Lydia slammed the receiver back into its cradle and backed away, wanting to tear the phone off the wall. A woman was waiting to use the phone, and her smug patience infuriated Lydia. She went and sat down at the break table, leaning her forehead against her clenched fists.
“Lydia, you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Something wrong?”
“No.”
“You sick or something?” An audacious hand on her shoulder.
She flinched. Her teeth clenched, which made her head pound. She’d have to say something or they’d never leave her alone. She didn’t entirely want them to leave her alone, but if they didn’t she’d hurt somebody, or they’d hurt her. She knew better than to let herself believe anybody was really interested. “I just have a headache,” she tried, and waited for them to say, “Well, I hope you feel better,” and go away.
“I think I have some aspirin in my purse.” Very loud rustling and rattling. “You want some aspirin if I can find it?”
Lydia sighed heavily and, before she thought, shook her head. Her head throbbed. “What I want,” she said, “is to be left alone.”
There was a pause. Then the woman said icily, “Sorry to bother you,” and moved with much indignant commotion to the other end of the table. Lydia’s regret, her anger at being bothered and then abandoned, filled her closed eyes with bloody images, which for her would never be more than frustrating fantasies and unnerving hints.
Her throat ached and—as always, but now nearly intolerably—her eyes burned. She was ashamed to be so tired, knowing that her mother and, especially, her grandmother had never sickened and trembled like this from fatigue, never stumbled over things and knocked things over and had trouble concentrating. Stress only served to make them more and more physical, more aware of their bodies, while she became disconnected and dizzy.
Her mother’s occasional confusion and memory loss lately weren’t from stress or exhaustion. Lydia didn’t know what they were from. Maybe just old age. More likely, the cause was something she, Lydia, was responsible for—electrolyte imbalance from improper diet, high blood pressure that she ought to be taking medication for but Lydia couldn’t get her to go to the doctor. Her fault.
Deborah running, Deborah not being ready for initiation in the first place—that was her fault, too. She didn’t know what she’d done or not done, but it was always something.
Because there was always the strong possibility that anything she did would make things worse and she would be blamed for it, Lydia tried her best never to take direct action or a firm stand about anything. Then, of course, she was liable to be blamed for inaction, and positions she didn’t take could make things worse, too. Deborah blamed her for that. Deborah blamed her for everything.
Bitterly, she tried to calculate how many consecutive hours she’d gone without sleep since Deborah had run away. It was at least thirty-six. When her grandmother deprived herself of sleep it was part of the ritual and the transformation; she remembered her mother deliberately staying awake for days. Ruth still sometimes couldn’t sleep, but Lydia didn’t think it was deliberate anymore. Lydia herself just got sick, and even more clumsy than usual.
The woman on the phone was loudly and interminably discussing dinner plans. Laughing. Lydia raised her head to stare balefully at the back of the woman’s neck. Rage gathered in her shoulder and thigh muscles, the way it was supposed to, but she knew from experience that she wouldn’t be able to do anything useful with it.
In the past thirty-six hours she’d made probably dozens of phone calls. Nobody had seen Deborah, or nobody was admitting to it. Talking to her daughter’s friends, even to some of their parents, Lydia had wanted to roar at them, had in fact said to one particularly insolent girl through gritted teeth, “Look, I’m her mother, I’m not the enemy. Don’t you understand that she’s in danger?” But it hadn’t made any difference. If any of them knew anything that might help her find her daughter, they weren’t going to tell her.
Several of the cousins from the mountains had eavesdropped on her end of that conversation, had looked at her, had looked at each other. Three of them had been sitting at her dining-room table playing cards, waiting, she presumed, for dinner. Despite her worry over Deborah, despite her own fatigue and utter lack of appetite, being hospitable was the least she could do; it was her daughter who’d failed them all, her daughter who’d brought them into the city for nothing, her fault. She’d gone into the kitchen, trying to think about food.
