Fauna (6 page)

POSTED BY
Coyote Cop at 8:10 PM

T
here was a time when Letty Jones still read a portion of the books she dragged home. Edal loved to watch her mother run a finger down a rank of spines until a particular title caught her eye. Letty would tilt her head and grow still, like a bird listening for creatures inside the bark of a tree. If the title exerted sufficient force, she would hook her finger over the crest of its spine and work it free.

Often she read where she stood, minutes, half an hour even, before she slapped the book closed and wedged it back into place. Occasionally, though, the story held sway, and she walked slowly, head bent over its pages, to the nearest seat.

Even more occasionally, she felt moved to read aloud. Only a certain kind of story, and only if Edal kept very, very still. If distracted by a question—even a finger pointing to the page—her mother might well set the book aside and wander off. Edal practised sitting beside her like a stone.

Ring of Bright Water
may be the only book Letty ever read to her in full. In any case, it’s the one Edal envisions—blue
spine, cover photo of a boy and his otter on a beach—when she calls up her mother in that rare, forgiving light.

Letty’s face was prettiest in profile. Her hair slipped forward, every strand of it still dark, still young. She would tuck the hank behind her ear six, seven times before giving up and letting it hang. Edal longed to sweep it back with her fingers, maybe even hold it in place—her hand a pale, decorative comb—but a stone would never do such a thing.

The story began with a man named Gavin sitting in his
kitchen-living room
and an otter sleeping like a baby among the sofa cushions nearby. They were in a house called Camusfeàrna, in a place Edal had never heard of called the Highlands. If it hadn’t been for the cover—a photograph and not a drawing—she might have thought the whole thing was made up.

Her mother explained nothing, and she left nothing out. Countless words slipped Edal’s grasp and swam away, but they swam beautifully, some darting, others wagging long and languid lines.
Pinnacles
and
glacial corries. Filigree tracery
and
tide-wrack rubbish-heap. Clairvoyance
and
manna
and
quarry. Purloined
.

Letty didn’t spare her the part where the hooded crows pecked the eyes out of a living lamb, nor did she skip the fatal rhubarb-leaf poisoning of the nanny goats. She read straight through the pneumonia that almost killed Jonnie the dog, and on to the cancer that got him in the end. Jonnie, whose
fleecy flank
Gavin had so often used as a pillow when the two of them went out together in the boat.

Letty didn’t cry when such things happened, but when Jonnie lay down under the vet’s needle, she turned from the
page to look her daughter in the eye. “Everything dies, Edal. Everything and everyone.”

It wasn’t news to Edal. She may have been only seven, but she’d already lost Nana and Grandpa Adam and, before them, the father she’d never met. Letty wouldn’t talk about the boy who’d gotten her in trouble, so Edal’s knowledge of him was patchy, stitched together from scraps her grandparents had let slip. He wasn’t a bad boy, just a little wild. He’d seen sense after a talk or two, agreed to make things legal and grow up fast. Too bad he didn’t do a little of that growing up before deciding to take his father’s Ski-Doo out on the lake. The ice was nowhere near ready to bear that kind of weight.

So, no, Edal didn’t need reminding about death. All the same, she couldn’t help crying a little, but she did so silently, in order that she might not miss what came next. Jonnie’s end brought the end of a chapter. Gavin couldn’t imagine owning another dog—that corner of his heart had sealed over. He could, however, imagine owning something else.

He found the first otter in another place with a made-up-sounding name: the Tigris marshes of Iraq. Edal fell in love with Chahala just as Gavin did—and who could blame them, when she had
more charm per cubic inch of her tiny body
than any other infant. Where a kitten would’ve mewed, Chahala chittered—a word Edal understood instantly via its sound. Gavin made a daughter of Chahala. He nursed her from a bottle, carried her inside his shirt, taught her to know her own name. When she was old enough, he fed her the flesh of two dead sparrows—sad, because Edal knew sparrows, could picture them puffed and twittering among the sunlit branches of the back hedge; but also exciting, because
it meant Chahala was growing like any baby, trading milk for solid food.

Then came the food that killed her. Digitalis was another deadly plant, and men in the Tigris marshes used it to poison fish—which, in turn, became poisonous themselves. Chahala lay on her back among the water flowers, looking as though she were sleeping. Her death ended another chapter, and when Edal lay in her small bed later that night, she felt her own hands floating webbed and lifeless by her sides.

