the hammer, but enough of them made that metallic sound to become a challenge. And some of them were higher, some lower, so she and Ethan could almost play a tune.

  “Want to try, Mama?” Ethan held out his hammer.

  “No, baby, you go ahead.”

  “Did you use to do this when you were a kid?” Kendra tapped a rock near her mom’s foot.

  “I did. Sometimes. I came here with...” Her mom trailed off with that faraway look in her eyes again. She shook her head like she could shake out a memory. “Someone. My grandma, I guess. Before she got sick.”

  “What happened to her?” Ethan balanced on a rock, one arm and one leg out.

  “Oh...I believe she had a series of strokes,” Mom said. “Eventually, she died.”

  Ethan jumped across the rocks to hug her, and Kendra wished it were still that easy and casual for her. She envied her brother a lot because he seemed to take up most of her mom’s attention, but she had to admit the kid did earn it sometimes.

  “I’m sorry, Mama.”

  Their mom hugged him, patting his back. “It’s okay, honey. It was a long time ago.”

  “Are you still sad about it?” Kendra asked.

  Mom looked at her with a small frown and the crease between her eyes that meant she was thinking hard. “I don’t think so, honey. I don’t think I was ever...sad.”

  Her mom looked at Kendra, mouth open to say more, but then Ethan screamed. Not the way he’d been hollering before, this was a scream of pain.

  “What’s wrong? Ethan!”

  He pulled his hand away from his face. Blood. Oh, God. There was blood. The world wavered and Kendra’s sneakers slipped on the rocks. Her stomach lurched.

  “What happened?”

  “Something hit me,” Ethan said. He wasn’t crying, but his lower lip trembled and he wiped the blood onto his shirt.

  “Hush,” Mom said. “Let me see. Kiki, bring the water.”

  Kendra had dropped the water jug, but it hadn’t spilled. She brought it, head turned so she didn’t need to look at the blood. “Here. Is he okay?”

  Her mom dug in the backpack for a roll of paper towels she wet from the jug, then pressed against Ethan’s head. “Oh, that’s not bad.”

  “What was it?” He sounded like he still might cry.

  Kendra couldn’t blame him.

  “Were you hitting the rocks too hard? Maybe a piece broke off and shot up,” Mom said.

  But in the next minute, a rock flew from the mountain side of the clearing and spanged the boulder they were sitting on. It left a white mark and made a dull thump. Ethan cried out and Kendra jerked away, searching the edges of the clearing and seeing nothing. No...seeing something, but so far away and so much in shadow she couldn’t make it out.

  Mom stood.

  Another rock, this one smaller but sharper, flew from a slightly different place in the woods. It hit Kendra in the leg. It didn’t break the skin, but the pain was instant and terrifying. She clutched at her leg and let out a wail, scooting backward on the boulder and slipping down the opposite side to get wedged between it and the one beside it.

  “Kiki, don’t move! Ethan, get behind me. Who’s there?” Mom’s voice carried across the field of rocks, but didn’t move the trees.

  Nothing moved, not even a breeze. The heat pounded down on them. Kendra’s leg hurt, and so did her back from where it pressed the rocks. It was burning from the heat of the sun. Something hissed, sliding in between the spaces in the rocks two feet from her head, and she screamed at the top of her lungs
.

  “Snaaaake!”

  “Get up,” Mom said, not yelling, voice firm and calm.

  Kendra wasn’t calm. She launched to her feet, one sneaker catching in the space she’d been lying in. Stuck. She screamed again, panicked. Snake, snake, oh, shit, where had it gone?

  Another rock flew from the trees. Then again. One hit Mom in the stomach, then her side. A third hit Ethan again, this time in the arm.

  Kendra screamed, cowering. A rock hit her in the back of the head hard enough to send stars shooting through her vision. She put her hand there, knowing, oh God, oh shit, there would be blood. Blood!

  “Stop it!” Mom screamed out into the woods. It was the first time Kendra had ever heard her mother’s voice that loud. “What are you doing? Stop!”

  The flurry of rocks ceased. The snake had disappeared. Mom put her arm around Kendra, the other around Ethan, holding them close to her. Protecting them as best she could.

