Northern Girls

It is true, you were complicated, and you killed small animals, but then, so did I.

Growing up, it seemed to me that there was always someone waiting in line to love my mother, and after my parents divorced when I was two years old, your father took his turn. Admittedly, I had a great deal of prejudice against you before I even met you, and I mistreated you the first years we were forced to live in the same home. Before you arrived, my mother asked our young teenage babysitter to help prepare my siblings and me for your arrival, but with her limited understanding of blended families, our babysitter told us that adopted girls, like you, were very angry, and that in a fit of rage you might try to scratch our eyes out. But quite the contrary with you, Brittany. 

Your father, however, started yelling, spanking us children at random, pushing my mother up against the wall, and slapping her in the face while she screamed. Their brief cycle of love, violence, and marriage came to a quick end. In one last agreed course of action, your father and my mother planned his exit while my siblings and I were on visitation at our real father’s house. Over a weekend, all evidence of your father vanished as he moved all of his belongings out of our house. When we returned, the rooms felt naked–he had contributed a lot of soft, comfortable sofas to the marriage, and now he’d have them all for himself. What was worse, I could not see you when I walked in. 

I had no claim on you because you’d come to live with us through him, but my mother, who had a marbling of tenderness throughout her broken and toughened heart, took me in her arms and said, “Britt stayed with us; we knew it wouldn’t be fair to separate you two.” Even though we remained family, it must have been hard for you being the only adopted one. It must have been hard to hear our mother say so matter-of-factly throughout your life, “I do not like Britt.”

After your father left, together we watched a string of male lovers, as well as a mysterious woman whom we were told to call Cookie, come through our house. They all sat around our table, shared our meals, cared deeply for our mother, and took up her precious time. And then all of a sudden, there was Joe. He was young, and handsome.

Things moved fast, and caught up in the whirlwind of love, the Great Getaway was set in motion. We would sell our house in the south, and move to the Gateway of the North. We’d exchange thick steel-town air for conifer-filtered breaths. 

After we moved into a house with some forested acreage, you took to the woods so often, walking alone. I never joined you because Mother had made it perfectly clear that we were to keep watch for bears, wolves, fox, and ticks, not to mention potential lusty men. The North frightened me, but it didn’t scare you, a feline, at all; it was I who frightened you at times. 

I am sorry I refused to scoop out the earwigs floating in your water bowl—some living, some dead. I watched you from my laundry perch as you drank around the pinching flotsam while I slowly pinned heavy basketfuls of wet linen and denim on a wash line that ran to the edge of the dark, creaking forest. I’d scream in frustration when I’d reach into the clothespin bin and pull out one wielding an earwig. How they liked to hide on me. It wasn’t long before they moved into my bed and shoes; finally, when all pretenses were gone during a full-on infestation, I found an earwig resting on top of my toothbrush, posing as the worst kind of toothpaste I could ever imagine. How much worse the vermin must have been for you.

I spied on you from the back porch sometimes while you watched the soul bleed from a small creature that you’d freshly killed. When it was warm enough outside, and I felt particularly angry and defeated by life, perhaps you spied on me as I trudged down to the creek and caught a pail’s-worth of frogs with my bare hands. With sweat beading on the tip of my nose and along my hairline, I’d haul the pail of frogs to the local French school–the one I could not attend because I did not speak French like most of the children in our French ville–and fling their tender bodies repeatedly against the jagged brick wall until they lay motionless on the hot asphalt below. It disturbs me now to think back to how I’d glare at the carnage and feel justified, but never satisfied.

Our relationship changed the night in the basement when Mother added another empty beer bottle to the collection growing on the bar top and struggled to enunciate to me, “You’ll probably get pregnant young and never make it to college.” 

I’m sure she had said one hundred sweet things as nourishing as honey to me over the course of my then short life, but nothing stung so much as those words that night. 

Without grabbing a jacket, I slammed the door and walked into the darkness of our backyard, crunching on dead, frosty leaves. Traipsing through the forest was out of the question, so I climbed the fence beside our tiny animal barn and leapt across the open space, risking a free-fall down onto the dirty concrete pad below where a dog could run. But I made the jump and sat crossed-legged on the shingles of the roof with my back to our house, shivering. I cried, hoping it wasn’t cold enough outside to get frostbite on my face again. When I heard a door slam I looked over to the back porch, hoping to see Mother searching for me in the darkness. She was not there. I should have known it was you.

Not a minute passed and you climbed the tall fence, made the jump to me, and sat in my lap, warming me. I don’t think I ever turned you away from my bed again after that night, Britt, even though your sticky gut worms poured out of your rear-end all over my bedspread, drying in the open air like hard little grains of rice–confetti of your neglect. It was easy enough to scrape those dead worms from the cotton, and use one curled hand to scoop them off into the other hand, as one might clear crumbs from a countertop before depositing them into the trash bin. Years passed with this sleep ritual. 

