What if there was a way —?
But Miranda was an expert at knowing when things were impossible.
A door had been shut — Miranda was the one who had shut it, and it would stay closed.
The secretary came through the foyer. “Miranda,” she said, surprised. “Don’t you have a ride?”
“My mom’s on her way,” Miranda said. To support her claim, she let the secretary walk her out of the school, back into the golden afternoon light; they paused together where the curb dropped off into the road.
The secretary shifted her purse against her body. “I can’t leave until all you students are home.”
Guilt crept into Miranda’s bones. Her mother didn’t actually know school ended at two forty-five. Her mother thought school ended at three thirty.
She thought it, because that’s what time Miranda told her school ended.
That way the school was always empty when Miranda was picked up.
“She’s running pretty late, isn’t she?” The secretary stared out at the street, the sun’s rays making ripples of the black asphalt, and Miranda fiddled with the edge of her shirt to keep her hands from migrating to her hair to yank out her guilt.
“Wait, what is that?” The secretary blocked the bright rays with a flat hand. “Is that . . . a dog?”
A vehicle cruised into the pickup lane — a huge, tan vehicle, a cross between a van and an RV. Cartoonish eyeballs circled the headlights; plastic antlers branched out from a dented roof rack. A pink tongue unfurled from the front bumper and dingy brown fringe dangled from the doors.
This was why she couldn’t go with Emma.
This, and a million reasons just as hairy and embarrassing.
Miranda screwed her mouth into a tight little pucker, putting away her smile for the day. “That’s my mom.”
The Critter Mobile was missing one of its hubcaps. It still wore the crusty mud of last month’s trip through Jackson Hole — hot on the trail of the borophagus, a hyena-dog hybrid rumored to prowl the shores of Wyoming’s lakes. All they’d found was beached carp and trash.
A collection of bumper stickers coated the cargo carrier on the Critter Mobile’s roof, overlapping one another in a veritable map of the vehicle’s travels: YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK. ARCHES — BEEN THERE, DONE THAT. EVERGLADES — LIVE FOR THE ADVENTURE!
Front and center, above the license plate, was the white I BELIEVE sticker, like an emblem.
“Where were you?” Miranda asked through the open window.
Her mother held up her brick of a cell phone. “I’m sorry, Bean, I lost track of time. Phone died.”
“Then charge it.” Miranda glanced back at the school. The secretary still stood there, squinting at the van —What are you waiting for? she thought. Go home.
“I can’t find my charger.”
Miranda deposited her backpack on the bench behind her, then pointed at the sign of a left-facing arrow with a red slash through it. ONE WAY. DROP-OFF OR PICKUP ONLY. “You’re not supposed to drive this way.”
“We’re fine,” her mother said. “That’s just a formality.”
“It’s really not.” Miranda’s quiet reply was lost in the noises of the Critter Mobile: the fart sound of the captain’s seat as she sat down, the screech of the door slamming shut, the sinister whistling in the undercarriage as her mother pulled away from the curb.
Miranda bent way over, out of sight, pretending to fix her sandal; the Critter Mobile always took a few minutes to accelerate, which meant they slunk past the busy soccer fields with the pace and energy of a parade float, scraggly brown fringe blowing in their exhaust.
Kat, Miranda’s mother, tossed a handful of spicy Funyuns into her mouth with one hand and operated the long, sticky gear shift with the other. “How was school, Bean?”
“Good.”
“Any big tests coming up?”
Miranda waited until they passed the edge of the school’s grassy acreage before she answered. “We just had midterms.”
“How’d you do?” Kat asked.
“Fine.”
The Critter Mobile’s driver-side mirror had suffered a fatal injury in the Ozarks last summer, so Kat had to stretch tall and arch around her headrest to see behind her when changing lanes. She did so now, and Miranda watched her, holding her breath. They were technically the same size, but Miranda always thought of her mother as shorter, smaller. Kat added bulk to her frame with sheer, floral-printed flowing robes — capes, Miranda called them, and Kat would argue, “Capes don’t have sleeves, Bean. These are capelettes.” As if Miranda should not only understand the various kingdoms and phyla of cryptids and monsters, but also demonstrate a working knowledge of the classification of capes, capelettes, robes, dusters, sweaters, and such.
