Here There Are Monsters

by Amelinda Bérubé

  He glances at my plate, which I’ve barely touched. He’s only taken a few bites himself. “Guess my timing could have been better for breakfast, eh?”

  “Sorry. It’s amazing. I’m just…not very hungry.”

  “Yeah. Same. Mostly I could use some coffee, to be honest.” He gives me a wan smile that makes me suspect he’s more hungover than he’s letting on. “Want some? And then we’ll shoot?”

  “Sure.”

  The back porch, a deep, covered shady space that must be heaven in the summer, houses a wooden swing hanging by heavy chains. It creaks as I settle onto it. William hands me a mug, and then disappears back into the house to return with another one for himself and a woolly blanket. He offers me one side of it, shrugs the other side around his own shoulders. The swing’s not that big; our arms rest snug against each other, my thigh against his, the blanket draped around us. We sit in silence for a while as we look out across the scrubby expanse of their backyard, a juniper-dotted field rising into sumac and cloudy white pines to the east. The coffee is hot, the day thin and bright, leaves skittering across the ground when the wind lifts.

  “Sophie said you guys went out for a while last year,” I say casually.

  The mug slips in William’s hands, and he almost drops it in his lap. A little wave splashes out to soak into his jeans, and he swears, scrubbing at it. I hide a smile.

  “Um. Yeah,” he manages. “What did she say, exactly?”

  I shrug. “That it was weird.”

  “Did she tell you why we broke up?”

  “The real reason? Yeah.”

  He slurps at his coffee, frowning. “Huh.”

  “Were you upset? When you found out?”

  “It was kind of a relief, actually. It was weird. Like we were both playing parts. And I’m not a very good actor. I didn’t know how to talk to her anymore when we were dating, you know?”

  “Did you like her, though?”

  “I thought I did. It kind of…evaporated on contact. Seemed like a good idea at the time.” He shrugs. “It wasn’t the real thing.”

  He looks briefly at me, then away. Silence hums between us. I lean back and watch him over the rim of my mug. I’m tempted to tell him to just say it—almost reckless enough to go there, to see where that conversation leads. Would he back into plausible deniability, pretend not to know what I was talking about?

  What if he didn’t?

  Deirdre would hate it if I went out with William. She’d be incandescent with rage.

  The thought shouldn’t be so satisfying when she’s missing. When I’m the one who turned away from her, when she ran away to drag me back into being her defender. The same old anger comes bubbling up, thick and hot as magma. I should get to have a life. Why shouldn’t I have friends? Or a boyfriend?

  But the thought chills quickly into ash. Maybe I don’t deserve it. Maybe William deserves better than Psycho Skye playing a part.

  Suddenly the possibility hanging over us is stifling, and I don’t want to face it after all. I shrug the blanket off, sit forward.

  “So,” I say, with a false brightness that sounds tinny in my ears. “Arrows?”

  “Yeah.” He clears his throat, sets his mug aside. “For sure. Arrows.”

  He hauls a target out of the shed—a big block of black foam cut into a many-sided die, fluorescent green targets adorning every surface—and sets it up in the middle of the grass, counting paces back from it. Avoiding my eye, maybe. We take turns using William’s bow to fire at it, conversation mercifully not required. We’re both off our game—by now I’m usually hitting the target at least half the time, but today we waste a ton of time hunting for the orange-feathered shafts where they’ve sailed off into the grass. William even misses once; I glance over at him and he makes a face.

  “What’re you doing,” a voice bellows behind us, making us both jump, “trying to let her win?”

  William blows his breath out, then puts a smile on and turns around in time for his dad to crush him into a bracing bear hug, thumping him on the back.

  “It’s the day after Halloween, Dad,” he says, sounding natural enough. “Cut me some slack.”

  “He was at Kevin’s all night,” Angie calls, leaning out the back door. “He wasn’t even up yet when we left this morning—” She catches sight of me and her teasing smile is instantly transmuted into wide-eyed concern. It reminds me of Sophie, that flawless transition. “Skye. Oh, honey. How are you? What can we do to help? I’ve barely slept since I heard about what happened. Is there any news?”

