by Megan Hart
He flinches at that, which makes Mari happy and sad at the same time. She knows the flavor of fear. The weight of frustration. Those are longtime friends. But anger? She’s worked very hard in her life to keep anger far from her. It’s never served her purpose. Now she wonders how she could never have known its power.
“I want to know this. I have memories, Ryan. Of this house. Of what happened here. Of what I was.”
“You were a little girl,” Ryan says gently, “who had the misfortune to be neglected and abused. None of it was your fault, Mari. And now look at you. You’re a strong, beautiful woman. A good mother. A good wife.”
“I ate scavenged food I fought the dogs for. I hid from people because my gran had made me so afraid I’d be taken away. I lived in filth, Ryan. I remember those things and yet so much of it is blurry.”
“Maybe it’s better if it’s blurry.”
She shakes her head. “How can I stand knowing you know when I don’t!”
“Fine.” He doesn’t say it angrily this time, but in resignation. “I’ll leave the files. I’ll take the kids to my mom’s but only for a few days. And when I come back, we’re going to talk about all of this. We’ll talk about what happened at work, about the book, whatever you want to talk about. We’re going to make this okay, Mari. I promise you.”
Ryan has always been her prince. He has promised her so many things in her life and always made them happen. She wants to believe him this time, too.
But she doesn’t.
Still, Mari nods. She turns her cheek when he moves to kiss her, but she allows him to hug her. Ryan sighs.
She doesn’t follow him to bed. She waits until he leaves and then turns to the stacks and boxes of folders and files. She doesn’t look up when he murmurs good-night.
Instead, she starts to read.
FORTY-ONE
GRANDMA CALDER’S HOUSE smelled like the candles she liked to burn year-round. Vanilla, sugar cookie, apple pie, pumpkin spice. All the sorts of treats she never actually baked. Underneath it, the hanging odor of cigarettes she always said she was quitting but never did. Kendra breathed it in and wanted to pinch her nose closed, but didn’t because Grandma was hugging her so close.
“Kendra, sweetie. My God, you’ve grown. Look at you. You’re going to be as tall as your dad. And Ethan, c’mere and give your grandma a kiss.” Grandma kissed and hugged them both, then turned to their dad. “Ryan.”
“Hi, Ma.”
She offered him her cheek. His kiss looked as if it pained both of them. Kendra hoped she never felt that way about her kids—or her parents. Though the truth was, she sort of felt like that about her dad at the moment.
Something had gone down, she didn’t know what, just that her parents had been fighting and now her dad had put on this big, fake smile and dragged them here to his mom’s house. Grandma liked to call them a lot and send emails, usually stupid forwarded jokes or warnings about urban legends she could’ve easily disputed by looking them up on Snopes, but they usually only visited her every couple of months. Every once in a while Kendra and Ethan might stay the weekend while their parents went away on a grown-ups-only trip, and there’d been a few times when they were younger that Kendra by herself had gone for a whole week, then Ethan after her. Never at the same time, because Grandma said it would overwhelm her. It wasn’t that Kendra didn’t love her grandma, she just didn’t really like the way Grandma treated her mom.
“I bought cookies. They’re in the kitchen—go grab some,” Grandma said to Ethan. To Kendra, she said, “I suppose you don’t eat cookies anymore?”
“Of course I do, Grandma.”
Grandma’s brows rose. “I thought all teenage girls were obsessed with diets.”
“Only ones with eating disorders.”
Grandma snorted. “Please tell me that’s not you, Kendra Jean.”
As if. “No, Grandma.”
“Go on, then.”
Ethan had already jumped ahead, and Kendra followed him. She knew an invitation to get lost when she heard it. She slowed her steps when she got to the hall, though, listening.
She didn’t hear what her dad said, but her grandma was a little deaf and therefore thought she needed to talk extraloud.
“Well, what do you expect from her, Ryan? I warned you.”
“Ma. Not now, okay? Jesus.”
“I’m just saying, how can you be surprised?”