With Kat twisted so, Miranda took in the full effect of her mother’s hairstyle. Kat’s long black hair was braided two ways: a huge fat braid down one side of her head, and six little snaky braids on the other side, sparkly lavender ribbons woven through the strands.
Miranda worked with other students’ mothers all the time. They came to PTA meetings, they volunteered for assemblies, they chaperoned dances —
To-do list, she quickly typed while the thought was as fresh in her mind as wet ink:
Confirm that Hannah’s mother ordered the linens for the Fall Fling refreshment tables
She loved how those moms dressed — casually in comfortable jeans and T-shirts, or in suburban-mom cardigan sets, or in tailored pants and blazers if they came straight from work. Their purses were subtle, their shoes practical, their haircuts symmetrical. Miranda always wanted to stare, wanted to drink in every detail.
Between Kat’s flowery capes, her wild accessories (today’s earrings were glittering white unicorns with jeweled lilac stars for eyes), and the giant silver-rimmed glasses that magnified her eyes to gargantuan proportions, Miranda often felt she was being raised by a wispy, human-size butterfly.
“Guess who I talked to today?” Kat said.
Miranda replied on autopilot, “Who?”
“Uncle Bob.”
Uncle Bob was not Miranda’s uncle.
Kat started calling him that years ago, but he wasn’t related to any of the Chos. Bob was one of her mother’s colleagues — or the closest thing Kat had to colleagues. He was a pale, perspiring, balding, middle-aged man who kept a portable metal detector on his belt and was a close talker. When Miranda thought of their meetings with him over the years, the memories came along with the scents of the things he’d eaten most recently — microwave taquitos, cheesesteak, onion rings.
“There was a Bigfoot sighting in Washington today,” Kat went on. “In Olympic National Park. At the falls in Fable Forest, early this morning. A couple of honeymooners spotted him across the reservoir — full corporeal sighting. Red eyes and everything! He lumbered back into the rain forest before they could get their cameras.”
Energy leached from Miranda’s body as her mother spoke. Another week, another Bigfoot sighting — and, Miranda thought with new alarm, another trip. Another absence.
She could not miss any more school. She couldn’t.
No matter what a pair of bored backpackers thought they had seen.
“Oh, don’t worry, Bean,” Kat soothed her daughter, misinterpreting her frown. “No photo means it’ll stay hush-hush for now — the last thing we want is for Bigfoot Bozos to catch wind.” She put on a war face. “Someone’s going to get him on film one of these days, and it’s not going to be them.”
Bigfoot Bozos was a reality show in the style of nature documentaries, filming Bigfoot researchers out in the wild. They flew around the country and captured it all: Bigfoot hunters sniffing the dirt for traces of the beast’s alleged sulfuric body odor. Bigfoot hunters sitting in lawn chairs for hours at a time with binoculars glued to their eyes, eating cold beans from a can while waiting for the Squatch himself to prance through camp. Editors compiled the footage and added music and sound effects, making the cryptozoologis
ts look maximally ridiculous.
To Kat, the show made a mockery of everything she stood for.
To Miranda, the show was the punchline to the joke she was living.
Kat moved on from the alleged Fable Forest sighting to the latest conference presentations on Bigfoot’s post-summer migration patterns to Uncle Bob’s theory about Bigfoot’s electrosensory abilities —“Just like sharks!”— and she didn’t stop talking.
She was still talking when the Critter Mobile lurched into the driveway of their humble single-story house. Miranda got out of the car and shut the door, and still her mother talked, hands waving so energetically she honked the horn by accident.
Miranda followed the sidewalk down to the mailbox, all the while keeping an eye on Emma’s house across the street. Emma’s garage was open, the curtains drawn — if Miranda didn’t know for certain that Emma was currently with the twins, she wouldn’t have risked walking outside at all.
What if they decided to come to Emma’s house instead?
But she had to check the mail.
It could be today.