  “Not yet,” I manage, small and awkward under all their stares. “Thanks for the lasagna.”

  “Dad, you remember Skye, right? Her sister’s—”

  “Sure, sure,” he says, frowning at me. “Brent Mackenzie’s girl. Angie filled me in. I was sorry as hell to hear about everything. How long has she been gone?”

  “Since the night before last.”

  “Two days and they can’t find one little kid? What are they doing down there?”

  “Well, that’s them in the helicopter,” William says, “and they were here talking to Mom and Christina yesterday.”

  Bill harrumphs. “God, I wish I’d been here. I’d have given them an earful. You tell your dad to hold their feet to the fire, okay? They should be going through those woods inch by inch with a fine-toothed comb. Technology’s no substitute for knowing the land. If he says the word, I’ll have the whole neighborhood down there in five minutes flat.”

  Behind him, William massages his forehead with one hand. The gesture telegraphs both a headache and terminal embarrassment.

  “I’ll tell him,” I say dutifully. “I’d better go, actually. I don’t want to be away too long.”

  “You let us know if you need anything,” Angie says. I duck my head and make my escape. When I glance back from the corner of the house, Bill is drawing William’s bow, demonstrating something. William stands there with his arms folded, smiling, smiling. I hadn’t noticed how tired he looked before.

  * * *

  I scuff my way home as slowly as I can, kicking rocks into the tall brown cattails that line the ditch beside the road. The helicopter swings past overhead in a long arc, its passage thumping in my ears.

  There’s no way you could have known. Right. You’d think that. You’d think this would be the sort of thing nobody could predict. Except I know Deirdre better than anybody. There were signs, and if I’d been paying attention, maybe I could have read them. Maybe it wasn’t just last night I missed a cry for help.

  Have the police found the clearing behind the castle yet? They haven’t mentioned it. But there’s no reason they should have said anything. It’s not like it’s evidence of anything other than the extent of her weirdness. The thought of strangers there, poking through her domain, raising their eyebrows, makes my stomach go cold.

  The tall dead grass of the empty lot whispers around me as I push through it to the heap of dirt at the far side. Deirdre’s influence there is obvious. The ramparts bristle with sticks wedged into the crumbling earth, woven with long spiny thistle stalks, as if she was trying to pen the woods in. Or wall us all out. They cast reaching, spiky shadows in the long slant of the sunlight.

  The faintest trace of a trail darts through the brush around to the other side of the hill, less a path than a path of least resistance. It leads under a pair of cedars canted together into a shadowed doorway. The space beyond is almost a room, no bigger than mine at home, a ring of shaggy trees surrounding twists of tall grass and the thin silver whips of saplings, reaching anemically for the sun. The light falls in slivers, shivering gold scraps slicing through the shade. It’s colder here.

  The rough concentric rings of stones are still there, if you know what you’re looking for. The back of my neck prickles in protest as I step gingerly across them, but it’s just Deirdre’s ritual creep
iness, and I won’t fall for it. I jerk my shoulders to shrug off the goose bumps.

  But aside from the stones, the clearing is empty.

  I scuff carefully around the circles to make sure. There are still a few bones left, scattered among the roots of the trees: one long thin skull, maybe a deer’s, old and cracked; a femur as long as my forearm; a handful of smaller ones the size of chicken drumsticks. That might be what they are, for all I know. But nothing like I found here before. Nothing worth commenting on. And what was I planning to do if there was?

  I stop in the middle of the clearing and let my breath out, hands crammed in my pockets, blinking hard, looking up through the dark combs of cedar branches reaching across the bright sky.

  Up there something flutters and ripples in the wind, hooked over a high branch—way out of reach, far over my head. A long streamer of fabric, light and sinuous. Blue as the sky, flecked with silver sparkles. It’s one of a dozen or so. All around the clearing, they hang down like sad pennants, torn and fraying, too forlorn to be pretty.

