When Women Were Dragons(51)

No. No you cannot. It was a needle in my heart. I couldn’t explain it. I needed her. Beatrice was my sister. It was me and Beatrice alone in the world. My mother had a sister, and then her sister was gone. And she didn’t come back. And my mother, despite her husband and despite her children, died alone. Was I also going to be alone?

I shook the thought away. Beatrice was Beatrice and she would always be Beatrice. She and I were a family, and that was that. All of this would pass. I watched her run, her feet barely touching the grass. The evening sun hung low and blazed brightly around her, the light falling on her skin and making it glow—yellow, orange, gold. Her crinkly hair shimmered, a cloud of whisps and tangles floating above her head. She outstretched her arms, like wings.

I am a dragon, she wrote.

“Beatrice?” I called, my voice suddenly tight and panicking. “Beatrice!”

She stopped, pirouetted on one foot, and struck a pose with a grin.

I was shaking. And despite the heat, my skin was clammy and cold. “Come and eat, sweet Bea,” I said, forcing myself to relax. I laid our dinner out on the blanket.

She did, and the two of us ate our sandwiches while lying on our backs, staring up at the sky. We didn’t say anything. After a bit, Beatrice reached over, her fingers gently twisting one of the curls over my ears, winding my hair around her knuckles.

“All we have is each other,” she said. “Right, Alex?”

I wrapped my hand around hers and gave it a squeeze. “All we have is each other,” I said.

It was the only thing that was true.

Later, when I went to the park building to wash my hands, I saw a flyer tacked up to a light post. It had a picture of a dragon on it. It was a reproduction of an old drawing—like a medieval woodcut. The dragon had bat wings and a snakelike neck and a tail wrapped around a tower. THINK IT’S OVER? it said across the top. And at the bottom it said THINK AGAIN. And then, below that, in very small letters, it said THE WYVERN RESEARCH COLLECTIVE: WE KNOW WHAT THEY WON’T TELL YOU.

I stared at it for a long moment. I had heard of that organization before. But I couldn’t remember where.

“What’s that, Alex?” Beatrice called from the swings. Her little legs pumped back and forth, back and forth, glinting in the late evening light. The storm clouds were closer now, and I knew we should be going soon.

“Nothing, honey,” I called back. “Keep playing.”

I reached up, grabbed the flyer, and crumpled it in my hand.

I let it fall to the ground, and I didn’t look back.



The next day, as I made breakfast, and folded clothes, and mended clothes, and cleaned the apartment, and made lists for what Beatrice needed to start school, and what I needed to start school, and made endless lists of what we would need and how we would get through the day, I turned on the radio, just to distract myself for a little bit. Beatrice was still asleep. She snored, open-mouthed, in a tangle of blankets, her red hair streaking around her like flames. She was all I had. I loved her so much I felt my breath catch. I laid out her uniform and the socks that needed darning and the cardigans that needed mending as the radio switched to the news.

I stopped cold when the newscaster mentioned Saint Agnes.

“Firefighters were called to Saint Agnes Primary School yesterday, due to a buildup of gaseous substances in the pipes in the teachers’ lounge lavatory, which caused a small explosion that shattered a window. Two teachers, both Sisters, were slightly injured in the blast. They will both take early retirement rather than disrupt the new school year. The principal’s statement reads as follows, and I quote: ‘I hope this puts any and all unfounded rumors to rest. Several theorists and instigators have been attempting to enter the building to further their ridiculous assertions. If they return to school property, I shall alert the authorities. There is nothing to see—nothing strange—at Saint Agnes.’?”

It wasn’t Mr. Alphonse’s voice. It was the newscaster’s voice reading Mr. Alphonse’s words. But I could hear the principal’s bombastic yodel inside each sentence. Why, I wondered. And why had his face been so red in his office?

I shook my head. It didn’t do me any good to question anything. There was too much to do. School was starting soon. Beatrice needed seeing to. I had to get food on the table and homework done and somehow make plans for . . . I shook my head again. It was hard to think about the future. My future after graduation was a yawning space. What would happen to us? How could I continue to raise Beatrice while I continued my education? I knew I needed to have both, I knew that they both were necessary, but how it would work was a mystery. I had no context to even begin to imagine it. I had no information. It was a hole in the universe where the truth should be, and where my life would be.

And, frankly, I was afraid.

When I was a little girl, they told us to keep our eyes on the ground. They told us not to ask about the houses that burned. They told us to forget. And we were good children. We followed the rules.

And now I realize, there is a freedom in forgetting.

Or at least it is something that feels like freedom.

There is a freedom in not asking questions.

There is a freedom in being unburdened by unpleasant information.

And sometimes, a person has to hang on to whatever freedoms she can get.

At this point in the paper, I feel the time has come to make a confession: I was once a member of a long-secret and underground group of researchers, scientists, doctors, and librarians called the Wyvern Research Collective. The scientific work conducted by this group has remained, for legal reasons, cloistered from the rest of the scientific community. Our findings are discussed and reviewed in the shadows and thus are prevented from shedding light on vexing conundrums in other aspects of biology, reproductive science, physiology, and aeronautics. The silencing or obscuring of any aspect of nature—due to cultural taboo or fear or general squeamishness—harms science. I do not regret my work with this group, or the advances we made. I do regret that any research we disseminated had to be done in secret, and anonymously, which prevented our discoveries from finding their place among the larger conversations in the scientific community.