Little Bigfoot, Big City

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Did it hurt?” Alice asked, feeling stupid.

  “Hurts,” Millie whispered, and pushed herself slowly upright. “I do not know how my father can do this over and over.”

  “Maybe it’s different for him,” Alice suggested. “Maybe the potion’s too strong for you.” But Millie had shaken her head.

  “I think it’s supposed to hurt,” she’d said. “I think we are supposed to know who we are and that we should not be changing it.” She’d touched her arms, her neck, her cheeks, then shuddered. “I don’t like it,” she whispered. “I am not feeling like myself.”

  Then Jessica had bustled in with her arms full of clothing. For the next thirty minutes, Alice had listened, amused, as Jessica had tried to cajole Millie into a dress—“so cute!”—or a pair of jeans—“very on trend!”—and Millie had either refused or somehow ruined the appearance of the outfit by adding scarves and hats when Jessica had her back turned.

  Finally, Millie had emerged, swathed in her layers, with a hoodie covering her head and body and leggings beneath her long skirt.

  The morning doorman called them a cab, and they’d gotten to Carnegie Hall, where the auditions were being held, in plenty of time. As the first group was called, Alice stood beside her friend, touching her arm or her shoulder, as Millie trembled and touched her smooth face and snuck peeks at the crowd. Millie had said she wished she could be as brave as Alice, and Alice hoped that her presence was giving her friend strength.

  She’d held her breath when Jessica and Millie had gone onstage. For a minute she’d been sure that the judges would kick them both out for breaking the rules. She had been so proud when Millie had started singing, so proud of how she’d sounded, and when she’d said Alice’s name, Alice had almost started crying. But before Millie could finish, there had been hands on her shoulders, hands underneath her arms. She’d screamed and tried to run, but the men grabbed her, saying, Just come with us, don’t make any noise, we don’t want to hurt you, we just want to talk. The men had managed to get her outside, out of the theater and into the street, in spite of her struggling. She thought that she’d heard Jessica and Millie chasing after her, and even Jeremy’s voice, and then a strange woman had come out of nowhere, flying across the street like a football player or an avenging angel. She’d wrestled Alice away from the men and shoved her into another car, a car that was, even now, speeding up the West Side Highway in the direction of New England, with . . . Alice blinked. Her rescuer was behind the passenger seat. Alice was in the middle. Millie was on the other side of the backseat, and Miss Merriweather gave her a cheerful wave from behind the steering wheel.

  “Hello, dears,” she said.

  Millie looked at Alice with wild eyes. Alice touched her hand, then looked past Millie, through the windows. The doors were locked; the car was zipping along at close to eighty miles an hour, and it was being driven by a woman Alice knew to be an agent of the Department of Official Inquiry, the arm of the government that was after the Yare.

  Oh, we are in trouble, Alice thought. We are in so much trouble.

  “Don’t worry,” said a familiar voice. “She’s one of the good guys.”

  “A double agent, I believe the kids are calling it,” said Miss Merriweather. But Alice barely heard. She was staring at the woman beside her, the one who’d saved her, the woman whose clothing and hair were entirely unfamiliar but whose low, cultivated voice was instantly, undeniably recognizable.

  Alice swallowed hard. She squeezed her eyes shut. Then she opened them and made herself look . . . and see.

  “Are you all right?” her mother asked.

  Alice could only stare. Felicia, in a long-sleeved T-shirt and sneakers and sweatpants instead of the skirts and jackets and heels she always wore, could have been a different person. Her hair, which she religiously straightened each morning, was a mess of curls—a familiar mess, Alice thought—and her skin, without makeup, was the same shade as Alice’s, right down to the constellation of freckles that dotted her cheeks and her nose.

  Her mother’s eyes narrowed. “What?” she asked. “What hurts? Did they twist your arms?”