  Those shredded scraps used to be a dress. My one dress, the one Sophie insisted I buy. I never even got a chance to wear it. And I knew Deirdre had taken it, though I didn’t have any proof until now. I fucking knew it. How did she manage to get them all the way up there?

  The distant crackle of police radios and the drone of the helicopter have become familiar enough that I’ve pretty much tuned them out, but one tiny sound cuts through them, yanks my attention back to earth.

  The sprightly jingle of a bell.

  It’s as real as the birds calling overhead, the whisper of the cedar boughs, the rasp of my breath. Unmistakable.

  It’s somewhere back there, in the tangle of the trees. I push my way through the cedar circle, into the brambles beyond; their claws snag in my coat, my hair. This close, face-to-face with them, you can see it’s not really accurate to say the woods are motionless. They’re moving constantly, in a thousand tiny ways, reeds sighing, branches trembling under sprinting squirrels. A crow cocks its head to look down at me from high up in a pine tree.

  There it is again, that twinkling sound. It’s coming closer. I could swear it is. Just like last night.

  “Mog,” I call, shoving my way through the thicket. “Kitty, kitty, kitty. Come on already.”

  It’s her. It has to be her. I know the sound that bell made as she galloped across the lawn. I press on, ducking branches, ignoring the burrs working themselves into the wool of my jacket.

  At first, I think it’s a clump of dead grass I’m about to step over, huddled between two fallen logs, but then a scrap of red cloth snags my eye, and the shape makes sense too fast to look away.

  Not grass. Fur. Matted into strings. Hanging over bones like wet cloth.

  With a collar.

  I reel back from the sight with my hand over my mouth, turn away, press my cheek against the rough bark of a tree. I squeeze my eyes shut, but can’t unsee it. I won’t look closer. I don’t want to know how she died.

  Deep breaths, deep breaths. This isn’t new information. It’s just closure. That’s all. Closure is supposed to be a good thing, the final word that lets you move on, lets you heal.

  I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to know.

  I am not going to think of what closure might mean for Deirdre. She’s still out there somewhere. One way or another, she’s coming home. Fuck closure. We won’t need it.

  Slyly, somewhere in the reeds, the bell twinkles out at me. Slinking closer.

  I freeze, my neck prickling, listening to it pace restlessly around me. But I’m being ridiculous. So I’ve been chasing somebody else’s cat. No wonder it’s not coming when I call.

  Still, I’m suddenly aware that the house has disappeared behind me. The sound of the helicopter has vanished.

  I’m not panicking. I know the way I came. I slap my way through the underbrush, trying to recognize the shapes of tree trunks, the placement of broken stumps, clumps of moss. Finally, I spot a cluster of cedar trees leaning together—alarmingly, off to my right. Somehow I almost veered off course. Breathless with relief, I hurry out of the clearing, back the way I came. I kick a couple of the stones out of the circles as I pass, hurting my foot.

  My parents don’t need to know about this. It would just upset them. It isn’t anything they don’t know already.

  It definitely isn’t a sign.

  Eleven

  October

  Sophie was trying to figure me out. That was my best guess as to what was going on when one of my attempts at the compliment dance ended in that invitation to go shopping. Maybe I was leveling up. It might have been weird, just the two of us, without William bridging the gap. He was the glue that held our little foursome together. Otherwise the rest of us would probably have bounced off each other, indifferent colliding marbles, without a reason for even speaking. But even so, I’d never had people to hang out with before, not like this, and I was determined. I was learning.

  “I’m really glad you asked me,” I told her as we strolled through the cool, sunny corridors of the mall. Confidences were part of the game. “You always have the best clothes. I’m totally taking notes.”

  Sophie gave me a melty smile and hugged my arm.

  “Are you kidding? It’s so nice to finally have another girl around. And someone who’s actually nice.”

