When We Were Animals(38)

This was my inheritance from my mother.

If I was truly out, as Blackhat Roy had said, why wasn’t I glad? And if I hadn’t fully gone breach, then what had caused me to blister myself with running?

And that was something else, something my brain burned to think on. If I was still as breachless as my mother’s blood had made me, then the night before—when I had stripped myself bare and woken in the melted snow at dawn—who was the girl who had done that? What was she driven by?

What excused her actions if those actions were not to be excused by instinct and biology or the horrible magic of this place?

*



Not everyone in our town acquiesced to the breaching so easily. It was difficult, sometimes, for parents to accept that their children could behave in such a way. Sometimes they even tried to delay the breaching or prevent it. There were urban myths about ways to keep your child from breaching. Giving them high doses of thiamine was one. Another was to make them sleep in a fully lighted room throughout their teenage years. For a while, before I was born, I even heard that some parents had begun to believe that if they kept their children shaved, completely hairless, the breaching would not set in. So for a period of five years or so, according to my father, there were a bunch of bald, eyebrowless teenagers walking around.

I was fascinated by the idea. I liked to close my eyes and picture it. And I wondered about these parents. What did they believe? That savagery was something you donned as though it were a pelt?

Other parents believed it was the town itself, our pinprick location under the moon, that was the cause of the breach. Sometimes parents would send their children away for the breach year to live with relatives in safe-sounding places such as Florida or Colorado or Arizona. And moving away did seem to work—insofar as the children did not see fit to run wild over the warm, sandy streets of Scottsdale. Sometimes, if they could afford it, the whole family would relocate and then return when the coast was clear.

So that worked—kind of. Except not really, because when they returned, the breachers seemed different, odd. It wasn’t just that they no longer belonged to the town—though there was that. It was something else. I remember studying Caroline Neary when she came back after a year of living with her aunt in San Francisco. It was her eyes. She seemed scared. Not of anything outside—but of something else. I think I knew what she was scared of. There was something trapped in her—something grown too big to fit in her body, something stretching her at the seams because it wanted to get out but couldn’t. She moved out of our town the minute she graduated from high school—and we all thought she would be better off for it. But then we heard the distressing news, just a few years later, that she had impaled herself on a picket fence by jumping out the second-story window of her pleasant suburban home in the middle of the day on a Saturday.

So I suppose whatever was trapped inside Caroline Neary eventually got out after all.

There were other parents who, when the breach was upon their children and they knew they couldn’t escape it, tried to keep it at least contained, usually with disastrous results.

When we were in the sixth grade, Polly and I had heard about Lionel Kirkpatrick, whose parents, unwilling yet to see their precious boy go breach, had locked him in the basement to keep him from running wild. Over the course of the night, Lionel had ravaged the space, trying to get out. It cost the Kirkpatricks ten thousand dollars in repairs, including a new water heater, because Lionel had somehow toppled the existing one and flooded the basement. In the morning, they found him asleep, curled on top of a pile of boxes, a castaway on an island in two feet of water.

Another thing, from just the previous year: Amy Litt had gone breach and had come to school one morning with bandages all over her fingers. She, unashamed, explained to us that it was like the Bible story of Noah. Her father had found her sleeping naked in the street one morning after breach. He was a righteous man, and he felt a curse had befallen him for having accidentally seen his own daughter without clothes. So the next night he had shut her in the basement, just as Lionel Kirkpatrick’s parents had done to their son. Except Amy Litt’s destruction was of a more self-?directed variety. All she had wanted was out. When her father had gone down to check on her in the morning, he found the concrete walls smeared with blood and his daughter huddled in the corner, shivering with pain. She had ripped all her fingernails out in trying to claw her way to freedom.

The Kirkpatricks restored their basement, and nine of Amy Litt’s nails eventually grew back—so these unfortunate occurrences, like most things, were reversible with time. But they served as admonitions to the parents of our town not to stand in the way of the natural course of events, no matter how ugly or shameful.

I know this now—and I raise my child to understand it as well. Some parents in our neighborhood do everything they can to keep their children away from violent images. And then, when something terrible happens, like murder or rape or genocide—well, then a conversation has to be had with these young innocents to explain that, yes, goodness is sometimes a fiction, like Santa Claus, and that humanity is, underneath all the cookie baking and song singing, a shameful and secret nastiness. Me, I’m going to raise my son differently. What he will be made to know is that there is violence in everything—even in goodness, if you’re passionate about it.

But he already knows that. It’s why he pulls hair, why he bites what he loves.