Chapter 8

Cordelia had been inside her mother’s study on only one occasion since her mother had left it for the last time: the day the confirmation of Elizabeth Clay’s death had come back to them by wire, a full three years after she had first set sail for the jungles of Brazil.

Her father had delivered the news in the old parlor, as a drift of feathers fell from the overhead chandelier, where two adolescent squelches, the first monsters he had ever kept at home, were encamped to grow their wintertime fur. They had been there since they had sprouted their summertime feathers, the year before. And although for a long time, Cornelius had pretended he would let them go “any day now,” he had recently stopped speaking of their release at all. Then, the week before, he had brought home four baby squinches, abandoned by their mother, rescued from the bottom of an old laundry chute in Chinatown.

Now, one of the baby squinches bounced rhythmically on Cordelia’s toes for her attention.

And for the first time in her life, Cordelia felt a sudden well of hatred—for the squelches, mindlessly shedding feathers, happy and unaware. For the baby squinch, the size of a golf ball but quite a bit more rubbery, thunking her toes over and over. For all the monsters, everywhere, and for her mother’s stupid desire to protect them, even though they would never protect her back.

“It isn’t the monsters’ fault, Cordelia,” her father had said, as if reading her mind. “Your mother believed in her work. She died doing something that mattered to her. If you have to blame someone, blame me. I should have gone with her—”

“Great idea. Then I could have been an orphan.” The baby squinch had gummed onto her bootlaces, and she tried to shake him off. “She went to the jungle for the monsters, didn’t she?”

“Cordelia . . .”

“She chose to go. She knew it was dangerous.” Cordelia looked down, blinking back tears. The squinch had latched onto her bootlaces, using its mouth for suction. “Let go of me,” she ordered it. But it only clung tighter. “I said let go.”

And in a sudden fury, blinded by a flash of grief and hatred, she kicked it.

For a split second, as the squinch spun through the air, time seemed to slow. Cordelia had time to register the squinch’s startled expression, her father’s look of horror, and a stabbing guilt that drained away all her anger.

Then the squinch hit the baseboard with a horrible, wet splat.

And Cordelia ran. She careened into the hall, pinballing off the radiator. And as the thunder of her own guilt, and the sound of her father shouting her name, filled her head with terrible echoes, she threw herself inside her mother’s study and bolted the door behind her.

She had killed the squinch.

Her mother was dead.

It wasn’t the monsters’ fault. It was her fault, for being a monster.

Otherwise her mother would never have left Cordelia to sail to the jungle. She would never have left Cordelia at all.

She heard the drumming of her father’s footsteps as he moved from room to room, looking for her. She dropped onto her hands and knees beside the fireplace and folded herself into the hearth, still covered in a silt of old ashes. She had been five years old when the telegram came, and whenever she thought of the word dead, it brought with it the taste of ashes.

When her father had finally found her, shivering inside a cold wind that swept down the flue and lifted the grit of old fires all around her, like a snowstorm in reverse, he had merely dropped to his knees and opened his arms. She had fallen into him, sobbing, choking on the taste of all the ash she’d inhaled. He had held her tight, rocking her like a baby, until at last she’d run through her store of tears, and felt as dark and empty as a chimney, swirling with cold ash.

Only then did he say, “You didn’t kill the squinch.”

In an instant, an ember of joy sparked to life inside her stomach. Cordelia pulled away, swiping at her nose. “I—I didn’t?”

Her father stood up and moved to the bookshelves. By then, it was after dawn, and sunlight peeked through a fissure in the curtains, illuminating the spires of books rising toward the ceiling. He withdrew The Guide to Monsters and Their Habits, her mother’s first book, from the place she had long kept it. He thumbed through the pages until he found what he was looking for. Then, clearing his throat, he read:

“‘The squinch at rest resembles a small, furry globe, “plumped up” by a normal circulation of liquid through the flexible tubing. In this state, squinches move primarily by bouncing, often reaching heights of twenty feet or more. At that point, the squinches “shed” water, expelling liquid from the structural tubing that keeps their shape intact, and flattening to the shape of a disk. . . .’

“‘In this “disk” shape, they are effectively conserving energy, and are capable of gliding or flying great distances, before landing without any harm to their structure. Starting from an early age, North American squinches are lulled to sleep when they are dropped from a height . . .’”

For a second after he finished reading, Cordelia could only stare at him, speechless. “It was sleeping?” she said.

“Thanks to you. I couldn’t understand why the little beast wouldn’t bed down. I’d forgotten all about your mother’s research.” He had snapped the book closed, letting up a drift of dust from its pages.

Then, very deliberately, he’d extended it to her.

“I think, Cordelia,” he said, “that it is time for you to begin your real education.”

And Cordelia, holding the book to her chest, felt the echo of her own heart, beating fast against the binding.

