The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (15 page)

Even after he'd left her for Vanessa, she still had funny dreams of him sleeping with his monsters. In some of these dreams he came home with gruesome red claw marks on his back. In some of them he opened his mouth to speak to her and produced, instead of words, a string of knotted gray hair balls. In all of the dreams she looked away and said nothing, letting it ride. As she had tried to do in her waking life.

Once the word
divorce
came up, she fought. She fought hard. She lost. Again with the loss. Always, always with the loss.

Following the divorce, she suffered another nervous breakdown. She went to Eastern State Hospital again, convinced the staff that she was well, and returned home to her daughter after a week. She took Amelia, then sarcastic and petulant at age thirteen, to Omak for a month or so but believed her doting and rural parents were a poor influence on the girl, and so they returned to Lilac City and the big empty house that Gladys adored. She was glad she hadn't lost it along with everything else.

Gladys's father died soon after that, and then her mother died, followed by both of her sisters, all of cancer, one after the other like balls shot from a cannon. Gladys could not find a proper way to grieve. She returned alone to Omak for each and every funeral. Amelia stayed with Eli and Vanessa, which she hated. Gladys was glad she hated it there, but where else could she go? She was practically the age where she could stay by herself in a house, but she wasn't quite there yet.

At each of the funerals, Gladys wore a different pair of expensive black gloves, a new black dress, and a fresh hat with a drawn veil. She was careful not to touch anything with her bare fingers and to lean away when anyone spoke to her too directly. She stayed just long enough for a cup of strong tea. Then she would throw the used garments in the trash can and drive rapidly back to Lilac City. The ghosts of her sisters and her mother crowded into the car, too; they chattered away at her about nothing. Simpletons, all of them, even after crossing over to the afterlife.

She picked Amelia up, unable to keep her hands off the girl, fussing over her hair and clothes and figure. She noted how much Amelia hated her stepmother, and she encouraged the hate. Every Wednesday and every other weekend—the days when Amelia was supposed to stay with Eli—Amelia complained of stomach pains.

“Let me call them,” Gladys would say. “I'll say you're not well.”

Eli's anger was palpable on the phone, but he was too indifferent, really, to fight it. He threatened going to court but never would. Amelia went to their house less and less. Soon she would see nothing of her father at all, Gladys hoped, and she almost felt triumphant.

“Did he say anything?” Amelia would sometimes ask after Gladys hung up.

“No, dear,” Gladys would reply. “Only to get well soon.”

Amelia would stare into the floor, gnawing at her lip. “I feel better already.”

So she and Amelia were a team, Gladys saw. When Amelia returned from her rare nights with her father, she reported on their disgusting habits.

“Vanessa licks her fingers when she serves us dinner. She'll lick the butter from her fingers and then pass me a knife! It makes me want to barf.”

“She's an uneducated harlot,” Gladys would say, pleased. “She's a menace.”

“You should hear her talk to the baby. The way she carries on, the baby will never learn to wipe its own ass or feed itself. It's really bogue.”

“Language, dear,” Gladys would say, but then she would hug Amelia and promise her a new dress, something pretty for a date with her fine young gentleman, whose name, Gladys had recently learned, was Marion.

*   *   *

O
F COURSE, THEIR
relationship wasn't perfect. Amelia sassed her and rolled her eyes, went to bed pouting, struggled to communicate and then stopped as though disappointed. At times she went so still that Gladys wondered if she was having a stroke. But she was a good girl and a good daughter, and Gladys was grateful for her loyalty.

Then Amelia disappeared.

Gladys braced herself for the inevitable. She was likely gone, like everyone else Gladys loved.

Amelia was missing for three days, and the news was grim. They found her boyfriend's car at the bottom of a ravine near Tower Mountain, but no bodies. Eli's car was also missing, stolen, apparently, along with some money.

All of this had happened under Eli's and Vanessa's watch. They cared nothing for Amelia, just as Gladys had always suspected. Gladys wondered if she should sue.

She told this to the police.

“They seem pretty bent out of shape,” an officer said. “Do you know why she would have stolen her father's car?”

