Bones & All Read online

  There was nothing lucky about it. A strange woman called me by name in a place full of odd smells, brisk voices, and mechanical ticks and beeps. My name in her mouth made me cringe. “I want my mother,” I said. “Who was that woman who went with my mother?”

  “She’s a social worker. She wants to work together with your mom so that you can get well.”

  A lie, of course. I just looked at her until she averted her eyes and hurried out of the room.

  After maybe an hour Mama came back. She looked really, really tired. “What did she want?” I asked.

  “She thought I wasn’t feeding you.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “The truth—the better part of it, anyway. I said you were upset because you had a friend at summer camp who’d been…” She sighed. “I had to give her the details, otherwise she wouldn’t have believed me.” She pressed her thumb and forefinger together. “You came this close to going into foster care.”

  I stared at her, amazed. I could have been somebody else’s problem.

  “Please, just eat and drink everything they bring you so we can get out of here, all right?”

  Early the next day, before Mama arrived, the social worker came back with her clipboard. She shook my hand, told me her name was Donna, and asked me questions about Mama and what our life was like. I told her Mama had always taken good care of me, that I always had plenty to eat, and Donna watched me as I prodded my scrambled eggs with a plastic fork. Finally she ran out of questions and left me alone. She’d never asked about summer camp.

  I was discharged the next day. Mama put her arm around me as we walked out to the car, and when we got there I saw one side of the backseat filled to the ceiling with garbage bags and cardboard boxes. There were more bags in the front passenger’s seat and, no doubt, plenty more in the trunk. While I was eating Jell-O out of a plastic cup, she’d been stuffing our car with as much of our lives as would fit.

  2

  The morning after Mama left I went into the kitchen and threw a dish on the floor just to see what it felt like. Stepping over the pieces, I picked up the fat white envelope, but I found more than money inside. She’d left me my birth certificate. It was blue and crinkly, and I took my time unfolding it. A birth certificate is sort of a sacred document for the person in question, even a monster like me.

  I only remember asking about my father one time. “He’s gone,” she said.

  “But what was his name?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “I just want to know.”

  “He didn’t have one.”

  “Everybody has a name!”

  She didn’t answer, and I let it go. A few weeks later I heard the kids in my class whispering about another girl, Tina, whose mother had been with so many men that Tina would never know who her father was. I didn’t see how they could have known this, but they pointed their fingers like they had it on good authority.

  At first I thought maybe Tina and I were in the same boat, but my mother wasn’t like the other single moms. She still wore a ring on her left hand, she never had boyfriends, and we had the same last name. So my parents must have been married. Maybe they had been living in that apartment in Pennsylvania when my mom came home to Penny Wilson’s bones on the carpet, and that’s when he went away. As for why she never dated—well, that was easy enough. I was a particularly heavy piece of baggage.

  I opened the birth certificate and smoothed out the creases before I let myself read it. General Hospital of Friendship, Wisconsin. There was my name, my birthday—female, 20½ inches long, 7 pounds 12½ ounces—my mother’s maiden name, Janelle Shields, in the space marked Mother (Place of birth: Edgartown, Pennsylvania), and in the space marked Father there was a name I’d never seen before: Francis Yearly. I had a father! A real father! I’d known I had one, of course, but it made all the difference to see his name there in faded type on the dotted line.

  It settled over me slowly, like a cracked egg trickling down around my ears: Sandhorn, Minnesota. That’s where she expected me to go with the money she’d given me. Mama wanted me to hop on a bus, find my father, and forget all about her.

  And what if I found my dad—what then? Something in me lurched. I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. I had to figure out a way to make things right with Mama.

  I’d pasted the Christmas card envelope with my grandparents’ address onto the inside cover of my notebook, even though I’d learned it by heart as soon as I’d fished it out of the trashcan. I hadn’t seen my grandparents since before Penny Wilson—and I knew better than to ask, I knew my mother would never take me to see them—but that was where she’d gone, so that was where I was going. I didn’t know what I would say to her; I only knew that a hundred dollars was more than enough to get me there.

  I ate what was left in the fridge, took a shower, and packed. Whenever we moved I stuffed most of my things into an old army rucksack labeled SHIELDS and U.S. ARMY in big black letters. It was my grandfather’s, but I wasn’t supposed to know that. This time it had to fit everything.

  I had to be picky about the books I brought with me because I knew the pack would feel heavier and heavier the longer I carried it. I packed my birthday book and my two-volume set of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. I packed the other books, their books, along with the other things I’d taken—a glow-in-the-dark compass, a pair of tortoiseshell eyeglasses.

  I left the house key on the table, went out to the end of the street, and got on the local bus. A man tried to smile at me, but he wound up looking like he was in pain. He hadn’t shaved in at least a week. “Goin’ someplace?”

  I glared at him. “Aren’t we all?”

  He turned back in his seat, chuckling, and I clasped my hands over the rucksack and looked out the window. It felt strange to be leaving a place when I hadn’t done the bad thing. We passed by my school. I was supposed to have a geometry test today.

