The Bigfoot Files

by Lindsay Eagar

  “I will.”

  “I’m going to update the blog,” Kat said, taking the laptop, “and then go to sleep. Make sure all the lights are off before you go to bed?” She kissed Miranda’s forehead, no doubt taking her daughter’s silence as gleeful shock at having such a lax, cool mother, and shut the door —

  And left Miranda in the wake of Kat’s mess, confusion and loneliness knitting themselves on her body like a stifling blanket.

  Nearly midnight.

  Midnight, and Emma’s bedroom window had gone dark long ago.

  Midnight, and even the crickets had stopped singing and bundled down, and gone still.

  Midnight, and Miranda’s skin was tired, and her eyes were dry, and the spark of adrenaline she’d felt earlier, the springing of action to fix this mess of Kat’s — that had stopped, and she was only numb.

  Black ink smeared the side of Miranda’s hand from leaning against her legal pad, poised to write another idea — anything, if only it would come to her.

  When her clock ticked into the official hours of tomorrow, she capped her marker in defeat and took a deep breath.

  Time to confront her mother. Time to wake her up and tell her she knew what was going on.

  Time to hear her mother’s excuses, her rationalizations, and her hollow promises to fix what she had done.

  Time to tell her mom that there was nothing to be done.

  Miranda had already pursued every possible option, but one:

  DO NOTHING.

  It was all hopeless. The house would be transferred from their possession, they’d be forced to live in the Critter Mobile — at least until they found a shelter or could convince Uncle Bob to let them crash on his disgusting couch. As for her leadership camp . . .

  The anger was a hot coal in Miranda’s stomach. If she woke Kat up and told her off, if she passed to Kat the blame that belonged to her — then maybe Miranda could finally sleep.

  In her bedroom Kat was snoozing sitting up, rumpled against the headboard, her bedside lamp dimmed, glasses askew on her nose. A book lay open on her chest: Handbook for Monsters.

  The muscles in her mother’s face had completely relaxed in slumber; Miranda studied the calm skin, the peaches of Kat’s cheeks, the planes of her forehead and chin ironed and smooth.

  Miranda waited for the surge.

  She waited for a cry to bellow out of her, to wake her mother with, “What is wrong with you? Other mothers’ faces would be like clenched fists from worrying about the mortgage payments!”

  But her mother looked so starry-eyed, even asleep. She looked so happy. Like she was having fun in her dreams, and it made jealousy lick at Miranda the way fire licks at sky.

  “Tell me a monster.” This was how Miranda used to implore her mother late at night — pushing the clock to its absolute limits when she was supposed to be asleep — and at the slightest request Kat would oblige. She’d launch into a story about the Bear Lake Monster, or the chupacabra, or the king of all creatures, Bigfoot, who reigned in the green, green forests of the Northwest . . .

  And Miranda used to be excited for these trips, these hunts for the monsters from the stories, hiding in real life. She’d wake early before even Kat was stirring — Kat, whose blood was so infused with coffee and sugar, she could go from dead asleep to walking and talking in less than ten seconds. Miranda would pack and wait on the front porch in the wee hours of the morning, still in her nightgown but wearing her old khaki explorer’s vest, pockets filled — What if we find something this time? What if we see Bigfoot?— before it became too hard to believe.

  Sometimes with Katerina, you have to let her fall on her face.

  But Kat would never fall. Even if Miranda threw the bills in her lap, even if she showed her mountains of evidence proving that her monsters weren’t real, still Kat would believe — believe it would all work out, believe she’d disprove science, believe Miranda would continue playing the role of dutiful sidekick forever, losing friends and leadership camps and even their house along the way.

  No, Kat would never fall.

  But maybe, just maybe, she could be pushed.

  Something sparked.

  An idea.

  A whiff of one, anyway. Idea essence. Idea vapor.

  Miranda took the laptop from her mother’s bedside table and went back to her room. She checked the foreclosure notice, rereading it with steady eyes.

  Thirty days.