  Alice shook her head. Her mother nodded. It was a brisk nod, not the kind of slow, assessing gesture that Alice was used to, from a woman who had nothing on her schedule but lunch and a massage and a Pilates class and nothing on her mind but when the spring fashions would arrive. Without lipstick, her lips were pink and chapped, and without her perfume, she smelled clean and faintly sweet, like soap and fresh-cut grass and honey.

  “All that Pilates actually came in handy,” Alice’s mother said. She reached over, wrapped her arms around Alice’s shoulders, and pulled her close.

  Alice let herself lean into Felicia’s body. She thought of all the nights she’d dreamed about finding her real parents—how her mother would pull her into her arms, just like this, and cry over having lost her, and promise that she’d never let her go. Now, it seemed, it was happening. She’d found her real mother, and it had been her real mother all along.

  She opened her mouth. “What,” she began, and then, “How?” Complete sentences, it seemed, were beyond her.

  Miss Merriweather’s dimpled smile flashed in the rearview mirror. “Hiding in plain sight, dear,” she said.

  “I don’t understand,” said Alice.

  Her mother stroked Alice’s hair. “It’s complicated,” she said. “And I’ve been wanting to tell you forever! But before I do . . .” She took Alice’s hands in her own—her mother, who, it seemed, had never liked to touch her—and stared into Alice’s eyes. “I need to tell you that I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry,” Alice repeated.

  “I never wanted to send you away. Not ever.” Her mother’s voice was solemn. Then her expression became rueful, and her mouth moved into an unfamiliar smirk. “I never wanted to spend my entire life wearing girdles and doing juice fasts and going to charity balls either, but it was the only thing that I knew would throw them off our scent.”

  Not your scent, thought Alice. Our scent. “Are you Yare?” she asked. She heard Millie give a frightened squeak. She knew that she had broken one of the main rules, possibly the only rule of Yare existence: Never tell the No-Furs about the Yare. She waited for her mother to look puzzled and ask what Alice was talking about. Instead, Felicia shook her head.

  “Not me, honey,” she said. She stroked Alice’s hair with a touch as gentle and as loving as anything Alice had ever imagined. “Your father. Not Mark. Your real father.”

  Alice blurted out the only two words she could think of. “What happened?”

  And then, as Miss Merriweather drove them, first east, then north, Felicia told her.

  “My name wasn’t always Felicia. It was Faith. Faith Nolan. And I didn’t always live in New York City. I grew up on a farm in Vermont. We kept cows and sold the milk to our neighbors, who turned it into cheddar cheese, and we grew apples that we sold at farmers’ markets and to other neighbors who made cider. I wish I could show you pictures,” she said. One of her hands was still patting Alice’s hair gently. “I looked so much like you do when I was a girl. Same hair. Same freckles. Same everything.”

  Alice looked at her mother, who was still skinny underneath her sweatpants. Felicia sighed and ran her free hands along her torso, over her hip bones. “It’s a disguise,” she said, and continued.

  “I was so happy on the farm. I had two older brothers, and I grew up chasing after them, always trying to keep up. We’d climb apple trees in the orchard, and skip stones and catch frogs in the pond.”

  Alice nodded, even though she was having a hard time picturing her elegant mother as a skipper of stones, a climber of trees, and a frog aficionado.

  “At night our mother would read us stories in front of the fire. A half hour, every night, before we could watch TV. We’d complain about it, or we’d pretend to, but it was the best part of the day.” Felicia smiled, remembering. “The only problem with two older brothers was that they were very protectiv
e. They wouldn’t let a boy come near me. The whole time I was in high school, not a single boy ever asked me to the movies or to one of the school dances, because they were terrified of Jack and Henry. When I left for college, I fell in love with the first guy I met.” Her mother’s gaze had turned inward, like she was watching a movie playing in her mind. “He was tall, with dark hair, and he was kind and smart and thoughtful and interesting. Not like anyone else I’d ever met. He knew everything about the woods, about building shelters and foraging and how to survive in the wilderness. He knew which plants you could eat and which ones were dangerous, and where to find every swimming hole near campus. But then there’d be things he’d never heard of, television shows or bands or even just things that had happened in the world. But I wasn’t sophisticated enough to realize just how different he was, and it wasn’t like I’d watched that much TV or been out in the world so much myself. And even if I had noticed, I don’t think I could have ever guessed the truth.”

