When Women Were Dragons(39)

“It looks like you thought of everything. Be sure to keep your ideas to yourself,” I said. And Beatrice skipped over to our yard.

And then, not really knowing why, I paused and turned. And looked again at the old lady’s yard. It smelled of herbs and weeds and wildflowers, of dirt and rotting wood and generations of cat urine. My eye fell on a gap in the wall—a section of the siding just under the kitchen window that had rotted off or fallen away in a storm. It looked as though the gap opened clear into the house, a window into the yawning darkness inside. A pair of eyes blinked in a gap in the siding, glowing in the dark. I tilted my head. The eyes blinked.

“Hey, kitty, kitty,” I said.

The cat—I assumed it was a cat—snorted. It made the wall shake a little bit.

I took a step forward. “Good kitty. Come say hi.” I took another step. The eyes blinked again. They were, I realized, much larger than a cat’s would be. But they must have belonged to a cat. Weren’t some cats simply much larger than usual? And didn’t all of their eyes glow?

I took another step forward. I felt the ground beneath my feet rumble a bit. Like purring. Or an engine. Or something else. “Suit yourself,” I said. And I turned and walked away, shutting the broken gate behind me.





19.

My mother learned that her cancer returned in March of my freshman year of high school. She didn’t tell us at first. She might have never told us, intending instead to simply slip away one day with no warning, but one evening in the middle of April, as she spooned roasted potatoes and canned peas onto our plates, she suddenly collapsed onto the floor, blood leaking from her mouth and nose. My father, who was home that evening, leaped to his feet with a strangled cry and was at her side in an instant. He scooped her up in his arms, whispering and crooning and shushing, as though he was her mother and not her husband.

“Oh, my dear,” he wept as he held her body close. I had never seen him speak to my mother this way. He gave a panicked groan as he lifted her up. “Oh, no. Oh, my darling. Why are you so light?” His voice was brittle and insubstantial, a thin husk of itself.

My mother’s head lolled from side to side as she struggled to stay conscious. My father held her tight, then released her to examine her face, then held her tight again, little moans of anguish erupting reflexively from his chest.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was back?” he murmured into her neck. His breath caught and he coughed. “Oh, god, why didn’t you say?”

Did my father love my mother? To this day I can’t say for sure. Most of the time, I don’t believe he did. But in this moment, when I try to pin it in my memory, when I try to observe it for long enough so I can write it down, I think he . . . yes. I think, in that moment, as he held her, as he carried her, he loved her deeply.

I stood there, dumbly, watching him. Beatrice came close and took my hand. We followed them as far as the doorway, and stopped when we reached the threshold, unable to move.

My father placed my mother into the passenger seat with a sense of tenderness and care that I had never seen from him before, and never saw again. He smoothed her hair and ran his hand along her cheek and kissed her forehead before closing the door. He patted his pockets, his face suddenly stricken with alarm. He turned to me where I stood in the doorway, his eyes wide and wild and pleading.

“Keys!” he shouted at me.

I scrambled back, sprinted inside, found the keys, and ran them out. My father was already in the driver’s seat, holding my mother’s hand. His eyes were red. He held his lips together in a pained, tight line. His breath stuttered and caught with each inhale.

“Alexandra,” he said. I didn’t bother correcting him. “Mind your . . .” He swallowed and shook his head. “Mind the little one. I don’t know how long this will take.” My mother pressed her fingers to her lips, which had paled to the color of birches. She blew me a kiss, and just doing so seemed to exhaust her—as though each breath was a tremendous effort. My hands were numb and my face was numb and the world felt numb. She was so sick, I realized with a tremendous jolt. How long had she been sick? How had I not seen it before? Why had no one told me?

“When are you coming home?” I managed. I looked at my mother, and not my father.

“Lock the house and make a plan for breakfast,” my father said. “It’s quite possible that you will be on your own for a bit.”

“Mama?” I said, my voice quaking. Or maybe the ground under my feet was quaking. Maybe the whole world shook. When I was a child, my mother disappeared. And the adults in my life didn’t explain, they didn’t soothe, they didn’t provide context to allow me to understand my situation. I was a child, you see? I was supposed to be well mannered and obedient. My eyes on the ground. I didn’t need to know anything. And they hoped I would forget. “Mama?” I said again. I reached into the car, past my father.

“I’ll be fine,” my mother said.

My father batted my hand away, started the car, and sped down the street.

I felt something creeping on my wrist. Looking down, I saw that the knot holding the leather cord around my wrist in place had unraveled. I stood there dumbly as it loosened, opened, and fell to the ground. I didn’t pick it up. Instead I looked down the street for my parents’ car, but it was gone.

Neither of my parents came home that night. Or the next. Five nights Beatrice and I were on our own.