This month, the dead bird on her front step was accompanied by a tooth. Renata gazed at tooth and bird both for long enough to miss her bus, then went inside to get a dustpan and brush. Paul was there when she returned, crouched over the dead bird. “Neighborhood cat’s back,” he said. “Thought we’d seen the last of it.”
“You say that every month.” Renata bent to sweep them up and away.
Paul got there first, picking up the tooth with a disgusted fascination. “What is this?”
“Tooth, I think.” She nudged the bird with the brush; the neck had been crushed but not bitten through. Renata held out the dustpan, and he laid the stained ivory on it, wiping his fingers on his pants. “I’ll take it to the bins around the side yard,” she said, whisking the lot away, then remembered Violet and Sean. “Can you take a little extra time before starting out, so they don’t ask about the bird?”
Paul chuckled. “If you really think I can get those two out the door that quick, you’ve got a wildly inflated opinion of my parenting skills.”
He leaned in for a quick kiss, which she absently returned. She palmed the tooth and rolled it over in her fingers, feeling the points worn down to nubs, the ragged edges where it had been pulled free. “I have to go visit my mother.”
The first months after were the worst. It was clear her mother wasn’t coming back, but the insurance company insisted that she wasn’t technically dead, so no payout, and the lawsuit against her office wouldn’t conclude for another four years (after all, there was no proof it was a workplace-related accident), so her father’s salary had to stretch farther than it was meant to go.
“Missy Chapman called me a mangy baby monster today,” she told her father over dinner (ramen noodles; she’d used to like ramen noodles).
Her father glanced up. “That’s terrible!” But he swallowed down his noodles and cleared his throat. “What sort of thing must she be going through, to think that that’s an appropriate thing to say to you?”
“Mm,” Renata said. She wanted to tell him that Missy Chapman didn’t go through things, that she didn’t need to go through anything to pick on Renata. But she didn’t say it, because her father was usually right, and when he wasn’t right he was kind, which was better. You couldn’t know what others were going through; you couldn’t know what drove them to be hurtful. Better to be the bigger person; better to extend empathy and understanding. To others, anyway.
Her father was a genuinely good man. There had been talk that it must have been something at home that caused it, some hidden ugliness that had come out so violently. But there hadn’t been anything. Or if there had, it had all been tied up in her mother, leaving him bereft and bewildered in equal measure.
At lights out, he hesitated in the doorway, the hall light turning him into a silhouette. “I’ve made an appointment for you,” he said. “You’ll like talking with her. She’s a therapist who specializes in loss.”
“We haven’t lost Mom.” Renata was fairly sure she knew where her mother was; there were only so many wild spaces around town, after all.
The shadow kept her from seeing his face clearly, but she knew the tight, pained expression it must bear. “I don’t think we’re getting her back,” he said, the sob coming out in the last couple of words.
He missed her, of course. He was a good man. But Renata, who wasn’t good enough to forgive Missy Chapman for her slights (that was what he called them, as if they were little wisps of smoke), wondered sometimes if she really did want her mother back. It was worse without her, but it was also easier in some ways, without her mother’s great knot of anxiety hovering over her. Pulling at her like gravity, hard and dense like the neutron stars on her father’s science shows.
It was easier without her. She hated that it was true.
Renata had had a thought, some years ago, that something like this would be coming, and so she’d laid some groundwork. She went first to her friend the veterinarian, picked up a few things that were technically legal for animal use, then to the camping store to get replacements for things that had weathered or rotted or just been superseded. She thought a long time about whether to bring the Tactical Outback Woodsman Knife that her sister-in-law had given her (“Paul says you love camping!”), but decided against it, bringing instead the serrated outdoor shovel, which had enough of an edge if it came to it.
Arranging childcare was a pain, as it always was even without her mother in the mix; Violet’s after-school program didn’t quite line up with Sean’s day care, and Paul had to reschedule several meetings to cover the gaps. But he did it, and didn’t complain; these visits were familiar enough, even if he didn’t know all the details. Her boss wasn’t happy, and even more so that she couldn’t say how long she’d be gone. Family emergency. No, she couldn’t get the paperwork. Yes, she knew it’d come out of her PTO. No, she wouldn’t reconsider.
And then it was just a matter of taking a rental car up to the trailhead, and from there into the foothills. This was part of why she lived where she did; she’d had offers for work in New York, Houston, Baltimore. None of which were close enough to real wilderness—the kind you could get lost in, the kind where a monster could hide.
In her sophomore year of high school they read Sylvia Plath in literature class, to the pointed yawns of the basketball team. Anthony was not on the basketball team; Anthony was new to the school, wore black velvet waistcoats over button-down shirts, and read “Lady Lazarus” with relish. “It’s about becoming a monster,” he said. “About a woman shedding all she was and becoming something beautiful and terrifying.”
