Red Hood

by Elana K. Arnold

  You are tired. So, so tired. More tired, perhaps, than you have ever been.

  Mémé pulls closed the garage door. You follow her into the kitchen. She fills the kettle and puts it to heat on the stove. You fill the pot with tea—Earl Grey, because you doubt either of you will sleep tonight anyway.

  “Bergamot,” Mémé says when she pours hot water over the leaves in the pot. “Excellent choice.”

  You can’t smile. The unasked, unanswered questions seem to form a haze between you, a scrim.

  You sit at the round wooden table, in the same chair you always sit in. Mémé unwraps a loaf of her bread from its blue checked cloth, cuts thick slices, and brings them to the table with butter and honey.

  You are, you realize, starving.

  You take a slice of the bread and slather it thick with butter, drizzle the honey across it, tear a bite with your teeth. You chew, swallow, and take a deep sip of the steaming mug of tea Mémé has poured for you. She sits, holding her cup, watching you.

  “It made me hungry, too,” she says. “The hunting.”

  She reaches into the pocket of her sweater, pulls out the sickle-moon necklace. She turns it over in her hands; it’s clean, the gore gone.

  Then she reaches across the table and, for the second time, gives it to you.

  You take it again. You loop it back around your neck. You tuck it beneath your T-shirt.

  And then your eyes fill with tears, your hands begin to tremble, and you cry.

  “Oh, Bisou,” Mémé says, and the deep sadness in her voice ratchets up your own emotions, and you set down the bread and put your elbows on the table, your head in your hands, and you cry and cry and cry.

  Mémé moves to the seat next to you, and she pulls you close, pulls you to her chest, tucks your head beneath her chin, and she holds you tight as you tremble. She holds you and rocks you and you are a child again, just arrived at Mémé’s house, and behind your eyes is a wash of red and death. There is Phillip’s body, and the wolf he was, and the pewter wolf, and Mama, too, with her throat torn, asleep forever in her blood-soaked bed.

  “I am sorry,” Mémé says, arms tight, rocking you. “I am so, so sorry.”

  Your tea is cold before you have finished with tears. You wipe your face with a cloth napkin. Mémé dumps your tea in the sink and pours you a fresh cup, pressing it into your hands.

  “Drink,” she says, and you do, though the tea is black and bitter.

  Finally, you are able to ask the question you have wanted to ask for a month, since the night of the pewter wolf. “Mémé,” you say, “what is happening?”

  She sighs. “I should have prepared you, I suppose, but I hoped—I thought perhaps—that it would not happen to you. Why should it? It never happened to your mother. Though other things did.”

  “What never happened?”

  “This,” Mémé says, waving her hand toward the garage, and, you suppose, toward the bloodied rags, the ashes of your burned clothes, James’s car, the woods beyond, the woods everywhere.

  “But . . . it happened to you?”

  “Indeed it did.” Mémé looks beyond you, her hands encircling her cup. You see some of yourself in the set of her eyes, the shape of her nose. You have only vague memories of your mother’s face, and only of the very end of her life, when you had been together in the old, empty farmhouse, in the snow. But Mémé, it seems, has looked the same as far back as you can remember, to that terrible day when she came to you, to Mama’s bloody bed.

  Her hair is steel gray now, with shots of white; then, it had been streaked brown and gray, but other than its color, it is still the same, long and smooth in a thick braid. Her face is lined, the skin looser around her jaw than it must have been that day. But something about her has always seemed unchanging. Mémé is reliable in her steadfastness; always she has baked bread on the same two days every week. Always she drinks tea in the morning and late in the afternoon. Always she has worn pants—corduroys, jeans—always she has been plain-faced and keen-eyed.

  And now you are forced to shift your perception of her. It is as if you have always seen her from one angle, and now she has turned, rotated, and you are confronted with another facet. Mémé, it seems, is a killer, too. A killer, like you.

  Her eyes return to you, from whatever—from whenever—she had been. Her eyes, green-gray and serious, stare into yours.

