My muscles sang when I pushed myself out of Mitzy’s outworn Ford pickup. She had jabbered like a Steller’s jay about how she was so happy I was finally home, and how she and the others had thought I’d never come back, and how Debbie-Ann down the cutoff road’s husband had died and why she thought the Californians were getting more bothersome every year (“the traffic was getting worse,” she insisted, but there hadn’t been any traffic in the bay since it was a logging town). I was held hostage in the passenger seat, staring at her through jetlagged eyes the whole drive up from Spokane.
Mitzy wriggled out of the truck behind me and insisted she would take a bag or two up and put the tea on. It was cold out here, she said. Too cold for an old house. I fumbled around in the dark, my fingers brushing through cobwebs and picking up splinters on the unfinished wood walls until they found the smooth plastic of a switch cover. I heard the whirr of a house come back to life, and the bulbs in the kitchen, who obviously didn’t want me here either, guttered on. The air was so stale I could feel the grit of it between my teeth, smelling like long-doused fires and burnt pancakes on an old gas stove. The shadows of the house’s faithful sentinel pines watched me kick off my shoes and dump the luggage on the hardwood floor. After I swore that no, I didn’t need help unpacking, and no, I wouldn’t be scared alone out here, I grew up here Mitzy, remember— yes, I know I moved away but some things never changed, ha yeah, you can take the girl out of the country and all that, and Mitzy decided that I’d be all right without her, and her truck rumbled back down the driveway.
I imagine my parents at twenty-four, newly married and pregnant, dancing around the kitchen in their bare feet and the light of the fireplace, eating the last of their wedding cake and dreaming about raising children in this place all their own. They wanted me to be like my mother, I knew, or like my father, selling fresh-felled lumber to the out-of-towners who wanted ‘rustic’ without the fuss. But I’m better with a book than a backhoe. And I wanted Manhattan skylines and a college education out of state.
Each time I come back, I’m rushed by the people who knew me when I was pigtailed, dirtying myself in the summer dust. They all ask me for copies of the book when it sells. They remind me not to forget them, as if their sun-speckled faces and callused hands haven’t been wheedled into my head with a patient awl.
— She hates you. —
I noticed the drumming of his sticklike legs against the cupboards. I can sense his watching me from the moment I came in, caught a glimpse of him skitter to his hiding place when the lights turned on, felt his eyes on the back of my head as I spoke to Mitzy and his presence mount when she left.
Who, Mitzy?
— She barely recognized you at the airport. You had to wave to get her attention. —
Shut up, would you?
— Oh please. —
I can’t help turning to face him, sticking a tired finger in his face, so close to his pointed nose that he goes crosseyed. He’s less than a foot in height, mottled brown crooked like the twigs I used to collect as a child, thinking they were magic wands. Delicate wings sprout from his back; his long arms drag when he stands. His eyes are like bugs’, wide and far too big for his head. He is a wild thing. Insists on dangling from high places and buzzing around my kitchen, on following me to places I told him he couldn’t go.
“Get lost,” I say with all the conviction I can muster, though I left most of it behind at the Laguardia security line. My mother’s favorite copper kettle whines a fever pitch, violent water turning the metal red hot.
—What would everyone say if they knew you were wearing a ninety dollar sweatshirt?—
Nobody needs to know about the cost of my clothes.
— Mitzy would have a heart attack and die, that’s what she’d do. That’d be awful. —
That’s an awful thing to think.
— Maybe she’s had one right now, driving home. Maybe you’ve changed so much she got distraught and died. —
That didn’t happen.
— You should check, just in case. —
I’m not going to check.
— Then they won’t find her body until morning. —
“Mitzy’s not dead!” I say, slamming my hands down on the counter. My right thumb grazes the hot kettle and I cry out, heat licking up my hand like a hornet sting. The faucet stutters on, cold water rushing over my hand, icing the heat creeping from my fingers up my arm.
I used to be able to take things like this with grace. I would run inside, covered in grit and intoxicated by sun, hold out my hand to my father and whimper a little as he pulled a nettle out with careful tweezers. When my brother broke his leg at work and I could see the bone through his shin, I never cried the whole way to the hospital.
His wings beat as he flutters over from the countertop and settles next to the faucet, leaning up against it like he’s about to pull a cigarette from a pocket.
“Fuck off,” I grumble, letting my head drop over. The water keeps running, racing down the drain, dancing in the silver basin.
— Imposter. —
Intruder.
— You move away and your parents move away and your brother gets married and where does that leave you? Back in your childhood home, unable to tolerate so much as a kettle burn. Remember when you used to run through brambles? Your mother would get so worried but you’d never bat an eye. —
I snatch my hand out from under the water and glower at him.
I want different things.
— To get away from “a dead end town, slowly consumed by the ghosts that refuse to vacate its unpaved lots and unsold, overgrown real-estate”? —
I didn’t mean that.
— Your parents sure thought you did. —
I explained it to them.
— Not well enough. That’s why they’re not here, you know. They don’t want to face you. Think you sold them out for a publishing deal, that you’re not grateful for the way they raised you. —
My damp hand vises his thin body before he has a chance to reach. The blister on my thumb breaks over his rough bark. He kicks and writhes in my hand, punches me with his delicate fist, tries to bite me but the neck is too short. I fling open my mom’s old crockery cabinet and hurl him in with all my strength, slamming the door before he can right himself and fly back out. I slot a wooden spoon between the handles. He raps on the cupboard door, slams his frail body against it a few times.
“Behave yourself.”
The doors stop rattling. I take a heavy sigh, and plod to the bathroom to find a bandage.
— That’s a new one. —
The little shit is behind me again, fluttering at eye level, head cocked in strange curiosity.
— You’ve never tried to kill me before. —
I didn’t try to kill you.
He shrugs.
— It doesn’t change anything. —
I slam the bathroom door behind me and sit down on the yellowing tile, hands laid flat against the cool ceramic.
Nobody ever understands that ponderosa pines drop their needles twice a year. That brambles sport flowers then berries then thorns. That jays leave for the south of the state and fly back when it gets cool again. That fires burn thousands of acres until they’ve decimated all they can, and the fuel runs out, and the land regenerates, the same as before.