She prepared herself and opened the mailbox.
Nothing. So not today.
No mail yesterday, either. Or the day before.
Miranda kept her face steady in case — just in case — someone could see her. In case Emma had already made it home and was watching from her bedroom window.
Inside, though, Miranda roiled.
No news about her leadership camp, positive or negative.
She wanted to know.
A quartet of terra-cotta lawn gnomes stood on their porch — much beloved by Kat, much endured by Miranda.
She kind of hated those gnomes.
It was unsettling, how easy it was to hate things lately. How she’d become quick to the drawing of scorn, swift to be stirred up over things which, not so long ago, had delighted her.
“Hello, Clarence,” Kat said, shaking the hand of the bespectacled gnome with the daisies in his beard. “Fine afternoon.”
Miranda went inside before Kat started responding for the inanimate lawn ornaments; she couldn’t stand the sound of her mother doing a wizened old gnome voice.
A habitat provides clues to the creatures it contains; it cites what foods sustain them, how they spend the darkest, starriest hours, what they do to bathe and wash and keep their skin or hair or scales or fur neat. Careful observation of such a habitat — a collecting of details — could tell you so much about the animals who called it home.
So then this was the Cho household:
Every wall but one was covered over in photos, in maps, in artifacts from their travels. Every spare surface displayed something that had been clawed from the earth or hewn from its slumber in a bog or cut from a tree. A wiry white hair in a glass case (its owner, Kat insisted, a snow Yeti). A yellow femur hanging above a photograph of the Chos in Florida (the bone belonging, Kat would have explained to queriers, to a skunk ape). A segment of petrified tentacle (“a giant freshwater octopus fossil!” Kat called it; “a common prehistoric squid,” Miranda argued) on the coffee table beside a stack of obscure wildlife magazines.
Centered on the mantel was a hulking footprint — plaster and rock and embedded twigs. An impression of the first print Kat had ever found. Other mothers kept photos of their children above the fireplace.
One wall of the living room was covered in rainbow splatters of oil paint. On a random, wine-soaked Friday, Kat had forgone ordering dinner and instead started this mural, but abandoned it by midnight, before it could ever become anything other than paint slop. It was still there, a rough, thick layer of abstract clouds and nonsense shapes.
“That part kind of looks like a tail,” Kat would sometimes say. “Maybe it wants to be a lizard.” As if globs of oil had ambitions.
Miranda knew it would never be anything but a mess.
Another of her mother’s projects that would never be completed.
Kat set her keys on the counter and turned to her daughter. “I’m going to update my blog. Do you want to —?”
“I have homework.” Miranda said. “Can I use the laptop first?” She was already down the hall, closing her bedroom door when she heard her mother say, “Okay, Bean.”
The habitat that was Miranda’s bedroom was one of bare white walls, well-dusted crown moldings, and plain blue curtains left to hang beside their window. No posters, no photos, no trinkets. Furniture was utilitarian. The desk was aseptic, a lone history book open.
An environment clean of distractions — but even so, its inhabitant was distracted.
If she tilted her head, Miranda could see the hydrangeas in Emma’s front yard, the corner of Emma’s roof, the checkerboard lines in Emma’s freshly mowed yard. All of them familiar details, recalled in blank moments as Miranda walked to school on dark mornings, between sentences on English essays, before she fell asleep.
Details of a former life.
Miranda could have picked this apart all evening. She wrestled with the idea of calling her, leaving her a message, retracting her earlier excuses, inviting her over. Letting her see Miranda like this.
In her habitat, exposed.
Letting Emma see Kat again. Introducing the two properly, crossing her fingers that it wasn’t too much — that Emma would see the footprint above the fireplace, and the assortment of antlers in the garden window, and the speckled eggs in the freezer, and decide to stay.
But Miranda drew her curtains and unzipped her backpack.
She opened the laptop. As its screen warmed and brightened, she checked the number of homework assignments she needed to complete (four) and rechecked the due dates for all of them (tomorrow).
Four assignments. Then she could do it.
She cracked open her notebook and, making sure the volume on the laptop was low, started an episode of Bigfoot Bozos.
