Bats or Swallows (6 page)

On Victoria Day weekend, Nick’s parents went away and he invited me over. He picked me up from the subway station in his mother’s car and on the drive to his house we stopped at a nearby convenience store and bought popsicles. Mine broke in the package, and I ate it with my fingers. His little brother watched television in the living room, but we ignored him and went straight to Nick’s bedroom where he made me listen to Tom Waits. We were making out and then we had sex. I hadn’t planned on sleeping with him, but it happened and it was nice and the only thing I regretted was that he kept Tom Waits playing on the stereo.
When the record ended, we heard small explosions outside. Kids were setting off firecrackers in the street for the holidays and we got dressed and joined them. Nick swiped a bundle of sparklers from his little brother, and we sat on the curb and lit them one by one, waved them around, the goldish yellow sparks flickering and spitting in the early summer night air.

After our first letters, Laura and I continued writing to each other, writing more than we actually spoke. We even stopped hanging out together at school and it was strange, but there was something satisfying about the letters, a feeling of connectedness that we hadn’t had before. We wrote about everything, except I never said much about Nick and she never elaborated on her dream. The only time we stepped out of this pattern was shortly afterwards when she invited me to come with her to a show that weekend. It was at the house of a new friend of hers, she said, and she thought I’d like the music.
On the way over to the house Laura explained to me that her friends were Straight Edge, that they didn’t drink or do drugs,
“So there won’t be any beer,” she said.
“That’s okay,” I said. “Are you Straight Edge now too?”
“Kind of,” she shrugged. A boy in one of the bands was handing out wristbands he’d made with skulls and crossbones on them. We fastened them to each other’s wrists. We sat under a tree and kept to ourselves as it got darker out, and then everyone went to the basement for the show.
The performers were hardcore/screamo bands, high school kids, and I didn’t really like the music, but there was so much energy in the room. Everyone jumped and sweated and screamed along and I closed my eyes and listened to everything vibrate around me, wondered if the ceiling could cave in from such exuberance.
We left before it was over to catch the last subway home, but right before we went inside the station, Laura grabbed my arm and we kissed, bathed in the light of the late-night TTC subway station. When you watch movies, television, whatever, it seems like teenage girls kiss each other all the time. It’s so cliché. But at the time, it didn’t feel like that. It felt essential and risky.
I got a scar on my wrist the next day, a tiny snip in my skin. I gave it to myself accidentally when I cut off the wristband. It wouldn’t come off and I wanted to stick it in my diary as a reminder of everything, but the scissors slipped and there was a tiny gush of blood, and a band-aid, and then, a v-shaped scar. A few days later I pushed up my sleeve and showed it to Laura. We were standing outside school on our way to different classes. We hadn’t spoken much since Saturday and hadn’t sent any letters either, and we’d definitely not spoken about the kiss.
“Did it hurt?” she asked.
“Not really.”
She held my wrist and studied the scar. Her hands were warm and I could feel her breath on my skin. “It looks like the bottom of a heart.”

A week later my parents and I were at Lydia’s for dinner. Before we ate, Mary said she wanted to show me something in her room.
She closed the door and put her hands on her hips. “I can’t believe you’re sleeping with Nick!”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
“Does everyone?”
“I have my sources. You slut.” She meant it as a compliment. “But Nick told you about his girlfriend, right?”
“Girlfriend?”
“They’re not really together anymore, but from what I’ve heard, they’ll be again soon. They’re like, soulmates.”
“Oh.” I leaned against Mary’s dresser, the wind knocked out of me. “I know about her,” I lied.
“You’re cool with it?”
“I’m kind of seeing someone else anyway.”
“You’re poly?”
I’d never heard the term, but nodded.
“Who are you seeing?”
“Someone from school.”
“But you go to a girls’ school.”
I didn’t know what I was getting myself into—polyamoury, girls—but I acted like I knew what I was talking about, that I had already pondered the philosophical and intellectual aspects of these concepts and was comfortable with them.
“Whatever.” Mary shook her head.
“Don’t say anything about it to anyone,” I said. “Especially your mom.” I imagined all of those paintings of Jesus directing their tortured glances at my immoral, pre-marital sex, homosexual experimentation ways. I felt damned.
“I will obviously not tell my mom. You’re so white, Esther.”
We both stopped talking, deflated.
“What do you mean by that?” My voice was smaller than I meant it to be. I was embarrassed to ask, but I wanted to know. I’d never thought seriously about the fact that I was Filipino or white until Mary pointed it out. “I am half-white.”
“You’re half-Filipino too.”
“So what? Why does it matter?”
I wondered if Mary was on to something. I liked kissing Laura, but I didn’t think about it the way I thought about kissing Nick. And I liked spending time with Nick, but I didn’t like it the way I liked spending time with Laura. I was worried that I would only always be half of something. That I was wholly nothing. Or maybe Mary was implying that I was letting one half engulf the other. Was that even possible? And was it bad?
I expected Mary to laugh at me, but I could see that she was genuinely considering the question.
“I can’t explain it,” she said. “You can just do things I can’t do.” She meant it in terms of freedom, permission. For some reason she thought my whiteness was what justified my actions.
“It’s a free country,” I said to her. “You can do whatever you want.”
“It’s different,” she said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
But I did understand. Kind of. She didn’t believe she could make the choices I made, I guess, whatever she perceived those choices to be. The only problem was that I didn’t know if I agreed with her. Our mothers came from the same background, were raised the same way and left their families at the same time, and yet had ended up leading completely different lives. I wasn’t sure if it had anything to do with their heritage or race or non-whiteness.
Lydia called us and we reluctantly went downstairs. Everyone else was already eating. My aunt was convinced she had a fish bone lodged in her throat until my mother got out of her seat and touched her neck and then pretended to throttle it.
“It’s a miracle!” Lydia exclaimed, swallowing for us vigorously. “I know you have powers. It’s gone!”
“If only miracles were always that easy,” my father said, scratching his baldhead. Normally Mary and I would join in the teasing, but that night we kept quiet.
Back at home I couldn’t sleep. I tried writing a letter to Laura and then one to Nick, but I ripped both of them up and wrote one to Mary instead. When I read it over it sounded all wrong, more like my
Gatsby
essay than something sincere. I threw it out and wondered why it was so hard to say the things that should be said, the things that actually counted for something.

