Kat still held the contraption, as proud as if she’d birthed it herself. “I can’t wait to try it this weekend.”
“This weekend?” Miranda said.
“Olympic National Park, remember, Bean?” Kat tested all the buttons on her new gadgets. “We’re going to find Bigfoot.”
And then the right words gushed from Miranda’s mouth. “Mom? About this weekend — I’m not coming.”
Stars belonged in dreams and in doodles and in night skies. Miranda’s hands clenched into fists now, tight enough to crush and smother a star even if it dropped into her palm like rain.
Kat filled a mason jar with water and lifted it to her succulents in the garden window — plants renowned for being easy to keep alive, and yet Kat killed a new batch every year. “I know it seems like we just got home, but this could be it.” Her eyes twinkled behind her teacup-round glasses. “Uncle Bob’s in Tahoe with the Tessie crew. He won’t be able to break away, not for days — so it’ll just be us. Just you and me, Bean.”
Beneath Miranda’s skin, her blood sizzled. “Mom, no.” She breathed in. “I cannot miss any more school. I’ve already missed so much!” Ten days, Ms. Palmer had said, a number that still made Miranda’s breath snag in her throat.
“We haven’t been gone that much —” Kat started, but Miranda held out her fingers and counted.
“Sharlie in Idaho. The Mothman back east. Arkansas for the Howler.” Miranda listed every trip they’d taken since summer vacation had ended until she wiggled seven fingers. “Seven trips, Mom. Plus all the driving time, there and back — that’s ten whole days of school I’ve missed. I haven’t even made up my late work from Ohio.”
Kat considered it. “They’ll just have to miss you for a few more days. It’s not like you’re skipping school for Disneyland — this is a major scientific discovery, Bean! It’s been months since there’s been a sighting with such specifics, and this is a new site for us. A real rain forest. It’s the perfect habitat for a humanoid creature: freshwater rivers and valleys and high ground —”
“We never find anything!” Miranda burst in. “No matter where we go, it’s always the same. It’s footprints, footprints, footprints.”
“Not true!” her mother crowed. “What about Tennessee? We found the hair of an Appalachian black panther!”
“That was dog hair,” Miranda said.
“Quit being such a cynic — as soon as Bob finishes the DNA analysis, we’ll know what it really was.”
Miranda instinctively tuned her mother out. The DNA analysis would come back with the same results that all the others had: zero evidence of the existence of any new species.
DNA was real science, and in real science, if the facts don’t match the hypothesis, you didn’t throw out the facts — you made a new hypothesis. You adjusted. You rearranged, you took new observations and tried again. Real science freed itself of all expectations, sorting the evidence as it came.
Which is why Kat would never be a real scientist.
“If I miss any more school, they’ll drop my credit for this term,” Miranda informed her mother.
“All right.” Kat said, taking in her daughter’s sullen face. “We’ll slow down after this trip. Weekends only — no more absences after tomorrow. And Monday. And possibly Tuesday, and that’ll be the last time you miss school — unless we need Wednesday, too. But it’ll be worth it, Bean. It’ll all be worth it when we find one.”
Miranda knew there was no point in bringing up the leadership camp, no point in explaining to Kat that her work trips dangled over the camp like an ax on a string — Kat couldn’t comprehend that anything was as important as Bigfoot. She probably thought Miranda could brag about it at school, convince her science teacher to let these trips count as extra credit.
And then this obsession of Kat’s, this fixation on creatures mysterious and unknowable — it would billow and strangle and burn everything else in their lives — it had already taken Emma.
Miranda wasn’t going to let it take anything else.
“No.” She was surprised to hear how quietly it came out; she found she didn’t need volume to make her point. Instead she found the old anger, rising like a storm within her — and the more she concentrated on this word no, the more powerful she felt. She could topple thousand-year-old trees, she could grind the Critter Mobile into axles and rubber and metallic mulch, she could blow away the whole Fable Forest, shadows and waterfalls and Bigfoot and all — but she would not go on this trip.
The leadership camp, she thought, and it was a beacon in the swirling madness. Anything to get into the camp. Anything to break free from Bigfoot, from this weird house cluttered with fake artifacts and oversteeped dreams.
Free from her mother.
Kat pretended to be wounded. “Other kids would be thrilled to have a mom who lets them miss school for trips around the country.”
Miranda resisted a snort. What did her mother know about other kids?
What did she even know about this one?
“I’m not other kids,” she finally said.
Her mother exhaled. “All right, Bean. I’m not sure who you can stay with — Uncle Bob is still out of town —”
“I’m twelve years old,” Miranda said. “I’m old enough to take care of myself.”
Kat shook her head. “This isn’t one evening watching a movie alone with a pizza. This is a whole weekend. Maybe longer.”
“I’ll go to sleep at a decent time,” Miranda vowed, “and I won’t make any messes or watch anything trashy. Please. I can’t miss any more school.”