Two other cousins were already in there, looking for pans in cupboards where the shelf paper was peeling off, cooking at the stove that needed cleaning. One of them said hello to her, said with apparent kindness that they thought they’d make dinner since she had other things to think about, but it was not kindness, Lydia recognized it as a reproof. The other one said without looking up, “Where are the paper towels?” When Lydia said she used rags because it was better for the environment, the rag bag was under the sink, the two cousins looked at each other triumphantly and one of them said, “I don’t know how you can keep house without paper towels.”
Lydia couldn’t stand it. She’d retreated to her room and hadn’t come to dinner when they’d called her. Now she’d never hear the end of that —her rudeness, her weakness.
Sitting with her head on her fists in the middle of the busy break room, knowing that her break must be about over but having lost track of time, Lydia longed for tears. All her life she’d thought of tears as magic, imagined that the flow of them would wash something out of her or open something up. She used to put eyedrops in her eyes, soap, dust, anything to make them water, but they never did. She didn’t understand why she was still so frustrated; she’d have thought you’d get used to something you’d had to live with all your life.
Deborah couldn’t cry either. Over the years of her life her mother had watched her anxiously. Sometimes a tear would have meant to Lydia that her child was going to be all right, was more human than wolf, had escaped or diluted the family curse. Sometimes it would have meant banishment, powerlessness. Watching, always watching her daughter’s eyes, even when she wildly resented the responsibility to watch, even when the girl stubbornly or shyly or carelessly turned her eyes away, even when all Lydia could see in her daughter’s eyes was hatred for her or, worse, love for her, need for her. Lydia didn’t dare respond to any of it, hatred or love or need.
As a baby, Deborah had at first made it very clear when she wanted something, which had seemed to be all the time. She’d yelled when she was wet or hungry or for no reason at all that Lydia could discern. She’d wailed all night for weeks at a time, fussed and carried on and was never satisfied. She’d wrinkled her ugly little face and bared her baby-pink gums, showing the single pointed incisor she’d been born with. She’d flailed her tiny fists so hard and with such purpose that Lydia often had to hold them forcefully enough to hurt in order to clip the nails. But there were no tears.
Even as far away from the family as she and Jake had been in those days, even without the monitoring of her mother and grandmother, Lydia had known to discipline the baby from the start. It was surprisingly easy for her not to give in, and she’d objected strenuously when Jake did. Finally, she’d spanked the infant and nipped her harder and harder until the willfulness abated, though it never had entirely stopped. It was then that she’d first seen the distaste in Jake’s face and known that before long she would lose him because of this child. But still there were no tears in the silent baby’s eyes.
As a toddler, as a preschooler, as a gangly young girl, Deborah had never cried. Trying desperately during those years to do whatever Jake wanted, to make herself and Deborah whatever it was so he would not leave, Lydia had sometimes worked to induce tears in them both—had paddled the child too hard and too capriciously, said deliberately cruel things to her, told her that Daddy was going to leave them and it would be her fault. All the time, Lydia resented her daughter for making her do these things, resented a parent’s eternally thankless job. Once in a while —less and less as time went by—the child would scream back at her, would even attack her with teeth and nails. Lately she’d developed a grim and insolent stoicism that could enrage Lydia more than anything else, and a permanent, cultivated attitude of disgust. But still there were no tears.
Remembering how it was to be an adolescent girl who couldn’t cry, Lydia shuddered with love and pity for her daughter. Such rage—at being so attentive, so vigilant, for so long, and still unable either to cause Deborah’s tears or to teach her how to live without them—that she hoped fervently never to see her again. Such terror for her. Such guilt at having brought a child into this world, this family, knowing what she surely should have known.
Lydia remembered—against her will, like a spell for shape-changing—how it had been to love Jake. How liberating and how enslaving. How expansive and, ultimately, how limiting. After all these years, despite everything she knew, she still missed him, still knew she should have killed him and devoured him as her mother had instructed, should have made him a part of herself forever rather than let him go.
She remembered walking with him hand in hand, out of the dark house on the hill. Just walking out. Nobody had followed them or called out. Nobody had said good-bye, wished her well or tried to make her stay. Her grandmother, as far as she could tell, had been asleep. Her mother had sat by the window with her yellow eyes.
