Diane Cook - Man V. Nature - Stories

Through the woods, Linda led a procession of strange little faces of varying ages, the bigger ones carrying the crawlers. Each time she tried to count them, they muddled and mixed themselves. She thought there were at least a couple dozen. They were all smudged with dirt and smelled like a horde.

Beatrice walked beside Linda, swinging Lewis’s chair wildly. The girl should look familiar, but Linda thought her the strangest of all. She watched Linda out of the corner of her eye, and seemed ready to flinch should Linda reach for her. So Linda didn’t.

As they left the house, many of the children, crying, had embraced the man, and he had cried too. Most called him Dad, but she heard a few call him Kevin. Kevin , she repeated to herself, and she almost laughed at how ordinary it all began to seem. At the head of the trail the man had worn through the woods, Linda looked back. The man was slumped on the porch, already yellow and dead.

What if the man hadn’t been ill? Would he have fought her for the children? Linda wasn’t sure anymore. Perhaps he’d never intended to keep them, to become caretaker to untold numbers of children throughout his life. Maybe he’d had other plans but long ago had given in to a sick impulse. And the defeated young women thought this must be what motherhood is, and they let it continue. They learned to expect — and so, accept — certain losses. And the man waited a lifetime for some relief.

Linda regarded her sullen brood. They stood expectant, sad and hungry-looking. Her stomach sank.

Linda phoned her neighbors and left messages. The man is dead, and I have all the children. Come and see if any are yours.

Only a few women came, called out names that weren’t recognized, tentatively lifted children, peered at their heads and bottoms as if making sure of something, then left with the ones that most fit what they thought they remembered or what they most wanted. Only one woman teared up with joy. The others emanated a feeling more like confusion. Or resignation. If you could suddenly get back everything you’d already said good-bye to, would you want it? Other women she had called answered with their silence. They never came.

Linda recognized their parents in some of them. Inherited noses, eyes, smiles, temperaments, gave them away. She was certain she could match these children, walk them over to their proper homes. Two children who had earlier been claimed reappeared on her doorstep, apology notes pinned to their jackets. She could have sent them back to their indecisive parents. But she didn’t do it. She kept all the children.

Linda hired men to build a cramped addition onto the house, and her husband worked extra hours to pay for it and for all their new expenses. Often after work he took long night drives, drank late at a bar, anything to avoid coming home to this new bustling clan. Linda remembered how, when they were newly married and fantasizing about their family to come, he had argued that three was the ideal number of children. Now they had twenty-five.

The new addition covered the footprint of the backyard and left no room for outside play. The children slept in rows on rough-hewn bunk beds that reminded her of a ship’s galley: industrial, sad, adult. She tried not to picture it that way and concentrated instead on how these children were no longer stolen. They had been found. Freed. She had rescued them. But was anything better? Her husband was unhappy; the children who had seemed content in their forest home now seemed lethargic. And though she had her children back, she still felt grief for what could have been, for what would never be. Maybe this is what her neighbors had tried to tell her. Motherhood was naturally replete with loss.

She tried to keep her own children close. She put their beds in her bedroom. For Lewis a crib and then later his own small bed, with a train engine’s face painted onto the foot, covered in conductor-striped sheets. And for Beatrice — a bed with pink sheets and a comforter trimmed with lace. But Beatrice didn’t sleep there.

Beatrice prowled the house at night, looking through cabinets and books. She went for long walks and came back with things that didn’t belong to her. In the morning, Linda would find her curled in a corner under a moldy, yellowed blanket Linda didn’t recognize and couldn’t remember bringing from the man’s house. Beatrice’s socks would be half off her feet in that way socks slide off children’s feet but never adults’.

Beatrice kept her treasures in her corner of the living room, and at night, when the children were in bed, when Lewis was asleep, when her husband was working late to avoid the teeming house, when Beatrice was loping through the halls, Linda explored the collection. Mixed in with the dirty baseballs and lost car keys, Linda found a box of letters she had written to her stolen daughter and hoped one day to give to her. Baby pictures were tucked into a dog-eared grief book heavily marked with Linda’s handwriting. Beneath it, Linda’s hairbrush, full of wiry grays, a sweater she hadn’t worn in years, a swatch of pink snipped from Beatrice’s own lonely bedding doused in an expensive perfume Linda kept on her dresser.

Linda waited for some warm tug of emotion, but the collection only made her uneasy. This study in the past cast doubt in Linda’s mind about the girl — she couldn’t possibly be Beatrice; Linda felt little for her. At times she wondered if the man had lied to her, or mistaken this girl for another. When the children were all together, Linda watched the girls and tried to feel a yearning for them, something. She asked herself, Is that how my Beatrice would look at age six? But none of them were like the daughter she’d spent years building in her imagination. And neither was this interloper who always seemed unsure where to stand, with her sly stare and twigs in her hair.

Some nights, after Beatrice had slipped out, Linda stood at the door and placed her hand on the lock, debated turning it. What would become of her? Linda pictured the girl returning to the sprawling house in the woods where she’d been raised, where her hiding spots were, padding across those bare floors with her dirty feet, tacking up new pictures, living like the man, collecting things in her travels, which would eventually lead to collecting children.

These were rare times Linda felt a straightforward, understandable emotion for Beatrice. She felt pity for the girl who was far from home. But it wasn’t the same as love.

So she took to imagining Beatrice truly roaming, undetected, wild; able to cast off the trappings of her true home and Linda’s home. Searching for a new home in the bottom of a dead tree, or maybe in a wet cave deep within a park. She’d sleep on pine boughs in the hot summer and shiver in her filthy yellow blanket in the winter.

Linda spent long nights composing Beatrice’s adventures, obsessing over the details. She tried to convince herself they had the makings of an enviable childhood: Beatrice drinking from fountains and bathing in lakes, calling owls at night and chasing butterflies during the day, hiding from snooping dogs, raiding squirrel stashes, spying on crows, making speeches to the tallest trees, weaving weeds through her hair, drawing pictures on sidewalks with burned wood, being a princess, reading street signs like they were adventure stories, laughing with ducks who told her jokes, digging through garbage, watching, from a tree, happy families picnicking across a great lawn, and waiting for the moment when she might slip unnoticed among them as though she belonged to them and steal their lunches, then, more.

Freshman year starts, and somehow everyone is someone else, someone older, someone interested in the faraway future life. Everyone except me. I’m back from a summer at my dad’s divorce condo — decorated to seem remote and armed — and no one cares. I’m watching my old clique grind into boys on the dance floor while the male coaches-slash-civics-teachers roughly separate them, swipe at inappropriate girl parts, and get away with it in the authoritative heat of the moment. I’m watching it all, cringing, but I wish I were in the scrum.