Kendra’s dad’s voice dipped again. She realized she’d totally stopped. If either her grandma or dad shifted a little bit to look down the hall, they’d see her eavesdropping. She took another couple steps.
“Can’t you just enjoy this visit, Ma? Do you have to bring up the past over and over again?”
“Watch your tone with me, Ryan. I’m your mother.”
“And Mari’s my wife,” Kendra’s dad said. “No matter what happened in the past, no matter where she came from and what she was.”
“You’re just like your father.” It was clear Grandma didn’t mean this as a compliment. “Well, I suppose you should come in. Have a cup of coffee. We can go out to that new place for dinner, if you want. That buffet place.”
“Sure, Ma. Whatever you want.”
At the sound of that, Kendra ducked quickly into the kitchen. “Hey, brat, don’t eat all the cookies.”
The monkeybrat looked up with crumbs around his mouth. “I miss Chompsky.”
“He’s staying behind with Mama.”
“To protect her?”
“What does she need protection from, doofus?” Kendra snagged a cookie.
“Whatever ate the peacock. That’s why Daddy said we needed a dog, remember?” Ethan rolled his eyes, making it obvious who was the real doofus.
“Whatever.” Kendra poked him. He poked her. They’d have gone at it, but then their dad and grandma came into the kitchen and both of them pulled their hands back, acting innocent.
“Not too many cookies,” their dad said. “Apparently your grandmother’s taking us to the Belly Buster Buffet.”
That sounded disgusting, but gave Kendra an excuse to escape upstairs with her suitcase to the small sewing room with the daybed that was always hers during visits. She heard the mutter of her dad’s voice in the room next door and pressed her ear to the wall to listen.
“Mari. It’s me. I wish you’d answer. Anyway, we got here okay. The kids are fine.” There was a long, long pause. “I know you have every reason to be pissed off at me. But I want you to know that no matter what, I do love you. I always have. And not because you were something I had to steal from my dad or a prize or anything like that. I love you for who you are and who you were when I met you. Not whoever you were before that. I love you. Call me, babe. Bye.”
Blinking, Kendra sat back, uneasy. That’s what happened when you listened to private conversations. You heard things you didn’t like. What had her dad done?
And why did everyone keep talking about what had happened in the past? Rosie, the manager at the Red Rabbit, Grandma...now Daddy. It wasn’t the best thing in the world to have your mom give birth to you in a bathroom, but it wasn’t like women didn’t have babies in weird places all time. There was a whole TV series about it on the Discovery Health Channel.
Somehow, Kendra didn’t think that’s what everyone was going on about. Something worse had gone on in her mother’s life. Which was probably why she never talked much about it. But what was it?
What could possibly have been so bad?
FORTY-TWO
THERE’S TOO MUCH information. Someone—Ryan, she thinks by the familiar handwriting on the labels—has sorted through all this material to put it in chronological order. But there’s still too much. Boxes and boxes of notes, written by Dr. Leon Calder. Printouts and handwritten letters back and forth between him and colleagues. Test results. Scribbled pictures Mari doesn’t recognize and yet knows she must’ve drawn because her name is on them. Report cards, height and weight and immunization records. The daily menu from the hospital,
along with notations about her reaction to the foods and the bowel movements she had after them.
Leon had taken notes on everything but had done little in the way of correlating what he observed. Apparently this had directly resulted in the loss of the grant money that had allowed for Mari’s care and keeping. She found the letter and documents stating his application had been turned down, the grant not renewed, the reason being “insufficient presentation of results gathered from the scientific observations provided for by previous distribution of funds.”
She also found the file of paperwork in which Leon had petitioned for her to become his legal ward. This, at least, makes her smile because she remembers the day the picture paper-clipped to the front of the folder was taken. She’d worn a pretty pleated skirt and white ankle socks. Saddle shoes. A white blouse with puffed sleeves. A new hair band Leon had given her himself. He’d told her he loved her as much as he could ever love a daughter and asked if she wanted to come home to live with him forever. Mari had said yes.
