“What was the fight about?”
“It was . . . personal.”
Keisha isn’t satisfied. “Did he say something? Did he do something? Do you think he might be a wolf, too? Do you think they all might be wolves?”
“No,” you say quickly. “James isn’t a wolf. He couldn’t be.”
“He must have done something pretty bad to make you get out of the car. To get you to go through the woods alone.”
Keisha is persistent, always.
“It doesn’t matter.” You make your voice firm, your expression flat. You worry if, by not telling her why you left James that night in the car, she’ll harbor suspicions about him; but even so, this topic is a closed door. You want to make sure she knows that.
Keisha doesn’t know that. You know her well enough to suspect she doesn’t believe in closed doors.
But she lets it go, for now.
“Did you tell anyone else?”
You shake your head. “Who would believe me? Would you have believed me, if you hadn’t seen it for yourself?”
Keisha takes a minute, considering the question. “I don’t know. I mean, probably not. I tend not to believe things I can’t verify.” She tilts her head as she stares at you, evaluating. “You’re what they call a credible source. So I’d wonder: What motivation could you have for lying? If I couldn’t dig one up, then I’d consider the next most likely answer: that you simply believed that boys turn into wolves. I’d explore that possibility thoroughly before I considered accepting that boys actually turned into wolves. It’s definitely more likely that you were hallucinating or unstable in some way than . . .”
“Than what actually happened.”
She nods. “So, I guess that’s the problem, huh?”
“Yeah,” you say. “Now there’s another body in the woods. They’ll find Phillip and they’ll start asking questions.”
“Yes,” Keisha says. “Well, we’ll just have to make sure we have our story straight. And, Bisou, that means you’re going to have to trust me. Your grandmother will, too. I’m not an idiot, you know.”
“I know.” Keisha is one of the smartest people you have ever met.
“You’ll both have to trust me,” she says. “You and your grandmother.”
You consider this. Keisha is better than you at figuring stuff out; she is a clear thinker, methodical, smart. Two dead boys in the span of two months . . . maybe the cops were able to explain Tucker’s death as an accident, but a broken neck is probably different from a slashed throat.
“Wait here.” You leave Keisha by the fire and go into the kitchen.
Mémé has finished making the salad and is rinsing the cutting board and knife. The woman who told you an extraordinary story of death and wolves is gone; she looks, by all accounts, like a normal woman who has lived a normal life. That makes you wonder, what kinds of secrets might other people be carrying around? What histories? What fears? What complicities?
“Lunch is ready,” Mémé says. She wipes down the cutting board with a red striped cloth. “Will you set the table?”
You take three bowls and three plates from the cabinet, and three spoons, three forks, and three butter knives from the drawer, and three napkins from the basket on the countertop. “Mémé,” you begin, “the authorities are going to find Phillip’s body. They’re going to be asking questions.”
“Will you get the butter dish?”
You take the covered dish from the shelf near the stove and bring it to the table, set it next to the bread bowl.
“They’ll want to interview everyone who was at the party,” you continue. “That will include me and Keisha. And it’s pretty unlikely that no one drove by the whole time our cars were parked by the side of the road. And I left the headlights on—did I tell you that?—someone’s bound to remember passing our cars.”
“Water or tea?” Mémé asks.
“I don’t know. Water.” You take the pitcher Mémé fills to the table; some of it sloshes out, and your grandmother returns to the counter for a towel. “Keisha and I are going to have to have the same story.”
“Of course,” Mémé says. She brings three glasses to the table and sets one next to each plate.
“So maybe we should talk about it?”
The table is set. The soup tureen is between the bread bowl and the salad bowl. Lunch looks delicious. It smells delicious.
“Mémé,” you say, “Keisha is smart. Really smart.”
“I’m not much in the habit of sharing my secrets,” Mémé says. “It hasn’t . . . gone well for me.”