She remembered driving across country with him, singing along to radio stations whose call letters changed from K to W at the Mississippi. Sleeping at rest stops to save money; hearing small creatures stir in the night—squirrels on the pavement, raccoons in the garbage cans—and not getting out of the car to chase them down, not giving in to the urge because Jake was asleep beside her, she was starting a new life with Jake. Marveling at the Nebraska cornfields, the flatlands, and then the rolling hills, the gradual incursion of green, so much green and so much rain. Realizing only after they’d lived a few years in Pennsylvania—after Deborah was born and Lydia realized that one day Jake would leave her because of this difficult changeling child—realizing only then that she had come back almost exactly to the place where her grandmother Mary had grown up. She never had known whether that was important or not.
Yearning to have Jake’s child, she’d persuaded herself that one way or another it would be safe to do so. The women of her family were so fertile when the time was right that she doubted she could have avoided pregnancy anyway except through celibacy, which at the time—in the throes of young love, and at her most passionate —had been unthinkable. Since Jake she hadn’t been with a man, and the very thought of sex now made her skin tingle unpleasantly.
Frantic about Deborah now, she clearly remembered what she’d said to herself then, heard the arguments again as though it were someone else debating with her. She had so few symptoms, it must be that somehow she didn’t carry the gene —tearlessness notwithstanding, frequent delirious rages notwithstanding, not once in her life had she ever transformed into anything other than what she was.
Or: she could control it. If she was were, she was also human, and through the power of love, she would renounce the power, control the curse, and keep her husband and child—her family now —safe.
Or: Jake would dominate. His solid decency and humanity would dilute whatever corrupt genetic material she passed on to their offspring, and the child would be not only fully human but protected from her.
The baby was a girl. Deborah. At first Lydia was crazy with relief. They won’t take her. They’ll have no use for her blood to drink, or for her new flesh, or for tallow and unguent from the melting of her body. Naively, defiantly, she’d even called long distance to share the happy news with her mother: “You have a beautiful granddaughter. Her name is Deborah.” But her grandmother Mary had come on the line, and Lydia had heard the awful interest, the claiming. She’d been frightened, and jealous; it had been a long time since the old woman had been interested in her.
“No news?” Pam Sandahl sat down beside her, and Lydia let herself look up. Pam’s round face was almost puffy with concern, and her brown eyes—always soft and direct—were even softer now, and looked right at her.
Lydia shrugged. Her shoulder muscles were so tense that they scarcely moved, and familiar pain radiated down her arms. Pam noticed, reached to lay her hand lightly on Lydia’s shoulder. Lydia winced, stiffened. Then Pam stood, moved around behind Lydia, and—incredibly—began to massage.
After a moment Lydia answered, “No. Nothing. She hasn’t called, and nobody has any idea where she is. Or they’re not telling me.”
“The conspiracy of the children against the parents,” Pam said sadly, as though she knew what she was talking about.
“Maybe she didn’t run away after all,” Lydia said unwillingly, and her voice roughened. “Maybe something—happened to her.”
Pam didn’t try to pretend that the worst wasn’t possible. The strong rhythm of her fingers was so soothing and intimate that Lydia was afraid of it. “What will you do now?”
“I’ll look for her. I’ll find her and I’ll make her come home.” Lydia hadn’t known that was what she would do until she said it, but now it had all the force and reality of a plan.
The hands on her shoulders shifted a little as Pam nodded. “Want some company?”
Surprised, Lydia tilted her head back against the other woman’s stomach to look up at her. The contact made her wince, made her angry with Pam for causing it. “Why would you want to do that?”
The muscles across the top of Lydia’s shoulders, up her neck into the base of her skull, around and under her shoulder blades were so tense that they hurt to the slightest touch. But she sat still under Pam’s hands. She didn’t know why she didn’t pull away. Nobody had ever massaged her back before, not even Jake. “My daughter had a rough time when she was a teenager, too,” Pam said quietly. “I think emancipation is especially hard for mothers and daughters.”
