“I don’t miss those women anymore,” I tell the tree, whom I have given a name—Anah—as I sit at his base and slash open tightly-wrapped packages of raw lamb chops. He is eager today; his tentacles tremble like the tails of excited cats, and the sounds he makes are like the ecstatic whispers of children. Today Anah seems to say, They aren’t like you, Mother. They aren’t special. They’re just plebian women with plebian children pursuing plebian interests who won’t leave anything behind except something else that will die.
I take a deep breath and pet the spikes of his dark brown mottled trunk. His tentacles coil down and press my cheek. How could you talk with people who do not understand your loss, your grief? They go smugly about their worthless lives.
“But I have you now.” I pat his jagged bark a bit too hard and slice open my palm; I cry out, and blood drips to the ground.
Anah emits another smell, like plantains and rotten meat. Tenderly a tentacle turns my hand and creeps inchworm-like across the wound. He rolls the tentacle’s tip in my blood and places it in the orifice that is his mouth, the inside of which I cannot see, for it is far above my head now. Someday I want to see the inside of his mouth, for I want to understand him as he understands me in this world where no one else does.
~~**~~
I feel sometimes in the stores that the checkout boys are looking at me, and am terrified that one day I will be out in the parking lot, loading up the van, and that the police will come and ask me what the hell it is I am doing with such a huge quantity of meat. It gets worse when he is up to two and three carts of meat per day, so I buy memberships at wholesale clubs and cruise the circuit within a sixty-mile radius.
I’m so hungry, Mother, he says on the day I have noticed he is as high as the roof of the house.
I offer him a skunk I’d hit with my car.
I need more food than what you give me, Mother, he says. The animals that wander and the meat you give are not enough to sustain me, and if I don’t get enough nutrients, I will die.
He lowers a trunk-thick tentacle; its tip is brown and withered, its pulsing tonguishness dry, brittle like scorched bark in a wildfired wood. I tell him not to worry; I will devastate the meat counters in every market, superstore, and wholesale club, capture every stray and swipe every roadkill from here to California if I have to, because he is not going to leave me the way my Anna did.
Still, on the quietest of nights, I swear it’s the sound of his weeping which drifts through my open bedroom window.
~~**~~
Bethany’s youngest, Kathy, has vanished.
There is the process with which this neighborhood is so familiar: panicked Have-you-seen? phone calls. Hysterics. Police. Human chains combing the woods. Search dogs and high-intensity lights fading the night sky to blue. There is yelling and chaos; there are lasagnas and cookies and bottles of wine, and then when it all dies down, I am the only one left Bethany has to talk to, to weep to, and the other women stay away from us, even though Bethany has three other girls. She pays them little mind, now, and is only focused on Kathy, the one that is gone.
Welcome to my world.
The night Kathy disappears, I lie in my bed and swear I hear my Anna talking, perhaps playing with her dolls, inviting them for tea or dressing them up in tiny clothes. I get up to check to see if it’s her, but it isn’t. This condition lasts for five days. Each day the sounds diminish; each day the noises get weaker, almost as though my Anna is physically dying, or that her ghost is fading from this plane. And each day I go into her room, exactly the same as it was the day she left, to find that it is never her. I tell Bethany that this is what she can expect; she will begin to think she hears Kathy, calling her name.
Anah’s illness has abated. I am relieved.
Bethany tries to drop in on me at the worst times, as when I am in the middle of preparing Anah’s next meal or bleaching up after it. I don’t let her in, making the excuse that the house is simply not in any condition for visitors, and spend a lot of time at her house instead.
“I understand.” She motions to her sink. “I can barely do the dishes every day.”
Three days before my husband’s scheduled return, Anah falls ill again, and this time it is worse. It seems as though by each new feeding another tentacle has begun to brown, wither, split.
I continue to feed Anah. I consider reaching out to Onja. One day, the phone rings. It is Sabrina from down the street.
