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The sun danced across the water, almost blinding Miriam with its brightness. The horizon looked different now. Full of promise, still, but also infinitely menacing. Her legs dangled off the end of the pier, far above the crashing waves. It wasn’t often that she took the time to reflect, which was fine with her: she found it tiresome.
She heard Tanner coming before he said anything, instantly recognizing her cousin’s gait. He slid down beside her, joining in her reflection. Of everyone in her life, he surely understood the emotions roiling inside of her; the inexplicable drive and terrifying uncertainty in constant tension.
Tanner spoke first. “Lusca, huh?”
Miriam only nodded.
He continued, “How many expeditions do you think your dad dragged us on over the years?”
“Too many.”
“Remember that ranch out in West Texas? I think Uncle Skylar still owns it. We spent, what, three weeks out there looking for skinwalkers? Didn’t find a damn thing.”
“We found a coyote pup under the porch,” she reminded him.
“You wanted to take it home. Uncle Skylar wouldn’t let you.”
Miriam shrugged. “That’s what you get when you take a twelve-year-old on a monster hunting expedition.”
“Yeah...” His sentence trailed off as he took his own turn silently staring across the water.
She sensed that Tanner was probing at some deeper point. The two of them didn’t talk much, confidently relying on unspoken bonds. The last time they’d talked about their feelings had been after Cornelius died.
Eventually, Tanner spoke again. “Does it ever haunt you? The things we’ve done?”
His question immediately conjured memories of the giant science experiment in Rose Valley; a man who had lost his humanity long ago. Did the memories of putting a bullet through its head haunt her? She’d taken a life, sure, but did she have any other choice?
“Not really,” she replied. “We just do what we have to. So much of it was out of our control.”
Tanner shook his head and breathed deeply. “I don’t know. I still feel bad. That cheetah in Rose Valley. The rare eagle up in Minnesota. I know it’s what we got hired to do, but sometimes I just got tired of killing things.”
Miriam didn’t answer. Should she also be tired of killing things? Though she had no interest in taking random lives, she also didn’t feel the same remorse that Tanner did about it. Maybe she’d cared about such things at some point in her life, but her dad had ironed that out of her.
Changing the subject, Tanner quietly asked, “Do you remember your mom?”
Miriam squirmed, adjusting her position and rocking her legs back and forth before answering. “Not really. Just flashes. We were so young when it happened.”
“Same.”
“Do you miss them?” she asked.
She felt Tanner look at her, but she faced forward with her question, staring toward the horizon, terrified to share a moment more intimate than she could handle. She regretted asking the question almost immediately.
“I don’t know. I guess? We were young, like you said, so I don’t know if I miss them exactly. But I wonder sometimes. What things might have been like if they hadn’t all died. If we didn’t have to live with Uncle Skylar.”
“They were a team,” Miriam said. “It would have been this life either way.”
“Maybe,” he admitted. “But I think Skylar had a lot to prove after that. I think it made him scared that he’d lose us, too.”
Miriam wanted to run. Literally stand up and run away. She’d spent the last two years pushing her father out of her life, and part of that process, rightly or wrongly, was to dehumanize him. To only focus on the bad things. The training. The expeditions. The constant criticism. She refused to believe her father did all of that out of fear.
“He didn’t seem very scared when Cornelius died,” she blurted out, using the anger and defiance to shield herself from the threat of tears.
Tanner didn’t answer right away, choosing to remain silent and calm, the light breeze tussling his close-cropped blond hair. His serenity irked her, even though she knew she was being irrational. She hated being irrational.
“He would’ve loved this,” Tanner finally said.
At first, Miriam angrily assumed that Tanner referred to her father, before realizing he meant Cornelius.
She replied evenly, “He would’ve hated the beach. But the two-hundred-foot octopus out there? Yeah. He would’ve loved that.”
“Well, he would have loved telling us how to catch it, anyway,” said Tanner. “That kid had two left feet.”
“Yeah,” she said with a chuckle.
She’d left the library in a flurry of excitement, but with the adrenaline dying down and the reality of her situation settling in, Miriam began to question her course. Why did she have this insatiable need to hunt down this creature?
“I don’t know if I can do this without Cornelius,” she said.
“Mir,” Tanner said, flipping one leg up on the pier to face her. “You don’t have to do this at all. That life is over.”
“But I need to. I want to?” She was surprised to hear the last statement come out a question.
Did she want to? She struggled to separate her own desires from her upbringing and conditioning. She equally hated and yearned for everything her father gave her.
Tanner popped to his feet in an instant, surprising Miriam. He seemed bothered. Annoyed, maybe? She didn’t have the strength to question him, instead trusting that whatever his reasons, he wouldn’t abandon her. Not when she needed him the most.
“Good talk,” he said, bounding away from her, his feet heavier on the pier than when he approached.
Alone again, Miriam breathed deeper to try and center herself and find the resolve that had started to fracture. As she exhaled, tears came, and the blood rose hot to her cheeks. Facing the possibility of going against everything she knew felt too overwhelming. Impossible, even.
So, she stared out across the water and let her mind wander back to the mysterious monster that she felt sure swam beneath the waves of Cape Madre and Joe Hampton, the man who’d encountered it. In the musings of her mind — the terror of her fantasies — Miriam found her center, felt her heartbeat returning to normal, and settled into the comfort of the hunt.