  Then, “It is far past the time I should have told you,” she says. And Mémé begins.

  II

  What Sybil Says

  Who’s Afraid?

  All right, my child. All right.

  I have spent many nights—many, many nights—wondering if I would ever tell this story. To be true, I hoped I never would. I hoped, dear one, that you would not need to hear it. For this is not a story for just anyone, you know. This is not a story most ears could hear, not a tale most girls would believe. But you will believe it. You will, because it is already your story. I am just filling in the blanks for you.

  I could not know for certain if we would share this story. I suspected, of course, when I heard about the first boy, the night of your dance—but you did not confide in me. Oh, I don’t blame you for that, not at all—it is the same as I would have done. I thought, maybe it is someone else out there in the woods. Maybe it isn’t my girl, my Bisou.

  But maybe it was you. I couldn’t know, not without asking—and that is not a question one asks. So I gave you the blade, and I waited, and now I know.

  I am getting ahead of myself. It’s been so long, you see, since I spoke of any of these things, though I’ve often wondered . . . all right. I will start at the beginning, my love.

  I was my mother’s second child. First came my brother, John. When he was three years old, I was born, but not into a happy home. Not a healthy home. Our home was sick, darling. It was sick and dark and by the time I was five years old, my mother was dead, my father, disappeared.

  My brother John and I—we were just eight and five—were sent to live with Mother’s aunt Gennie and her husband, Frank, on their farm outside Montreal. It was a fine place to grow up, I suppose—there were sheep all the year round and lambs each spring. There was blood, too, each winter, when the lambs went to slaughter, and sheep milk to drink, white as snow, until the next rutting season.

  Farm life, dear one, is beautiful and terrible all mixed together. Much like life off the farm, I suppose.

  I lived on that farm for a dozen years, mostly happy. I was never really very close to any of them—not my brother, nor Aunt Gennie or her husband, Frank, though they were kind to us, and I think, looking back, that they must have hoped that John and I would become, with time, the children they themselves were unable to bear.

  I was a disappointment, I know that. John, though, did grow close to them. He was good boy, a loyal boy, and the farm was a good fit for him. He never had the urge to leave, and after he finished school, he stayed right there on that farm for the rest of his days, even after Frank’s heart gave out, even after Gennie was gone, he stayed on that farm until he died, right there on the farm, in his bed, they told me, in an upstairs room at the end of the hall.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself, dear girl.

  Frank stayed on the farm. I did not. I didn’t fit there. At school, I did my work well enough, but always felt as if I was going through the motions, nothing more. And I know I made Gennie . . . uncomfortable. I made her sad.

  They didn’t neglect me. They did not. They did the best they could, with what they had. For John, that was enough. He was an easy child to love. He remembered our parents much more clearly than I did, but even so, Mother’s death and Father’s disappearance didn’t do to him what they did to me, I suppose.

  This is what John was like: He was the kind of boy who would rejoice over the birth of the lambs each spring, and cry over their slaughter each winter, and hum over the lamb chops on his plate that same night. He was a boy who took exactly what life gave him.

  I suppose that is a goo
d kind of a child for a farm, and that kind of boy grows into a good farmer. I was not like that; I was secretive, often hostile. I was brittle, and angry, and solitary even when I most longed for connection. I refused to eat the meat my aunt and uncle provided. I would not drink the milk the mother sheep gave.

  That—my diet, my refusal to eat such things—was why I didn’t get my monthly cycle the way other girls did. At least, that was Gennie’s theory. For even after all the other girls at school had begun to bleed, still I was dry, and I stayed dry all through high school.

  When I was accepted to the university here in Seattle, I think we were all relieved. The scholarship meant that Gennie and Frank wouldn’t have to support me, and it meant I would not be beholden to them more than I already was.