Nobody spoke. Renata looked down at her clasped hands. “Oh, Renata would know all about that,” someone finally giggled. Missy Chapman.
“An interesting interpretation, Mr. Willis, but not entirely supported by the text,” the teacher cut in, too late. “Let’s look instead at ‘Daddy.’ How does the vampire metaphor in the last few stanzas change the poem?”
Anthony came to find her that afternoon on the way home. “Hey,” he said. He smelled like slightly stale bread, and Renata thought she might no longer prefer her bread to be fresh. “I heard about what happened. I’m sorry for bringing it up. I didn’t know”
Renata kept walking, her head down, hugging her books tight to her chest. “It’s okay,” she mumbled. But it wasn’t okay, and so after a few steps together in silence, she snapped out, “It wasn’t like that.”
“Like what?”
“Beautiful. Powerful. Anything like that.” She risked a glance at him.
He had very green eyes, and they widened, taking on an intensity she wasn’t sure what to think of other than she wanted it to continue. “What was it like, then?”
“Awful,” she managed, and walked faster.
But he kept walking with her, and he only asked for details about it every other week or so. And he liked her father, who thought he seemed a decent sort. And walking with someone was so much better than walking alone.
Even if he did start asking about her mother more and more often. “It’s not curiosity,” he told her. “It’s research. When you have a singular event like this, people usually dismiss it as something impossible, out of the ordinary, never to happen again.” He’d loaned her a book on epistemology and asked frequently what she thought of it. Renata didn’t yet have an answer, but it didn’t seem to bother him. “You have to challenge yourself.”
She didn’t want to go unchallenged—nothing grows in comfort, that was another Anthony saying—so one afternoon she changed their route so that it matched the one she’d taken to and from elementary school. When they reached the corner of Linden and Pierce Streets, she stopped, gazing at the tufts of sumac that separated them from the slope leading down to the highway. “What is it?” Anthony said, peering around. “Oh—oh,” he went on, bending to touch the gouges in the sidewalk. “This is where it happened.”
Renata nodded, not quite able to say it aloud. “I think those are just from roadwork, though,” she croaked.
“You’re minimizing it. Why do you always minimize it?” He hopped up, a quick roll back onto his heels and a jump upright beside her, too close, too close. “This is the closest thing you, I, anyone has come to an encounter with the numinous. The uncanny. The wild.” He rolled the last word around in his mouth in a way that made her shiver, and then shiver again for different reasons. “You can’t let your trauma hide this from the world. You have to share.”
The sentiment was so preschool—we have to share!—that she almost laughed. But she didn’t want to laugh at Anthony. She didn’t know what she wanted from Anthony now. She hunched over, hands clasped tight before her, while he circled her, telling her that she owed it to the world to tell him everything, she owed it to him, it wasn’t her experience alone, it couldn’t be, don’t be selfish. He put both hands on her shoulders and tried to get her to look him in the eye.
They both mistook the growl for noise from the highway, right up until a great paw swatted him aside. Too startled to even flinch, Renata stared as a misshapen form, all scales and fur and wound-pink hide, loomed over Anthony prone on the sidewalk and roared two inches from his face.
She looked just the same. The long, ridiculous neck, bristling with spines, the underslung jaw like an anglerfish’s, the eyes pupil-less and blank. The heavy paws like a bear’s, claws worn to nubs, the pockmarks as big as Renata’s fist all through her body, as if someone had taken an ice-cream scoop to her flesh. Even the lurching, uneven gait as she staggered back, still on all fours, was the same as when she had struggled out of her shredded clothes, the same as when she had turned to give Renata one last look.
As she did now, head ducked like a dog who expects a kick. She spat on the sidewalk, smoke rising up from the spittle, and backed up a pace.
“Mom.” Renata put out a hand. “Mommy, wait.”
Behind her mother, Anthony whimpered, trying to scramble away. Renata thought he might have peed himself. He’d hate her for that.
Her mother gave another hoarse, coughing growl, then hesitantly shuffled closer, till she could nudge Renata’s outstretched fingers with one scarred, drooling cheek. “Mom,” Renata said again, and something unknotted inside her.
She didn’t usually have to do much tracking. Every time she’d come up into the mountains, her mother had been curled up outside the tent the next morning. But this time, the ground outside her tent was empty.
It took her a couple of days to find the trail, eventually by stumbling upon the dead birds, each bludgeoned and then unsuccessfully gummed, the bodies picked apart by insects. From there she followed the broken branches and gouged bark, and the occasional pile of loose, feather-riddled scat. Eventually, higher up than she expected, she found an overhang near a stream, not enough to call a cave but enough to give some protection. The air from it smelled ammoniac and heavy. “Mom?” she called.