W
HEN I EMERGED FROM THE FOREST I WAS SIX YEARS OLD,
all tangled hair and scabby legs. Skinny. Everything had been so blurry, a wash of murky colours and shadowy landscapes that when I saw the sun, my eyes teared up.
The old woman that found me was small, papery and greying, but she bent down and picked me up and carried me into her house. I looked up at her face and thought she looked like a cartoon. She had deep wrinkles and black eyes and when she opened her mouth a stream of question marks poured out.
I refused to sit at her kitchen table, so I sat underneath it. It seemed safer. And I didn’t drink the water from the glass she gave me. I turned my head and saw her little grey dog lap at his bowl. When the woman left the room I scooted over to the bowl, held my mouth to it and drank deeply. The woman caught me in this position and in an instant the rumour started that I’d been raised by wolves, that she’d rescued this wild thing that couldn’t speak or hold cutlery or sit upright.
The story was proven false as soon as she called the police, but the old woman was stubborn and told her version anyway, and too many people listened. I don’t blame them. There are always people clamouring for a good story or for something otherworldly to believe in. I didn’t speak for a week and it was as if I’d never had any human vocabulary. I’ve seen pictures of myself from that time and I have the wild-eyed and frightened look of a captured beast.

Here’s
another story: a mother leaves her two-year-old with a babysitter. Her six-year-old is supposed to stay with the babysitter too, but on the way over she’d started complaining.
I miss you, Mommy, I never see you. Let me go with you. Please?
The mother faltered.
Fine.
After the youngest has been dropped off, they stop at a grocery store and buy a bag of food. And then they drive for a long time.
We’re going on a hike
, the girl is told. Before the two of them go into the forest the mother shows her daughter what’s in the bag: juice boxes, a package of processed cheese slices, apples, animal crackers. The two of them set out into the forest. Sometimes the mother cries and the girl doesn’t know what to do. Finally they stop walking. The mother tells her daughter to go back to the car.
Just follow the path, it’s not far away. If you get hungry, eat.
She gives her the grocery bag and kisses her on the head.
Okay. Bye bye.
The little girl starts walking. It’s like they’re playing hide-and-go-seek. Her mother goes in the opposite direction.

After I was found and before I started talking again, sometimes at night in the hospital I’d whisper to myself or sing. From my room I could see thin lines of light from the hallway seeping under the door. I held my breath and strained to hear the reassuring hum of machines, the faint elevator pings. I would inhale and the antiseptic smell of the hospital burned my nostrils in a way I liked. It was different, sharper than the fetid, earthy smell of the forest. I knew my mother wasn’t coming back.

The last
guy I met at a bar had blue eyes, clear and pale and icy. He asked me to tell him something about myself. I told him that there are people in the world who believe I was raised by wolves.
“Are you really that wild?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “A little.”

My sister and I lived with my aunt and uncle. They had wanted to stay in town, but when I started speaking again, when my mother’s body was found, when the stories started spreading in newspapers, at water coolers, across kitchen tables, passing from person to person like a game of broken telephone, they realized there was too much to hide, so we moved to a different city, a different province. In the new city I was aware of how normal we appeared. We looked like a regular family: two lovely girls and a young, married couple. People assumed we belonged to my aunt and uncle and we didn’t correct them. They changed our last names.
At school my class did a unit on the metric system and we stood in a long chain from shortest to tallest. I was right in the middle and our teacher gave me a red flag to hold up and wave. Since what had happened to me had happened to the most average person in the class, I worried that it could happen again. I would sometimes hear my aunt crying at night and it reminded me of the sounds my mother made when she cried, a soft crescendo of tears and gasps. I remembered my mother’s cries more clearly than anything else about her.

