You scoot around so that you’re looking at the map from the same perspective as Keisha. “It’s north of Champlain, New York, just across the border. Here.” You point to a spot on the map, just west of Vermont.
“Okay,” Keisha says. “This is what we have to do.”
The new route will take an just an hour longer in the car. You’ll skirt underneath the Great Lakes, staying in the States, then head northeast up the shore of Lake Erie. You’ll traverse upstate New York. You’ll find a place, as close to the border as possible, to ditch the car. You’ll cross, staying in trees as much as you can, hoping no one sees you and calls the police on the US side or the Mounties on Canada’s side of the invisible line that divides the trees into separate countries. You’ll hope your cell phones still have reception and you’ll use GPS to navigate by foot to the old blue farmhouse, the place with the room of ghosts, the place you last saw your mother, in a bed of blood. You’ll be racing the moon’s rise. Once on foot, you’ll have to be fast. And you’ll have to be lucky.
Keisha takes a screenshot of the map, her face unreadable.
“You guys don’t have to cross with me,” you say, though you don’t want to go alone. “You can just take me to the border and wait for me there.”
Keisha shakes her head.
“Over the river and through the woods . . . ,” says Maggie, and she reaches over to take your hand, squeezes it.
The sun is already setting when, on Monday, Keisha navigates her Bug to the dead end of Glass Road. Your cycle has begun, and when you climb out of the car, you are not stiff or sore though you have been sitting for hours, your eyes are not tired though you have not slept.
You feel a buzz of pent-up energy, a calibration of your body to its environment. You smell the air, turn up your face to the sky.
It’s maybe thirty-three degrees. Snow and slush crunch beneath your feet. Night is coming; though the sky is awash in orange and purple and pink, in less than an hour the only light will be from a full moon.
Keisha locks the car; Maggie bends to retie her laces. You scan the tree line to the north. Over there, in those trees and beyond, is Canada, and your grandmother, and the wolf.
“Are you guys ready?”
“Yep,” says Keisha.
“Let’s go,” says Maggie.
There’s a big white house near the end of Glass Road, and maybe this will be the only piece of luck you get, but it’s a good piece—no one seems to be home. The windows are dark, and only the blackened eyes of the house witness the three of you duck between the horizontal slats of the fence and cut across the grassy field.
With each step you take toward the Canadian border, the sky grows darker. There’s a rustling in the grass that makes Maggie suck in her breath and jump closer to you, but you don’t flinch.
“It’s just a groundhog,” you tell her, and then you spy it. “There.”
Maggie’s gaze follows your hand, and she sees the animal half a second before it disappears into a hole. “How did you know what it was?”
It’s the sort of question you have stopped asking yourself. You don’t know how you know, only that you do know.
A wind blows from the north. You stop, you breathe it in. Rusted metal. Singed hair.
“We have to hurry,” you say, and you begin to run.
Wolf, Whistle
The thing is, everything cycles. Your body cycles each month, your uterine wall thickening, then sloughing off. The moon waxes to full, it wanes to new, it waxes once again. You are a hunter; your mother was not; before her, Mémé was. That is a cycle, too, and who knows how many generations back it reaches, the every-otherness of it, the cycle of hunter/not-hunter/hunter. The seasons cycle from cold to warm to cold; the trees cycle from waxy foliage to bare branches and back again.
And you have left the farmhouse, but here you are returning to it, though by a different path—not down the road to its front door as you came with your mother, but from behind, emerging from trees and cutting across a field, dipping between barbed wire fencing and then through another field, feeling your way to the place your personal history of blood began.
The farmhouse is worn and brittle in the moonlight. It is a miracle that you find it, or if not a miracle, then further proof of who you are when you bleed.
Keisha and Maggie do not question your lead; they fall into lockstep behind you, and when you look back once, you see they are holding hands. When at last you see the farmhouse, the moon is nearly risen. The air feels frozen. The moment feels frozen.
