Lovely Wild (20 page)

FORTY-TWO

THERE’S TOO MUCH
information. Someone—Ryan, she thinks by the familiar handwriting on the labels—has sorted through all this material to put it in chronological order. But there’s still too much. Boxes and boxes of notes, written by Dr. Leon Calder. Printouts and handwritten letters back and forth between him and colleagues. Test results. Scribbled pictures Mari doesn’t recognize and yet knows she must’ve drawn because her name is on them. Report cards, height and weight and immunization records. The daily menu from the hospital, along with notations about her reaction to the foods and the bowel movements she had after them.

Leon had taken notes on everything but had done little in the way of correlating what he observed. Apparently this had directly resulted in the loss of the grant money that had allowed for Mari’s care and keeping. She found the letter and documents stating his application had been turned down, the grant not renewed, the reason being “insufficient presentation of results gathered from the scientific observations provided for by previous distribution of funds.”

She also found the file of paperwork in which Leon had petitioned for her to become his legal ward. This, at least, makes her smile because she remembers the day the picture paper-clipped to the front of the folder was taken. She’d worn a pretty pleated skirt and white ankle socks. Saddle shoes. A white blouse with puffed sleeves. A new hair band Leon had given her himself. He’d told her he loved her as much as he could ever love a daughter and asked if she wanted to come home to live with him forever. Mari had said yes.

But now, in another box marked only “Mari, 15–17” she finds many more pictures. Many more pages of notes. And these tell a different story. She reads, scanning with her finger the way Leon taught her so she can keep the words in their places, not wiggling all over the pages the way they tend to do when she doesn’t concentrate. In these pages, Mari reads about more tests. Experiments Leon wrote about that she’d never even known he was doing. And all on her.

He’d documented her menstrual cycles and how she’d reacted to criticism and how quickly she picked up new tasks. He’d written at length about his choices in her wardrobe and of his plans to encourage her to continue her education—something Ryan had not done. Leon had written extensively about the subtle psychological profiling he’d done, everything from withholding affection to gain a response to testing her tendency to hoard sweets by purchasing candy for her but telling her she had to finish it all before he would buy her any more. He’d also journaled of his pride in her accomplishments. How much he’d gained by his research. But never once did he mention how he’d felt about Mari herself. Never once had he written that he loved her.

Mari sits back. Her back and knees ache from bending over all of these boxes. Her eyes itch and burn from the dust. Even her fingertips feel swollen from flipping through so many rough-edged papers. She’s been at this for two days, since Ryan left with the children, with barely a break.

The notes about her when she was still wild didn’t faze her—she barely remembers those times and any information they gathered seemed necessary for them to understand her. It’s also mostly boring and says very little about who she really was. The folders of information about her progress are even less important, because she remembers those times better. But what she holds in her hands now is proof that the man who’d said he wanted to be her father viewed her as no more than an experiment, a learning tool, something to study—even up to just a few days before he died! This, like her husband’s infidelity, is something else Mari wants to unknow.

Weeping comes easier now, and like the anger she wonders why she waited so long to appreciate what strength can be found in tears. At the very least, releasing the emotion leaves her feeling worn and empty, not coiled spring-tight. At least when she looks at her reflection in the window glass she sees who she is and not who she was.

Still, it’s all too much. Maybe Ryan was right. She shouldn’t look at this. She shouldn’t know that Leon didn’t truly love her, at least not in the way she’d wanted him to. That he referred to her as “proof of the Forbidden Experiment” or “a modern living example disproving Avram Noam Chomsky’s language theory.”

“Chompsky.” The dog at her feet looks up with a tilted head and an inquiring whine. She can laugh at the name now. How fitting that Ryan named the dog after the renowned linguist whose theories on language have shaped the treatment of every “wild” child discovered in the United States since the fifties.

From these boxes of files and folders Mari has not only learned a lot about herself, but also about the others like her. Abandoned, lost or isolated children. Raised without love or human social interaction, some horrifically abused and others, like her, simply ignored. She sees now what Ryan meant by “success story.” Unlike most of the other children documented in these materials her husband’s been hoarding, Mari did learn to talk and interact. She married, had children of her own. She has not spent her life in assisted-living care or mental hospitals.