It occurred to Lydia to be vaguely curious about the daughter, about Pam. But she didn’t ask.
After a moment Pam said, “She and I had a rough time together.”
This time Lydia managed to say, “Oh.”
“And I’m sorry to say we never got past it,” Pam went on. “She died two and a half years ago in a car accident on the Western Slope. Two days before Christmas, but she wasn’t coming home for Christmas. We hadn’t had much real contact for a long time. She was twenty-three when she died. I kept counting on her growing up so we could both get over her adolescence and have a relationship again. But it never happened.”
The gentle hands had stopped moving while Pam had said all this, resting on Lydia’s shoulders. They were warm. Sitting still under the warm, still, silent touch of another person was almost more than Lydia could bear.
She had started to get to her feet when Pam sighed and resumed both talking and massaging again. “People have helped me,” she said.
Lydia nodded slightly, which made her head ache, and could think of nothing to say.
“A lot of teenagers go through this,” Pam said reasonably. “Getting emancipated is so hard.”
Lydia leaned her head very slightly back against Pam’s stomach. Sleeplessness created rainbow haloes around the flickering fluorescent lights. Her head buzzed and rang with noise from inside and outside. The motions of Pam’s hands were hypnotic. “It’s more than that. I think there’s something really wrong with her.” She almost laughed at the enormity of the understatement.
“That could be,” Pam said.
Lydia shivered. The deliberate pressure of Pam’s fingers increased, and hurt.
“But,” Pam went on, “I was pretty crazy when I was her age, and I bet you were, too, and look, we turned out pretty okay.”
Again Lydia almost laughed. “How could she do this to me?” she whispered.
Pam’s hands had moved to Lydia’s scalp, and amazingly, the massage became faintly erotic. “She’s not doing this to you,” Pam said reasonably. “You’re the symbol, the conduit. That’s what mothers are for.”
That wasn’t true about her, of course, though it might well be true about other mothers and daughters. Oddly, there was comfort in hearing it, in the momentary delusion that her family might be like other families and her terrible fatigue like the fatigue of any other middle-aged mother. “I hate her.” She was still whispering. “I hate my own daughter.”
So far, Pam hadn’t been shocked by anything. Now she just cradled Lydia’s head in her hands. Lydia could feel Pam’s fingernails in her hair; they were not at all like claws. “I used to feel that way when my daughter did things to scare me or hurt me. But parents can’t always keep their children safe,” Pam said. The simple, terrible truth infuriated Lydia—for her daughter but mostly for herself, for she had never in her life been safe.
A customer came into the store ten minutes before closing, and although Lydia did everything she could think of to be both unfriendly and efficient, it was after six and she was nauseous with irritation before she got out of there. The thermometer on the bank across the street still read 98 degrees F when she went out to the parking lot. Waves of heat from the asphalt were nearly tangible, and they made her skin itch. The car’s air conditioner had gone out again; she wouldn’t be able to take it in now because Deborah had run away, and she might need the car to capture or rescue her.
The car didn’t want to start. Lydia gripped the sticky steering wheel until her wrists and forearms ached, tapping the long nail on the little finger of her left hand against the hot spoke. Her chest tightened with frustration. Her body itched fiercely between the skin and the flesh. She could hardly breathe; she was panting.
She found herself wondering whether extreme heat by itself could bring on the change, and was further enraged that she didn’t know such things by now, that there were still secrets the elders of the family hadn’t taught her. As if she wasn’t good enough. As if she hadn’t paid her dues. She took care of mundane, everyday life so the rest of them could express their true natures; she sacrificed her life for theirs, and they kept secrets from her, and Deborah didn’t appreciate it, wasn’t even ready when her time came.
Finally, reluctantly, the car started. Dizzy from heat and anger, Lydia managed to pull safely out of the lot. Traffic on the Colfax viaduct was awful, backed up all the way past the Aurora campus. By the time she realized she should have taken Speer, it was too late to turn around and she was trapped. She took no comfort in the jovial insistence of Sky-Spy on the radio that, compared with other metropolitan areas, Denver hardly had a rush hour to speak of.