  They had thirty days until the bank would knock on their door with the legal right to send them packing.

  Thirty days to get her mother to grow up.

  OPTION FOUR, Miranda wrote on her legal pad, every letter a ritual as the entire plan flickered through her mind on grainy footage.

  A DEAL.

  She circled it.

  And then she drew up plans and wrote lists and printed out articles and highlighted. She dragged every one of Kat’s books from the living room bookshelves and cracked their spines, until her bedroom was carpeted in cryptozoology.

  She made charts, a map, and in the quiet house, silent but for her mother’s gentle snoring in the other room, Miranda went to her e-mail and sent one message.

  A tentacle.

  The deepest, darkest hours of the night came to keep her company, and Miranda plotted, the house still, the gnomes on the porch holding their breath as moonlight threw shadows past the windows and onto the plaster footprint on the mantel.

  It would work. It had to.

  To-do list:

  Wake up

  There is a curious thing that happens in the middle of the night, in the darkness of a still house and in the quiet of a moonlit neighborhood. You suddenly realize that, without fanfare or notification, you have passed into the early beginnings of morning. The blackest hours are spilled behind you like the dregs of yesterday’s coffee, and the new day stretches before you with welcoming arms.

  Miranda knew this moment well. She had read or studied or worried her way through it many times — but this time, she felt the morning rush toward her, a great river of light flooding the horizon. She set aside her papers and reluctantly closed her eyes, but then dawn arrived, and brought with it an end-of-summer bite that dotted the grass with dew and left the windowpanes chilly to the touch.

  Miranda heard Kat wake across the hall. Heard her mother choose a capelette from her closet, heard her mother kiss the jade frog on her nightstand — if only such a superstitious gesture could actually bring them luck, Miranda thought. They needed it.

  As she lay there, the heat turned off with a rattle, and the electricity hummed along the floorboards, up behind the walls and the power sockets. Even the silence sounded too expensive to afford.

  Beneath her pillow, the mail she’d opened seemed to glow like something radioactive; had they been awake all night, waiting for her? She pulled out the envelopes and stared at them. The red words looked just as serious now in the soft filter of morning, stamped on firmly by someone who meant it.

  What if there was another way?

  What if she was missing something, something in the details?

  She scanned the statements again — those same terrifying numbers, the same impossible hole her mother had dug.

  If she wasn’t ahead, she was behind.

  By the time Kat came into the brightly lit kitchen, Miranda was vertical and dressed, transferring the few food items from the refrigerator to the cooler, burying squeezable yogurt tubes and prepackaged baby carrots in ice cubes.

  “Bean!” Kat yawned. “How long have you been up?”

  “I don’t know,” Miranda answered honestly. “Half an hour?” She shut the cooler lid and consulted her phone.

  Things to pack, the header read, and with some pleasure, she crossed Food off her list. There. She lived for that moment, the temporary lightness.

  “It’s before six,” Kat said. “And you were up late — Bean, you need your beauty sleep.”

  Miranda whirled to the drawer next to the fridge and found a pack of AA ba
tteries and a roll of tape, which she tossed into an open duffel bag. A body in motion stayed in motion.

  “Pretty sure your brain needs more rest than that, too,” Kat added.

  “Well, I’m awake now.” Miranda didn’t have time to be tired. Momentum — momentum was what greased her joints and made everyone else seem as though they were running on molasses-slicked sidewalks. Momentum was key. “We still have a lot to do before we leave.”

  First aid kit and backup emergency stuff. Done.

  Everything was packed, but there was plenty to do. Plenty of lists.

  Lists upon lists upon lists . . .

  “Before we leave?” Kat filled her cat mug with fresh coffee and added an absurd amount of chocolate syrup. “Where are we going?”

  Miranda inhaled her mom’s signature perfume, a blend of chalky candy heart, artificial vanilla, and what she imagined the inside of a cloud must smell like. “Mom . . .” She had practiced saying this speech all night, but now that it was time to speak it, she choked.