You approach the house, coming up from behind and emerging onto the driveway, fifty yards away from the door. There is a car—dirty from the long drive. The sight of it here makes your eyes sting with tears, but you blink them back, you stand still and listen, wait, smell, and feel the air with every inch of your body.
Then comes the roar, a sound that raises up the hair on the back of your neck and fills you deep with dread, but also with something else: fury.
The distance between you and the others doubles, then triples, as you sprint. They’re running, too, but they can’t possibly keep up, and your head is full of pounding blood and memories.
There are the shuttered windows. There are the sagging stairs. There is a light, glowing, from inside the front room. You take the steps by twos, you meet the half-open door with your shoulder, and you explode into the room.
There—there, thank God, there—is Mémé. She stands with her feet spread, a woodcutting ax hefted over her right shoulder. Your eyes follow the line of her sight; there, at the other end of the room, arms loose at his sides, is a man. Your father.
It is not true that you look only like your mother and your grandmother; you see yourself in this man’s scarred face—his nose, and the way his cheekbones jut, and the high arch of his forehead.
You hear, from inside your head, called up from memory, a long, high whistle . . . a warning.
Three things happen then:
First, Keisha and Maggie crash through the doorway behind you, slamming into your back.
Then, the man’s eyes begin to shiver, and his arms begin to shake, and his lips pull back from his teeth—no, his fangs—they sharpen and lengthen even as you watch, and his gray-streaked brown hair lengthens and spreads in a crest down his neck, and he hunches and his fingers splay into claws, and he shakes his head and his ears and muzzle lengthen, and in the last moment when there is still something human about him, before his clothes fall shredded to the floor, before his gray-streaked tail wags behind him, the wolf man turns to you, and grins.
The third thing that happens is that Mémé, who has not flinched as the man transformed to beast, hefts back the ax and throws.
Behind you, Maggie screams. The ax strikes the wolf’s shoulder; he’s thrown back against the piano, which makes a sick tinkle of not-music. But though he’s hit, he’s not done, not nearly, and as soon as he’s thrown back, he’s forward again, shaking away the ax with a spray of dark red blood, snarling and angry, and now Mémé’s hands are empty, and he’s leaping forward, his aim true, he’s in the air flying toward Mémé, and you will not lose another person in this house.
You scream as you attack, no time for weapons, no time for fear, no time for thoughts, and as the wolf lands on Mémé, as you hear the sick crunch of his teeth on bone, you are upon him, your own fingers hooked into rigid claws.
You’d like to make him suffer. You’d like to make him pay, as Mémé would have liked to, for what he did to your mother—both that night, while you hid in the ghost room, a terrified little girl, and what he did before that, when he was a wolf but still in sheep’s clothing.
And you remember. You remember when the three of you were in the little house, before the memory you thought was your first, that night that your mother snuck you away. In this memory, you were so young. You had a blankie that you’ve forgotten about entirely, but now you remember—it was red satin, trimmed in blue. You took it with you everywhere, and you would scream and scr
eam if it was missing, until your mother found it.
That night you’d been crying. Blankie was missing. It was missing, and you needed it to sleep. And your mother said shhh and she looked everywhere—under the couch, in the bathroom, between your little bed and the wall—everywhere she could think to look, but still, no Blankie. And then Mama grew frantic, too, and she begged you to be quiet, please, be quiet, Bisou, we’ll find Blankie in the morning, we will, we will, I promise, and you said, no, not tomorrow. Tonight, now.
You yelled that word—now—and you balled your fist and you stamped your foot. And you watched as Mama’s face lost its color, as her eyes grew white-rimmed and round.
You heard a whistle behind you, long and high, and you turned to see Papa, so tall you had to bend back your neck to see his face. And in his hand was Blankie—it must have been in his bed, in Mama’s bed, the one place she wouldn’t let you look, because Papa was sleeping and mustn’t be disturbed.