“Not sharing them hasn’t gone all that well for you, either, has it?” Your voice is sharp, and it cuts, you can tell, from the way Mémé stiffens, just for a moment. You try again, this time more gently. “Like it or not, Keisha’s part of this. She’s still here; she hasn’t run off yet.”
Mémé is still, then shakes her head. “I don’t like it.”
“Well,” you say, and your voice sharpens again, “it’s too late, anyway. Keisha was there, she saw. That’s just the way it is.”
There is a twitch of tightened muscle in Mémé’s jaw. Her knuckles are white as they grip the edge of the table. She closes her eyes. When she opens them, she turns to look at you. “For forty-three years, I bled. For forty-three years, I hunted. All that time, it was up to me, and me alone, to keep this place safe. I was not perfect. But I did my best, with what I had.”
You’re sure she’s going to tell you that you need to defer to her. That you need to follow her lead, trust her wisdom, stay on her path.
But she doesn’t.
“Now you bleed,” she says. “The burden is yours. For that, I am sorry. It’s a lonely life. You are not alone in the way I was. You have me. But the choice is yours, darling girl, and you alone must make it.”
“I love you,” you say.
This surprises her, if only for its suddenness, and her eyes widen, and then shine. “I love you, too, my dear one,” Mémé says. “You are my shining star.”
You go to her, and her arms are wide, and she folds you into them. You rest your head upon her shoulder and close your eyes, and you breathe in her cocoa butter, her patchouli, her Mémé-ness.
It’s a long time before you pull away, and even then, Mémé releases you with reluctance.
She wipes her face, one cheek and then the other. This is the first time you have seen her cry.
“I say we tell her everything. She’s smart, Mémé, and I can tell you that if Keisha doesn’t have answers, she’s going to keep asking questions until she does. And anyway, what else can we do?”
Mémé says, resigned, “I can’t think of any other options. We’ll have to trust her.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” It’s Keisha, from the kitchen doorway. “Anyway, I’m pretty clear already, I think, on the main parts. You’re like Bisou, aren’t you? You’re a hunter, too.”
In Sheep’s Clothing
Keisha has been busy since Tucker’s death—that quickly becomes obvious. Over lunch, Mémé sketches the outline of her story, the parts relevant to what’s happening, not going into all the details she shared with you about Garland and your mother. Keisha nods, listens, and eats two bowls of soup.
When Mémé tells Keisha about the first wolf she encountered at college, Keisha says, “Dennis Cartwright.”
Mémé’s eyes widen in surprise, an expression you don’t often see her wear. “How did you know that?”
“I’m a reporter,” Keisha says, a little too pleased with herself. “It’s what I do. After Tucker died, I started digging around in old newspapers at the library. Just to see if I could find anything similar having happened around here. I had to go a long way back, but there it was. Dennis Cartwright, found naked in the woods, with a broken neck. It seemed like an awfully odd coincidence. But sometimes life is just weirdly cyclical, and so I left Dennis Cartwright out of my article about Tucker because I wasn’t sure how it connected, or if it did at all.”
&nb
sp; Mémé looks at Keisha differently now. Appraising. Perhaps, even, approving. And when she returns to her story, she offers a bit more detail. She respects Keisha, you can tell.
“I have questions,” Keisha says after Mémé has finished, which almost makes you laugh. “In my research, I found that there had been a few men found in the woods, like Phillip and Tucker, but not many, and not for a long time. And you’re saying you’ve had to hunt wolves all your life.”
“There isn’t always a wolf,” Mémé says. “Sometimes years go by without a predator in the woods.”
“Yes, but even so, you must have killed more wolves than there were bodies of men in the woods.”
“Well,” Mémé says, “I knew that what I was doing was good. But there was no guarantee that everyone would see the situation as clearly.”
“You disposed of the bodies.”
Mémé nods.
“How many wolves?” you ask.
Mémé’s jaw clenches, like she doesn’t want to answer. At last, she does. “Dozens.”
“And no one ever caught you?”