“Miranda was playing in the yard, and when I went to check on her she was gone! Have you seen her?”
I tell her no, I have not seen Miranda, and I know that by evening the whole missing-child-search process will start all over again, and so I need to hurry and feed Anah before the men with the dogs and the hats are crawling all over the neighborhood, and then it will be me and Bethany spending lots of time at Sabrina’s house. We will have our own club.
I go down into the basement where five-year-old Miranda is bound by heavy-gauge rope to a chair; she squirms and tries to jump it a distance from the pile of Kathy’s things—her shoes, her dress, her hair bows—in the corner. Miranda is gagged, but I know I will have to knock her out completely so the neighbors won’t hear her; I will do what I have to do. Her plump little body plus the meat cuts and roadkill should be enough, at least for now. Bethany has three more girls. Diane has two boys. Sabrina has a son—Miranda’s brother—who is almost twelve.
I think of all the other women in the neighborhood, and how soon it will be that we’ll see all our children’s faces on the milk cartons.
Then, at last, we will all understand each other.
THE THING INSIDE
S he and Reese had never talked about it, what their dead baby had looked like. They’d both seen it, something Kristina would forever regret, even though she couldn’t quite recall the image; it lurked, fuzzy and blurred, at the edge of memory. She remembered blood, lots of it. She remembered a dripping shape. She remembered the feel of Reese’s large, hot hand around hers and his screaming, as well as a foreign sound that had left her wondering why the doctors had let a tortured cat into the room.
Then she’d realized the sound had been coming from her own mouth.
They’d tried to discuss it, a couple of times, but the words had remained unspoken. Then, when she’d gotten pregnant again, that’d been the burial of any further attempt.
Now, as she sat in the passenger seat of their Grand Cherokee and watched the fleeting Texas landscape as they trundled toward Austin, she wondered what was truly ahead. During the earliest weeks of this second pregnancy she’d fallen into catastrophic depression, spending hours in what would have been their son’s bedroom, all painted robin’s egg and graced with spruce furniture and stuffed bunnies. It was then Reese had decided they needed a new environment, someplace in which they could both pack that horrifying undefined visual in a cardboard box and forget about it.
“You comfortable? You’re quiet,” he said.
“I’m fine.” She rested her hand on her protruding stomach. “We’re fine. This is just . . . very different.”
“Far cry from New York.” He reached over, set his hand on her knee. “No more dark skies. Well, once these fires clear.”
Despite the promise of sun, they hadn’t chosen Austin; it had chosen them. Reese had agreed to stop firefighting. His brother’s position in the state Fire Protection Office had secured him a desk job processing certifications, and as several thousand acres had been burning for months due to the drought, he was guaranteed overtime. Their new brick house wasn’t too far outside the city, in Bastrop, close enough to conveniences but isolated enough so Kristina would have peace. Everything had fallen into place so quickly, so cleanly, it’d felt perfect. But the dense gray smoke chunneling in the distance, the thick smell of hot tar, soot, and mesquite coming through the A/C vents, and the taste in her mouth—left from when they’d passed the carcass of a charred cow and she’d made him stop the car so that she could get sick under the relentless August sun�
�was changing her opinion.
She shifted in her seat. “Can we stop? I just feel like I could use . . . a cold drink.”
He eyed her.
“Like juice! Just juice.”
His gaze lingered before returning to the road. “Sure. Soon as we see someplace.”
A Mobil station sign glowed against the smoke from the distant fires, and she laughed at her own surprise—she’d expected some decrepit shack plastered with antelope skulls. See, she thought, this is gonna be fine.
Reese pulled into a slot next to the handicapped space.
She reached for her door handle.
“I’ll get it.” He whipped the keys from the ignition, climbed out and went around.
“I’m not crippled, you know.”
“Every little bit helps.” He held out his hand. She took it and stepped onto the pavement, noticing it felt soft.