But he was awake now, and he smiled a sharp smile and held Blankie out to you, and you took it and wrapped it around your shoulders like a cape. And then he turned to Mama and his smile went away.
You went to your room. You sat on your bed. You pulled Blankie up over your head like a hood, and you screwed tight your eyes, and you pretended the sounds you heard were the sounds of the television, and not the muffled cries of your mother.
When Papa had fallen back to sleep, and Mama scooped you from your bed in the deepest velvet of night and cocooned you, wrapped in Blankie, in the back seat of the car, when she rolled the car down the street almost to the corner without turning the key, then made it growl to life, when she turned to look at you in the red glow of a traffic signal just before the freeway on-ramp, and she was somehow both mother and not-mother, the side of her face distorted by blood and the swelling of her jaw, you pulled the blanket up over your head once again and squeezed tight your eyes, and then the car began to move again, speeding onto the freeway and away, away, and that was when you began to forget.
You would like to make him suffer, for that night and all the nights that came before, for the raised bump in Mama’s pretty nose, for the way she stroked it as she watched out the front window, waiting for the moment she knew would come, and you would like to make him pay for the moment that did come. For the poems she wrote, and all the poems she would never write. But Mémé is beneath his beastly weight, and you are on his back, and his muzzle is in your hands. It is not mercy for the wolf but love for your grandmother that guides you to dig your fingers into the beast’s face. You feel the hot wetness of his nose or his mouth or his eye, and you are both wild with bloodlust and driven with precision as you gouge him, as you yank his head, hard and fast and certain, until the wolf is dead.
You scissor the wolf with your legs and you roll him off your grandmother, who is lying beneath him, too still, too quiet.
He is heavy, and for a moment you are trapped on your back beneath the bulk of him on the wood-planked floor of the old blue farmhouse. Maggie and Keisha run up, drop to their knees at Mémé’s side.
“Is she dead?” Maggie wails.
For a moment you are paralyzed beneath the weight of all that fur and muscle, and also by your own fear. Better not to know. Better not to see. Better buried here by the weight of so many things than seeing Mémé’s slack face, her blood-let body.
The animal above you shivers and transforms, and now you are beneath the naked, broken-necked body of your father, his legs and arms splayed across you, his head lolled back in the crook of your neck, and this you cannot bear, and you thrust him from you, twisting and pushing to emerge from the weight of him, the press of him, and his body slides away, becoming, on the floor, just the corpse of a man, a terrible man.
Maggie is petting the hair back away from Mémé’s face, and Keisha is kneeling at her side, looking for the source of all the blood. She moves Mémé’s right arm, the one that held the ax, which lies, now, sticky with spilled blood, halfway beneath the tall chair by the window where Mama used to sit and keep watch.
Mémé groans and moves, shaking her head and twitching her arm.
“Oh, Sybil!” Maggie cries, her relief at this proof of life redoubling her tears.
“It’s her arm,” Keisha says. She rips open Mémé’s sleeve from wrist to elbow, and you see a constellation of puncture wounds where the wolf’s fangs sank in, an odd looseness of a broken bone.
“We need to get her to a hospital,” Maggie says.
“No.” It’s Mémé, eyes still closed, bringing up her left hand to the back of her head, which must have hit the floor hard when she fell. “Not until after we take care of the body.”
Keisha and Maggie help Mémé sit up, propping her against the back of the couch.
There is a moment when you want to scream at Mémé—How could you leave me? How could you go?—but you force your pulse to slow, you force your throat to relax, you force your gaze to soften.
“Mémé,” you say in a whisper.
“Darling girl,” she replies, and her voice is tremulous. “I wanted to spare you this. I truly did. No one should have to kill her father, darling. I am so sorry.”
You shake your head, and your tears make the whole room sparkle as if there is magic here, as if this place, this terrible place, is full of wonder, too.