  “I think,” Mom said in a low voice, “we’d better get out of here.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  THIS MAN KNOWS NOTHING.

  The police officer, Barrett is his name, has come in his white SUV and his blue uniform to take their statements, but though he’s written everything down in his neat little pad with his cheap little pen, this man cannot or will not help them. Mari sees it in his eyes. He doesn’t care.

  “Probably was kids,” Barrett says and closes the pad to slide it into his front shirt pocket.

  “Kids?” Ryan is angry and pacing. He’s run his hand through his hair so much it’s standing on end. “What sort of asshole kids throw rocks?”

  Their own children are sitting, quiet and white-faced except for the bruises, on the couch. Uncharacteristically, Kendra’s arm is around Ethan’s shoulders, and though Mari hates the reason for it, she’s touched to see the sibling love. She has bruises herself, and a wound on her temple that Ryan declared could have used a stitch but instead patched up with a butterfly bandage at her insistence.

  “Hillbilly kids,” Kendra says.

  Mari has raised her kids to be respectful to adults, but she’s proud of the look her daughter gives the cop. She knows what kind of kids he means, she thinks. “He means local kids who don’t like outsiders.”

  “The hell is this, Deliverance?” Ryan, raised in suburbia his whole life, already has a prejudiced view of rural life, and this isn’t helping. “We’re in Pennsylvania, for god’s sake. We’re two hours from a major U.S. city.”

  The cop stands. “I can file a report, but the best advice I can give you is stay off other people’s property.”

  “Kids don’t defend their property with rocks.” Ryan sneers. “And even if they did, or hell, even if it’s some crazy mountain man up there with a boner about people gettin’ on his land—”

  Something in the cop’s eyes shifts. Ryan sees it. He stops. Studies the guy.

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “I’ll file a report. Are you sure none of you needs medical attention?”

  “I’m a goddamned doctor,” Ryan says. “And just hold on a minute. Are you really saying there’s some...mountain man...out there throwing rocks at people?”

  “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to watch your language.”

  “Ryan,” Mari says in a low voice. Her husband tosses up his hands and stalks away into the kitchen, where she hears him rattling the glasses in the cupboard and cursing. “Officer Barrett, thanks for coming out. I didn’t know the clearing was private property.”

  Now the man hesitates, gaze going shielded. His mouth works. “Technically, it’s state game lands. This whole area back here backs up to state game lands.”

  “We could have been seriously hurt. My kids,” Mari says carefully, making sure he’s looking her in the face, “could’ve been very badly hurt. Killed, even. Rocks can kill people, you know.”

  “This is the Pfautz place. It’s been a rental for years and years. Anybody who stays here...” Again, he trails off, looking almost embarrassed. “Well, nobody stays long.”

  “Is that because someone throws rocks at them?”

  The officer squares his shoulders. “I’ll file the report. That’s really all I can do. And maybe...just stay out of the woods.”

  He’s already heading out the front door before Mari can say anything, but there’s no way she’s going to let him leave like that. Not without a better explanation. She catches up to him as he’s sliding into the driver’s seat of his patrol car.

  “Officer Barrett.”

  “Look, Mrs. Calder, I understand your concern. I have kids, too.”

  “What would you do if someone threw rocks at your children?” She touches her temple, the sore spot beneath. “Would you just tell them to stay out of the woods?”

  His mouth narrows and thins. “Yes. I would. And I’m telling you the same thing. Just stay out of the woods up there, and you’ll be fine.”

  “If you know someone is out there,” Mari says, “isn’t it your job to tell me so I can protect my family? Or better yet, how about you arrest the person?”

  “I can’t arrest anyone without a reason. If you didn’t see someone, there’s nobody to arrest, now, is there?” Officer Barrett looks personally affronted, like she accused him of letting a pedophile babysit his kids.

  He’s not going to tell her anything else. She can see that in the way his face has shut down. His shoulders hunch. He won’t look at her. She can read him the way she’s been able to read so many people over the years. A gift, some have called it, that perception, making her empathetic when really she’s not. She’s just able to use what she sees in people’s faces and the way they stand to make them think she understands them when she hardly ever does.