As Kat regarded her daughter, the daylight from the living room hit her unicorn earrings, making them gleam. Making their purple eyes sparkle, almost like they were alive — to anyone else they would have seemed alive. To Miranda they were just the gaudy details of the biggest wound in her life. “Promise me, Bean,” her mother said, “that you’ll make at least one mess, okay? Blow up a potato in the microwave or something. And only let three teenage boys over at a time — they’ll eat all my Funyuns.”
Miranda spared her mother half a smile. “Your Funyuns are safe with me,” she said, holding back a high-pitched glee because she’d won — she’d won!
No trudging through yet another national park, which should be a sublime experience, a chance to celebrate the natural heritage of the country — but was always ruined when they spent the whole time tracking cryptids. No crawling through grime and mud to spy, for hours, on a watering hole that’s deader than the school halls after the bell, no pretending to be excited about bushes that appeared to be trampled in a very specific way. No footprints or stray hairs or errant growls in the twilight.
No disappointment.
“Indian okay for dinner?” her mother asked.
“Yes. Good. Anything you want.” Miranda went back into her bedroom, where she shut the door and promptly leaped onto the bed, mouthing, “Yes!” silently, so Kat wouldn’t hear her celebrating the first time she’d ever successfully turned her back on Bigfoot.
When Miranda was finished gloating, she went back to the laptop.
She had finished her homework, accomplished all of today’s pressing matters on her to-do list, and cleared up the situation with her mother.
Now. Now she could do it.
A nightly ritual, she logged into her e-mail and, with a prickly breath, hit enter.
No new messages.
Her father had given her a cologne-spiced hug and a dry kiss on the forehead when she was five, and then he had left.
Miranda had asked her mother where he was once, maybe two years ago. (She already knew the answer; she’d used the Internet to follow his migration from their home state to the smoggy, hilly San Francisco Bay region. But she wanted specifics, painted details — where he was, how, and why.) Kat offered a vague, “He’s . . . somewhere else, Bean. Not here. Isn’t that all that matters?” Then she had quickly and clumsily switched the subject to Mongolian death worms.
The divorce h
ad been swift. Void of drama. When it happened, Miranda tried to collect details of the proceedings, but she was too young. Too young to gather the information she wanted — all she knew was that the court had awarded Kat full custody and then her dad had slipped away like a fish in a stream.
“I’ll come back.” That’s what he’d said, in their driveway, when he’d knelt down in the rain to give her a kiss. He hadn’t cried, so she hadn’t, either.
Wasn’t that all she needed to know? He hadn’t cried.
If he had been saying good-bye forever, he would have cried.
All this time, and she was still waiting.
So two years ago when Kat’s Bigfoot Files blog had become successful enough that she needed to maintain it daily, at home, instead of walking to the library, she finally invested in a laptop. Miranda hadn’t even waited twenty-four hours before she took the computer when Kat was asleep and searched for her father, safe in the blackest hours of the night, safe in her room.
Safe with the “delete all history” function.
There he was, the very first hit, his name in bold beneath a photo — head tilted back, a laugh uncurling, sleek leather jacket.
Miranda felt like she was seeing herself for the first time. People regularly called her a miniature version of her mother, but she didn’t think it was accurate. Surely a person’s appearance was more than just their physical traits; surely their internal attributes bled out onto their skin, shaped their faces, shaped their countenances?
In which case Kat and Miranda should look like strangers — and that was how Miranda thought of her lately. A stranger who may have given birth to her, but was her polar opposite in every way.
Her father was a mirror — Miranda saw her own reflection every time she saw his face.
On that night she had peeked at his website, his social media links, trying to act like all of her clicks were accidents, slips, stumbles down the virtual rabbit hole.
He was part of a start-up business — an IT management company with funding from Apple — and he had recently relocated to California because “this is the neighborhood to be in if you want amazing things to happen,” he said in the article she knew by heart now.
Memories of her father were crisp only around the edges — soft and soggy in the days and times and years, but sharp in the specifics. She could remember flashes of him:
His hands, long, rough fingers with half-moon nails and a scar on one knuckle, she forgot which.
His space in their garage, where he stored his tools.
His smell, bracing and spicy.
Parts of his voice were fuzzy in her mind — she hadn’t been able to find any video or audio of him speaking — but his face . . . it was a somber version of her own, her dark eyes reverberations of his.
Insignificant details, perhaps; it was all she had of him. She hoarded those details like rubies.
Miranda couldn’t pinpoint why, exactly, she had written a message to him that night. One moment she was staring at his e-mail address, wondering how she could ever summon the courage to reach out, to uncurl a tentacle — the next, she was hitting send.
Maybe he collects details, too, she had thought. Maybe he wishes he had details about me.
For two years now she’d been sending him e-mails — updates on her school life, a celebratory (and subtly bragging) message when she won her big election, random tidbits from her best homework assignments.
Every week, after particularly long and difficult days when the items on her to-do list were self-replicating and her head was filled with the black smoke of a grinding, overworked engine, she would do this — she would carefully, mindfully complete the things she needed to complete.
She would close herself in her room.
Then, in her most hallowed, protected routine, she would open her e-mail, and she would write, and she would tell him how hard she worked, every day, in case that was the type of thing that would make him proud.