“There was a girl, once. About twenty years ago. I know she saw my face in the moonlight. I’d tried to lead the wolf away—that was what I always did first, get the wolf away from its target, as far away as I could—then, kill. It was the safest for everyone. But this wolf didn’t want to leave his prey. I could tell that he wanted to deal with me and then go back to finish her off. So I had no choice but to fight him there, in front of her. When he was dead, she stepped forward, and we stood together and watched the wolf shiver back into human form. Then she said, ‘Thank you.’ She told me this wasn’t the first time the man had assaulted her, but the other times, though he’d done terrible things, he hadn’t become a wolf. ‘At least,’ she said, ‘he didn’t look like one.’ She was so grateful, and she looked me straight in my eyes, and then she embraced me.”
Mémé is quiet for a moment, remembering. “I told her to leave, and she did, promising she wouldn’t tell anyone what she’d seen.”
“Maybe she would have helped you, if you had asked,” Keisha says. “Maybe she could have been a friend.”
Mémé laughs softly. “I don’t know. Maybe. I didn’t think in those terms. It was after Garland, and I wasn’t looking for friends. I was focused on doing what had to be done.”
Mémé hasn’t told Keisha about Garland, but Keisha doesn’t ask. She gets the gist of it, probably, just from the expression on Mémé’s face, the fact that Mémé hadn’t recognized a potential friend or wanted one.
“It sounds lonely,” Keisha says, “hunting wolves. Being a hunter. I wonder if that’s the only way.”
“It was the only way I knew,” Mémé says brusquely—this is the second time she has had to explain her choices today, and you can tell that it pains her. “I never thought I could save everyone. There are too many terrible things that can happen, and not just because of wolves. For whatever reason, I could do this thing—the thing Bisou can do now. I could go into these woods, here in Washington. I could challenge a wolf. But I was not blind to the facts of the world. Wolves are not the whole danger, yes? Terrible things happen every day, all the time, all across the globe, to women and to girls. I could not stop them all from happening. I could barely stop a fraction of them from happening. Whatever I did, whatever power I had, it was just a drop. But it was my drop, do you see? It was not nothing. To the people I saved, to the wolves I killed—it was everything. And, for many years, it was my everything, as well.” She is quiet. And then, “I didn’t want anyone else to be in danger. I didn’t want any of it. I’m sure Bisou doesn’t either.”
You don’t. You don’t want it.
You wonder if they have found Phillip’s body yet.
“Do you think there are others?” Keisha asks. “Other hunters?”
“It’s possible,” Mémé says. “There could be, I suppose, any number of us. I haven’t ever looked. How would I go about such a task? Would I take out an advertisement in the classified ads, or start an online group? And even if I were to find another hunter, what then?”
“You could compare notes,” Keisha says. “Support each other.”
“If the others were anything like I am, they wouldn’t welcome such support,” Mémé says. “If they were anything like me, they would have also learned how dangerous it can be to speak of this aloud.”
“Even so,” Keisha pushes, “maybe there’s a way to teach what you know.” She has that earnest, enthusiastic tone again, that Keisha tone. “Maybe there could be more of you. More fighters.”
“It’s not that we need more wolf hunters,” you say. “It’s that we need men to stop becoming wolves.”
“What we need right now,” Mémé says, her voice a cautious warning, “is to get through these next few days. Heads down. Eyes up. The world is not kind to women who cry wolf,” she cautions. “It never has been.”
You look at Mémé’s face. You look at Keisha’s. One old; one young. One bare; one spectacled. And, both, fiercely determined.
At last, Keisha nods. “First things first,” she agrees. “Triage. Like in an emergency room. First, we stop the bleeding. Then, later—”
“First things first,” Mémé interrupts, and that is the end of the discussion.
By the time the evening news announces the discovery of Phillip Tang’s body, Keisha’s tire has been changed, James has been by to collect his car—“Aw, Bisou, you didn’t have to wash it!”—and you have your story straight.
