My grandparents raised my cousins and me. Grandpa said our respective mothers abandoned us. Luckily, he was there to swoop in and save us all.
Even back then, I didn’t believe my grandparents were good people. Why else would all their daughters have abandoned their kids? Just a sad thing all around. Sins of the father and all that. But I did my best to fill the void for my cousins.
There were nine, a mixture of daughters and sons from different mothers. I was the first and oldest. The rest trickled in over the next several years. Most came to us as infants. A couple were toddlers. Everybody had a sibling but me.
I took over the parenting duties. Grandpa was a short-haul trucker and wasn’t home much. Even when he was, he spent all his time out in the woods. We lived on the edge of a national park. As an avid outdoorsman, he spent more nights camping than he did in the house.
As for Grandma, she didn’t do anything except pop prescription pills in her dark bedroom and watch TV. Sometimes she made us all crowd in to watch with her. It was a lot worse than it sounds.
Grandpa homeschooled us. Well, kind of; he gave me lessons until I was twelve. Then he made me teach the others. Grandpa had weird ideas about religion and how people should behave. Mostly it had to do with kids. He made me memorize what he called his “overarching ideology. It was simple: “Men are the head of house and earth. Men and women understand that children are more important than anything else. Making children is the only true path to salvation.”
It all sounded like human sacrifice to me, so I never taught it to my cousins. Grandpa spent so much time in the forest that he never knew the difference.
Now, I knew that caring for my cousins was a good thing. But it was all I ever did. I don’t think I knew how to be anything else. I was starting to resent them for it, which wasn’t fair. They were blameless. So was I, though.
And that’s why I just about lost my shit the morning Grandpa introduced a tenth cousin.
I knew what was happening the second he stepped inside the house. He face had this luminosity. The beautific glow of a zealot who thinks he’s just crawled into God’s right hand.
“Miranda,” he said dreamiy. Buttery sunlight shafted over his face, erasing some of the wrinkles and intensifying that unsettling inner light. I looked down at his arms, expecting a baby.
But no.
He stepped aside, revealing a rail-thin girl of about thirteen. Joints protruded from her bony limbs, which looked far too long for her painfully small body. A tangle of filthy black hair fell past her shoulders, full of twigs and leaves, matted with streaks of dried mud. Like she’d just crawled out of the forest.
“Hello.” I smiled. She stared back with empty, frantic eyes.
Grandpa’s pushed the girl forward. She flinched at his touch, and gave me a look I didn’t understand. Wide-eyed and far too scared, almost wild. That was it. That was what bothered me so much.
She seemed feral.
“Meet your sister. Clara.”
Clara looked away and uttered a shrill moan.
Grandpa gave me a meaningful look. “Miranda, why don’t you make her some breakfast?”
Clara did not want me to feed her.
She squalled like a mountain lion. She tried to escape six times, broke Grandma’s china cabinet, wrenched the door off the fridge. Grandpa finally got the oldest boy to restrain her while he tied her to a chair.
It sounds barbaric, but it was how he handled the little ones’ tantrums. It was too much for Clara. She gave up and began to cry: a weird, shrill keen that made me shiver.
Grandpa took me to my bedroom and closed the door.
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked immediately. “Why doesn’t she talk?”
“I’m going to tell you a secret. Not one word is to pass beyond this room. Understand?”
I nodded.
“You hurt your mother when you were born. It looked like she couldn’t have any more children. But she did. She had Clara.” Rage swept over his face. “She raised her all wrong. Abused her.*”
“That’s awful.”
“She refused to take care of Clara. That’s why she’s so dirty. That’s why she can’t talk.” He leaned close. “Your mother never taught her to speak. Just made her live outside for years on end.”
I thought of Clara’s wild, unfocused eyes and filth-caked hair. I thought my heart would explode with rage and sorrow. “Why?”
“To hide her from me.” He started to pace. “My girls. I love them but I’ll never understand them. Like I’d hurt any of you.”
“I’m sorry, Grandpa.”
“I need you to take care of her. Teach her things she needs to know. I have to go on a haul tomorrow.”