  “Who lives in those woods, Officer Barrett?”

  “Good night, Mrs. Calder. I’m sorry about your kids. And you.”

  She surprises them both by putting her hand on the door so he can’t shut it.

  “Look, ma’am...” The officer sighs and rubs at his eyes. “I know you’re not from around here—”

  She laughs at that, ruefully and with little humor. “I am not from around here. I am from here.”

  He blinks at her, slowly. “I thought you were just renting.”

  “No. This is my house. The others were tenants. The ones you say never stayed long. Tell me why.”

  Now he’s looking at her with something like respect but it could be fear. Something like revulsion and fascination. “Your house? You’re not—”

  Her chin goes up, her eyes narrow. He doesn’t quite cower from her, and why should he? He’s got a gun, after all, and outweighs her by a hundred pounds if not more. What could she possibly do to him?

  “I haven’t been here in a long, long time. Things change,” Mari says. “People change, Officer Barrett.”

  “I see that.”

  He’s no older than she is. He didn’t know her then. Whatever he’s heard of her has been passed along like the stories he refuses to tell her. So she’s become a legend? Or is it more like the sort of story you tell around a campfire to scare yourselves while you eat s’mores?

  “My family and I have every right to be in that house. We have every right to be in those woods. Without being attacked,” she adds. “If I find out who did it—”

  “Like I said,” the cop says, and jerks the door from her hand. He speaks to her through the open window of his car. “They’re just stories.”

  She watches him drive away until the red taillights blink like eyes at the end of the lane, and he’s gone. Mari turns and stares into the dark, toward the trees and the mountains beyond. At the front porch, she stops to see something tacked into the pillar there. It might’ve been there forever, faded as it is into the color of the paint, but under the yellow porch light only just now catching her attention. Or it might have been pinned there within the past hour, or the past five minutes between the time she ran out after the cop and her first step back onto the porch.

  It�
��s another butterfly, twisted from faded, sun-bleached paper and tied with a bit of equally ragged ribbon. It doesn’t fly, this butterfly, though it might if there was a breeze to push its wings. It hangs, limp and dead and almost unseen. Mari plucks it up and crushes it in her palm.

  Some stories, she knows, are true.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  SOME PIECE OF shit hillbilly redneck had thrown rocks at his kids.

  Anger still burned in Ryan’s gut at the way the cop had handled it. For a moment, unease at his decision to bring them back here did a tumble-turn in his belly, but then he reminded himself that this choice, this book, was going to give them all their lives back. Better than before.

  And he was doing it for them, he told himself. To make sure they didn’t lose all the things they’d grown accustomed to having. To make sure he could keep providing for them.

  But what good did providing do when he couldn’t protect them?

  Ryan scrubbed at his mouth with the heel of his hand, then took another long pull on his beer. The blinking cursor mocked him. He put his hands on the keyboard, half a page written, and couldn’t think of another damn word. He’d organized all the files and reports and made an outline of how he wanted the book to go.

  He just couldn’t write the damn thing.

  It was too hot in here, for one thing. No air-conditioning, and whoever had converted this screened porch into a three-season room hadn’t done such a great job with the windows. Only half of them opened. Besides, there was something disturbing about being this open to the woods outside. During the daytime it was fine. Soothing, even, to watch the leaves shift and flutter. But at night, with the lights inside making it impossible to see out, all he got was the creeps.

  He got up and let the ragged, half-broken blinds down. If someone came around again, he vowed, he would beat the shit out of them. If someone messed with his family he would do what he needed to take care of them.

  At his desk, he looked at the last folder he’d been organizing. Photos of a filthy child, hair matted, mouth pulled wide in a scream, being carried under the arm of a tall man with a beard. The background was somewhat familiar—the house and the barn, though both were half-obscured by the rampant weeds and bushes of the yard. The drive that was now made of white gravel was nothing but dirt and weeds crushed under the tires of a waiting van. Behind the man was a woman with a grim look, and behind her, half out of frame, a pair of coverall-wearing animal control people using loop hooks to capture what appeared to be several snarling, cowering dogs.