Fierce Little Thing Read online

  “It sounds like you have.”

  “I didn’t pay much attention at first. Billy and I … we’re public. Donations, boards.” He hastens over the boast in a way that’s practiced, as though it’s the requisite defense to everyone wanting what he has. “I figured it was someone a little obsessed.” If you look like Xavier, you take obsession for granted. “Or, you know, mentally ill.” He casts his eyes away.

  “What did the notes say?”

  “Threatening things. Nothing that scared me”—white male privilege rears its head in the implication that a string of threatening letters sent to one’s home wouldn’t produce fear, even when you’re married to a Black man—“but unpleasant enough that even Billy wanted me to go to the police.” His eyes dart back to my face. “Of course I didn’t.”

  So he’s still scared of me. “I don’t know what this has to do with me.”

  “You really should have a working phone.” His Adam’s apple rises, then falls. “The others got the notes, too.”

  Here they are, then: the others. I knew they’d show.

  “It didn’t occur to me they were getting them until Cornelia called. She was at one of her kids’ soccer games, hiding out in her minivan, absolutely hysterical. Started hyperventilating when she found out I’d gotten the same ones. She took the whole thing very personally. She said the last letter made her think whoever wrote the letters … knew.”

  Steady.

  “So I called Issy. And I texted her. And I called her again. Finally got her through a Facebook DM though she claims she never checks social media. Anyway, I had an old number. She’s not in Chicago anymore.”

  “Last I heard, she was in El Paso.”

  “El Paso was before Chicago.” Xavier’s the type who’s smug about calendars and holiday cards. “I finally convinced her to reach out to her old roommate in Chicago, which was a whole thing because he’d moved to Virginia. Anyway, turns out it was the same for her. Six letters, all from Maine.”

  “And what does Billy think? He sounded upset on the phone.”

  Xavier raises an eyebrow but doesn’t take the bait. “Ben got the letters, too. But of course Ben is almost as hard to reach as Issy. And you know better than anyone, he’s … he called me a drama queen. Kept insisting it was some kind of prank. Until…” Xavier’s gaze tips out the window, over my shoulder, like he’s hoping the story can end a different way. “Until he called me back. He was upset. Honestly, more upset than I think I’ve ever heard him since…” Xavier leans forward, presses his hands together. “He’s got his mom in an assisted-living facility up there, did you know that?”

  Sarah’s too young.

  He sees me care. “Well, Sarah went missing. For a night. Someone sprung her out of the nursing home and she wasn’t found until the next morning. Want to know where?” He hardly waits. “Wandering Bushrow Road. In her nightgown. When they found her, she said everything was going to be okay because he’s back.”

  “Who? Who’s back?”

  “You know,” he says. “You know.”

  8

  Philip’s piece of paper held directions after all: Turn right out of JimBob’s. After fifty feet, turn right again onto the unmarked gravel road (Bushrow Road). Follow Bushrow up and over the hill. As the second hill rises, look for the broken fencing. Move the brush off the driveway. Find your way in.

  The paper was illustrated in the margins, with sketches of Bushrow Road wending its way through the trees, and the hill rising out of the valley. Windows finally unrolled, the world rushed to meet us. What we saw felt remarkably the same as it was drawn. Not just the landscape itself, but the essence of it: the dappling of sun upon the branches, the unforgiving bracken where road met land, the gravel dust kicked up by our tires. I couldn’t imagine someone being able to tell that story with a simple pencil, nor taking the time to turn a list into a labor of love, but I had yet to meet Sarah.

  The Lincoln climbed the second hill until we spotted broken fencing. We idled at a dramatic pitch. Find your way in. Philip clambered out. He kicked at the undergrowth. The bottom of his longyi snagged a branch. Deciduous and evergreen trees pressed their branches toward us. A mosquito whined in the open window. I let it latch onto my forearm, then flattened it into a red stitch.

  Philip pulled at the bushes. He laughed. He cursed. We’d assumed a rocky coastline, maybe a funky motel, or a moody cabin set at the edge of a cliff. Xavier swiveled toward me, his breath a hot stink: “Whatever he’s got planned, it’s going to suck.”