  Don’t misunderstand me. I was grateful to them, truly I was. They had taken me in, they had sheltered and fed me the best they could, they had tried to love me, though perhaps that had proven to be too great a hurdle. No matter—they loved John, and he loved them, and I, eighteen, could leave them all behind with a clear conscience and start a life for myself.

  So I boarded a plane—the first time I’d ever left the ground—in the fall of 1976, landing not far from where I had been born, not far from where you and I live today. But I returned to the region with no real memories of it, having been so young when John and I moved away. I unpacked my few things into a dorm room, I began my classes, I lived modestly and enjoyed myself more than I ever had before.

  Here, my work made sense. It was work mostly of my choosing, in areas that interested me—physics and philosophy and poetry. It was in my first poetry course, you know—didn’t you know?—that I met Garland. Your grandfather.

  But that was later.

  Those first few weeks at university were the best of my life. If there was an Eden, I had found it, I was certain. But Eden didn’t last. It never does. Not more than a month into the school year, something terrible happened. I didn’t know the girl—she was an upperclassman, a junior, some sort of science major. The obituary they ran said she had planned to teach after graduation.

  But of course, she wouldn’t get to do that. They found her in the woods not far from campus.

  Before she was even in the ground, there were whispers about how she wasn’t a very good girl—not that she deserved what happened to her, of course, no one was saying that, but that if she hadn’t been out so late, way past curfew, and if she hadn’t been known to be so free and loose with boys, with men, then she would have been perfectly safe in her own bed that night.

  I was sorry to hear about what had happened, of course, but I hadn’t known the girl and it seemed like a freak event, to be honest. And I was busy; aside from classes, I had finally begun to make friends, real friends, for the first time.

  My closest friend was my roommate. Laura. She was a local girl, the first in her family to go to college. And she was absolutely darling—these enormous dark eyes, the sweetest smile, those curls. And smart. Smarter than anyone I’d ever met. Smarter than me, that’s certain. Smart, charming, funny—and somehow, she wanted to be my friend! Me, who’d never felt close to . . . well, anyone, I suppose, not a single soul, since Mother died.

  Maybe it was sharing a room with Laura that finally started my cycle. They say that can happen, don’t they, that women who live together bleed together? Well, it happened, much to my shock. Honestly, I had stopped expecting it to ever come and then, in November, just before Thanksgiving, there it was.

  Laura was so kind about it. I didn’t have any pads, naturally, and so I had to ask her for help. “You can have all the pads you want,” she told me, “but if you want my advice, go straight to tampons.” She told me that her mother had forbidden her to use tampons at home—“They’ll take your virginity,” her mother had told her—and Laura hadn’t had the heart to confess that that job had already been done by her junior high school boyfriend!

  In any case, she gave me what I needed, and she didn’t laugh at me for being so late. She said I was lucky, even, for managing to put it off this long, as if I had any control in the matter.

  So you can imagine how I felt later that same night when I woke up to moonlight pouring through our bare window, flooding Laura’s still-made, empty bed. She had gone to a party to meet a boy, someone she used to date in high school. She’d been excited, and a little nervous, when she’d been getting ready to go out. Laura went out a lot, but she never stayed out this late. And she always came home. There was something wrong. I knew it. I could feel it, and every part of me itched with it. It was almost as if I could smell the trouble. It was coming, I was sure, from the woods.

  Our dorm room was on the ground floor, and it was easy enough to open the window, to climb outside. It was a dry night, and I remember how cold it was—my breath huffed a cloud in front of me as I crossed the campus, making my way toward the trees.

  When had I ever been this aware of the world around me? Never. There had been a small fire on our campus several weeks before. Nothing major—an old outbuilding had caught fire. A prank, maybe, by drunk students? No one knew. The structure had been unimportant, the incident largely forgotten. I hadn’t given it a thought since the day after it had burned. But this night, creeping across campus under the wide, white moon, I smelled the char of burned wood. What’s more, trees that dogs had visited seemed to glow with the scent of their urine. I passed an overfull trash can and smelled the sticky sweetness of an unfinished soda stuffed inside it, among the rot.