“I had a flat,” Keisha says, as you run through it together one more time before she goes home. “I pulled over and checked it out, looked in my trunk for a spare, figured out I didn’t have a jack. I would have called for help, but my phone was dead, so I was waiting for it to charge enough to make a call.”
“That’s when I came by in James’s wagon,” you say. “We looked together at the tire and decided maybe it would just be better to go home to my place, since it looked like it was getting ready to rain.”
“I followed you home. We came inside and slept. This morning, your grandmother helped us reshape the rim in her garage and then taught us how to change a tire.”
“Because every girl should know how to take care of herself,” you add.
“Exactly. We hung out at your house all day, and then I headed home at . . .” Keisha checks the time on her phone. “At around eight o’clock. Just after hearing the news about Phillip from the news station your grandmother was watching.”
“Okay,” you say, and you follow Keisha out onto the porch. Her car is parked in the driveway, rim a little worse for the wear but not as bad as you’d thought it would be.
“Bisou,” Keisha says, her voice dropping a little, “I know your grandmother thinks the safest thing to do is to keep all of this to ourselves. And I know it’s her story, too. I get that. But things don’t change unless people change them.”
“I don’t know what you want us to do, Keisha.”
“I don’t either. But, just . . . think about it. Okay?”
This girl doesn’t know how to be chill. Not even a little. Maybe she’s right, that things could turn out okay if you told your story. But maybe she’s wrong. And she doesn’t have anything to lose, compared to you and Mémé. To get her to leave, you say, “Okay. But don’t do anything until you talk to me first.”
“Of course not,” Keisha says. Then, “And Bisou? Thank you.”
After Keisha has gone, you go to your room and shut the door. You sit on the edge of the bed; you pull open the drawer of the bedside table. You take out your mother’s poems, unfold them, and spread them across the quilt.
You read them through. They feel like sacred documents. You have always been so careful not to leave a mark on them, to refold them right along the crease. But now they are yours.
You stack the poems again, with the poem marked “i” on the top. You find a pencil in your drawer, then cast it aside and dig until you find a pen. You yank off the cap with your
teeth. You answer her, scrawling your words next to hers.
I
I know now
that mothers leave
But I know more
I know they try to stay
You read her poem, and then yours. You’re no poet—you don’t even know what makes something a poem instead of a bunch of sentences just randomly broken into different lines. But it’s better this way—answering her, taking the poems out of the drawer, not turning them into relics.
When you close your eyes, you see the farmhouse. You remember each room; the pond; the skipping stones.
“It’s totally a serial killer.” Lorraine is practically foaming with excitement.
“Both of them were naked.” Darcy takes a loud bite of her apple, and says, chewing, “Totally naked.”
“Do you want to hear something weird?”
Darcy leans in closer to Lorraine.
“I heard that Maggie used to have a thing with Phillip. A couple of years ago. Before high school. Like, they were each other’s first girlfriend and boyfriend. Isn’t that bizarre? That she’s, like, the common denominator?”
The lunchroom is abuzz with the news as if it’s the plotline from a TV show, or something they’ve read online, not like they’re talking about real people who actually went to this school.
You don’t have much of an appetite. You have a sandwich and an orange in front of you, and a little thermos of soup left over from the weekend, but mostly you’re just moving it around. Lorraine and Darcy are sitting at the table behind you, and you are doing your best to ignore them, reading the school paper on your phone. It’s hard, though. Their bloodthirsty glee is so gross.
There’s an article, of course, about Phillip’s death—Keisha’s written it, and you’re pretty impressed how dispassionate she managed to keep it.
There’s another letter to the editor, too.
A hundred years ago, by the time people were our age, they were paired up. That meant they didn’t have to worry about the sexual marketplace the way that young people do today. Thanks to the rise of feminism and the “sexual revolution,” so-called alpha males get their pick of the girls, and the rest of us are left out in the cold, no matter how smart or talented we are.
Red Hood Page 16