Chapter Text
This is how it begins.
You look around at the drab décor and all you can do is bite your lip and blink hard and try to keep your composure. What could Mama possibly be thinking?
“We thought you might like to commemorate the day somehow,” she says—quiet, sweet, understanding, and you just keep staring in gentle horror, wondering how you could possibly respond to that.
You want to say, Yes, it’s been a year, but the baby is dead. Let her stay dead.
Let me forget.
But you know how dismayed she would be, how her injured response would have everything to do with the boxes of little clothes and books and toys in your basement, the ones you don’t care enough about to move…and nothing to do with the fact that she’s actively reminding you of what they represent.
You try to smile, something you’ve barely done at all in the past year and a half, but you feel your face might crack if you push it too far. You let it fall back into a neutral expression.
“It’s a…a nice thought, Mama.”
She clucks and hugs you. “I love you, Cara! We’re all here for you, you know.”
How long it will take for you to be overwhelmed and find an excuse to be alone so you can cry? Maybe an hour or so, since any more talk about Lu…about the ba…any more talk about last year might drive you to distraction.
You kiss the cheeks of what seems like an endless parade of relatives, greeting some of them in rusty Italian. In school you were always told that you should be “speaking English at home”, and your parents’ language still embarrasses you somehow.
An aunt says that Great-grandmother sends her regards and still thinks you should join her in the convent because “now that the marriage has been annulled there’s nothing stopping you”.
Maybe you should take old Mother Maryam’s offer this time.
Dinner starts late because relatives on Mama’s side refuse to eat any earlier than 8:00. The broad family table is covered in dark linen, and around the candles Mama—or a daughter-in-law working under her instruction—has arranged fresh fruit and vegetables, most of which will no doubt be gone before dessert.
The atmosphere is incongruously cheerful for the “occasion”. You feel distant and blank until conversation turns in your direction, at which point your stomach twists a little and you hastily drop a comment about Kennedy’s foreign policy. After that, the clamor of debate downs out all other topics and you draw back with a sigh.
Soon everyone seems to have forgotten the black tablecloth and little cards with condolences written on them sitting around the house, and you’re praying it stays that way. But after dinner, when the men are sipping wine and the women are taking care of the dishes that won’t fit in Mama’s new dishwasher, the other shoe drops.
There is a late guest, heralded by an influx of chilled autumn air as the door opens and a gratingly familiar voice-- “Rosa, we bought a present for you!”
Oh…it’s your sister-in-law. You set down the cup you were drying, press a towel to either hand, and go to greet your brother and his wife. Patricia hugs you and kisses your cheeks.
You smell perfume and remember, in an absent way, that you haven’t showered recently. Against your cheek, Patricia’s hair is glossy with hairspray. Her clothes are always the newest off the line and a part of you hates her dully for being so energetic and cheerful. Tancredo, dark-eyed and bearded, stands to one side, holding an old gray pet carrier and giving you an apologetic stare—dear lord, what’s in it…
You don’t have to ask. Patricia ushers Tancredo forward, saying, “He got a raise this year and we decided to buy you something special! I thought this would be perfect because—well, you’ll see. We’d almost given up but this one was on sale because it’s an unlisted kind of troll.”
“Unlisted?” you say, then, “Troll?”
Tancredo hands you the carrier, grimacing briefly at you before stepping back to make a beeline for the wine.
“It’s the wrong color or something,” says Patricia. “Anyway, it was still quite expensive but I thought of how much you used to love those little…caterpillars…” She grimaces, and then brightens. “Well, have a look!”
You have a look.
You had heard that trolls hatched from eggs as larvae, but you’ve never actually seen one before. The grub is curled up near the back of the gray box. It’s a little over a foot long, with dark, soft fur growing in close, scale-like tufts from its head. Its segmented body is a shiny scarlet. You count six short legs, each with small, hooked claws curled under its belly.
“Well,” you say, “I’m not sure…”
You trail off at the husky noise coming from the little red shape—a sort of chirruping hum. It rolls over with groggy slowness and then crawls a bit closer to the wire door of the carrier, almost tripping over its own legs. A round, gray, snub-nosed face peers out at you with sleepy red eyes. It sniffs once and then yawns hugely, and you catch a glimpse of a black tongue and small, perfect white teeth.
And then it chirrups again and keels straight over onto its side to sleep and you feel a surge of fondness in your chest, faint but so unexpected that you almost gasp.
“Oh, it’s awake.” She tries to sound pleased and fails. You are too preoccupied with the sudden flare of emotion to care.
“Does it have a name?” you ask, setting the carrier down on the table.
Patricia smiles brightly, seeming genuinely proud of herself now. “No, but it’s a boy, so I thought you might call him Luciano.”
Oh.