The second otter was a boy, Mij, and unlike Chahala, he lived. He survived a gruelling trip by plane and car back to Gavin’s home, though he fought the box that held him until his face and paws were wet with blood. Mij chittered too, but he also had other ways of making himself understood. A simple whistle-chirp. A harshly whispered
Ha!
or
Hah?
upon entering an empty room. He burbled to greet a bathtub full of water, hummed a serious warning and wailed to herald a coming bite.

He was clever in other ways too. He could untie knots and turn on faucets, carry a marble or a flower or a shotgun cartridge for miles. He played like a child in the bathtub, and swam in the
burn
, which was another word for a creek—though the burn in the book ran brighter and deeper than the one that crossed Edal’s own back woods. Mij learned to catch his own food there, and soon he moved on to swim in the pounding sea. Once, he got trapped in the shadowy ravine above the waterfall. Once, he went missing for so long, Gavin imagined him eaten by a killer whale. All this and more Mij survived. Then, after a year in Gavin’s company, he went wandering and met a man called Big Angus working on the road. By then he knew no fear of humans. He didn’t even
flinch when Big Angus lifted his deadly pickaxe and brought it down.

Edal feared that would be the end of animal companions for Gavin, a loss too great to chance repeating. She never dreamt another could take Mij’s place.

It was a charmed meeting. Gavin—a man with an otter-shaped hole in his life—crossed paths with the MacDonalds, a couple who were most anxious to find a home for their unusual pet. “‘Everyone admires her,’” Letty read in the voice of Dr. MacDonald, “‘but when they come to the point of actually owning her they all shy off … Poor Edal—’”

Edal squeaked. She couldn’t help it. Letty met her gaze, her brown eyes mild, unblinking. Then she nodded, and Edal knew she’d heard her mother right.

Edal was a girl otter, and she was different from Mij in other ways too. She shared some of his language; other sounds were her own. The hum Mij had threatened with, she used to ask for the food in a human hand. By then Gavin had a helper, a boy named Jimmy Watt. Edal loved Jimmy fiercely, scolded him often and followed him when it suited her mood.

She learned to fish for eels in the burn as Mij had, and to swim in the sea, though at times the depths sent her panicking to shore. Her hands had no webbing, so she was capable of even greater feats: picking pockets, peeling boiled eggs. The boy on the cover could only be Jimmy, so the otter in that picture had to be her. The description fit. Where Mij had been a dark, luxurious brown all over, Edal was silver-headed, with a snowy throat and chest. Her skin was several sizes larger than she was, and she turned inside it as Edal the girl might turn in a sleeping bag, or in Nana’s old rabbit-fur wrap.

The book ended happily enough, but it felt unfinished somehow. Edal watched the spot where her mother pushed it into its row, and took it back down the first chance she got. The photographs came as a shock. Letty must have pinched the slick pages between finger and thumb and turned them as one, eager to learn what happened next. Edal turned them singly, holding her breath.

Camusfeàrna was about the same size as the house Letty and Edal shared, but instead of crouching amid trees at the end of a gravel driveway, it sat in the open on a grassy coastal field. Edal had thought she and her mother lived far from their neighbours, but Gavin had only the land and the sea.

Gavin wasn’t a real father, but he had a fatherly look about him—worried while he was awake, a little less so while he slept. In one photograph he wore a skirt, but Edal thought she knew something about that being all right for Scottish men. In another, the boy Jimmy stood naked at the top of the waterfall. He looked to be shouting or laughing, but the picture was taken from too far away to be sure. Edal looked long and hard at the happy, blurred figure, wondering what it would be like to swim without her blue suit between her and the water, to stand in her skin like a tree in its beautiful bark.

There was Mij—chewing his towel, tossing an apple, kissing a woman on the lips—and there was Edal. Her throat really was white as snow. She lay across Gavin’s lap as he slept; she lolled in the rowboat, deciding whether to slip into the sea. The photographs Edal the girl went back to again and again, though—the best ones in the book—showed Edal the otter in Jimmy’s arms.