  She reached for a bottle of water in the seat-back pocket, unscrewed the cap, then replaced it without drinking. “He’d leave bouquets of flowers outside my dorm room door. Every morning, flowers.” She smiled, remembering. “He’d take me camping, and he’d build a lean-to out of branches and start a fire with a flint. Whenever I asked him how he’d learned to do those things, he’d tell me that he’d been an Eagle Scout. He wasn’t a college student—I thought he was at first, because he was the same age as the rest of us. When I realized he wasn’t enrolled at the university, I thought he was a townie, one of the guys who lived in town and worked on campus. I didn’t realize. I mean, how would I?” Felicia uncapped the bottle of water again and drank down half in a single swallow.

  “So he was Yare.” That was Millie’s piping voice; Millie, who’d been listening to the story as closely as Alice had.

  Felicia nodded. “We were in love,” she said. Her voice was cracking, as if all of that high-society smoothness had been scraped away. “We were going to get married after I graduated, and have a little farm of our own.”

  Alice felt dizzy as the car wove through traffic, settling into the fast lane and racing along on a road that ran along the Hudson River. Her mother on a farm? Her beautiful, fashionable mother, raking out stalls and milking cows, picking apples for cider, weeding gardens? The mother Alice had known all her life would have hated that as much as she, Alice, would have loved it.

  “When I found out I was pregnant, I was happy. Surprised but happy. I knew what he was by then. He had to tell me, if I was going to have a baby, and we’d have to figure out how to tell his Tribe and make sure it would be safe.” She smiled, then sighed. “It was a shock, but I still loved him. We wanted to be together.”

  She looked down into her lap, where her fingers were worrying at the water bottle’s cap. “And then they found me. The Department’s men. They’d been after him for a while, I guess. He’d forged some papers so that he could get a social security number and a driver’s license, and they found out that he wasn’t who he said he was. They grabbed him, right off the street, but he got away.” Her head bent even lower. “And then they got me.” Her voice was low and dull. “They told me that Jamie wasn’t human. That my baby would be a monster. They said they would take me to a safe place where I could deliver my baby and that then they would take it away, and I could get on with my life.”

  Alice closed her eyes. A monster. She’d heard kids calling her that, and worse, for her whole life. And now there was a government agency, a bunch of officials, maybe even scientists, saying the same thing.

  “So you gave me away,” said Alice. Her voice was small and mournful. Felicia took her hands.

  “Never,” she said. Her hazel eyes gleamed with tears, but her voice and her hands were steady. “I loved you from the minute I saw you. And I knew that I would never let them take you. I knew that the only way I could have you and keep you safe was if I found a way to turn into someone else.” She sniffled, then raised her chin in a familiar, haughty gesture that Alice had seen a thousand times.

  “I gave birth to you in a hospital in Vermont. The Department had men with me, all the time, right outside my hospital door, all day and all night. When you were five days old, I told them I needed some privacy, so I could feed you.” She smiled, remembering. “I got dressed, and I got you dressed. I ripped the sheet from my bed into strips, so I could tie you against my chest. I put everything I could carry into my backpack, and I climbed out the window. Out of the window, around the hospital, and into town. I used all the money I had to buy a tent and a lantern—and diapers, of course, and a baby carrier—and you and I went hiking. All the way from Vermont to New York, following the path that Jamie had told me about.”

  Alice was trying to picture it: Felicia, who exercised only in regimented increments, usually under the instruction of a personal trainer, and always in color-coordinated, stylish athleisure wear, clumping through the woods in hiking boots and a flannel shirt with a baby strapped to her chest.