Nearby, Tancredo chokes on his wine. Your face is hot; your lungs are suddenly void of air; you have to force your hands not to clench into fists. But even this hot, awful feeling can’t completely become anger. Soon, you know, it’s going to fall back into the void inside you and you’ll be left with nothing but the tears.
You’ve already spent a year like this. You can’t take another.
“Patty, we should go,” says Tancredo, hastily putting an arm around his wife’s shoulder.
“But we just got here, can’t we—“
“I’d just like to go home,” he says, not looking at you. “Please, darling? It’s been a long day.”
She considers, and then kisses him once and says, “…Alright. See you at Easter, Rosa, enjoy your present!”
She hugs you and you can’t hug her back.
You realize, picking up the carrier with one trembling hand, that you’ve reached the point where you need time alone.
You go to the bathroom first, running the tap water ice cold and bending down to splash it on your face over and over. When you look up at the mirror, water trickling down your numb skin, the face you see is the same as ever; a young woman with short, dark hair, olive skin, and an arched nose that makes her more handsome than beautiful.
You stare in a kind of stupor into your own dull, dark jade eyes until someone knocks on the door. Time to find somewhere else.
Your old bedroom upstairs is illuminated only by dusk light from the window. The carpet has been vacuumed, your bed stripped of covers. You’re surrounded by dusty childhood memories and they seem almost to belong to a stranger. You drop the carrier on the bed next to you without much concern for its occupant.
The house is small and despite the volume of the company downstairs, there’s still a chance someone will hear you. You squeeze your eyes shut, mouth frozen in an open, soundless grimace. You shake all over with the effort of containing spasmodic sobs.
You cry for a timeless interval, in a daze of misery and words repeated over and over again in your mind. You dimly count the four tears that actually fall, dropping onto your knees, leaving spots on the green of your skirt.
And then you’re spent. You relax muscle by muscle, taking slow, trembling breaths. You can hear the sound of the television downstairs, and that at least gives you a leaden kind of relief. They’ll be less likely to notice your absence with I Love Lucy to distract them.
You don’t register the noises coming from the carrier at first. It’s only when the chirruping escalates into a high, complaining cry that you turn abruptly to look at the grub.
He’s awake now, bumping up against the carrier door, squeaking insistently. You realize distantly that it seemed wrong to keep him in there from the instant you saw his face, and you open the door.
You think for a moment he’ll recoil, but instead he nuzzles against you and crawls clumsily onto your bedspread. Glancing into the dark recesses of the carrier, you see red, waxy fragments of what might be an egg shell. Just how recently did he hatch?
The grub doesn’t move like the caterpillars you raised to maturity when you were young; rather he seems just now to be learning how. His legs are clumsy; he meanders, not unlike a human child.
Luciano, you think abruptly, and cover your face. The hot anguish that’s been fading for the past half-hour resurfaces painfully.
Like a baby learning how to crawl—
Something bumps against your leg and you look down through a gap in your fingers to meet wide, curious eyes. You let your hands fall away from your face and the grub curls backward, ungainly with surprise, chirruping loudly.
Then his eyes crinkle shut and it’s such an bright, unmistakably smiling expression that you can’t help returning it in surprised delight—a genuine smile, not the tight imitation you gave Mama earlier. You feel like a miniature sun just rose inside you, and again the unexpected happiness leaves you oddly breathless.
He whines again and something occurs to you.
“Patricia didn’t feed you, did she?” you ask. Another plaintive noise. You take that as confirmation and tentatively scoop him up.
The grub is warm, his red body oddly smooth in comparison to the velvety skin of his face. In your arms, he squirms for a moment before nestling in the crook of one arm and rolling up like a pillbug, a little hot bundle of chirruping and quiet breathing.
You almost start crying again and you don’t understand why—it’s that sharp, bright feeling, and it’s been too long, your body doesn’t know how to respond except with tears. But you can’t sit down and cry now.
You have a responsibility.
You feed the grub leftover salad from dinner, as you might any of your childhood caterpillar charges, but he squirms in your arms to sniff at the casserole and Uncle Eugene’s sandwich and you’re starting to think maybe he’ll just eat anything. Come to think of it, you don’t know much about trolls at all.
You’ll have to visit the library later, you think, and then wonder how long it’s been since you visited a library.
On the way home, your hands are cold on the wheel, dinner churning in your stomach. But with the pet carrier on the passenger seat, you feel a little less lonely. There’s still a part of you, bitter and sad and disinterested, that says No, this is exactly what Patricia wanted, how dare she try to replace my child, how dare she, I should just give the thing up, I can’t afford this--
But something’s starting to stir, some part of you that’s been sleeping for a year. You’re making lists, planning budgets, wondering whether you can take boarders in the empty bedrooms of the lonely little house he left you. Can you take sewing work? How long can you leave a grub on its own so that you can work?