In the first, he cradled her like a baby, his strong right hand cupping her supple back. The second was more grownup. She lay beside him on a hillside, her tail draped over his thigh, her forepaw folded in his loving grip. She looked into the camera for the baby shot, but her gaze was soft and somehow private in the one where they lay together on the flowering hill. Behind them lay the view—black cattle grazing, a crust of rocky shore—but Jimmy was looking at Edal. He couldn’t tear his eyes away.

D
arius had never been kept in at recess before. Mrs. Gamble’s eyes looked weak and watery behind her glasses, but it turned out she noticed things anyhow. Things like the way Darius couldn’t stop yawning and laying his head down on his desk. The way, when he wasn’t sleeping, he was scratching himself, hard.

“Darius, honey, when is your bedtime?”

“Eight o’clock.” Scratch.

“And do you fall asleep right away?”

“Sometimes.” Scratch, scratch. He had his red and blue sweatshirt on. It was hard to get through to his arms. “But then …”

“Then what, Darius?”

“I get woken up.”

Her eyes closed, a blink longer than most. “Who wakes you up, honey?”

Darius wasn’t sure he should say any more. He and Faye had never even spoken about it between them. He looked down at Mrs. Gamble’s shoes. “The biters.”

“The biters?”

He nodded and scratched his arm.

Mrs. Gamble breathed out a long breath. “Darius, push up your sleeves.”

They walked together down the long, deserted hallway to the school library, Mrs. Gamble leading him by the hand. The book had a green and white striped caterpillar on the cover. Mrs. Gamble let him carry it to a nearby table even though it was heavy, big enough to show every bug that ever was.

“These ones?” she asked, after finding the page she wanted. “They’re small, almost like specks. You see them hopping.”

Darius shook his head.

She turned the pages, glassy wings and antennae flashing past. “These? About this big?” She pointed to the nail on his pinky finger.

Darius peered into the book, and there they were—the red-brown, shiny-backed biters that found him no matter where he lay down. They were worst on the couch that was his bed, but the carpet wasn’t safe either. He knew not to bother seeking refuge in Faye’s bed; she liked sleeping alone, and, anyway, they’d found her too. He’d seen the marks on her thin white skin. It might have been why she spent so much time in the bathtub, lying motionless until the water cooled, then digging the stopper out with her toe and running the water up to her chin again.

“Does your mother know about this?” Mrs. Gamble asked.

Darius said nothing.

“Darius, what does your mother say?”

——

Faye wasn’t mad at him for telling—at least, she never said she was. As usual, she said very little at all. Even when the lady in the light brown raincoat came, his mother mostly listened, nodding her head slowly, as though she could scarcely manage its weight. The raincoat lady was their first-ever visitor, but she wasn’t their last. The men in dark blue jackets and matching pants came next. Darius and Faye weren’t allowed to stay in the apartment while the men were there. The raincoat lady was late coming to pick them up, so they crossed the street—Darius reaching for his mother’s hand—and sat together on the curb, watching as Darius’s couch and Faye’s grown-up mattress were lowered from the apartment window on ropes. They landed in a black Dumpster the men had wheeled into place.

“Where will we sleep now?” Darius asked, but Faye didn’t hear him over the passing cars.

The answer was somewhere called The Miskes.

“They’re very nice people,” the raincoat lady said, twisting to smile at him over her shoulder when they came to a red light. “You’ll like them.”

Darius held his tongue. It seemed wrong to speak up while Faye was strapped into the front passenger seat, keeping her thoughts to herself.

Mr. and Mrs. Miske turned out to be older than Faye, but they were stronger-looking too. Muscles moved under the skin of his arms; smooth, solid fat under hers. The first room they showed Darius and Faye was the bathroom. The toilet, tub and sink were pink as cupcakes, the towels a frosty green.

“You can put your clothes in this bag,” Mrs. Miske said,
smiling. “Just go ahead and put everything in there and hand it out to me. Then you can have a nice hot shower, the pair of you. There’s a fresh bar of soap in there, and a couple of washcloths. Shampoo, the works.”

Darius had never taken a shower, at least not one he could remember. At first it was too hot, and frightening in its force, but once Faye adjusted the taps, he warmed to the feel of the water-fingers combing his hair. Faye stood in the tub with him, even soaped up a washcloth for him to use. He’d seen her naked before, of course, but always lying down in the rust-stained tub. Standing up, she looked even less like a mother than usual. He scrubbed hard behind his ears while he counted the ribs in her side.