  A knot of branches bigger than a man came away in Philip’s hands. He raised his fists in triumph. Blood dripped down one arm. It took ten minutes to clear a dirt track. The Lincoln revved over the berm of gravel where the driveway met the road. Branches squealed along its side. Xavier leaned toward the windshield, but only the unsteady gravel track, under a cathedral of flourishing green, lay ahead. The woods on either side were dense and deep. The air was cool. I wished I’d asked questions.

  “What the fuck kind of vacation is this?” Xavier said.

  “A vacation of the soul, my boy.”

  When we reached the base of the driveway, a broad-shouldered woman pushed open the screen door of the log building directly before us. She took two steps out the door. Brown curly hair cascaded over her shoulders, vining down her arms and past her waist. She had ample breasts that quivered, unbound, under her mustard-colored T-shirt. She pitched back her head and yodeled. Her voice ricocheted down the valley.

  The yodel called the people who made that place their home. I thought of Munchkinland. Mother loved the scene when Dorothy opens the door and the whole world becomes color, before she wants to get the hell out. The Munchkins creep out to look at the powerful girl who’s killed the Wicked Witch of the East and these strangers, emerging from the woods and its log cabins, took the same cautious approach toward our car.

  There were a couple dozen of them. Adults, mainly, wearing Goodwill T-shirts, except for one family who looked like they’d stepped right out of Little House on the Prairie: a small, tidy woman and a little girl of about six, both wearing long brown braids and starched white pinafores and old-fashioned ankle boots. The father wore black pants and suspenders and a wide-brimmed hat.

  The tall woman who’d spotted us plucked a naked toddler from the path as she moved our way. The kid put his hand down the neck of her shirt to fiddle her nipple. Philip leaned out the window and said, “Okay if I park here?” but instead of answering, she began to sing in a determined alto: “Oh I once had a horse and his name was Bill.” This melodic line gathered the others closer. They joined their voices to hers as they surrounded our car:

  When he ran he couldn’t stand still

  He ran away

  One day

  And also I ran with him

  It became a fast-paced song, the lyrics goofy. The people warmed to it, clapping along and laughing as they moved in a circle around us.

  Now in Frisco Bay there lives a whale

  She eats pork chops by the bale

  By the hogshead

  By the schooner

  By the hatbox and the pillbox

  Xavier had a hand over his mouth. He glanced at his father, waiting for the practical joke to end, but if this was a joke, Philip was in on it. He raised his hands toward the roof of the Lincoln like a man in church. All the while the strangers whirled, a dizzying array of exuberant noise and shimmying bodies, a cloud of sweat and dust rising over us, the voices strong and lush, if not always on key.

  She loves to laugh and when she smiles

  You just see teeth for miles and miles

  And tonsils

  And spareribs

  And things too fierce to mention

  A slender man of about forty, with a long, dark ponytail, broke through the crowd. He approached us as a mayor would. I was set away from him, in the backseat, but his unblinking eyes found me at once. Philip got out of the car. He offered his hand and the other man pulled his eyes away from mine. />
  The song was louder with Philip’s door open, verse after verse—“I once went up in a balloon so big, the people on earth they looked like a pig” … “Oh what would you do in a case like that, what would you do but stamp on your hat.” The lyrics didn’t make sense, but the people seemed euphoric to be singing them.

  The mayor pulled Philip into a bear hug. They embraced as the people reached the end of their song, raising their hands and whooping. A troop of black birds lifted off the trees.

  Over Philip’s shoulder, the man’s eyes, once again, found mine. He grinned, as though in simply seeing me, he had been paid a compliment. The others moved to greet Philip, shaking hands and patting his shoulder, as though he was a long-lost friend. The toddler shimmied down his mother and broke free. He ran to my open window. Xavier and I had an unspoken pact to stay in the car. But the child was too much like you to resist (those days, I found you in anything small—kittens, stones, acorns). The kid’s eyes and hair were darker, but the important parts were the same. I found myself flexing the door handle and stepping out into the northern light with all those eyes watching.

  “Hello.” I crouched down.

  The child offered a gummy smile. Without warning, he wrapped his hot hands around my shoulders. He smelled of piss and oatmeal and his mother’s armpits. He sunk his teeth into the flesh of my upper arm. “Tomas!” his mother said. He darted into the woods. No one went after him.