“My daughter is not a thief,” Gladys said. “She would not take a car without asking. Not without good reason. I'm sure he's a bit confused.”

The police asked if Amelia was a bit of a troublemaker.

“Not at all!”

They mentioned her grades.

“She does her best.”

They mentioned her truancies.

“She's a beautiful girl. And curious.”

They mentioned her older boyfriend. Last year he had been arrested for destruction of property, for crashing one of his young girlfriends' cars. And did she know that he was too old to be dating a teenage girl?

Illegal,
they said.

Kidnapping,
they said.

They said,
Rape.

“I've met him,” Gladys said. “He's an upstanding young man. His father, you know, is a decorated war pilot.”

A pilot, they confirmed. Not decorated. Navy-trained, yes, but not a veteran of any war. Gladys tried to think if she'd been told that detail or if she'd made it up.

“The boyfriend's a shit,” one of the larger cops said. “High school dropout with a slew of young girlfriends. Been arrested for petty crime but his dad always bails him out. Probably wrecked that car of his for fun. He could've really hurt somebody. Could've hurt your daughter.”

Gladys tensed. “I don't appreciate that sort of unruly language in my home.”

“Huh?” The cop's big dumb mouth hung open.

“Your diction, Officer. The word you chose to describe my daughter's young man. Is this something your supervisor would appreciate, befouling a citizen's home with such rude language? Is this how you comfort a worried mother?”

The officer looked over at his colleagues in confusion.

One of them laughed. “You said the word
shit,
man. She's calling you out.”

All of them laughed now.

“Apparently I'm a source of amusement to you gentlemen,” Gladys said. “I think it would be best if you got back to work and found my daughter.” She went to the door, opened it primly, and stood to the side to usher them out. “Please. She's all I have left in the world.”

They shuffled toward the door, feigning humility, but once they were outside she heard them laughing again and cussing. One of them even spat on her rose bed.

“Monsters,” she cried into the thick panes of glass, watching them fold themselves back into their vehicles. “Monsters, all of you!”

Her husband studied monsters, she thought, and grimaced. He had left her not for a Sasquatch, after all, although his new wife was nearly as tall, nearly as awkward and uneducated as one. He had left her for a poetess. Imagine! A poetess! Gladys had known many true artists in her time, and it amused her to think of how poorly Vanessa spoke—like an uneducated woman, a woman who had never been to college, which, obviously, she had not.

No, Eli had fallen in love with Vanessa because of her verruca plantaris. Gladys had scraped the lurid details from him the night he finally admitted to the affair. A longtime patient of Eli's—one of the few he continued to see after selling his podiatry practice to his partner—brought Vanessa to the house during one of his own appointments (the two had been dating casually but not seriously, which only strengthened Gladys's notions of Vanessa's general whoredom), and Vanessa had mentioned, as an aside, that she had barnacles on her feet.

“Barnacles?” Eli had asked her, amused.

“Yes. I've had them for years. They ache.”

He instructed her to remove her stinking yellow socks, and Vanessa shyly complied, revealing what Eli described as the worst case of plantar warts that he had ever seen.

Only he, Gladys raged, would love the truly disgusting.

Eli had ordered Vanessa to return for a private consultation. Their tryst began, certainly, at that next appointment, in Gladys's own home. While she was there! Walking overhead! Cleaning or cooking for her husband! Having recently returned from a nightmarish “respite” in a filthy hospital!

There was no fairness in the world.

And the worst part of it: She had enjoyed Vanessa initially. She had approved of Vanessa being chummy with Amelia. She had even encouraged it. Here was a beautiful young woman, she had assumed, who was desperate for a family of her own. She had found Vanessa's attentions touching. She had even invited the younger woman to dinner.

If only she had known!

Maybe, Gladys thought, Amelia's disappearance would return Eli to her. That would be something, wouldn't it? They would be at the funeral together, holding hands, consoling each other, and Vanessa would be dry-eyed and ignored on the other side of the casket. It could happen. Not that she wanted Amelia dead. She would die if the girl were dead! But she wasn't dead. A mother knows. She knows in her bones.

Frequently after these vivid mental outbursts, Gladys would feel sick and need to lie down.