And if she’s felt for most of her life as though she doesn’t quite fit in, as though she’s not sure how to connect with people in those shallow surface ways that seem to come so naturally to most—well, she’s not alone in that even among people who were raised “normal.” Yet here, too, she’s lucky. She read the story of a woman raised by her grandmother in the swamps until age four, isolated and ignored. That woman, according to her autobiographical essay, many of the passages highlighted in yellow with Ryan’s notes scrawled in the margins, has never been able to connect with anyone but her child.

Mari, at least, has loved.

Leon, her only father. Ryan. Kendra and Ethan. This dog, she thinks as Chompsky rests his nose on his front paws, eyebrows twitching as he watches her.

It’s all too much, and she gets up from the chair not caring if the papers scatter onto the ground. The dog scrambles out of the way. Mari stretches, easing the kinks in her back and shoulders. She rubs at her eyes, blurring her vision.

She strips off her clothes, not bothering to fold them. Naked, she leaves the three-season room and steps into night-damp grass. Her feet leave marks but no sound as she walks. Her ankles and shins get wet. She doesn’t care. Mari lifts her face to the night sky and looks for the moon and the stars.

They, at least, haven’t changed.

Stay,
she says to the dog with her hands, and the dog understands.

She needs the woods. She needs the sough of breezes in the trees and the smell of earth littered with pine needles. She needs to dig with her hands in the dirt.

Her feet are soft and easily bruised now. Her skin not used to the chill. She shivers, nipples going tight, and she cups her breasts as she remembers the feeling of her babies nursing there. She is naked in the night. Free. But it’s not the way it used to be when she ran from Them into the woods, bare feet hard and crunching on sticks and stones without even a flinch. When she could stand out in the heat or the cold and barely feel it.

Mari climbs the mountain. It’s dark but not quiet—there’s the shuffle of animals in the undergrowth and the soft coos of birds in the trees. The breeze she craves. The distant sound of an airplane or something overhead reminds her that no matter how much she wants this to feel like the wilderness, society is close enough to grab her if she lets it.

Her feet guide her. Maybe it’s memory. Maybe instinct. Maybe just stupid, dumb luck, because when she stumbles into the clearing she feels at once she knows this place and also that she does not. It’s not like the meadow with the ringing rocks, which she knew at once from memory.

Golden light spills out from small windows in a strange, small house. The one Kendra told her about. Mari is standing naked in someone’s front yard. She’s not so wild that she can’t be embarrassed by it. Yet when the door opens, Mari doesn’t move. When the shadow figure of a man comes out onto the small porch and lifts a hand to his eyes so he can scan the clearing, she stays still. Her skin is tan yet still pale enough that it will stand out if she moves from the cloak of shadows cast by the trees all along the clearing’s edge.

She waits for him to call out, but he doesn’t. She thinks he’ll move into the grass, looking for whatever it was that called him out. It’s what she would do, she thinks, if someone came into her yard in the night and made noise. Except she knows she barely made a sound.

She smells a fire and sees a ring of rocks. This is a camp, then. It must be. Who else would live out here in a house she can see is tiny even with only the moon to light it. And if it’s a camp, maybe he’s a hunter. Maybe he has a gun.

People in rural Pennsylvania own guns they’re not afraid to bring out even when it’s not hunting season. Maybe this time, she thinks as she backs up one careful step at a time, it won’t be rocks hitting her but bullets, instead. A twig snaps. She can’t see the man’s face but his body turns in her direction. He still says nothing, but she sees the gleam of his eyes. He can’t see her, she knows he can’t, but she turns and flees, just in case.

Mari runs down the mountain, bursting with a flurry of giggles she has to bite back, afraid he might hear. No gunshots. No shouts. She’s made it back to the safety of her yard without anyone seeing her running naked through the trees. Her feet hurt. Her arms, legs, belly, thighs, all scratched. She has bruises that will throb and ache later but are at this moment only a murmur of pain.

