When Women Were Dragons(62)
“Wash up,” I said curtly. I gave Mr. Burrows a hard look. “Can you please help?” Mr. Burrows, unflappable as always, guided Beatrice toward the sink.
“But!” she said, not even attempting to complete the sentence.
“Alex, will you please listen,” Mrs. Gyzinska heaved behind me.
I didn’t know why I was so angry. I thought about my aunt standing in her dragon-destroyed house. I thought about how much I had wanted her to appear in my mother’s hospital room. Avenging her. Avenging us. An elemental force of rage and violence and righteous fury. My skin felt hot. My bones felt hot. The library was too hot.
“Get your things,” I said to Beatrice.
Mrs. Gyzinska composed herself. She folded her hands and rested them calmly on her bulbous belly and took a long breath. Even her calm seemed to infuriate me.
“This is your library, Alex dear. It always was and it always will be. I apologize for making you upset. I do think, however, that you might be interested in reading some of this research. I have it available, if you wish to glance through it. It was suppressed, you see? Shut down by the same entity that funded it. I can put you in touch with some of the scientists doing this work if you are interested. But what you need to understand is that what happened in America was not the first of such events. This is a well-known phenomenon. And it is important to note that they do not always stay gone.”
“Who doesn’t?” Beatrice said as she skipped over to Mrs. Gyzinska to give her a hug, as she always did.
“The dragons of course, darling.”
I felt, suddenly, pinned in place. Without breath. Without time or motion—like a butterfly stuck to a board with a needle through its thorax. What is anger, anyway? What does anger do? My mother was not an angry person. Or at least I don’t think she was. My aunt was so angry that it became too much for her own body. It destroyed her house and swallowed her husband and left a broken family behind. I didn’t want that, but I didn’t know what to do with my anger. I felt the world shake, and I felt my skin burn, and I let out a volcano of words that rattled my teeth as they came out.
I don’t remember what I said. Only that it was cruel. Only that it made poor Mr. Burrows go quite red and then say, “Language!” Only that it made Beatrice cry.
I grabbed Beatrice’s hand and left the library.
She didn’t speak to me the whole way home.
24.
Where did it come from, this anger? I wasn’t raised to be an angry person.
And yet.
As I walked home, my anger didn’t dissipate. It coiled inside me like a set spring, straining to release.
It was warm for early October, and the leaves were just starting to turn, splashes of candy red or deep gold shooting through the green. We walked by one house with a tree at the edge of its yard, heavy with apples, and a sign that said PLEASE PICK. We both ignored it, though we usually didn’t. Beatrice wouldn’t hold my hand. She walked a little bit ahead of me, her steps slow and stunned.
I waited for her to say something. Something accusatory. Something angry. Something reproachful. Anything at all. I remembered my mother’s face when she came down hard on us for stepping out of line. I remembered my mother’s face at the moment of the slap. When does fear become anger? When does anger become fear? Or were they the same?
“Beatrice?” I faltered. She quickened her steps. “Beatrice, I—”
Beatrice simply increased the distance between us. I didn’t really know what I wanted to say, anyway, so I just let the matter drop. My anger didn’t go away. It shifted and adjusted itself. It wound its way through my belly and spiraled around each of my bones.
We walked in silence the rest of the way home. Beatrice was a good girl. She kept her eyes on the ground. I did too, out of habit. And yet. I had to fight my gaze from inching upward, as though it was somehow magnetized to the sky.
Around midnight, long after Beatrice and I ate our dinner and I put her sullenly to bed, long after I heard the beginning of her nightlong snoring in the other room, I stood, slid my feet into my boots, hugged my coat onto my back, and stepped outside. I left a note for Beatrice on the entry table just in case. I locked the door behind me.
I’m ashamed to admit it wasn’t the first time I’d gone out by myself at night, leaving Beatrice on her own. As young as she was. What if she woke up? What if there was an intruder? What was I thinking? If I had children now, I would never do this in a million years. But I was a teenager, and thoughtless in the way teenagers are thoughtless, and impulsive in the way teenagers are impulsive. And restless. Ever since the beginning of school my restlessness had increased—it felt itchy, somehow, as though my skin didn’t fit right on my body anymore. The world was an uncomfortable piece of clothing with stiff fabric and harsh seams and an unrelenting tag. I wanted nothing more than to shrug the whole thing off, but replace it with what, I didn’t entirely know.
I turned on Spencer Street and walked toward the river. The town-side riverfront back then was a mixture of abandoned industry and undeveloped lowland scrub that had been slated to become industry someday. It was a waiting place, and quiet. On the opposite bank was a broad cranberry bog, punctuated every once in a while by small stands of tangled willow trees. In the summertime, the bog rang with the full-throated voices of frogs singing their lust and hope and yearning in the dark. Now, though, the bog was quiet, save for the hiss of wind through the marsh grasses, and the groan of willow limbs in the unrelenting breeze.