  I got off at the Greyhound station and spent too much of the money Mama left me on a one-way ticket to Edgartown. All through the trip I ate out of pit-stop vending machines: untoasted Pop-Tarts for breakfast, Snyder’s pretzels for lunch, Fritos for dinner. I had to switch buses three times, and every time I got on the driver raised his eyebrows as if to say, Aren’t you supposed to be in school?

  The closer we got, the more I felt my guts twisting up. I was nervous about seeing my own mother.

  * * *

  I used to have two kinds of dreams about Luke, and I could never decide which was worse. In the first kind I didn’t see him, I only heard his voice in my ear. My tree house will have three stories and only a ladder on the way up the trunk, and there’ll be real staircases inside it—spiral staircases and lots of windows on every side so you can watch the birds and the sunset and the sunrise too, if you get up early enough. I’ll have a wife, and she’ll be pretty like you, and we’ll sleep in bunk beds on the third floor. I like the top bunk best but if she’d rather have the top then I’ll give it to her because that’s what men do, it’s called shill-vurry. And I’ll have a horse too, for when I go out on my forest rangering, but I guess we’ll have to build the stable on the ground.…

  In the other kind we were back in the tent. The camping lantern had run out of battery and I couldn’t make out the shape of Luke’s face, but he looked at me with red, glowing eyes. I would cringe against his breath, hot and foul as mine must have been, and then he bared a mouthful of gleaming fangs and tore my face off. You’d think that one would be worse, but even though it’s happening to me it’s just like in the horror movies. It isn’t that scary when people are getting what they deserve.

  “Do you think anyone else does it too? The bad thing?” I asked my mother once.

  She hesitated. “If there were others, would it make you feel better or worse?”

  “I want to say better, but I know I shouldn’t. It’s the same as wishing even more people…” I trailed off. “But I wouldn’t be
alone.”

  I wanted her to say, You aren’t alone, honey. You’ve got me. But Mama never said things just to make me feel better. She never called me honey, and she wouldn’t say anything unless it was true.

  I only found people like me in storybooks I read in the library. Giants. Trolls. Witches. Ghouls. The Minotaur. If this were a Greek epic, I would be the hero’s narrow escape. Chronos, the god of time, was convinced that one of his children would overthrow him, so every time his wife gave birth he gobbled up the baby.

  Gobble. That word was the reason I dreaded Thanksgiving. One time my fourth-grade teacher told Mama I was a voracious reader, and Mama got really upset and pretended she was feeling sick so she could get out of the parent-teacher conference. But maybe she wasn’t pretending. Mama never read me fairy tales, and I knew why.

  Wherever I was going to school, I spent all my free time in the library. My mother wouldn’t buy me The BFG, so I read it during lunch period, but Roald Dahl disappointed me. The heroine never ate anybody, and the nasty man-eating giants all got their comeuppance.

  What was I expecting? Somebody like me could never be the good one.

  I collected all the monster stories I could find and put them in a notebook. Sometimes I copied out whole passages, and I always photocopied the pictures. Saturn Devouring His Son. Goya. Painted around 1820. Sawney Beane, head of a clan of cannibals living in a cave along the Scottish coast. I used to hide myself away in the quietest corner to avoid the librarians coming up to ask what I was working on. Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.

  * * *

  I got to Edgartown and asked for directions from a man behind the counter at McDonald’s. It was almost dark by the time I got to my grandparents’ neighborhood, if I could call them that.

  They lived in one of those split-levels built in the ’50s, in a neighborhood where every house and yard is bounded on three sides by others just like it. It made my heart hurt to see our car in the driveway, behind a dark blue Cadillac that had to be my grandfather’s. I waited until dark, walked around the block, and hopped the back neighbor’s fence. Better to be caught by someone who didn’t know me.

  I figured out the kitchen was at the back of the house, so I crouched by the neighbor’s fence looking in. They shouldn’t call picture windows that because you have a pretty view looking out. They’re picture windows because everything inside is all lit up, and in the darkness you can see people sitting down to dinner like you’re watching them on a movie screen.

  Mama brought the salad bowl to the table, they took their seats, and her father poured her a glass of wine. I couldn’t get a good view of either of my grandparents because my grandfather’s back was turned to the window and my grandmother was seated directly opposite. I could see my mother clearly though. I saw her pushing her food around her plate exactly the way she’d told me not to, I saw her lips form one-word answers, and I saw when she dropped her fork and hid her face in her hands. My grandmother got up from the table and put her arms around my mother, and Mama clung to her and cried. She’d probably told them everything.

  I thought I’d understood how hard it was for my mother. I was sorry and I wished I could be different, but that wasn’t the same as understanding. I didn’t understand when she locked herself in the bathroom, didn’t understand when I saw the empty wine bottles lined up along the kitchen counter, didn’t understand when I heard her crying through the wall. Now I was beginning to.

  She wore herself out, and her mother handed her a tissue. My grandfather lit a cigarette. He offered Mama the pack, and she reached out and took one. This really shocked me, because Mama never smoked.

  My grandmother cleared the table and washed the dishes, while my mother and her father sat and smoked in silence. Then the woman put her arm around Mama’s shoulders and led her from the room. Her father turned out the kitchen light, and I went over the fence again and out of the neighborhood.