“Come,” her father had said, in a quiet voice. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “Let us leave our ghosts in peace.”

That day, he had closed the door to her mother’s study for the last time, and locked away their memories inside it.

The key was still right where her father had left it—hanging on a faded purple ribbon on the crooked nail on the wall outside the door. It took her several tries to fit the key in the lock. She jumped at every creak and groan of wind. She half expected to hear her father shout and demand to know what she was doing.

She had to remind herself that her father was gone, and that she was leaving, too, to go look for him.

Finally, she got the door open. She slipped inside, holding her breath, as if otherwise the room might hear her coming and startle away.

Inside, it smelled just like she remembered: like ash, and paper, and ink. In the bare moonlight trickling through the curtains, Cordelia could just make out the silhouette of her mother’s desk, and the familiar shape of her crib positioned next to it. Seeing it there made a lump grow in her throat. She swallowed quickly and felt her way carefully to the small paraffin lamp that stood on the mantel. She was now tall enough to reach it, and easily got the wick lit before replacing the lamp chimney.

Warm light leapt suddenly across the carpet. Now Cordelia could see another oil lamp, this one standing on the bookshelf, next to the long, curved talon of an extinct breed of cockatrice her mother had mounted behind glass. She lit that one, too.

Now light washed the shadows from her mother’s desk, still stacked with the pages of her unfinished manuscript. Cordelia had never looked at it closely. She had been too young before; and of course, for years the study had been strictly off-limits.

But now she approached, leaving faint imprints in the carpet thickened with heavy dust.

The pages of her mother’s unfinished manuscript had been brittled by age into the texture of old leaves. There was a stack of nine-year-old correspondence, pinned beneath the sterling silver letter opener engraved with her initials; there was her leather blotter, splotched with ink stains, and a sketch pad filled with diagrams and illustrations she intended for the inserts of her book. In one, her mother had drawn the arterial branches of the whole vast evolutionary tree of life, as it fissured from kingdom to phylum and all the way down to different species, from snapping turtles to squinches. In another, she’d carefully detailed the mandible of both an armadillo and its distant cousin, the growrk, to demonstrate the similarity. In a third, she’d resurrected the long-extinct Giant Hippogriff in the glorious details of her pen strokes, and given it a head that very clearly suggested a relationship to the common dairy cow.

Then there was her manuscript itself: every page drafted and redrafted painstakingly, crosshatched with corrections and amendments. She had been only weeks away from finishing her book when she set sail for South America, hoping to find definitive proof of a prehistoric, shape-shifting monster called the morpheus, and forever prove that the kingdom Animalia and kingdom Prodigia were just two branches on the same evolutionary tree.

Her mother’s manuscript was weighted down by what looked to be an oval stone, but bone-colored, and imprinted with a complex pattern of fine veins that coiled up and down its surface. In Cordelia’s hand, it seemed to pulse with secret life, and she spent some time peering at it, forcing the pattern on its surface to take on a shape she knew. Finally, she slipped it into her pocket. She didn’t know why. But it felt like good luck.

She reached out with a finger and followed the graceful slope of her mother’s handwriting across first one page, and then the next. The question of the origin of monsters is in fact really a question about the nature of categorization. . . . How do we define difference? How do we decide which traits unite, and which divide?

Words leapt to her imagination—words that opened up to enfold everything on the planet that had ever grown, crawled, soared, budded, or squirmed—and in them she saw a vast unfolding cartography of life and more life, ever unfurling, like the green palm of a new leaf touched by spring sunlight.

Cordelia turned back to the beginning, and to the Latin phrase her mother had inscribed beneath the title: Vince malum bono. Her father would know what it meant.

Cordelia felt the sudden urge to cry. It was so quiet in the house without the monsters, and so still. Like a tomb.

She stepped back from the desk and heard the crinkle of paper beneath her boot. Her mother’s wastepaper basket was overflowing, and had loosed several crumpled letters onto the carpet. Her mother, Cordelia thought, must have been sorting mail just before her departure. Curious, she sifted through the envelopes from the trash, and saw that they had come to her from all over the world. From individuals and from universities, from scientific journals, religious publications, and public societies with long and complicated titles, like the American Collective for the Promotion of Humanistic Principles. There were letters from Oxford University in England, from the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

But the content of their messages was largely the same: Elizabeth Clay’s work was an abomination. It was unscientific, or satanic. Monsters didn’t exist. Or they did, and they must be killed. They were an aberration of life, not an expression of it.

She was a nut. She was deluded. She was demonic.

But for some reason, it was the final letter—the one that she had stepped on—that bothered Cordelia the most, perhaps because it was written with such courtesy.

Dear Elizabeth Clay,

Every life has value.

But some have more value than others.

Sincerely,

A Patriot