There were plenty of things she didn’t tell him. How she would give an arm and an ear to get into that leadership camp. How she would give an arm and an ear to get a reply from him.
How she would give an arm and an ear to know when he was coming back.
She never mentioned anything about her mother, or Uncle Bob, or the cryptozoology madness that now infected her life like a pox — the tiny, harmless hobby of Kat’s that had snowballed into an entire lifestyle. Just snippets of what his daughter was like now that she was ten. Eleven. Twelve.
Snippets of what he was missing.
Her entire body deflated now, as she stared at her empty inbox.
He’d never written back. Not once.
Kat didn’t know this, but right before he left, Miranda had had a dream.
She and her father were in a forest at night, the trees tall and thick as skyscrapers, darkness pressing violently against the leaves, crowding the two of them. She walked between the trees, holding hands with her father, and then suddenly he was gone. Vanished. She cried out for him, but she was alone, and spent the rest of her dream running in every direction, lost, spiraling deeper and deeper into the trees and the shadows.
If she were the type of person who believed in such things, she might consider the dream a premonition, a hint from the universe that someone was about to step out of her life.
But Miranda was no such person.
It was only a dream.
Her father hadn’t left her; he’d just left.
“I’ll come back.”
Two years without a reply, and yet. Yet she still believed —
“Bean?” Kat knocked with one knuckle.
Miranda slammed the laptop closed.
“I’m going to Bombay House,” Kat said through the door. “Be back in twenty.”
“Okay.”
“Unless you want to come.” The doorknob twisted.
“No,” Miranda said, a bit louder than necessary. “I’ve got stuff to do.”
“All right, Bean.”
Miranda counted her mother’s steps away from her door, counted the seconds between the Critter Mobile’s squeaky, abrasive ignition and the graceless squeal of Kat riding the tires hard, and then she typed out a new message. A new update. A new tentacle.
And then she deleted the history.
Somewhere, deep inside of her, there was still a filament of light, a thrumming heartbeat.
Somewhere, deep inside of her, she still believed.
There was always more to be done.
Even though Miranda had already accomplished more today than most of her peers (and many adults) did in a week, there were other to-do lists, other plans. If she wasn’t ahead, she was behind — and if she could get the itineraries for her student council meeting tomorrow printed and stapled, then she might be ahead.
Out in the living room she opened the desk drawer where Kat usually kept the stapler, but it was empty.
Not empty, but full of silverware.
Forks, butter knives, and a long iced-tea spoon.
Miranda sighed. It was a daily occurrence in the Cho household, to come across such wildly displaced items — Miranda would reach for bread and find a pair of Kat’s clean folded underwear instead. (The loaf of bread would be carefully tucked into Kat’s dresser, along with the saltshaker and the TV remote.)
She’d even witnessed her mother do it — wander through the house with her hands full of laundry or groceries, and somehow lose everything during the span of one conversation, setting things in cupboards and baskets and onto shelves. It was a marvel, Miranda often thought, that Kat hadn’t ever misplaced her own daughter.
Miranda gathered the silverware in a bouquet and headed to the kitchen. There, in the cutlery drawer, was the stapler, along with a toothbrush and a bundle of mail.
“So here’s where she’s been stashing it,” Miranda muttered, flipping through the envelopes, and then chills ran down her back.
What if my acceptance letter is in here?
What if my rejection
letter is in here?
But each letter in the stack of mail was addressed to her mother.
She let her eyes run over the words on the envelopes: KATERINA CHO, URGENT! PLEASE RESPOND! FINAL NOTICE! FINAL ATTEMPT! The words were stamped on every single envelope in red, bright as blood.
And every envelope was unopened.
Her stomach clenched.
Those were not good words.
She glanced out the living room window. No giant panting van-dog in the driveway, not yet.
And so she slid all the mail out of the drawer and took it into her room, where she tore it open, every stitch of it — opening someone else’s mail was definitely illegal, but what if the person who it belonged to would never, ever open it, because she was allergic to responsibility?
They were all bills, statements, notices for their phones, their water, their electricity, everything.
Then she spotted the letter that stopped her breathing altogether.
NOTICE OF FORECLOSURE.
Foreclosure.
They were going to lose the house?
Miranda felt as if a bag of stones had been tied around her neck, and every time she read another statement, a new stone fell in. How long had it been since Kat had made a payment on anything? The numbers in bold at the top of each page were massive, almost imaginary; Miranda couldn’t picture those numbers being converted into real money.
Money.
When was the last time Kat had had money?
Heavier and heavier . . .
A week ago she’d dragged Miranda to Ohio for a creature hunt — an unsuccessful one — but they didn’t earn any money from that trip. The week before, it had been Wyoming — and again, they’d come back empty-handed.
“Not empty-handed, Bean!” Miranda could practically hear her mother defend the broken piece of shell they’d found on the shore of Lake DeSmet, which Kat believed was a molten fragment of Smetty, a giant invertebrate that swam in the lake’s briny depths.
The Bigfoot Files Page 4