Page 50 of The Deer and the Dragon
We left the trailer park within six months after the first incident.
Maybe it was the sort of thing I should try to let go, but I couldn’t forget.
She’d convinced my father that there were outside influences battling for my soul and that getting a fresh start in the woods would be good for me. It had been the first time I’d looked at my mother with a question in my eyes, as I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was wrong about the fox.
The fox was good.
But we moved. My father’s commute to work was substantially longer, and my two-hour bus ride to school began at six thirty each morning, but a trailer in the forest was cheaper than one in the city. And so, for more than ten years, I lived with the flowers and trees. No streetlights interrupted my view of the stars. If I walked far enough into the woods and ducked under a farmer’s fence, I could get to a small, babbling brook and play barefoot for hours. The birds, the snakes, the wild hares became my friends. My imagination flourished while I caught crayfish with my fingers and read tattered novels I’d smuggled from the school library in the crooked boughs of oak trees.
We remained too poor to live in anything beyond a trailer, but our new lot in the woods was quite the upgrade. It was still only two bedrooms, but over the years, we acquired a new couch and a television that played the VHS tapes my mom would borrow from the church or check out from the library. My mother had picked an eclectic antique theme of thrifted items to decorate the space, and my dad kept the grass short and the bushes trimmed. I’d always thought our excessive use of candles was a pretty choice until I was old enough to understand we were saving on electricity rather than living for aesthetics. Still, my parents were adamant that you didn’t have to have a lot in order to be proud of what you had.
My clothes were never new, but they were always wrinkle-free. Our house was cheap, but it was quaint. My mother cleaned obsessively, scrubbing every inch, vacuuming, dusting, mopping, bleaching as if proving her worthiness.
“Cleanliness is next to godliness,” she’d say.
“That’s not actually in the Bible,” I’d reply. It always gained a smile of approval from her. She liked that I was well read and could argue my verses. While other teenagers were getting boyfriends and going to parties, I was excelling as a student of the church, glowing each time I earned her approval. Her praise was like the sun after winter, cutting through the freeze-outs, the silent treatments, the punishments that frosted my misdeeds. But my mother went on washing as if she swept and sterilized and spruced to prove her worthiness, should anyone step into our home and witness our poverty.
No one ever did.
When I wasn’t at school, I was in the woods.
For over a decade, I’d wait at my window until I saw a flash of white fur. If I didn’t see it first, it would usually find me while I played with sticks, creating tiny corrals for boxelder bugs as I pretended to be a giant rancher, as I jumped from rock to rock in the creek, as I scraped my knees and palms on tree bark or read in the shade as I got older.
I was old enough to know that arctic foxes didn’t live in the American Midwest, but it was as real as anything to me. Whether it was wild pet or imaginary friend, I loved it more than life.
If I was on a walk through the woods and I didn’t spy it right away, it would chirp, wave its paw, or leap to get my attention. There was no feeling like the sun that bloomed within my chest, lighting me from the inside out when I finally saw it. Sometimes it followed me, listening to me as I babbled about my day or homework, or church. Sometimes it would lead me to a pretty flower, or I’d follow it to a bushel of wild strawberries. Other times, it would flick itstail in greeting. Then when I turned my head, it would be gone.
My mom couldn’t know about my imaginary friend. She wouldn’t understand. And I was no longer a child. Teenagers didn’t conjure woodland creatures to keep them company. The fox would be a guarded secret. It made me happy. That’s what mattered.
Very few students talked to me at school, though it was no mystery why. As I grew older, the librarian was one of the only friendly faces I saw at the school. She always had a smile for me and often set aside new or interesting books before other children could snag them. By age eleven, I’d read every fantasy novel within my reading level, and even those far beyond my grade. I loved history, poetry, and animals. I had my mom, the wilderness, the fox, Kirby, a library of books, and the Bible. I didn’t need other friends. After all, she’d said, Jesus was the only friend I needed.
Jesus and her, of course.
She called what we had “friendship.” We were best friends, she’d said, and I believed her, though sometimes I wasn’t sure how much of our companionship was by choice. It was a solemn vow she’d say before singing haunting, beautiful songs with terrifying theology to lull me to sleep, each melody reinforcing fear over my soul and its eternal destination. It was a promise she made before coaxing my secrets from me. It was something she’d repeat before something I said or did ignited her rage. That was the pattern for years and years, and it worked. At least, it worked for her.
Everything was fine, until it wasn’t.
In the weeks leading up to my sixteenth birthday, I stopped seeing the fox.
It was just as well. I was ready to stop seeing everything. The hot and cold desperation to please my parents, the unrelenting torment at school, the despair that no matter how I tried, I was always one imperfection, one sin, one shortcoming away from crossing through the Pearly Gates. I brokeGod’s heart time and time again, so my mother said, and He wasn’t the only one. Anguishing waves of disappointment from the way my mother looked at me, the sneers at school, and the disgust in the faces of the church elders—men who’d once rebuked a frightened little girl for seeing unclean spirits in the form of a white fox—made me feel like I was suffocating day in and day out. I wasn’t happy, nor would I ever be.
I’d been crying so hard I nearly threw my back out. My nose was stuffed. My eyes were bleary. My ears rang. I’d kept my sobs as quiet as I could as I made my way from the bathroom to my bedroom. But I still heard a voice as clear as a bell when I reached for the bottle of painkillers I’d taken from the medicine cabinet.
Two male words came from the shadows.
“Drop it.”
I choked on my final cry. Sorrow evaporated as fear took hold, shattering my bubble of isolation. The pill bottle clattered to the floor with thirty-odd tablets scattering across the carpet. I tore out of bed and grabbed the door the moment I saw movement in the shadows. Horrible words clanged through me as I tripped over my sheets and lunged for the door. Crime. Murder. Abduction. It was four long bounds from my bedroom through the living room to the kitchen. My mom was still awake, balancing the checkbook, paying bills.
“There’s someone in the house,” I gasped.
She jumped up from the table so hard that the chair clattered to the floor. She threw on the lights, checked under the bed, looked behind doors, and secured every nook and cranny in the rectangular tin can we called home. She didn’t even notice I’d been crying. The woman had no sympathy. Worry turned to impatience as she informed me in no uncertain terms that our eyes played tricks on us in the dark, and I was almost an adult. I was too old to let my eyes play tricks on me.
“It wasn’t a trick,” I insisted, panic-stricken that there’d been a break-in and my mother wasn’t taking me seriously.
“Then pray for protection,” she replied, still irritated.
So I returned to bed with my covers over my head, struggling to breathe through stuffy clouds of carbon dioxide as I tried to outlast the quiet certainty that there was someone in my room. She was right. I was too old to be afraid of my imagination.