Something’s filling up that void inside you, the one you thought couldn’t be filled. It’s like grains of sand falling into a canyon, but something is changing.
--
The grub really does eat anything. You try the blandest of foods—applesauce, oatmeal, more salad—and then move on to larger pieces of fruit and bread. The bread is homemade with a tough, chewy crust, but if anything he seems to enjoy the chewing.
You don’t want to leave him in the box overnight, but you certainly can’t let him loose in the house. If only you had a pen… But it’s late, and you’re not sure you could even make some kind of impromptu fort. Unless…
The crib is cherry wood, an antique, light enough to carry up from the basement without winding yourself. You replace the perfectly folded wool blankets with newspaper, trying not to think about how wrong this feels, and set the carrier gently down in the crib.
Even when you open the door he doesn’t emerge, and you don’t want to wake him. Instead, you add a makeshift nest of towels in one corner to compensate for the unfriendly, flat expanse of newsprint. And after a little work, you secure another one over the top of the crib. You don’t know how good troll grubs are at climbing, but you don’t want to risk it.
You fall into bed planning an agenda for the week, your heart beating faster than it has in months. There’s so much to do…
When you wake up, the sky outside is a clear periwinkle blue, an encouraging sight after weeks of steel gray clouds. You think idly that you should do housework some time. You were always faithful about it early in the marriage, but after that day at the doctor’s office it became an obsession, compulsive rituals completed in an attempt to make yourself more useful.
When it was all over you didn’t want to do anything anymore, and the house…the house is a mess. There are unwashed clothes piled in one corner of your room and you feel a sudden flash of annoyance that makes your eyes well up again.
You shake your head sharply and turn to get out of bed. It’s nine in the morning, early for you. Even your sleeping habits have fallen lax without your noticing—when did you start sleeping in until noon every day? You stagger towards the kitchen, ignoring the state of the bathroom as you pass it. Cleaning can wait. Before that, it’s breakfast and then—
You see the crib in the living room and remember. If he left the box over night, he must have crawled back in. You move the towel aside and gently lift the carrier to look.
It’s empty.
Panic sets in immediately. How did he get out? The bars can only be two or three inches apart, surely he couldn’t have squeezed between them? Where can he have gone? Is there any way he could have gotten out of the house?
Visions of yourself searching the house for hours on end flash through your mind as you rush through the kitchen, and are abruptly curtailed when you see that one of the lower cabinets is wide open. You drop to your knees and peer into the darkness, heart pounding.
Your eyes adjust with painful slowness. You see first a pile of oats, spilling from a brown paper bag that you don’t remember ever opening. And then, as you lean further forward, the bright red of the grub’s body comes into view. He’s curled up, sleeping, looking very full and round.
You reach hurriedly forward to pull him into your arms, both relieved and worried. Did he overeat? Is that even possible for a growing grub? You remember how much your adopted caterpillars would eat before shedding and pupating, but trolls obviously have a very different diet. You really need a book.
The local library is only a few blocks away, and although you don’t want to leave the grub alone in the box he came in, it seems to be the best way to keep him out of trouble. You resolve to come home as soon as possible.
The library only has one book on grubs. It’s a small red paperback, practically a pamphlet, with the Betty Crocker logo of all things stamped on the corner. The more of it you read, the further your heart sinks because it’s not so much a how-to guide as a collection of advertisements. It was published nearly a decade ago.
Trollchow! one page announces, the exclamation accompanied by a rosy-cheeked housewife pouring kibble into a bowl. At her feet sits what looks like nothing so much as a small, gray child. Its cheeks are also round and blushing, but the artist has colored them blue instead. You had forgotten about trolls and their strange blood colors.
Turning the page makes you forget all over again. The prices are ghastly, utterly impossible for a woman living alone, relying on her parents for money. How on earth are you going to afford owning a troll when the only company selling troll products makes everything so expensive?
How are you going to do this?
…Do you have to do this?
You look down at the kibble in the advertisement. The artist has done his level best to make it look appetizing, but there’s only so much to be done with pet food. You compare it mentally to your grub’s interest in lettuce, applesauce, casserole, and oats.
Suddenly, you have a lot more trouble believing the little troll’s beatific smile. You glance at the illustration again and see for the first time the collar around its neck. The artist included a name on the tags.
“Cobalt”. You grimace. It’s somehow hard to imagine giving your grub a pet name, whatever conventional pet troll names are supposed to sound like. You’ll have to put real thought into it.
And you do. Naming takes even longer than expected and you end up making a list—Biblical names, classical poets, favorite relatives—and cross them out one by one. The grub sits comfortably on one of your shoulders, tiny orange horns bumping your chin. You squint at him, imagining calling him Nathaniel, Bartolomeo, Armando, Francis, and none of those fit. You keep crossing out.
