All these people whose lives Vern only ever got snippets of.
Gogo left the candle burning and joined Vern in the bed. “Better now?” she asked. She kissed the back of Vern’s neck. Vern was sweaty and sticky, spent from fear. She couldn’t even nod.
“I’m here, I’m here, I’m here,” said Gogo. She kept on saying it.
The sun was about to rise when Vern finally drifted off to the sounds of a wailing baby and a gun cocking in her ears.
* * *
“READ TO ME, Mam!” Howling said one evening after everyone else had retired. “You can read now, can’t you?”
“I’m busy,” Vern said. She was working her way through her own book.
“But you’ve never read to me,” he said, and invited himself into her lap.
Vern sighed but relented, trying to make space for her child, lest he pull away from her and find himself searching for love elsewhere, in someone who saw him not as a child but as a vehicle. Like Brother Freddy with Carmichael.
Howling shared much in common with her little brother. They even looked alike. Only difference was Howling was here, and Carmichael was back there.
“It’s called Robin Hood. Gogo said I would like it, but the words is too big. I can’t read it. Can you?”
Vern grabbed the book. The Adventures of Robin Hood Retold. “I know about him. He stole from the rich and gave to the poor,” said Vern.
“Then read it to me.”
Vern always had to resist her urge to bristle at her child’s commanding tone. That was just the way kids talked. It didn’t represent any real authority. Vern opened the book to the first page and began to read. She smiled at the normality of it. How many places in the world was this scene taking place? They both booed at the part where it said the punishment for killing a deer in the king’s wood was torture or imprisonment. Vern, Howling, and Feral would’ve been dead a hundred times if the repercussions for killing and eating game were so cruel.
Howling burrowed deeper into the front of her body, pressing against the exoskeleton. As she read, he lifted her shirt to comfort himself against her skin as he’d done when he was younger. “It’s like claws!” he said in awe, laughing.
“Do you want me to read or not? Then stop interrupting.”
Howling pressed a finger against one of the skeleton’s shell-like curves, gently exploring, but the pain of it startled Vern in its intensity. She clenched, and her skeleton unfolded, ripping through her shirt.
“Fuck,” yelled Vern, standing quickly. When she did, Howling went tumbling out of her lap onto the carpet.
He looked at her with an accusatory pout. “What’d you do that for?” he asked, rubbing his hurt thigh.
Vern’s passenger folded inward, and she bent to join her eldest on the floor. “It was a reflex,” she said, and forced out an apology. “I’m sorry.”
The haunting of the white woman had forced Vern to rely on anger as fuel, and there was little room left for the gentleness motherhood sometimes required.
“I thought you said it didn’t hurt. I wouldn’t’ve done it otherwise,” said Howling.
Vern curled her finger toward her, gesturing Howling closer. “This time you poked harder and in a more tender place. Not all of it is the same.”
Howling crawled into Vern’s arms and rested his cheek on her shoulder. “You still love me, then?” he asked.
“Of course I love you,” she said, breathing in Howling’s scent. Vern was so used to making herself hard, she struggled to deliberately soften herself. “That will never change,” she said, and squeezed Howling tight, embarrassed that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d hugged him. “Forever and always,” she said, and kissed the top of his head with a smile. For a brief moment, she felt it. That perfect sweetness love could sometimes bring on.
It lasted until she heard the crack and Howling’s subsequent yelp.
“Mam!” Howling cried out, and Vern let go of her babe. She’d broken his ribs with the force of her embrace. “Mam,” whimpered Howling again, gasping for air.
“Help!” Vern called. “He can’t breathe!” Pain stilled him every time he tried to inhale. “I said help!”
Gogo blazed in first, then Bridget.
“I’m too strong,” Vern sputtered out in explanation. She was sniffling and crying as much as Howling was. “I didn’t mean it.”
“Oh, Vern,” said Gogo, struck, eyes yawning open at the sight of Vern’s unsheathed exoskeleton.