  She was bulbous, she was an overfilled bucket, she was straining with things she could say, the great hurt she could cause, all of the truth she could pour down now over her mother in a sticky black mass, and it took such effort, on her part, to keep these things stabled, keep them inside.

  Look at this place, Mom.

  Look at you, Mom.

  I can’t breathe, with all these footprints on the walls. I am upside down.

  Behind her, buried beneath pairs of woolen socks and a spare windbreaker in her duffel bag, the stacks of bills in their opened envelopes whispered to her, fed her lines —

  How could you let it get this far?

  How could you choose Bigfoot over me?

  Like something rotten, she swallowed those things down.

  “Mom,” she said again. “I know we never —” She stopped, selected different words. “I know the last few trips have been disappointing — we’ve found some interesting things, yes. But we’re still waiting to find proof. Something real. And I know I’ve been impatient.” She pulled in a breath before she said it: “But I’ve got a feeling about this weekend, too.”

  Kat tilted her head sideways; her hair, which today was wrapped in two high knobs, gave her the look of a little kid with a cheap headband of costume ears. “What do you mean, Bean?”

  Only hours ago, in the obscurity of night, Miranda had watched her mother sleep. Such a strange thing, to see your parent so unguarded, relaxed and free from their grown-up tendencies. Now her mother blinked at Miranda, waiting, eyes enhanced by the glasses so Miranda could see every detail, every shine of light reflecting off the velvety black of her pupils. Not the wise eyes of a grown woman, a mother; rather Miranda had the overwhelming notion that she was staring at the clean, expectant eyes of little-girl Kat. Wanting. Needing.

  Looking for the magic.

  “This weekend,” Miranda said, “I want to help.”

  Her mother’s eyes glittered starry. In any other adult, you’d have to search deep to find a glimpse of the child they had been; little-girl Kat had never gone away. She was standing right here with her daughter.

  “You do? Hurray!” Kat clapped her hands. “It’s been forever since you helped —”

  “No,” Miranda said. “I don’t mean I’m going to hold your sample dishes or chase after you with the camera if you think you see a shadow.” The words stung, she noticed, Kat frowning as she took them in, and so she put on her smile — it felt too big for her face — and added, “I’m old enough now to really help.”

  She held up a folder, filled with pages and pages of articles and monster fact sheets, every paragraph streaked with highlighters and feathered with sticky notes. “If Bigfoot is in that forest — still in that forest, I mean —” She caught herself just in time —“we’re going to find proof. But we’ve got to do this the right way.” She slipped on her old khaki explorer’s vest, the well-worn pockets already filled with index cards, binoculars, and a Swiss army knife. “As scientists. I’ve already repacked the van.”

  The Critter Mobile had been safely parked in the closed garage when Kat went to bed last night — now it was halfway down the driveway, its back hatch open, filled with bags and storage boxes and tarps, everything wedged together like sandbags stacked to stop a rising tide.

  “You moved the car?” Kat looked surprised, but not bothered.

  “And I made a plan.” She showed her mother her printed itinerary, a weather chart and a master to-do list comprised of ten littler baby to-do lists for the weekend. “I’ve plotted out every minute of the next seventy-two hours,” she explained. “Pit stops, meals, bedtimes — it’s all here. It’s foolproof. A foolproof plan to find Bigfoot — but we have to do it in three days.”

  This last detail had Kat raise an eyebrow. “Why three days?”

  “I have to be back for school on Monday.” Two more absences, Ms. Palmer had said, and then Miranda would lose her credit for this term — which meant today, Friday, would be Miranda’s contribution. A sacrifice to the cause. She could afford one more absence.

  “That’s a pretty tight deadline, Bean.” Kat poured a second helping of coffee into her cat mug.

  “If we stick to the plan and the research,” Miranda said, “we should only need three days.”

  Miranda had always been an advanced reader, but her mother’s face was indecipherable — Kat sugared her coffee and lifted the cup to her face, steam fogging her glasses. Like the coffee had a life force, and if she sniffed hard enough, she could take it for herself.