The place was just like every other chain—fluorescent lighting, immaculate tiles, aisles rainbowed with Nutter Butters, Pringles, Oreos; the faint smell of burnt coffee and cherry cleaner.
Reese squeezed and released her hand. “I’m going to get the bathroom key. Do you need it?”
“No, but give me a minute.” She’d had no problems with incontinence during her last pregnancy; this time, it had started almost immediately.
He kissed her on the cheek. “Get me a root beer.”
She heard him talking to the cashier while she, not knowing what she wanted, headed toward the back of the store. She neared a long waist-high bin and stopped; inside, the Lone Star and Dos Equis beer cans on ice gleamed like rubies, emeralds, and topaz. She had never been a beer drinker, but on a day like today, one would’ve been a godsend.
She moved on, reaching the coolers and grabbing his root beer. She settled on a cranberry juice, made her way to the counter and rummaged through her satchel for some cash. When she looked up to hand her bills to a gangly, flannel-shirted kid behind the counter, what caught her eye was the giant, furry, mounted head of what looked to be a rabbit with antlers growing out of its skull.
Its malicious stare startled her.
“What is that?”
He looked surprised and stroked his immature excuse for a beard. “You never seen one?”
She smiled politely. “No, we’re new to the area. Moving to Bastrop.”
“Well, that’s a jackalope.” He tapped in a few numbers on the register, which emitted high-pitched beeps. “Cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope.”
She laughed but realized it was more out of nervousness than anything else. “Interesting. Nice sense of humor you’ve got down here.”
He frowned. “No, they’re real. My brother, he’s a big dude at UT at Austin, he studies ’em.”
The register drawer sprang open and she heard the schwick-schwick of her change scraping against the molded plastic.
He put the change in her hand. “See, they’re actually just these rabbits all infected with this virus, it’s like a papa-whatever, sorta the same shit that causes cervical cancer, and they all end up like that, all rabid and with horns growin’ outta their heads. They’re mean, they imitate people’s voices, and they get pretty big, too.”
She dropped the change in her wallet, anxious to get away from him and the thing. She was sure it was watching her.
He leaned over the counter and lowered his voice: “You know, some stupid town in Wyoming claims it’s the capital for jackalopes, but they’ve got nothing on us. The state park in Bastrop, plenty of places for jacks to live there. Wyoming only says that because what the fuck else they got? That skeleton volcano or something?”
Apparently, she thought, he’s never seen Close Encounters. “Devil’s Tower, you mean.”
“Yeah, right,” he said. “Devil’s Tower.”
She looked at the beast again and shuddered. Something was tugging at her, but she didn’t know what. Had she seen something like this on one of those shows, like the In Search Ofs she used to watch when she was a kid?
“Thanks.” She grabbed both drinks and started to the door. “I’ll be sure to steer clear of them.”
“They are real, you know,” Gangly Kid called after her. “They even got a Latin name. Things that aren’t real don’t get Latin names.” He twisted his body under the overhang where the cigarettes were stowed and pointed to a gold plaque on the mount. “Le-pus tem-pera-men-talis.”
“Thanks,” she repeated, because she didn’t know what else to say. Then she sat in the Jeep. She watched Reese come out of the bathroom, go inside, come back out again. When he climbed into the driver’s seat, she was grateful.
“Did that kid say anything to you in there?” she asked.
“No. Why? He say something to you?”
She cracked open his root beer, passed it to him, and filled him in on her encounter. “Did you see it?”
Reese shook his head and backed the Jeep out of the lot. “No.”
“It was gross. It was all . . . deformed.”
He stopped the car and looked at her, and she felt that familiar tension that signaled she’d gotten too close to the flame. There’d been a lot of those moments lately.
“Don’t,” he said at last. “Just don’t. Just a weird kid, that’s all.”
Then he jammed into first gear and they were moving again, but no matter how many more disturbing sights they passed—clouds of smoke, the occasional burnt animal—she couldn’t get the leer of that jackalope out of her mind.