“You didn’t have to do this alone,” you say. “You aren’t alone.”
“I tried,” Mémé says. “but I couldn’t.”
You lean forward. You press your lips to her forehead. You close your eyes and breathe.
“You aren’t alone,” you whisper. “We aren’t alone.”
“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”
You settle back on your heels. Keisha is there, waiting, and she’s holding a dish towel and a dusty bottle of vodka that she must have found in the kitchen.
“Sorry, Sybil,” she says, handing you the bottle. “This is probably going to hurt.” She ties the dish towel above Mémé’s elbow to slow the flow of blood. You twist off the bottle’s cap and pour the vodka over Mémé’s wounds. She hisses but doesn’t cry out. Her left hand, which Maggie is holding, grips tight.
“None of the wounds look that deep, but we’ve got to splint it,” Keisha says. “Find something to use.”
You scan the room, looking for something to use as a splint. There is a small stack of books, the top one a hardcover. Adrienne Rich, the spine reads. Diving into the Wreck. Atop the stack is a small pyramid of stones—smooth, oblong, perfect for skipping.
You placed those stones on this stack of books. You remember.
“It’s too cold to go to the pond today,” Mama had said. “The lake is icy. We’ll have to wait for spring to skip stones again.”
You had been collecting stones before the last snow came, thick and heavy, a snow that would not melt, not for weeks. And so you’d taken the stones and built this pyramid—carefully, slowly, and full of pride when it did not topple.
It has waited here, all these years, this stack, these stones.
You disturb it now, scooping up the stones and setting them aside, and then you lift the book from the stack.
It’s poetry, of course. You flip it open and your eyes land on the end of a poem, these words:
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
You turn to the front of the book. There, in your grandmother’s script, is her own name, Sybil Martel.
This was the book your mother read, sitting next to the window, waiting for her death. Your grandmother’s book. How did your mother come to have it? Garland, the grandfather you never met, must have given it to her, he must have taken it when he left. Or perhaps it was happenstance that it was among the things in his car when he drove away. And now she is dead, and he is dead, and this story will die with them, you suppose, how this book came to be at the blue farmhouse, what your mother thought of the poems inside, how they may h
ave moved or formed her, how they might have given her the courage, at last, to leave your father and spirit you away. All of that, you will have to accept that it is among the stories you will never know the truth of.
Maybe this is why people make up fables and myths and fairy tales: to fill in gaps. To answer unanswerable questions. To shelter their fears, and their hopes as well. And to connect with one another in the only way there is, in sharing their story.
The book will make a fine splint.
Maggie has found a sheet upstairs—from the room of ghosts? You do not ask—and she is tearing it into strips. You take the book to Mémé and kneel beside her. She recognizes it, you can tell, and she smiles to see it, but she doesn’t ask questions. She accepts that the book is here, for whatever reason, in whatever way.
You fold it open at its center, and Keisha places Mémé’s broken arm on its pages, doing her best to be gentle. Mémé breathes deeply, in and out, and closes her eyes. Maggie brings over the long strips of fabric, and together the three of you tend to Mémé, wrapping each strip carefully but firmly around the book and her arm.
At last, you are done. Mémé opens her eyes. “Thank you,” she says. “Now. The body.”
We Are
We are, I am, you are, by cowardice or courage, the ones who found our way back to this scene. We are the ones who, under the goddess moon, lift the naked man from the floor and wrap him in a sheet.
We are the ones who carry him, together, sharing the burden of his weight, out of the house for a final time. He will never disturb this place again, and the ghosts wave good riddance as we bear him away.
We are the ones who take him to the pond.
We are the ones who fold back the sheet to expose his belly to the moon, and we are one the ones who use the sickle to slice him open.
We are the ones who fill his belly full of stones, each of us choosing and placing one, the heaviest we can fit, all of us working to wrap the sheet tight when we are done, tying it fast to secure the stones in place.
Red Hood Page 23