  She bought one pair of slouchy boots for herself, spending her paycheck from working weekends at an ice cream store. But mostly the point of the outing turned out to be for her to dress me up, especially since Mom—depressingly thrilled that I was showing some interest in something as normal as shopping—had given me her debit card.

  Sophie steered me through store after store. Basics from Old Navy, skinny jeans and T-shirts that clung so tight, I’d have said they were too small. But Sophie declared them perfect. We spent half an hour tottering around a shoe store in the highest heels we could find, cracking ourselves up, until the saleslady’s smile started to look fixed and unhappy. Next came Anthropologie, where she picked things off the rack and held them up to me, piling them into my arms, pushing me into a dressing room.

  “I don’t even know where to start,” I protested.

  “With the blue thing,” Sophie urged. I made a face.

  “I told you, I don’t do dresses.”

  “You have to at least try it on. It’s the rules. Come on, just one.”

  I fished it out of the pile, looked at it doubtfully. It was slinkier than anything I owned, with occasional silver sparkles scattered across the fabric, winking.

  “It suits you,” she insisted.

  “Let me guess. Because of my name.”

  “No, it’s a good color for you. Brings out your eyes. Like, pow. Just try it.”

  I rolled my eyes and shut myself in, wrestled the dress off the hanger.

  “So real talk, Skye,” Sophie said through the door, “what do you think of William?”

  “William Wright?”

  “Of course William Wright.”

  “He’s nice,” I said, startled.

  “Nice,” Sophie echoed.

  “Well, yeah. The kind of nice that people take advantage of, you know? He just…likes everyone. But everyone seems to like him back. It’s weird.”

  “And what about you?” There was a sly smile in her voice. “Do you like him?”

  “Oh, come on—”

  “I’m a hundred percent serious here,” she protested. “I need to know. I’m the one who’s going to have to deal with his broken heart if you don’t.”

  I threw the straps of the dress over my shoulders and leaned out the door.

  “Okay, what?”

  She gave me a pitying, knowing look, her hands on her hips.

  “He really likes you,” she said. “Hadn’t you noticed?”

  I had, actually. It was hard
to miss. But I wrinkled my nose and made my eyes pleading. Like I was supposed to.

  “Do you really think so?”

  “I’ve known him since I was, like, five. I can tell.” She stepped into the fitting room and zipped the dress up the back.

  “Do you like him?” I ventured, trying to figure out what her agenda was.

  “Not like that.” She shrugged. “We went out for about thirty seconds last year.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. It was weird. I think it mostly happened because everybody expected it to, you know? And maybe because he needed to prove something to his dad. He has a thing about his dad. But with you? Totally different story. Different universe.”

  “Are…are you okay with that?”

  “Aw, Skye,” she said, dimpling. “You’re so sweet. I’m totally okay with that. Let me put it this way. I broke up with William because I kissed someone else. Her name’s Annabelle. Okay?”

  “Oh,” I said, blinking. “Sure. Okay.”

  “Not for publication,” she said briskly, fluffing my hair forward so it hid my ears. “People are assholes. This is strictly on a need-to-know basis.”

  “Right.” The confidence threw me off-balance. I couldn’t figure out why she’d trusted me with it. At a school like ours, that was weapons-grade. But then again, a carefully placed word from her would set a rumor running through the school faster than a virus. Anyone who made the mistake of double-crossing Sophie would be annihilated. “Does Kevin know?”

  “Well, obviously. He was the first one I told.”

  I gave her a look. “We’re talking about the same Kevin, right? The one who was talking about you like someone died and made him the world authority on tits?”

  She burst out laughing.

  “Oh my God, Bethany told me about that.” She studied me, her eyes alight. “Holy shit. Is that why you decked him?”

  “I barely touched him—”

  “Oh my God,” Sophie repeated, clapping her hands in delight. “You’re amazing. That’s, like, the best thing ever. I can’t wait to tell him about this.”

  I eyed her, baffled. “Yeah, I bet he’ll be thrilled.”