  I walked along a busy road lined with shops already closed for the night. There wasn’t even a place where I could order a slice of pizza.

  I walked around to the back of the strip mall, thinking maybe there’d be some food that was still clean enough to eat, even though the thought of eating out of a garbage bin grossed me out. There wasn’t anything edible in there, but I did find a car parked behind the Dumpster. I tried the handle and found it unlocked. It was a Cadillac, like my grandfather’s, but there were newspapers and empty soda cans all over the seats and gaping holes in the upholstery, as though the car had been left there and forgotten months ago. I cleaned off the backseat as best I could, climbed inside, and locked the doors behind me. The car smelled like mold and cigarettes and the unwashed body of whoever had driven it last, but it was better than wandering up and down the highway all night.

  I laid my head on my pack and eventually fell asleep, and when I woke up my head was in a woman’s lap and she was stroking my hair. My grandmother looked down at me, and her face was earnest and concerned. I asked her questions as she conjured a plaid car blanket out of the darkness and draped it over me—Where’s Mama? Does she know you’ve come?—but she only smiled and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear, just like Mama used to.

  In the driver’s seat, my grandfather was smoking a cigarette. He raised his eyes to the rearview mirror and we looked at each other, but he didn’t greet me. He sighed out a stream of smoke, flicked the cigarette into the street, and rolled up the window.

  We drove in silence through the empty town, the street lamps washing the darkened Caddy with hazy orange light at steady intervals. I slid sideways and laid my head on the cold leather seat, and when I woke up I was back in the empty car, damp and shivering.

  * * *

  Sometimes out of the blue I’d have that taste in my mouth—the taste of things no honest person knows the taste of—and I would stumble into the bathroom for the Listerine. I’d gargle and gargle some more, letting it linger in my mouth until it stung, but as soon as I’d spat I could taste it again, the bad taste after the bad thing. At school other girls would come into the bathroom and catch me in the middle of rinsing. Through the mirror they would stare at me as I spit, screwed the cap back on a bottle of Listerine, and stuffed it in my backpack. Maybe that was why I never made friends with girls.

  In sixth grade we had to do our first research papers, with footnotes and a bibliography and everything. I was used to looking things up in books, so I would have enjoyed choosing my own topic, but everyone had to write their papers on termites. Our English class went to the library every day for a week.

  On Thursday morning somebody wandered over to my table, and I looked up. It was Stuart, the smart kid. I felt him leaning over my shoulder to see what I was reading, I felt his nearness and smelled the tuna fish on his breath, but he didn’t make me feel funny. He was one of those boys who never thought of girls in that way, or at least he wouldn’t for a long time yet. Finally I asked, “Do you need this book or something?”

  “No. I finished my report at home last night. What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing.”

  “We’re supposed to be looking up termites,” he said.

  “Who’s going to tell?”

  I felt him shrug behind me. “Anyway, you’re right. Australian redback spiders are much more interesting.” He kept reading over my shoulder. “This entry is incomplete. The entomological encyclopedia I have at home is better. Do you know why they’re called black widows?”

  “Why?”

  “Because their mates all die. Because she eats him.” Stuart sat down across from me as he spoke. “She eats him right after they copulate, sometimes even while they’re still doing it. He lets her eat him because she needs the protein for her young, and anyway, his reproductive destiny has been fulfilled.”

  His reproductive destiny has been fulfilled? I would have laughed at him for memorizing whole lines from the encyclopedia, but all of a sudden I was too nervous to say anything. My heart was thumping
like it was trying to get out.

  “It’s called sexual cannibalism,” he was saying. “It’s the most important thing to know about the Australian redback spider, and it’s not in there at all.”

  “It’s a kids’ encyclopedia,” I said. “They can’t put the word ‘sex’ in it.” I paused. “Stuart?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do other species do that?”

  “Do what? Eat each other?”

  I nodded.

  “The black widows, like I said. And there are a couple more kinds of spiders that would die after copulation anyway—the males, I mean—so even though the female doesn’t attack during copulation”—he was using the word ‘copulation’ too often and too loudly; other kids were looking up from their notebooks—“she might as well eat him afterward, you know?”

  “For the protein,” I said, careful to keep my voice low.

  “Right, for the protein.”

  “But are there species besides insects that do it? Like mammals?”

  Stuart gave me a funny look and didn’t answer. I was very aware that we had been having a conversation, and now we were not, and I could have kicked myself.

  “Why do you wear black all the time?” he asked.

  Just in case.

  So the mess wouldn’t show.

  What I said was, “So I never have to match.”

  “You should wear colors. Then maybe people wouldn’t talk so much about how weird you are.” We locked eyes, but only for a second. “Sorry. But it’s the truth.”

  We outcasts had a way of organizing ourselves into concentric circles, so kids like Stuart could feel bad for someone like me on the very outer fringe and feel relieved that they weren’t on it. I said, “They’ll think I’m weird no matter what I wear.”

  He looked at me. “Yeah.” He got up from the table and hugged his Trapper Keeper to his chest. “You’re probably right.” Then he went back to sit at a table by himself.