But now, in another box marked only “Mari, 15–17” she finds many more pictures. Many more pages of notes. And these tell a different story. She reads, scanning with her finger the way Leon taught her so she can keep the words in their places, not wiggling all over the pages the way they tend to do when she doesn’t concentrate. In these pages, Mari reads about more tests. Experiments Leon wrote about that she’d never even known he was doing. And all on her.
He’d documented her menstrual cycles and how she’d reacted to criticism and how quickly she picked up new tasks. He’d written at length about his choices in her wardrobe and of his plans to encourage her to continue her education—something Ryan had not done. Leon had written extensively about the subtle psychological profiling he’d done, everything from withholding affection to gain a response to testing her tendency to hoard sweets by purchasing candy for her but telling her she had to finish it all before he would buy her any more. He’d also journaled of his pride in her accomplishments. How much he’d gained by his research. But never once did he mention how he’d felt about Mari herself. Never once had he written that he loved her.
Mari sits back. Her back and knees ache from bending over all of these boxes. Her eyes itch and burn from the dust. Even her fingertips feel swollen from flipping through so many rough-edged papers. She’s been at this for two days, since Ryan left with the children, with barely a break.
The notes about her when she was still wild didn’t faze her—she barely remembers those times and any information they gathered seemed necessary for them to understand her. It’s also mostly boring and says very little about who she really was. The folders of information about her progress are even less important, because she remembers those times better. But what she holds in her hands now is proof that the man who’d said he wanted to be her father viewed her as no more than an experiment, a learning tool, something to study—even up to just a few days before he died! This, like her husband’s infidelity, is something else Mari wants to unknow.
Weeping comes easier now, and like the anger she wonders why she waited so long to appreciate what strength can be found in tears. At the very least, releasing the emotion leaves her feeling worn and empty, not coiled spring-tight. At least when she looks at her reflection in the window glass she sees who she is and not who she was.
Still, it’s all too much. Maybe Ryan was right. She shouldn’t look at this. She shouldn’t know that Leon didn’t truly love her, at least not in the way she’d wanted him to. That he referred to her as “proof of the Forbidden Experiment” or “a modern living example disproving Avram Noam Chomsky’s language theory.”
“Chompsky.” The dog at her feet looks up with a tilted head and an inquiring whine. She can laugh at the name now. How fitting that Ryan named the dog after the renowned linguist whose theories on language have shaped the treatment of every “wild” child discovered in the United States since the fifties.
From these boxes of files and folders Mari has not only learned a lot about herself, but also about the others like her. Abandoned, lost or isolated children. Raised without love or human social interaction, some horrifically abused and others, like her, simply ignored. She sees now what Ryan meant by “success story.” Unlike most of the other children documented in these materials her husband’s been hoarding, Mari did learn to talk and interact. She married, had children of her own. She has not spent her life in assisted-living care or mental hospitals.
And if she’s felt for most of her life as though she doesn’t quite fit in, as though she’s not sure how to connect with people in those shallow surface ways that seem to come so naturally to most—well, she’s not alone in that even among people who were raised “normal.” Yet here, too, she’s lucky. She read the story of a woman raised by her grandmother in the swamps until age four, isolated and ignored. That woman, according to her autobiographical essay, many of the passages highlighted in yellow with Ryan’s notes scrawled in the margins, has never been able to connect with anyone but her child.
Mari, at least, has loved.
Leon, her only father. Ryan. Kendra and Ethan. This dog, she thinks as Chompsky rests his nose on his front paws, eyebrows twitching as he watches her.
It’s all too much, and she gets up from the chair not caring if the papers scatter onto the ground. The dog scrambles out of the way. Mari stretches, easing the kinks in her back and shoulders. She rubs at her eyes, blurring her vision.
She strips off her clothes, not bothering to fold them. Naked, she leaves the three-season room and steps into night-damp grass. Her feet leave marks but no sound as she walks. Her ankles and shins get wet. She doesn’t care. Mari lifts her face to the night sky and looks for the moon and the stars.