When she finally got over to the west side, traffic was moving better. People were actually watering their lawns in this heat, at this time of day. The blatant waste of water—and the collective underlying stupidity that led residents of a semiarid climate to try to grow bluegrass—made her sick.
She thought she saw Deborah sitting at one of the concrete tables outside Taco Bell. She pulled into the parking lot. It wasn’t Deborah. Lydia rested her forehead for a minute on her hands still clutching the steering wheel. When she looked up, the girl who wasn’t Deborah was walking away laughing with her friends, and Lydia entertained disorganized thoughts about running them down.
Her family’s four houses looked, even to her, like ordinary houses in an ordinary middle-class neighborhood, interesting to local history buffs, maybe, but otherwise hardly noteworthy. You’d never know there were skulls in the basements. You’d never know women put on wolfskins and smeared themselves with salve made from the fat of babies in order to claim their true nature. Looking at the houses now as she drove toward them, Lydia herself could hardly believe all that. You couldn’t even tell that two of them were essentially vacant; Lydia and Ruth worked hard to make them appear lived-in, and maybe the fact that Mary routinely slept in each of them made a difference, too.
Lydia had been assigned to live with Deborah in the house on Harvey Street (originally Hannah’s house, so there were no bones in the basement). Although she reminded herself that it wasn’t hers, that any day it could be taken away, she tried everything she could think of to make it her own and to distinguish it from the other three, especially from the mother house on Ingram Street, Mary’s house.
The house on Ingram Street faced west while the one on Harvey faced east, so that the cyclic play of light and shadow across them was each a negative of the other. The fifteen-foot-high hill on which the Ingram Street house sat had a sharp south-facing slope that supported rampant bindweed, shoulder-high ragweed, rabbit ears with tall penile blossoms, the occasional colony of Canadian thistles that in July produced creamy white flowers with, apparently, millions of hardy seeds. Lydia’s house on Harvey Street was at street level, and Lydia kept neatly trimmed the three rosebushes that grew along the wall.
Lydia’s house had a wide front porch with three pairs of fluted white pillars that gave it an airy look, and the bay window on the north side was covered only by lacy half curtains. The porch and south-facing bay window of her grandmother’s house on Ingram Street were draped with heavy Engelmann ivy, which late into every spring looked dead, then sent out tendrils to coat and disintegrate more of the old brick and pull the drain spouts farther away from the roof, then every autumn turned jewel-box red and gold if the first hard frost came late enough.
Her grandmother’s house seemed much older than her own, though she knew all four of the houses had been built in the same year. She’d found the original deeds of trust in the attic, though no one else in the family seemed to know what they were.
Mary’s house seemed a lot bigger, too. Maybe that was just because she’d been a child in it. As an adult she’d counted and measured, and there were in fact the same number of rooms of the same dimensions in the same floor plan. The big room across the back of each of the houses, opening onto the central open courtyard—where in her grandmother’s house the women of the family gathered every full moon, where they’d gathered pointlessly for Deborah’s initiation—was in her house nominally a guest room, although she and Deborah hadn’t had guests in years.
The lawns of all four houses needed mowing. Deborah could be doing some work around here, but she wouldn’t, she was always sick or she acted as if she was too good to get her hands dirty. Deborah wasn’t here. Deborah had run away. Deborah was in danger. Deborah had been in danger all her life, and Lydia resented her for it.
She’d have to fix something for dinner. She herself was too upset to eat, but the others had to keep their strength up and between kills it was up to her to feed them. She really didn’t know why she bothered. Her mother criticized everything she cooked, her grandmother barely noticed, and half the time Deborah wasn’t home for meals, or wouldn’t come out of her room, or ate no more than a few bites and then made herself throw up. The last time Lydia had caught her sticking her finger down her throat, she’d spanked her, a girl nearly as tall as she was sprawled over her knee and hardly struggling. Deborah had become so gaunt, bones so close to the skin, that her buttocks and the backs of her thighs had bruised badly and the deep scratches left by Lydia’s nails had flared bright red, had become infected so that for weeks there were stripes down the backs of the girl’s legs. But the punishment hadn’t made any difference. Deborah still starved herself.