In her yard she gives in to laughter. Tips her face and laughs at the moon and the stars that have watched her. She spins and spins until dizzy, she falls into the grass. She rolls in the softness and gets up with bits and pieces of flowers and weeds clinging to her bare skin, then stumbles to the hammock strung between two trees. Mari folds herself into it, not willing to go back in the house where she might have to remember everything she ran out here to escape.

She’s so tired she can’t keep her eyes open. She hasn’t slept more than a few hours at a time for the past couple days, so her exhaustion is not unexpected. She falls asleep there, naked in the hammock in her backyard, and even that is not a surprise.

What shocks her, though, is that when she wakes she is surrounded by folded paper butterflies. Too many for her to count, as anything beyond what she can tick off on her fingers still becomes the vague “many” unless she concentrates on the numbers. Strung from bits of ribbon the same as the few she’s found before, but these are bright and colorful. Not faded. They hang from the trees around her and the morning breeze pushes them into flight.

Mari blinks and blinks to clear her eyes, but the butterflies don’t go away. She lurches to her feet, scanning the yard, but it’s empty. She listens and hears nothing but the furious pounding of her heart.

But there in the grass just in front of her, just the size of what might’ve been two human feet, is a trampled-down spot of grass just now beginning to spring back up. Settled into it are two things. One, a library book. And two, Kendra’s cell phone.

FORTY-THREE

RYAN DIDN’T WANT
to listen to his mother’s lectures about the choices he’s made as an adult. He understood why she had such bitterness toward his dad, even though she’d been the one to leave him and not the other way around. Even now she couldn’t talk about Ryan’s dad without curling her lip. So much for not speaking ill of the dead. On the other hand, it was as though she couldn’t
stop
talking about him, either.

She was good with the kids, though. No matter what she thought about her son’s father or her daughter-in-law, Jean Calder loved her grandkids. She’d taken them shopping, leaving Ryan at home to try and get through to Mari, who still wasn’t answering the phone. He’d have been more worried, except he knew she sometimes turned the ringer off on her phone and forgot about it. And that the cell service in the Pine Grove house was terrible.

It
was
possible she was ignoring him on purpose. Ryan thumbed the phone to end the call, then slipped it into his pocket. He rubbed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose. He was so freaking tired.

He put in a call to his lawyer, who depressingly went from assuring Ryan that everything was going to work out, to cautiously suggesting he might want to consider making sure his assets were listed in his wife’s name. That he might want to think about a different line of work.

That was that, then. He was well and thoroughly screwed. And he’d done it to himself—that was the worst of it. He’d been stupid and not only lost his job, but maybe his wife, too.

Mari had made him leave the files and folders, but Ryan had brought the computer containing his notes and outlines for the chapters he’d begun to draft. He opened the laptop, brought up the file he’d simply titled Book. In school he’d never much liked English classes. He couldn’t have said what a gerund was, or how to diagram a sentence. But writing this book, for the first time Ryan had felt like he was managing to do something interesting with what he’d learned in school, instead of simply chasing after his father’s legacy.

He scanned the lines of text and made some changes. Took some notes. He called Mari, and again she didn’t answer. He didn’t leave a voice mail this time. He’d have tried the house phone, but realized they’d never used the landline and he wasn’t even sure if one existed or what the number was. So if she’d turned off the ringer on her cell and forgotten to check it, he was pretty much out of touch with her. A thin irritation corkscrewed through him. Why’d she have to be so damned irresponsible? What if this was an emergency?

Except he knew that was unfair. Mari might be a lot of things, but not irresponsible. She didn’t take care of the household finances, but she did damn near everything else from the grocery shopping to cleaning to keeping track of everything the kids needed. Ryan couldn’t have said where the school absence excuse slips were, or what size shoes Ethan wore or the name of Kendra’s English teacher. He knew Mari could answer all those questions without a second’s hesitation. She kept the gears of Ryan’s life moving smoothly, without snagging.

What was he going to do without her?