They, at least, haven’t changed.
Stay, she says to the dog with her hands, and the dog understands.
She needs the woods. She needs the sough of breezes in the trees and the smell of earth littered with pine needles. She needs to dig with her hands in the dirt.
Her feet are soft and easily bruised now. Her skin not used to the chill. She shivers, nipples going tight, and she cups her breasts as she remembers the feeling of her babies nursing there. She is naked in the night. Free. But it’s not the way it used to be when she ran from Them into the woods, bare feet hard and crunching on sticks and stones without even a flinch. When she could stand out in the heat or the cold and barely feel it.
Mari climbs the mountain. It’s dark but not quiet—there’s the shuffle of animals in the undergrowth and the soft coos of birds in the trees. The breeze she craves. The distant sound of an airplane or something overhead reminds her that no matter how much she wants this to feel like the wilderness, society is close enough to grab her if she lets it.
Her feet guide her. Maybe it’s memory. Maybe instinct. Maybe just stupid, dumb luck, because when she stumbles into the clearing she feels at once she knows this place and also that she does not. It’s not like the meadow with the ringing rocks, which she knew at once from memory.
Golden light spills out from small windows in a strange, small house. The one Kendra told her about. Mari is standing naked in someone’s front yard. She’s not so wild that she can’t be embarrassed by it. Yet when the door opens, Mari doesn’t move. When the shadow figure of a man comes out onto the small porch and lifts a hand to his eyes so he can scan the clearing, she stays still. Her skin is tan yet still pale enough that it will stand out if she moves from the cloak of shadows cast by the trees all along the clearing’s edge.
She waits for him to call out, but he doesn’t. She thinks he’ll move into the grass, looking for whatever it was that called him out. It’s what she would do, she thinks, if someone came into her yard in the night and made noise. Except she knows she barely made a sound.
She smells a fire and sees a ring of rocks. This is a camp, then. It must be. Who else would live out here in a house she can see is tiny even with only the moon to light it. And if it’s a camp, maybe h
e’s a hunter. Maybe he has a gun.
People in rural Pennsylvania own guns they’re not afraid to bring out even when it’s not hunting season. Maybe this time, she thinks as she backs up one careful step at a time, it won’t be rocks hitting her but bullets, instead. A twig snaps. She can’t see the man’s face but his body turns in her direction. He still says nothing, but she sees the gleam of his eyes. He can’t see her, she knows he can’t, but she turns and flees, just in case.
Mari runs down the mountain, bursting with a flurry of giggles she has to bite back, afraid he might hear. No gunshots. No shouts. She’s made it back to the safety of her yard without anyone seeing her running naked through the trees. Her feet hurt. Her arms, legs, belly, thighs, all scratched. She has bruises that will throb and ache later but are at this moment only a murmur of pain.
In her yard she gives in to laughter. Tips her face and laughs at the moon and the stars that have watched her. She spins and spins until dizzy, she falls into the grass. She rolls in the softness and gets up with bits and pieces of flowers and weeds clinging to her bare skin, then stumbles to the hammock strung between two trees. Mari folds herself into it, not willing to go back in the house where she might have to remember everything she ran out here to escape.
She’s so tired she can’t keep her eyes open. She hasn’t slept more than a few hours at a time for the past couple days, so her exhaustion is not unexpected. She falls asleep there, naked in the hammock in her backyard, and even that is not a surprise.
What shocks her, though, is that when she wakes she is surrounded by folded paper butterflies. Too many for her to count, as anything beyond what she can tick off on her fingers still becomes the vague “many” unless she concentrates on the numbers. Strung from bits of ribbon the same as the few she’s found before, but these are bright and colorful. Not faded. They hang from the trees around her and the morning breeze pushes them into flight.
Mari blinks and blinks to clear her eyes, but the butterflies don’t go away. She lurches to her feet, scanning the yard, but it’s empty. She listens and hears nothing but the furious pounding of her heart.