  “These are my children,” Philip said to the tall man, and to everyone else. “My son, Xavier.” Xavier got out of the car. He was scowling.

  Together, the group said, “Hello, Xavier.”

  “And Saskia,” said Philip.

  “Hello, Saskia,” they said in a single voice. Then, as though on some predetermined cue, the people broke apart, back to their labors—the old-fashioned family; the yodeling woman; everyone but the mayor.

  “Welcome home,” he said. His voice was melodic and precise, as though incapable of lying. “Welcome to Home.”

  “I still don’t know your name,” Philip replied. He sounded so timid.

  “I’m Abraham.” But Abraham wasn’t looking at Philip anymore. He was watching me. Looking into me—I had never understood that phrase until now. He came my way and rested his cool fingers on my wrist. “Why are you sad, Saskia?”

  “I’m not sad.” But I felt ashamed as soon as I said it.

  His eyes, in description, were plain: brown with a speckle of gold. A beard smudged his jawline. His nose had been broken; a crooked hitch lay in its bridge. There was nothing pretty about him. There was nothing to explain the fact that since spotting him, my eyes had been hungry.

  And then: a feather.

  A feather from the sky, a black feather, fringed in gold, floating down. A feather just like the one you gave me on the day you left. Abraham plucked it up. He held it out to me and said, “Well, look at that.”

  I began to weep.

  Xavier moved my way; it was the first time I’d cried since he’d become my brother. Abraham held up the hand that wasn’t touching mine and stopped him. He spoke quietly, only to me. “It’s all right to be sad here, Saskia. We will let you be sad. But you can also find joy. We ache for it so.”

  9

  “Abraham’s been dead more than twenty years,” I tell Xavier.

  “What if he isn’t?”

  “The body.” I am laughing as I prove him wrong. “They found his body in the forest, in case you forgot that salient fact. He’s dead, Xavier. Thank Goddess.” I mean the invocation to be a joke, conjured up from our mutual woo-woo past, but I can’t tell if he knows.

  He reaches into his canvas bag and hands over six white envelopes, each addressed in a clean, unlooped black scrawl. The postmark is Maine. The stamps are American flags.

  The one on top holds only two words: Hello again.

  Xavier has sizzled through adulthood with that pornographic mouth and just-fucked hair. It’s some boy is all it is, some boy who got the wrong idea, who happens to live in Maine. Probably a fan of Philip’s. I myself was recognized on East Sixth Street once—“You’re in that Philip Pierce painting! Twins!” Or maybe it’s someone interested in defunct cults. (But the others? What about the others? Why send them the letters, too? There must be a reasonable explanation, one I haven’t come to yet.)

  The second note reads: Did you miss me?

  But the third one catches. I missed you so.

  “I love it so,” Abraham would say of the land. “I need it so,” when there was a job he wanted done right. “I thought it so,” when quoting Gabby back to herself. “We ache for it so,” on the day we arrived.

  But then, people end sentences like that all the time. Don’t they?

  The fourth: I need you, in fact.

  That settles it; it’s not Abraham. He never needed us. We believed we needed him; that was the problem.

  Xavier’s eyes are on my hands. I struggle with the thin paper as I draw the fifth letter out: It’s time to come Home. Poor Xavier, seeking doom. I speak to him as I would a scared child. “So someone knows you lived at Home. It’s not a secret.”

  He waits for me to draw out the sixth letter. To unfold it. To say its words over the highboy and the lowboy, Grandmother’s grandfather clock, the twin Hepplewhite chairs, the dust suspended in the morning sun. But I find I can’t.

  He lifts the envelope from my lap. He reads what’s inside in his clear tenor: “All five of you. Or else.”

  10

  Our first evening at Home, we ate asparagus frittatas, cabbage soup, homemade sourdough crackers, wet rounds of goat cheese, and blueberry wine, so sour I could only handle a swallow. We ate in the Main Lodge, the log building from which the tall woman had emerged. Soft light gilded the hair of the men and women gathered there. To the east, in the valley below, lay a quiet lake. Crickets hushed.