And now she’d failed at her initiation. Mary had decreed that the time wasn’t right, although Lydia had tried as hard as she could to get her ready. Mary had commanded, “Go deeper,” and Lydia had no idea what she meant. Now Deborah had run away, had taken the baby away. And all of it, of course, was somehow Lydia’s fault.
Fumbling in her purse for her house keys in the heat and painful glare of sunlight on cement, Lydia went faint with remorse and with frantic love for her daughter. Something bad was happening to Deborah. She was in some kind of trouble, some kind of danger, and Lydia didn’t know how to take care of her. She had never known how to take care of her.
Before she could stop, Lydia was yearning for her other children, mourning them as acutely as if they’d died yesterday instead of sixteen and eighteen years ago. She knew that if they’d been allowed to grow up they’d have brought her joy, not this fearsome worry and resentment. Two beautiful baby boys, marked in their baby sleep with the sign of the claw and then killed before they were ever fully awake again.
Her mother had said it was for the best, the way things should be; she’d had to give up a son, too. Lydia remembered him, her little brother. She’d seen him when he was born. She’d been there when he died, and what she remembered most was the smoothness of his skin both warm and cold and the odd mixture of horror and gratitude with which her family had regarded him. She’d glimpsed what might have been sadness in her mother’s yellowish eyes when the older woman had told her that male babies didn’t suffer because their nervous systems weren’t as developed as girls’, that they’d have suffered more if they’d lived. Lydia didn’t believe any of that; she’d heard her second son cry out.
Her grandmother had taught her, wordlessly, how to make the lost babies forever part of herself. Even now, after the jar had been emptied and refilled numerous times, she could feel the essence of her sons whenever she anointed herself, understood their power in her life and the reason they’d been born to her. She rubbed her forearms now, brought the back of her wrist to her nose and mouth. The fragrance of the unguent, the lingering taste of it, was reassuring.
Her eyes burned and itched; there were, of course, no tears.
She wasn’t supposed to have named the baby boys, and she didn’t think their names now. Instead she thought Deborah, and desperately hoped Deborah had come home. With that hope came also a profound fear.
She was afraid to go into her house. She was also afraid not to, and the sun was making her sick, blinding her. She wished Pam were here with her, and told herself again that Pam could never come here, could never be part of her real life.
She took a deep breath, went swiftly inside her dark cool house, and locked herself in. She went upstairs to Deborah’s room, knocked, went in. It was, of course, empty, but it smelled and felt so strongly of her daughter that Lydia stood in it longer than she meant to, feeling closer to Deborah in her absence than she ever did in her presence. Although she knew Deborah was not there, she looked in every room of the house, in the attic and the basement, too, and tried to ignore the persistent fantasy that the girl was following behind her, hiding in rooms she’d already searched.
One of the cousins met her in the upstairs hall. “I’ve been opening the windows,” she said, without greeting. “I don’t know how you stand the pollution and the noise, but I guess it’s better than no air at all.”
“I always keep the windows closed,” Lydia said, stubbornly.
The cousin paid no attention. She had gone into Lydia’s bedroom. “I can’t get this one open,” she called. “Do you have something to pry it up?”
Lydia fantasized leaping on the cousin’s back, tearing out the cousin’s hair, sinking her teeth into the back of the cousin’s neck. The woman was family; she was also enemy. One of these days—when the mountain people were down here or, more likely, when Mary and Ruth and Lydia and Deborah and Deborah’s daughter (so many fewer of them) were up in the dizzying mountains—somebody (not she) would determine that the time was right and the battle would be joined between mountain and city and all places leading from one to the other.
Lydia knew to expect this ultimate confrontation, and knew that she could neither avoid nor call it. She would have no say, and wanted none. So, instead of attacking her arrogant cousin or saying anything in protest, she went quietly back into her absent daughter’s room, shut the door, closed the window, and crouched beside the bed, where she dug her nails into her own wrists.