  At the edge of the forest, it was clear to me that I wasn’t alone. Night birds, skittering rats and skunks—the woods were full of life. Most of it felt innocuous, but there was more . . . there was something terrible out there, too.

  I felt pulled toward it as if by a hook in my chest, and as I went deeper into the forest, the canopy of trees blocked out the moon.

  My hands clenched in empty fists; my heart thudded into my chest.

  And then I heard a howl, a triumphant, screaming sound, and I began to run.

  The Wolf Behowls the Moon.

  —A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT’S DREAM

  As I ran, the hook in my chest pulled tighter, as if the line that pulled me reeled in. And though it was dark, and though I did not know the path I took, I did not stumble. I did not fall.

  I ran, my throat thick with fear. And then I heard a scream, and then I heard it end. I knew it was Laura, and I knew I was too late to save her.

  A wolf hunched over her, its pelt as white as moonlight. Its hips shuddered as it feasted on her throat, as it tore her breast.

  I smelled the iron of her blood. I smelled the heat of the wolf’s breath. And then it turned its head toward where I stood, underneath a tall fir tree, and it pinned me with its eyes—blue, mean, smart.

  And when it turned back to its feast as if I was of no consequence, no concern, my fear shifted to anger. I stormed toward the wolf, I screamed as I ran, but then it was off, so fast, and though I chased it, though I ran faster and harder than I ever had, it disappeared.

  There was nothing to do but return to Laura’s body, and pick her up, and carry her home.

  A girl in my dorm heard me calling from outside, and she turned on the lights to find me standing with Laura in my arms. She screamed and woke up the others, and someone called an ambulance, and someone called the police, and then we were swarmed by men—police officers and emergency responders. Someone must have called the dean because soon he was there, too, in striped pajamas and a dark blue robe.

  They took Laura to the hospital, for an autopsy, I supposed, as no one there could save her. And they took me to the police station, still in blood-soaked clothes.

  At one point, Laura’s family came in—her father, mother, a redheaded little boy who was maybe ten years old. They were shuttled right past me, into a room with a closed door. The boy looked at me until the door was shut, and I couldn’t help but feel that I had failed him. That, somehow, I had failed them all.

  The officers’ questio
ns became an interrogation.

  Why hadn’t Laura been in her bed?

  I didn’t know.

  Why had I woken in the night?

  I couldn’t recall . . . the moonlight, perhaps?

  How had I found her there, in the forest?

  I heard her scream.

  But why had I gone in that direction? How had I known which way to go?

  I didn’t know. Maybe because another girl had been found dead there just a month before?

  It was a white wolf? With blue eyes? That sounds strange.

  Yes, I told them. It was strange.

  The questions carried through the night, and finally someone thought to offer me different clothes, though all they had were men’s sweatpants and a worn shirt, which I changed into. My bloodstained clothes disappeared in a plastic bag and were taken—where? A lab where the blood would be tested? A garbage can? An incinerator?

  They returned me to campus late the next morning, near to noon. By then I had bled through the tampon I was wearing, too embarrassed to ask the all-male police force for sanitary supplies.

  There were two more rounds of interrogation in the days that followed, and a write-up both in the student paper and the city press. There were looks from other students; there were questions unasked in their eyes and on their screwed-tight lips.

  Then the rumors began: Laura, who had seemed to be such a good girl, was actually not so good after all, people began to say. Two boys from WSU told a reporter that they had seen Laura the weekend before, drunker than any girl should allow herself to get, at a mixer. She was flirting outrageously with all the guys, and the skirt she was wearing . . . well, it didn’t leave a lot to the imagination. A girl who had been in one of Laura’s classes said that sometimes she’d show up late to their study sessions, wearing sunglasses inside, probably hungover. A teacher from Laura’s high school said that Laura was one of the most talented students he’d worked with in his entire career, but, he said, there was “something about her.” The kind of girl who was asking for trouble.