Lovely Wild Read online

  There is a way to relieve the sting of this anxiety. She bends down to reach the box she pushed behind the pots and pans. She slips out a plastic-wrapped treat, her fingers fumbling so that it flies from her grip and lands on the floor. She’s on her hands and knees again, tearing the plastic with her teeth to gobble at the sweetness. Licking her fingers to get every crumb. Eating until her stomach clenches in protest and she claps a hand over her mouth to keep herself from vomiting.

  There’s nobody to see her acting this way. Crazy and wild. And though she doesn’t much believe in God, Mari sends up a prayer of gratitude for this chance to be alone. It’s harder to act normal when she’s with other people, and though her family might accept any number of eccentricities from her, none of them have seen her like this.

  She can’t let them. If they did, they wouldn’t love her any longer. How could they? When she is this unmotherly and unwifely creature? This wild and unlovable thing?

  She straightens up, wipes the crumbs from her face just as she hears, “Mama?”

  She turns, and there is her boy. Her dear, sweet boy. Mari clutches her fingers tight to her stomach, holding still the language that used to be the only one she used. “Yeah, honey?”

  “Is it dinnertime? I’m hungry.”

  “Oh. Yes. It’s dinnertime. Call your sister and Daddy.”

  Ethan does, but as they’re sitting down to the table to eat, something screams from the yard. It’s an eerie, cackling scream much the same as what had come out of the woods a few nights before, but this time, it ends in a squawk. Mari freezes with a pot of chili in her hands, halfway between the stove and the table. Kendra screams along. Ryan jumps up, knocking over his chair.

  The scream comes again, louder this time, along with the muffled squabbling of the chickens. Mari puts the chili back on the stove. “Something’s after the chickens.”

  They all run. Dirt kicks up under their feet as they run across the gravel driveway and toward the barn.

  Blood.

  There’s so much blood. It paints the earth in splatters of dark, not even red because it’s already soaked into the ground. Here and there, black puddles of it. And in the center...

  “Oh, no.” This is Ethan, small and sad. “Oh, no, the peacock.”

  Something might’ve been after the chickens, but whatever it was has killed the peacock. Its long tail is filthy with mud churned with blood. Its head, the feathery crown also thick with blood, is cocked at an odd angle that clearly shows the bird’s neck is broken. Its throat, in fact, is torn apart. Shredded.

  Kendra shudders and puts an arm around her brother, turning him away. “Don’t look.”

  Mari can’t not look. She has to see. She runs through the dirt of the barnyard and falls to her knees beside the peacock’s corpse. She doesn’t touch. She looks at it without turning her gaze away, even though the sight is enough to turn her stomach. Not because of the blood or the death, but because of how such a beautiful creature has been made so ugly with it.

  “Babe, get up. It’s dead. You can’t do anything for it.”

  Ryan’s right, of course. He so often is. He’s been Mari’s guidepost for so many years. Her rudder, steering her through the complicated and confusing seas of social intercourse. Yet when he bends to lift her up, Mari shakes him off.

  She remembers this, or something like it.

  The chickens ignore their fallen companion, pecking and scratching and clucking, and it’s not the chickens Mari remembers because she’s never forgotten them. Running behind them to catch them and the way they never squawked until she helped Gran hold them down on the block. How they ran and ran, blood spurting, when their heads were chopped off. Killing the chickens had been necessary to fill her always hungry belly.

  But the peacocks had served no use but beauty. They had, in fact, been something of a nuisance, fighting with the chickens for food and making a mess of Gran’s garden—when she’d been well enough to plant it, anyway. And the noise had always been scary and strange, never something Mari got used to. Still, she remembers them now, strutting with their feathers fanned out. The little ones in the spring. Another memory sifts to the surface.

  She remembers something like this, too, the lolling head and blood-coated feathers. She looks up at Ryan. “Fox.”

  “Huh? What? You’re kidding me.” He looks at the field beyond the yard automatically, as though he expects to see the fox there.

  Mari stands and gathers Ethan against her. Kendra’s backed off a few steps to tap furiously into her phone. “A fox killed the peacock. We’ll have to make sure the chickens are locked up at night.”

  “Shit.” Ryan scrubs at his face. “Are you sure?”

  She’s momentarily surprised by this, that he should turn to her as the expert. “It might’ve been a dog, but I haven’t seen any around here. Raccoons will kill chickens, but I think this was a fox.”

  “Why didn’t it eat it?” Kendra asks suddenly.

  Mari looks at her daughter. “I don’t know, Kiki. Maybe it got interrupted.”

  Ethan looks up from where he’s pressed his face to Mari’s belly. “Are some of the chickens gone? Maybe the fox ate them and wasn’t hungry enough to eat the peacock.”

  “I don’t know.” The same answer to a different question. Mari pushes her son’s hair from his face. “You could count them, but I don’t know how many there were before.”

  “Rosie will know,” he says. “I’m sad about the peacock.”

  Mari nods. “Me, too.”

  “That’s what made those screaming noises,” Kendra says, but her face is pale beneath the blush of summer sun.

  “I guess we should bury it.” Ryan sighs and looks as though this is the last task he’s interested in doing.

  “After dinner.” Mari tugs on Ethan’s sleeve. “We can do it after we eat.”

  “As if we could eat now. Gross,” Kendra says in a voice thick with scorn, though her eyes keep darting to the peacock’s corpse, and Mari has the idea her daughter’s not quite as unmoved as she’s trying to pretend.

  “Things die,” Mari says to all of them. “Sometimes they die naturally and sometimes they get killed. It happens. It’s sad, but that’s what foxes do. Kill things. And sometimes, it’s something pretty that we’d rather have alive. So we’ll eat dinner, and then we’ll bury the peacock.”

  Ryan stares. Kendra stares. Only Ethan nods as though what she said makes perfect sense. It’s only later, inside over bowls of chili and silence that Mari realizes out in the yard she’d been speaking aloud, yes—but she’d also been using the language of her childhood.

  She’d also been signing.

  THIRTY-TWO

  KENDRA HAD GONE to the top of the mountain again, searching for a cell signal. She’d waited until Dad and Ethan left for the Humane Society because, after the peacock got killed, she knew her dad would’ve told her she couldn’t leave the yard. Maybe her mom would’ve, too. But she needed to talk to Sammy, bad.

  Except Sammy didn’t answer her phone. Kendra got voice mail. Taking a deep breath, biting her lip, Kendra dialed Logan’s number. He didn’t answer, either. They were probably talking to each other, Kendra thought sullenly and thumbed Sammy a text before slipping the phone back into her pocket.

  She’d wait a few minutes to see if either of them answered her, but, restless, she didn’t want to sit while she did. She’d avoided the creepy crooked cabin, which meant staying in the trees instead of being in the clearing. Her feet crunched branches and twigs slapped her in the face as she pushed through, waiting without much hope for the vibration of a return call.

  The snap of branches behind her didn’t bother her the first time she heard it. But the second time, Kendra froze. Heart in her throat, she turned and saw nothing. She heard something, though.

  Breathing.

  Heavy, harsh. Another snap of twigs and shuffling like feet in the soft bed of leaves covering the ground. A low, muttered voice like a growl.

  “Go,” it