The answering whispery growl was enough to tell her she’d been right to bring everything.
“It’s pretty creepy,” Renata told her mother. “How you follow me like this.”
Her mother, pacing alongside her on the way back to her off-campus housing, gave a huff of agreement.
“I mean, it’s not that I don’t appreciate the protection, but I mean, give me some space, right?”
Another huff. She did have space, Renata reflected; her mother didn’t venture very far from wooded areas, except at night. Indoors, in public, all of that was her own space. But walking home, that was different. She’d see the shadow keeping pace with her, never quite hidden, and finally would just call her mother over to walk beside her.
“Most college kids’ moms just want them to call more often. Or they harass the professors about their grades. Don’t do that,” she added.
The huff was almost a laugh, as close as she’d ever come to one.
“Most moms don’t do this.” Renata slowed to a stop. Her mother turned, head first, then the rest of the body shuffling around to match. “Why don’t you talk?”
No answer.
“I’m pretty sure your mouth is set up for it. You don’t have any fangs in the way or anything. Or write something—you have those claws, you can scratch something on bark or even dirt. Or even, I don’t know, twenty questions. Yes-or-no.”
No answer, still. The undersea eyes blinked, one at a time.
“Why are you like this?” That came out as a whisper. Her mother looked down, her head craning toward the vicious scars pocking her flesh, the gaps that in places went all the way down to bone, some healed but new ones still oozing. “I hate you.”
Her growl was almost words, almost an answer, and Renata remembered the one time she’d dared to say the same thing before, seven-year-old Renata saying the unthinkably bad words. Her mother, still two years away from growing claws, had given a strangled laugh and said You’re not alone.
And as it had before, remorse flooded through her. “I’m sorry,” she said, and reached out to stroke the bristles along the spine. “I didn’t mean it.” But she had, and they both knew. Renata cast about for something to make the moment bearable or at least pass more quickly. “Hey,” she said, putting both hands on her mother’s neck. “Can you give me a piggyback ride?”
Her mother’s expression was first confused, then elated, like a mastiff promised a treat. She crouched low, and Renata climbed on unsteadily, locking her arms around where the neck joined the body. Her mother first put her forepaws under Renata’s ankles as if it really were a piggyback ride, then went back to all fours, carefully judging the weight on her back. She took a few hesitant steps, then more, trotting along the pavement. Renata laughed, sitting up a little, clasping the patchy ruff of her mother’s fur.
Her pace quickened to a lope, and with a bound, her mother dashed into the underbrush. Renata gave a whoop and held on tight. This was the only really wild part of campus, a park whose ownership was contested between college and town, along a creek with banks crawling with poison ivy and the occasional gap for stoners to smoke up or couples to neck or both. Her mother charged through it all, leaping over the stream, Renata laughing on her back.
They paused on a rock mid-stream, the half-moon brilliant and low above them. Renata threw back her head and gave a long howl—not even close to a wolf-howl, but a girl’s howl, exuberant and free. Her mother reared back, neck curled like a heraldic beast, and opened her own mouth.
The sound that emerged was strangled, uneven, and ludicrous, as out of place as a whoopie cushion after a fanfare. Her mother’s head drooped, then her forequarters, and she slumped to the ground.
Renata slid off and took the monstrous muzzle in her hands. “Mom?”
Her mother pulled away and spat, a great coughing retch. Acid smoked in a puddle, burning a hollow that would still be there every time Renata came to look for the rest of the year. She gave Renata a hangdog glance and turned away to disappear into the underbrush.
She hadn’t eaten; if the scat piles had hinted at that, the sunken skin tented over every bone confirmed it. Renata mixed up some oatmeal with protein powder and spooned some between the dry lips. Her mother ate five spoonfuls, then turned her head away with a sigh. “That’s right,” Renata said. “Not too much at once.” She unrolled one of her other packs and examined her supplies. Her talks with the vet had, eventually, circled back to the same question: how do I help a large, dying animal?
At least her mother understood that she was trying to help. She didn’t flinch, only closing her eyes as Renata gave her an injection. “Just morphine,” she told her mother. “Not much, but enough to ease some pain.” She thought about giving her the antibiotics as well, but ultimately packed up that vial untouched. “Thank you for the bird,” she said, scooting back against the overhang. Pitched next to it, her tent made an almost-decent shelter. “For all of the birds over the years.”
A soft huff. She’d have called it amused if it hadn’t been so exhausted.
“The kids are fine. Violet’s starting karate, and Sean wants to do everything she’s doing. Paul’s fine, too.” She smiled. “I’m okay too.”
Silence, just slow breathing, and the occasional digestive gurgle.
She thought of two of her coworkers, who had both had parents in hospice in the past year, of the things they’d said about trying to preserve their parents’ dignity, their humanity. With her mother, one was already long lost, the other not long to go.