~~**~~
Their new house was much as she’d recalled, brick-faced and large-windowed, but the grass was dead, and the once-lush mesquites loosed brittle leaves. The tangled branches reminded her of that . . . thing’s antlers, and it didn’t look as though the trees in the woods surrounding 2nd Avenue’s houseless cul-de-sac had fared much better.
“Home sweet home.” Reese busied himself with his keys. “Wait here. I’m going to open us up.”
She watched him approach their stained-glass front door and noticed something else: the potted bushes on the stoop were also dead.
She heard rustling and turned toward it: the cul-de-sac. There, at the edge of the woods, a cat-sized, brown something moved.
Her breath caught in her throat.
It turned to look at her. It was a jackrabbit. Just a normal jackrabbit, chewing thoughtfully. She chided herself. Of course there were going to be rabbits. The realtor had said there was lots of wildlife, and beyond the woods was a lake, and there was a nice state park—
The state park in Bastrop, plenty of places for jacks to live there.
She heard the thwuck of the front door. “We’re in!” Reese yelled.
Startled, the rabbit leapt into the woods.
Reese emerged, opening the back of the Jeep.
“How far are we from the state park, exactly?” She reached for a box marked Kitchen.
“Oh, no. You’re not carrying a damn thing.” He waved her away, hefted the box into his arms. “The park’s a few miles north. Why?”
“No reason.”
He eyed her with what she took to be mistrust.
She followed him into the house, but when the smell of varnish and fresh paint nearly overwhelmed her, she stopped.
Reese put the box on the counter. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I just—strong smell.” She took a deep breath. “It didn’t bother me when we saw the house.”
“’Cause you’re further along now. Come here.” He settled his arms around her. “It’s going to be different this time. You’ll see.”
She kissed him on the mouth, grateful for the taste of him, like root beer and pine. It’d seemed to her like months since they’d really enjoyed each other; after she’d gotten pregnant again the whole focus had been on being careful, taking it easy, keeping her calm, and, finally, moving. They leaned against each other in the quiet and then she heard, from somewhere, thump.
She pulled away from him. “What was that?”
He shrugged. “Acorn or something on t
he roof. House is only one floor, remember?”
They’d purposely chosen a one story; Reese hadn’t wanted her climbing stairs this time around.
Still, something didn’t seem right, and even though she was grateful she’d never have to worry again about getting the call that he’d been killed on the job, she wished he didn’t have to start work for at least a week so she could settle in before being alone all day . . .
It’s going to be different this time, like he said. Don’t you trust him?
“Now.” He rubbed her arms. “I’m starving. Don’t suppose anyone delivers subs out here.”
She laughed. “I don’t suppose anyone delivers decent subs out here. Maybe we should settle for barbecue.”
“Too spicy for you.”
“No,” she said. “I think I’m craving it, actually.”
She heard it again: thump.
She trusted him. She just wasn’t sure if she trusted herself.
~~**~~
It wasn’t as if there was nothing to do, but during the day Kristina still wished she weren’t alone. She emptied boxes, stowed towels, organized pots and pans, and decorated their bathroom with the Caribbean-themed ensemble populated by festive (frankly, creepy) stick figures that Reese had bought with cheer-up intentions.
The house was almost too open; there were so many windows that from any room she could see the lawn and surrounding woods. The Texas light was different from the light in New York, however. There, afternoons were soft gray, chick, or lavender; here, they were golden-olive-rust: if heat had a color, this was it. There was something stark about it, stark and unforgiving. Even the shadows were too bright.
They hadn’t brought much furniture, because Reese wanted new things, and she hoped they would buy them soon, because despite her unpacking, her footsteps still echoed. In a vain attempt to absorb sound, she left emptied boxes in the rooms instead of shuffling them to the garage. She’d just finished the few in their bedroom when she found one Reese had top-shelfed in their master walk-in. When she reached for it, she couldn’t quite grab it, and it crashed to the floor and broke open.
The Shadows Behind Page 19