Dread unfurled in my stomach, heavy as lead. “But I don’t know how to help her.”
“Of course you do,” he said dismissively. “You’re a proper mother. You raised your cousins right. You’ll raise her right, too. Tell you what.” He gave me an encouraging smile. “When I come back, I’ll take you on a trip. Just you and me. No cousins, no responsibilities.”
And that was that.
He kept Clara restrained all day. She wasn’t toilet trained, so I had to clean up after her. After dinner, he locked her in a spare room. She railed and cried long after I’d settled in for bed.
He left before dawn the next morning for his haul. I got up to see him off like always. When I got back inside, I heard Clara. Still whimpering and crying.
It made my heart ache. It was only 4:30. All the other kids were asleep, so I figured this would be a good time to let her out.
Grandpa gave me handcuffs and a leash to use on her, but I went to her room empty-handed. She sat up when she me, looking like a deer in headlights.
“It’s okay,” I whispered.
She tangled her fingers together and bleated.
“Come on. I want to take you out of here. But you have to be good, all right?”
She nodded. This sat oddly with me; if she’d never learned to talk, how did she understand?
I took her hand. Together we trundled to the kitchen. I made bacon and eggs, which she refused to eat. In fact, she refused just about everything. After a lot of trial and error, she finally accepted Rice Krispies, which we always had on hand because it was Grandpa’s favorite cereal.
She ate four bowls, staring at me all the while. Her eyes still had a distant, unfocused quality. The kind of look Grandma had when she’d taken too many pills.
When she finished, I immediately washed her bowl. “Clara, why don’t we –”
I turned around just as she ran out the back.
I bolted after her and stopped at the porch, looking around helplessly. It was dark. The sounds of owls and night bugs filled the landscape. Cold wind rattled the leaves.
I was afraid, but there was nothing else to do. So I ran.
I quickly plunged past the treeline, shivering as the woods’ damp chill enveloped me. Bracken crunched underfoot. Small animals skittered out of the way, and an owl chastised me from overhead.
I caught a glimpse of Clara through the trees. Her white nightdress rippled and danced like a phantom.
I was fast, but she was faster. After a while, I couldn’t do it anymore. I stumbled to a nearby tree and sat.
A faint smear of white touched the eastern horizon. Tears threatened to spill. I was running out of time. If I didn’t get back home soon, my cousins would know something was wrong. They’d figure out I’d lost Clara soon enough. One of them was bound to tell Grandpa.
So I climbed to my feet and continued the search.
My grandparents owned a vast tract of protected woodland. We weren’t ever supposed to venture out alone. That morning was the first I’d seen of the forest. It was beautiful and breathtakingly eerie: slope after slope full of towering pines and twisted valley oaks with boughs fanning along the ground. Wonderfully majestic and chillingly impassive.
Just before dawn, I realized I had no idea where I was, and no idea how to get back home. Even if I found Clara - which was starting to seem more and more unlikely - how would I even get us home?
Fear squirmed in my belly as the sun rose. Pale copper light shafted through the trees. It looked like a painting, a red-gold field marked with unnervingly symmetrical bars of dark pines.
The sweetly dissonant chirping of birds filled the woods as red dawn mellowed to golden morning. I labored up yet another slope. Sweat dripped down my face. My shirt clung to my back, simultaneously clammy and suffocating.
Finally, I reached the top. A small valley spread before me. In the middle of a plain choked with juniper, oaks, and orange poppies lay a white house. An ancient oak grew at the back, great canopy draping the roof.
Relief and hope twined through my chest. I hurtled down the slope. Dust and dried leaves flew past me, carrying the smell of fresh forest dirt and dewy sage.
My momentum carried me to the doorway. Hanging from the open door were several heavy padlocks. They seemed so out of place. Looking at them gave me a chill.
Otherwise, the house was breathtaking: built from roughhewn blocks of white stone that glittered like snow. Small curlicues and flourishes gave it the look of a temple.
It looked empty, so I stepped inside. Shadows clustered strangely in the corners. Several sets of shackles were secured to the walls. Across from me, I saw five narrow doors.