Kat could never know, but Miranda binge-watched the show. She’d seen every episode.
“My pa saw a squatch when he was my age,” a man with a neckbeard was saying, “and his pa saw one, too.” He sniffed. “Guess I was just born to believe.”
A shaky camera panned an ambiguous forest, then the lime green flash of night-vision goggles, and the logo sprawled across the screen, the B in Bigfoot shaped like a footprint.
And then the man launched into his list of evidence, all of it limp, and Miranda’s laugh was freeing. These same things had been uttered here, under this very roof, multiple times, and they sounded as porous and outlandish from the neckbearded believer as they did coming from the woman in the “I Kissed the Jersey Devil (and I Liked It)” shirt in the kitchen.
This was why she watched it. For catharsis. The show was the closest thing she had to a confidant.
“Everyone keeps telling me I’m wasting my time out here,” the man said, “but I know he’s out there.”
“How?” the interviewer prompted. “How do you know?”
The man shrugged. “I always trust my gut. And my gut believes.”
Miranda looked up from her notebook and studied the screen, the swift cutaway to a snarl of overgrown branches and thickets of green and moss and leaves. For a moment it focused on a particular mass, a clump of something in the corner of the trees.
Miranda hit pause.
She stared.
A shadow.
She played it again, and the camera whipped past the shadow to the man. His sweaty-lipped, “Over there! I saw it near them bushes!” had Miranda snorting, rolling her eyes, and scanning her history study guide for the best possible entry point.
You need something, Bean?”
Miranda hovered in the kitchen. Her hands wanted very much to pull out a hair — just one, to settle her dancing nerves. She’d worked for nearly three hours, finishing her assignments and whittling the day’s to-do list down to this one last item:
Talk to Mom
She searched for the right words; they flitted away like shy moths in the dark.
Kat was sorting artifacts �
� when she had too many of one kind of object to store in their house, she sold them on her blog. She finished wrapping the dried scales of a North Atlantic furred trout skin in tissue paper and looked at her daughter.
Miranda cleared her throat. “I was thinking —” The doorbell rang, and her heart kicked against her chest as if it had grown feet.
What if it’s Emma?
What if she’s ready to be friends again?
What if she’s ready to forget what happened?
But Kat came into the kitchen with a long white package.
“It’s here!” Out of a snowstorm of packing peanuts Kat lifted something that could only be described as a Contraption. “Do you know what this is?”
Of course I don’t, Miranda answered wearily in her mind, but I’ll bet you’re going to tell me.
“This is a scanning pulse detector: part radar, part video recorder.” She positioned the thing on her shoulder and aimed at the fridge. “Trust me, if a creature walks past, this thing will catch it one way or another. Isn’t it amazing, Bean? Someone on Bigfoot Files recommended it.”
Every one of her mother’s words was a tentacle, covered in suckers, reaching out, feeling for human contact — and it made Miranda want to fold in half, limb and hair, and hide beneath a rock.
“And this,” Kat said as she unwrapped a stainless-steel canister, “is for scat samples . . .”
Miranda’s attention drifted like flotsam, wandering to the fridge where a printed article hung on a cheeseburger magnet: “Patterson-Gimlin’s Bigfoot, Fifty Years Later: The Real Deal, Or Gorilla Suit Hoax?”
Another paper was below it, a newspaper clipping yellowed with age — it might be older than Miranda — about the sighting of a leather-winged, long-beaked prehistoric-looking bird in the Rio Grande Valley, silhouetted against a flaxen harvest moon.
If Kat was correct, the whole world was full of creatures and mysteries and magical things, around us all the time. Things most people couldn’t — or wouldn’t — see. Who knew so many of us were blind? Miranda thought.
She used to think it, too, or something similar. Miranda remembered when she would wake up every day seeing sparkles in the corners of her eye, when she would walk with her hands open and loose because she knew, any second, a falling star could land in her palm. A time when she would check outside every window, behind every tree, and peek into every backyard — just in case. Just in case she caught a glimpse of something that no one else saw.
The Bigfoot Files Page 3