  A massive fireplace, sporting andirons the size of Great Danes, was at one end of the long, open room, beside the humble screen door where the woman had spotted us. At the other end lay the kitchen, an ample collection of fridges and stoves and bags of onions and of potatoes, and, I’d soon discover, the occasional cured deer or moose leg, and an enormous farmhouse sink for washing dishes, where someone was always trapped like the Sisyphus of Daddy’s stories.

  Down the length of the lodge, from fireplace to kitchen, tables were arranged in two long lines with Homesteaders—for that’s what they called themselves—hunched over their bowls like French peasants. Xavier and I got separated in the buffet line. By the time I found a spot at the middle of the dining room, Philip had settled in before the fireplace, at Abraham’s right hand.

  “You forget something in your car?” The man asking plonked down beside me. I recognized him from our arrival: a carpet of dark hair escaped his holey T-shirt, down his arms and up his neck. “You keep looking that way.”

  “Trying to get my dad’s attention.” It was funny to call Philip that.

  “My advice is let go of those labels. ‘Dad,’ ‘Mommy,’ it’s all bullshit.” He shoved in a bite of frittata, closing his eyes to savor the taste. “You guys are some VIPs for sure. Haven’t eaten like this in months.”

  “You get plenty.” The yodeler settled in across from us, her long, curly hair now cinched on top of her head. She was tall, even at the table, taller than he was. “You being nice?” She frowned at him playfully, then stretched out her hand. “I’m Teresa. Jim’s wife.” Her grip was firm; this close-up, her biceps were positively chiseled. The crook of her elbow held up the sleeping head of the toddler who’d bitten me. He suckled from her purple nipple, eyes rolled back in his head. “You’ve already met Tomas.”

  An enormous, taxidermied head of a moose hung from the old-growth beam above us. A furred cobweb dangled from the moose’s nose. I was glad for that head; it offered a respite from the insistent gaze of Teresa’s nipples, one of which was leaking a growing circle on her shirt.

  “That’s Grimm,” Jim said, thumbing up toward the moose he
ad.

  “Did you shoot him?”

  Jim’s laugh startled me. “We’re not those kinds of assholes.”

  “Oh, but Jim’s definitely an asshole.” Teresa’s tone was affectionate. “Hey, I need soup.” She switched the kid to the other side. Her long-necked nipple gaped.

  “Saskia likes your tits, Teresa,” Jim said.

  “Fuck off.” She winked at me before looking down over herself. “They are magnificent, though, right? Only good thing my mother gave me.” She shook her empty bowl in Jim’s direction. “More soup, dude. More soup for your breast-feeding wife.”

  “Sarah will bust my balls if I go for seconds.”

  I hadn’t taken any soup. I picked up the brown, hand-thrown bowl. I moved away from them, down the line of tables and chairs, ariot with laughter and conversation. I joined the end of the buffet line again, feeling Grimm’s glassy gaze on the back of my head, willing myself not to turn to see if Jim, or Teresa’s breasts, were looking, too.

  The room was the color of unfiltered maple syrup: beadboard walls; creaky floorboards; and those long, rickety tables. There were pencil and ink drawings pinned up along the walls, sketches of the natural world that bore the same hand as the drawings on the map we’d used to find our way in. Stained photographs, hung in fits and starts, told the story of the place: it had been a girls’ camp once upon a time, when well-to-do families sent their white-frocked daughters north for wacky canoe races.

  The small woman dressed in the starched pinafore oversaw the buffet line. Physically, she was Teresa’s opposite: petite, contained. She was obviously the Sarah that Jim had referred to; the kitchen’s queen. How she had carried that giant vat of soup from the stove all by herself was a wonder. She nodded to each person as they passed the aluminum pot, which stunk of cabbage.

  Her little girl, in a calico dress and pressed pinafore, stood tucked in beside her. I was aware of the line moving on in front of me, but I couldn’t bring myself to care, not when that child had a constellation of freckles over the bridge of her nose. A child can be the whole world. The girl tipped her long lashes, as though I’d said something terribly funny, then lifted her face and offered a toothy grin. She stepped forward. I thought she might hug me. But instead she flipped me the bird. Her middle fingernail held a half-moon of dirt.