Three days passed in this electrified manner. The police phoned almost hourly with updates.
No word on your daughter
, they would say, until suddenly they had news:
Someone spotted the car up by Coulee Dam
.
We're combing the area. We'll be in touch. Stay strong.

“I'm as strong as an ox,” Gladys said. “Just as strong. Don't worry about me.”

The officer on the other end of the line promised he wouldn't.

Finally they found the car. It was submerged in Lake Roosevelt. Again, no bodies.

Things didn't look good. Gladys worried: Should she call Eli now? Should she seek his support? Her daughter! Amelia! Likely dead. Drowned! Possibly dismembered!

As Gladys sat by the phone, brooding, her hope for Eli turned to rage. Why hadn't he phoned her? His daughter's mother. His wife of nearly twenty years. She imagined the funeral, the scene she would make.
We did nothing but love you,
she would tell him. She would beat on his chest elegantly.
And now she's gone! My baby! My one and only lost little girl!

Gladys put a pillow over her face and screamed into it. This final loss, she knew, would wreck her forever.

The skin on her scalp burned. She stood under the rays of a cold shower and wept from the heat. Then she went to stand in the living room and stare out over the immaculate lawn.

It was twilight. (The raspberry bushes had bloomed, and their asymmetrical fuzzy heads were haloed with empurpling sky.) A shadowy figure moved quickly across the lawn, and Gladys felt less afraid than curious. The chicken-legged woman from the old shop, she remembered. The woman who had sold her the devil's cap. Here she was, tall and lean and menacing, returning to finish her off. She was the one of the three Fates who would bring her to the cutter, and then her life would be shorn.

When the doorbell rang, Gladys bravely went to it. She was ready. She threw open the door, her heart thudding in her chest.

It was not the chicken-legged woman.

It was Amelia.

Amelia!

Her baby!

Gladys was frozen with joy, holding the door open, gaping.

Amelia was thinner, tall as ever but smaller somehow, and she was shaking and weeping and saying wonderful things like,
Mommy, I'm home. Mommy, Mommy, I'm home.

She collapsed into Gladys's arms, and Gladys stroked her back and head. She breathed through her mouth to avoid smelling the child's putrid filth. She triumphed, thinking over and over,
She chose me. She came back to me. Not him. Not her. Me.

She had won. Here was proof: Amelia loved her more than the others. And, Gladys knew, she must never lose that love. She wanted to take up her daughter's arms and dance with her around the living room, rejoicing, but Amelia was a poor limp creature, barely able to stand erect, and so Gladys brought her over to one of the leather couches and sat her there before the fireplace, stroking the girl's wan cheek.

“You'll have some dinner,” Gladys said. “No. First, you'll have a shower. Then some dinner. Then we'll tuck you into bed for some rest. How does that sound?”

The girl was a mess. She clawed at Gladys and glanced nervously around the room with wild, wet eyes. She babbled incoherently about a horrible old man she'd met, about her trip to be married (“Married?” Gladys murmured, but then she told herself, “No matter”), about a lake monster (“You sound like your father,” Gladys scolded), about how she was sure Marion was dead.

Gladys shushed the girl, retrieved for her a glass of ice water. “Calm down, sweetheart. I'm sure it's been a terrible adventure, but you need to get cleaned up, and you need food and rest.”

Amelia upended the glass of water on the floor.

“Don't worry about any of that,” Gladys said. “I'll take care of it.”

“I was upset,” Amelia said. “Loopy! I walked back to the beach for the backpack. It took me hours. I was exhausted and slept there.”

How had the police not found her?
Those idiots,
Gladys fumed.

“The backpack was there! A miracle! I had enough money for a bus ticket.”

Gladys, incredulous, said, “Why didn't you phone? Why didn't you go to the police?”

Amelia gnawed on her lip, a habit Gladys hated. “I don't know,” she said. “I tried you both, but the phones were busy. Then I thought … I guess I thought maybe no one cared. Or that's not it. I didn't want to get in trouble until I was back here. You know, like I could walk back in and start all over? Sort of like none of this had ever happened? Like in
Where the Wild Things Are
.”