I tried the middle door. It came open, sending clouds of dust and glistening cobweb into the air.
Inside was a narrow compartment lined with shelves. Dirty laundry filled the floor. Small cloth bags were piled on the shelves. I picked one up and looked inside. Rocks. Rose quartz, iron pyrite, brittle bits of bismuth.
A second bag held arrowheads. A third was full of costume jewelry, faded and broken but meticulously clean.
I dropped to my haunches to inspect the laundry. Except it wasn’t laundry, but four large bundles swaddled in dusty clothes. I saw wilted flowers and twig wreaths tucked into the fabric.
I picked one up, marveling at its lightness. Even through the wrappings, it was obviously fragile. It felt like a baby doll: I could discern the limbs and head. A small pulse of excitement went through me; it would make a nice present for the younger girls.
I pulled the swaddling away and froze.
Buckled, discolored skin papered across a fragile skull. Sunken sockets bore the desiccated remains of eyes.
A baby. A long-dead baby.
I looked back at the closet. Three other bundles wrapped in cotton and wildflowers.
A deafening scream rang through the room. I spun around, dropping the corpse. Clara flew across the room and tackled me to the ground. My head cracked against the floor. Red stars rocketing across my vision as Clara tangled her fingers in my hair and wrenched, ripping entire locks out by the root.
I trapped her between my legs and rolled over, and pinning her down. She clawed my face. I caught both her hands and pinned those, too.
She took a deep breath and screamed again. Her open mouth revealed a swollen, cauterized stub where her tongue should have been. My gorge rose. I looked up, focusing on anything and everything else, and saw a massive smear of blood on the opposite end of the room.
“Clara.” She kept shrieking. “My head rang and my ears buzzed. “Clara!” I know it’s wrong, but I slapped her. That did the trick; she fell silent, stunned and whimpering. “Clara. Do you know what happened?”
She immediately dissolved into tears. I rocked back on my haunches and held her for a long time.
Once she cried herself out, she threw open all the closet doors. Each was full of cheap ephemera: twig crowns, broken toys, threadbare clothing, rocks and dried flowers. Two of the closets held a cache of dead infants.
Seeing them made Clara cry again. She rocked them as she sobbed, kissing each one on the forehead before tenderly rewrapping them and setting them back in their cupboards.
Then she led me outside.
Behind the temple lay a field of flowers, undisturbed except for a large mound of dark earth. It looked out of place. A relic of a darker world dropped in the midst of a glorious spring.
Something had disturbed the base of the mound. An animal, perhaps, digging for shelter. A small, pale object lay in the shallow hole. I drew closer as Clara continued to cry.
A hand.
Frail and wet with rot, shining with a melange of green and brown and moldy grey.
I told Clara to find the nearest house. One, of course, that didn’t belong to my grandfather. She knew the landscape like the back of her hand, and took me to a small cottage maybe three miles from the temple. We called the police, and waited.
None of our mothers abandoned us.
My grandfather kept them in the woods as breeding stock. My grandmother was infertile. He didn’t believe in divorce, but also believed that childbearing was the only path to salvation. Somehow this was his solution.
None of the women were related to him. As far as I know, no one ever found out who they were. I hope that changes.
Many of their babies died in childbirth. A few were smothered to hide them from my grandfather. Clara’s existence was somehow concealed, passed off a stillbirth and hidden for thirteen years. Until my grandfather stumbled upon her in the forest.
As punishment for this deception, he killed them all. He had six girls living at the house now, more than enough to replace them. I was supposed to be the first. If it hadn’t been for Clara, Grandpa would have locked me in that little white temple soon enough. I think that’s what he meant when he said he’d take me on a private trip.
He died in prison. My grandmother went to a nursing home. We all went to foster homes, of course. It wasn’t easy for us; none of us had birth certificates or any record of existence. But we made it.
It’s been many years. I reconnected with most of my cousins. Clara never recovered, so I take care of her. But we all came out all right.
I suppose that’s the most we can ask for.