  “Thank goodness you were such an easy baby,” she said. “A few times, the men were so close I could hear them talking around their campfires, and I’d just sit and feed you, and then pray you wouldn’t cry. But you never did.” She sniffled. “Jamie told me where he’d come from and where to find his Tribe. I gave you to his brother and his brother’s wife, and I promised I’d be back for you as soon as I could come.” She looked down at her body with regret. “By then I’d already lost enough weight that I could almost pass as a New York society lady. I just needed a new name. And a husband.” She smiled faintly. “Mark was an old friend of my brothers’. He’d always had a crush on me, and I’d never been interested. He was working in New York, so I went back to the city and found him, and I told him that I’d marry him but that there’d be a few conditions.”

  “So I was a condition,” Alice said.

  “You were my darling,” her mother said, and pulled Alice’s head against her shoulder, cradling her, holding her tight. “And so Faith Nolan became Felicia Mayfair, a fancy Upper East Side lady with a brand-new name. I straightened my hair.” She touched her hair gently. “And I never ate anything.” One hand strayed to her flat belly. “It took them years to catch on.”

  Alice wanted to hear about that—about how the Department had caught on and what had happened next—but she had other, more pressing questions. “When did you come and get me?”

  “As soon as I thought it was safe. You were nine months old. Mark and I were married, so I had my new name. Mark told everyone that I was an old family friend. His family had a place in Vermont, near where I’d lived, but different. Very fancy.” A faint smile curled the corners of her lips. “Everyone assumed that I was rich, like he was, that I was a cousin of one of the families that lived in one of the big houses in the compound where Mark’s family had their place. And, of course, by then I looked the part. So I went back and got you. And I loved you.” Her voice was cracking again. “I loved you so much. It killed me every time I had to send you away, to every single one of those god-awful snooty schools. Every time I tried to straighten your hair or put you in clothes that you hated.” She touched Alice’s curls again, gently, fondly. “I don’t think you’ll ever forgive me, but I had to keep moving you around. It was the only way to try to disguise you, keep you safe.”

  Alice thought of all the different schools she’d attended, how her family never went to the same place twice on their winter and spring vacations, and how the one constant in her summers was her visit to her granny.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They suspected,” Felicia explained. “But they never knew for sure. I never let them get close enough to test your blood or start asking Mark questions. As far as they knew, I was just a rich society lady, and you were just a girl in boarding school or at sleepaway camp. I was trying to keep you safe. Safe meant hidden. And hidden meant . . .” One of Felicia’s hands touched Alice’s hair and stroked it gently, from her crown to the nape of her
neck. “Hidden meant that you had to look like the rest of them. Enough so that even my parents . . .” Her voice broke. She sniffled, then started to cry. “I’m so sorry,” she said. Tears ran down her cheeks and did not leave muddied trails of mascara and eye makeup. “I wanted to tell you a thousand times, and every time I had to send you away, it felt like I was taking poison. And now . . .” Alice followed her mother’s gaze to the rear window. The white van was still trailing them, and it had been joined by two gigantic black SUVs.

  “Not to worry,” said Miss Merriweather, but her hands had tightened on the wheel. The little car whined as she stepped on the gas, pulling into the left-hand lane.

  “Where are we going?” Millie asked.

  “A safe place,” said Miss Merriweather.

  Millie moved restlessly in her seat. Alice leaned into her mother, feeling her soft sweatshirt against her cheek, smelling the sweetness of her skin, hearing the slow, steady beat of her heart. Home, she thought, and shut her eyes as Miss Merriweather steered the car toward some unknown destination. Beside her, Millie squeezed her hand. I am home.

  JEREMY BIGELOW WALKED THROUGH THE woods, the same stretch of pine trees and fallen logs where he’d spotted his first Bigfoot. Only they weren’t Bigfoots, he reminded himself. They were Yare. He’d learned that, and much more, during his time with Benjamin Burton, before The Next Stage’s founder and chief judge put him on a train back home. He counted out fifty paces, then called out something reassuring. “I am your friend!” he yelled, trying not to feel ridiculous. Then he stopped and listened, his head cocked, his eyes shut. Nothing. He walked on.