Still. She was glad she’d come.
Her father’s death had had no dignity, but there was some comfort in that he hadn’t been conscious for most of it. It had been a series of medical mistakes adding up, a misdiagnosis followed by a well-meaning miscommunication followed by a procedure that went awry, followed by more and more. It had just been a confluence of events, the doctors had told her. There wasn’t any one particular thing that they could point to and say, if that had changed, he’d be alive.
Renata sat on one side of the desk, the cardiologist and specialists on the other. She stared at her tightly clasped hands.
Her father hadn’t wanted her to be angry. He would have said people make mistakes, extend them some grace. But she was angry at him too, for not getting checked earlier, for having a heart that gave out, for being dead.
But you couldn’t hate the dead.
Her hands gripped tighter. She couldn’t be angry at her father. She couldn’t be angry at the doctors, any one of them; they were all doing their best. She couldn’t be angry at his boss for keeping him working up till the end; he’d been too vital to the business and too willing to work. Who was left to hate? Who was safe to hate?
Her stomach was full of roiling heat. She was so stupid. If she’d just checked in on him more; if she’d been more on the ball she’d have caught the symptoms; if she were a better person she wouldn’t need to find someone to hate.
A sharp pain jolted through her forearm. Renata opened her eyes with a gasp and saw an uneven oval of fading red marks. Tooth marks, a carnivore’s bite, not enough to break the skin but close. She sat up and turned around in her chair, ignoring the glances between the doctors, knowing that her mother couldn’t be with them in the room but expecting to see her anyway, with her wide jaws and blunted teeth and the gaps in her own flesh —
This was a smaller bite, she realized. From a smaller mouth. One her size. She stared at the fading marks, knowing they couldn’t be real—did I just bite myself? she didn’t quite ask. There was fire in her gut, but it was burning holes in her, opening up acidic pits. She swallowed heat and bile and turned back to the desk, unclasping her hands. “I’d like to speak to a lawyer,” she said, and it only felt like fire coming out.
Two days of oatmeal and protein powder had helped, but not enough. Renata contemplated the morphine, but kept it to small doses for now. Her mother slept curled on her side, the bitemarks made more obvious now that the rest of her flesh was wasting away. Renata looked her over, washed what she could. There were fewer fresh bites. Becoming a monster hadn’t stopped her from savaging herself, but it had slowed a little.
On the third morning after finding her mother, Renata woke to a scuffling, whimpering sound. Her mother was prying at her own mouth with both forepaws, eyes scrunched tight with concentration and pain. The paws that weren’t quite bearlike had almost-opposable thumbs, but it still took both to get a grip on something small. “Mom?” she said, sitting up half out of the sleeping bag.
Her mother gave another grunt and jerked something free. She rolled over, carefully laid the tooth on Renata’s sleeping bag, then began worrying at another.
Renata picked up the tooth. It was a canine, worn to a lump. “Thank you,” she said softly, “but stop. Please. I don’t need them.”
Her mother’s eyes opened fully, wide and skeptical. She didn’t stop pulling.
“No—no, really. I can bite without them. I have my own.”
Again the stare, this time touched with what could have been horror, on the face of anything less horrifying.
Renata sighed and struggled the rest of the way out of her sleeping bag, coming to sit by her mother. “It’s not that I don’t want to bite,” she said, thinking of how she’d described it to therapists, even though that had had to be dressed up in metaphor. “But I save it, and I don’t bite just for being angry. That means I don’t bite where it’s not needed.” Not Paul, not Violet, not Sean. Not herself.
“When there’s fire here,” pressing under her sternum, the place where she felt her anger, “I save it. I wait till I need it.” And when it came out, it came out white-hot—as the hospital knew, as her clients’ opponents knew, as the man who’d tried to follow Violet home knew. “It doesn’t hurt me. I don’t let it.” And because of that, she didn’t feel it as often. She didn’t clamp herself down so tight that there was nowhere for her feelings to go except combustion.
Her mother stared at her, then took both paws out of her mouth. She shuffled forward again like a dog on her belly and laid her anglerfish jaw on her daughter’s leg. Renata stroked the bristly hide, feeling the unhealed gouges from claws now dull, the constant anxious tremors smoothing out into stillness. The lamp-like eyes closed, and her starveling ribs lifted and fell in a long, slow breath. Another, and another. No more after that.
When she returned to the trailhead, Renata dumped the remnants of her tent in the trash—let some cryptid hunter find the rest of it, a ripstop shroud for an impossible body. She kept a few of the nylon cords, taking time to braid them together and loop them around the worn-down tooth. She slipped the braid over her head and tucked the tooth against her skin, the only monstrous thing she needed.