You sniffed around for mice in the garage, shucked through their scrappy nests with your sharp claws, and picked up salty baby mice in your mouth. You slurped back those still-blind pinkies as a woman who grew up seaside might slurp back a freshly shucked oyster. When I caught you with a baby in your mouth, I yelled, “Drop it,” and you did. It was still alive, so I tried to feed the tiny creature with a medicine dropper filled with cow’s milk, but I accidentally drowned it. I found the nest in our garage by standing very still and listening hard for movement, as you did, and put the dead pinkie back so that its mother could say goodbye. By then I was feeling a healthy sense of remorse about the frogs, and gently poured buckets of them into a pond behind our house because Mother liked the sound of their song at night. 

I realize now that you were probably bone-hungry for something delicious, and baby mice don’t have strong bones to crunch through, which worked well for you because you had no teeth. And you had no teeth because we only served you a gelatinous wobbly sphere that slid out of the can and into your bowl. Whenever you slept, your tongue would slip out of your mouth for the duration of your nap. You may have had severe headaches and abscesses. For that, I am sorry. 

Mother had been luring hummingbirds to our home with sugar-water feeders and nectar flowers in low dirt beds, which was a mistake, given how things turned out; you offended her deeply when you started killing her little flying glories and gumming their iridescent feathers. She held you against your will and put a collar with a bell around your neck. You looked defeated and left for a few days, jingling all the way into the dark forest. Upon your return, you somehow made it past Mother in the house while carrying a fully-grown dead robin in your hard pink gums, your bell ringing all the way down the hall to my bedroom, where you laid it to rest on my bed–a gift for me.

As an axe chops to fell a tree, so too did Mother and Joe’s hatchet tongues fell each other in a devastating rhythm. As you know, Britt, imitation is a strong instinct in the young, and I quickly adopted Mother’s prejudice toward him. Finally, the night Mother confronted him in the bowels of a dark, seedy strip club that lay at the edge of a Northern highway, things were clearly over.

With him gone, we rationed cords of wood, and shivered in bed. You became a hot rock at my feet. During Mother’s lowest point, we ate potatoes often. Earwigs thickened in the corners and cracks as Mother chain-smoked in bed and drank alone. Sadness and anger slow-burned blue and orange in equal parts, travelling through our soft, tinder hearts, reducing us all at times to ash. It seemed that the north, with its stony skin, glassy lake eyes, and acres of coniferous hair flecked with nests, watched while hope bled from our family.

Not long after, I moved in with my father, and you and Mother moved to a higher northern region with Mother’s new lover. By then you’d lived about eighteen human years, which is roughly ninety cat years. You had started bumping into things because all your whiskers had fallen out. The hair on your head was patchy, and a cloud of cataracts had reduced your eyes to milky glass. 

By the third time I travelled north to visit you and Mother, you were dead. Mother never did find your body, Britt, though she searched the woods. In the most sensitive way she could say it, Mother told me that you simply walked off into the forest on a very cold winter’s night, and that the snow had disappeared your footsteps. To this day, I imagine a grizzly wind ripping apart a herd of snow clouds migrating across the night sky, and death falling on you as light as feathers, and as heavy as suffocation. I cried bitterly at hearing the news and focused on how you lived your life, who you were to me, and that at least you’d made it to eighteen, given the circumstances. 

The next time I visited Mother, I helped her nail her tiny cottage windows shut because her ex-lover had physically abused her, had set her vehicle on fire, and was threatening to kill her. We made a plan for her to move back down south, but then she forgave him and stayed. She broke up with him again and he stalked her, then broke into her cottage and tipped heavy furniture over and onto her body. She was hospitalized, and then she forgave him again. When he threatened to kill her the last time, saying he’d make sure to finish the job properly, she died in a car accident on the run from him. I had just turned twenty when I lost her.

Where your bones have shuffled down and settled into a dirt bed, Britt, I hope nectar flowers blossom yearly above your grave to draw hummingbirds. I believe I’ll see you and Mother again in the afterlife, where we are given new bodies. Mother’s body will no longer be mangled, and her skull will be intact. She will have no fear. And you, Britt, will have no gut worms, and strong, new teeth and eyes.

Michelle Willms‘ work has appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Scrivener Creative Review, Lieu Commun, In/Words, The Writer’s Block, Black Dandy: Fiction for the Fearless, and in the anthology THIS SIDE OF THE DIVIDE: Stories of the American West (Baobab Press). She holds two degrees from McMaster University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia.

A Song for Michelle