  “Mom? Is this okay?” Miranda said.

  Kat set down her cat mug and pulled Miranda into a hug. “It’s more than okay!” Miranda’s cheek pressed against today’s capelette, a pale sea foam green thing that billowed on her mother’s frame, a blanket with sleeves. “It’s been ages since we had a trip all to ourselves — and we’re going to find one this time. You feel it, and I feel it, and we’re going to do it together. Just you and me, Bean.”

  Miranda should have been relieved.

  Should have been grateful that she and her mother were so different — that Kat was so easily convinced while Miranda remained a wall, stalwart mortar and brick, immovable no matter how the wind cried.

  Instead, Miranda was surprised to feel a tender lump of disappointment. Shouldn’t Kat have known her daughter was telling a lie? Shouldn’t she have noticed the signs? The way Miranda’s sentences curved up at the end, lacing a mechanical, musical excitement into her voice that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

  The way her eyes flickered to the duffel bag not once, but three times during the conversation.

  The way her hands twitched.

  The way her lips pulled together into a line, like she was trying to keep her guilt contained as she remembered —

  The e-mail she’d sent. The tentacle.

  Then again, Miranda thought, if her mother were more observant, this plan wouldn’t work. Miranda would be stuck, helpless on the sidelines as Kat let their lives implode. “Thank you, Bean, for doing all this work. We’re unstoppable now that we’ve got a Miranda Cho to-do list for this weekend.” She released her daughter from the hug, but kept her fingers on the curl of Miranda’s shoulders. “I can feel it, Bean. We’re close. We’re so close.”

  Miranda never knew how to argue with a feeling.

  Logic was a rock, a boulder, a mountain with roots sunken into earth. It could withstand earthquakes and mudslides. The end of the world could happen and there would be logic and fact and knowledge — irrefutable, immovable.

  But feelings were slippery. They swam; they were viscous; they could fit into any container they needed to fill. How was she supposed to fight against something so spineless?

  “I feel it, too.” No matter how many times she said this, it would never roll smoothly off her tongue like honey; it clumped on her tongue, as if her mouth knew how far it was from the truth — though it didn’t used to be, she thought. It used to be the truest, the st
rongest thing she knew — this feeling of possibility, this feeling that the world would soon split open, that the black thickets would part and she would know, she would know.

  But that feeling had died a long time ago.

  “Let’s go, then!” Kat rinsed her cat mug in the sink, then carried the cooler out into the garage, leaving Miranda alone to delete the last item off her to-do list:

  Lie.

  She would go with her mother. She would act like a real Bigfoot hunter, searching for evidence — real evidence, not footprints or shadows, but something concrete. Something irrefutable. Because to bring her mother onto the side of truth she would have to show Kat that no such proof existed — and it never would, no matter how hard they looked.

  Then, when all the nonsense had been wrung from her mother and Kat was devastated, Miranda would show her what she’d found in the silverware drawer. The bills, stacked high enough to tower over any excuse Kat could come up with. And then Miranda would gently steer her into a conversation about what to do next. It was right there on the top of her biggest to-do list:

  Find Mom a real job.

  Getting Katerina Cho to give up creature hunting and find a real job that would pay the bills and save their house — this would be Miranda’s biggest project ever. And as soon as she got her mother into an office, a warehouse, a classroom, a ticket booth — anywhere with a steady paycheck and low expectations — Miranda would go to that leadership camp, and she would be free.

  All Miranda had to do was pretend to be a die-hard believer for one more weekend. Use all of her research, all of her planning — and all those years she’d spent as the daughter of a renowned cryptozoologist — and then Kat would know.

  She would know.

  The only reason they haven’t found Bigfoot, after years of looking, was because there was no Bigfoot.

  And then it would all be over.

  Outside, the morning chill was now a memory; the sky had shifted from shades of a wild salmon’s belly to a pale blue, the first cool morning they’d had since last winter ebbed into spring.

  Across the street, a single light was on upstairs at Emma’s house.