I learned early on that things don’t come out of nowhere. There is always a buildup. You just have to be attuned to it, like how sailors study the shapes of clouds to determine when they should set out to sea. I knew the significance of those dark circles under my aunt’s eyes and I knew what it meant for her to be sad. So, as I got older I read books on survival. I wanted to be prepared for something bad, something sudden.
This is what you should keep in a survival kit: two boxes of waterproof matches, a Swiss Army knife, a good length of nylon rope, two garbage bags, a small mirror, some fishing line and hooks, dental floss (handy for repairs or fishing line if you run out), Band-Aids, a few flat packets of anti-bacterial lotion, instant soup, hard candy. And water, of course. All of this, minus the water, can be folded together and stuffed into a small bag or pouch. The average human being can get by without food for up to two weeks, so it’s not a necessity. At age nine I kept my survival kit in my school bag. I didn’t have a Swiss Army knife so I wrapped a small steak knife in a piece of gauze that could also be used in an emergency situation. I gave a kit to my sister and she ran around the house unravelling the dental floss. Our cat ate it and when the threads started hanging from his ass I got in trouble.

The day my mother brought me with her to the forest, she’d told the babysitter that she was bringing me to the mall for school clothes. When the stores closed and we still hadn’t returned the babysitter got worried. There was no list of emergency contacts, no father mentioned. My mother had found the babysitter through an ad pinned to the corkboard at the grocery store. The babysitter called the police when it got dark.

I’ve never had a good sense of direction, but I know some tricks, like how to find Polaris using the Big Dipper as a guide or how, if you visualize a straight line grazing each tip of a crescent moon, the imaginary line that extends to the horizon is due south. These rules of thumb are useful, but when I was in the forest, I didn’t know any of this. I was too young and everything seemed too dark. I felt as though I was a foreign object introduced to the land as a science experiment. I bobbed along and ate apples and cheese slices. I walked and then backtracked. Once I thought I saw my mother weaving through the trees, running, so I went in that direction. I sprinted and ended up at the edge of the forest, in a field near a house. I walked towards it, and saw the old woman weeding her garden.

That night at the bar, the blue-eyed man kept buying me gin and tonics and asking me questions. I told him about the old woman, how she looked for me and took photos and sent them to at tabloid magazine based out of Atlanta, Georgia. There were sensational, nonsense headlines like,
WOLF GIRL FOUND IN NORTHERN CANADA
or
REFORMED SHE-WOLF GOES TO SCHOOL
. I wrote a letter to the woman once when I was seventeen.
I wish I had never found you. I wish I had torn your fucking head off with my baby teeth.
She must have been dead by then because the letter was returned to me, unopened and unread.
“So what really happened?” the guy asked, “You got lost on a Girl Guide trip?”
“My mother hung herself from a tree and brought me along.”
“Excuse me?”
“I was abandoned in the forest.”
He put down his drink. “Shut up.”
“It’s true.”
“So you saw your mother hang herself?”
“No, she left me before doing it.”
“Why did she do it?”
“The usual reasons.”
“Bullshit.”
I’ve told this story to a few people, only late at night after they’ve had enough alcohol to numb the shock. Some of them believe me, some of them don’t. I like the ones who don’t believe me best and I always end up going home with them. But I never remember anything important about them, like their names or phone numbers, just some distinguishing features instead. Their eyes, maybe. Or their smell.

I’ve been reading about babies recently—how they grow, how they latch on to you, how they burst into the world, a squelchy mass of blood and tissue and soft, unfused bones. The bond between a mother and her baby starts so early, the baby growing in rhythm with her heartbeat, the same blood shooting through their shared veins.
I don’t carry survival kits anymore, but I still firmly believe in Being Prepared, of steeling yourself for what will happen next. These days I find myself removing bags of milk from the fridge and cradling them to my breast. The cold plastic makes my nipples harden, the way I imagine they might when you’re breast-feeding.

When I was younger I wished I’d been raised by wolves. I would burrow under my sheets and blankets, surround myself in pillows and imagine they were wolf pups, that I was one of them. I imagined being nudged to sleep by a warm, wet snout. I dreamt of animals with sharp teeth circling me and keeping others away.
Lately it’s been the other way around: I’m the wolf. I see myself walking through city streets holding a naked baby by the scruff of its neck, in my mouth. The baby, a girl, squirms but then goes limp. She has blue eyes, like the guy I met at the bar.
With my free arms I carry shopping bags, my purse, a bottle. I hail a cab and climb in. I’m not sure where the cab is taking us, but I don’t really care because what matters most is that I have my baby in my mouth, that she’s with me, and I won’t let her go.