Eventually you’re left with Silas, the name of your favorite uncle on your father’s side, and Canaan, one of Noah’s grandsons. But you’ve never met anyone named Canaan, and it seems just exotic enough to be a pretentious pet name.
You pick Silas.
--
A month passes. You clean the house. Silas keeps you so busy that sometimes you even go a whole day without thinking about him or the baby or the divorce.
New knowledge about troll grubs blindsides you on a daily basis—you realize early on that Silas can, in fact, squeeze through the bars of his crib, and does so with distressing frequency before you line the crib with new blankets.
When he does move around the house on his own, he ends up behind couches, in air vents and once, memorably, stuck in a hole in the drywall that even he couldn’t fit through. His plaintive whining brings you running into the spare bedroom, where you spend a good half hour extracting him from the hole.
It’s just as well he’s learning to come to you when you say his name.
The first time he starts crying, you almost run him to the nearest vet for fear his eyes are bleeding—trolls cry in the color of their blood, and it’s terrifying, you have no idea why they would do that, but after his cries subside, so do the translucent scarlet tears.
In addition to eating anything (you try to keep his diet balanced), he chews on anything. His teeth are only little blunted points, but they do remarkable damage to the legs of furniture, books and magazines, and, eventually, the straps of the wristwatch you keep on the end table in the living room.
The watch was a gift from your husband. You let Silas keep it. When the leather finally comes to pieces, though, you find yourself in the local pet store looking for a replacement. You have the oddest feeling the whole time that you ought to be buying baby chew toys instead, but you brush it off.
He sheds twice, eating voraciously and growing so fast—he’s almost as long as your forearm by the time he breaks through his old skin for the second time. You’re familiar with shedding, but your caterpillars were never so vocal about it.
You look after him. You keep a spray bottle on hand for his dry skin. You comb pieces of cracked exoskeleton out of his soft hair and run a thumb over his tiny orange horns when he starts whining. He seems to like horn-rubs a lot, so you end up giving them a lot to keep him calm.
He purrs, you’ve discovered, like a cross between a cat and a cricket. And there are other, more human noises in his repertoire, soft babbles and even squeaking laughter. You play peek-a-boo with him almost every day, carrying him on your shoulders when he gets tired of playing.
And then, just as you’re starting to get used to your new housemate, you wake up one day to find a chrysalis lying in his crib, still partially wrapped in old exoskeleton.
You should have expected it. You never knew exactly how old Silas was, but you knew he’d been getting bigger and he’d become more sluggish recently and you should have recognized the signs. Now, looking down at the dull grey sheath lying on the blankets, you wish you’d tried to do more research. You should have known.
You wish you’d been here to make sure he was all right shedding that last layer of skin. At least he doesn’t seem to have made an effort to hang himself from the edge of the crib. You hope that means trolls are meant to pupate on the ground, and not that you failed to give him the right environment.
There was nothing in the Betty Crocker booklet about this. You don’t know what temperature the chrysalis should be, how long the process will take, what signs might indicate that it’s drying out. You don’t know anything.
You don’t know how you’ll stand waiting.
--
After the first week, life starts to lose the energy it had with your new pet around the house. You consider moving the chrysalis…but in the end the crib seems like the best place for it. Still, it’s unnerving…the sight of that oddly lifeless dark shape where Silas used to be.
After the second week, you stop cleaning.
After the third week, you find yourself crying on the living room floor thinking about the caterpillars who never became butterflies. Mama calls once and you barely have the strength to answer the phone, let alone make conversation about plans for Easter—it’s another month away, for God’s sake, and why is she asking you?
You start forgetting to eat. Sometimes you remember the cold drop in your stomach after the doctors told you the baby wouldn’t make it. The abrupt emptiness inside you as though someone flicked a lightswitch.
This is the same and it’s the second time and now it’s ten times worse. Some nights you’re convinced that Silas won’t survive pupation. Some nights you vomit from worry and stress. Some nights you would rather lie down on the floor than stagger to bed.
The worst part is that you’re aware on a separate, distant level that your fears are irrational. You have no idea how long pupation is supposed to take for trolls—it has to be longer than just ten days, they’re so much bigger. So it makes sense for Silas to spend weeks pupating, and it doesn’t make sense for you to worry yourself to the point of despair. But you do.
Taking care of him was what kept you active and now it’s the only thing you’re motivated to do. You keep the chrysalis warm and your spray bottle on hand. You don’t even think about the heating bill.
As the fifth week starts, you begin to wonder whether you should just give up. It’s been over a month. You spend the next couple of days curled up on the floor next to the crib, unaware of date or time, only occasionally making your way to the kitchen. Nothing seems particularly appetizing.
You’re on your way back from one such trip when you glance into the crib and something is…different. The gray of the chrysalis is lighter, its surface shinier. Peering closer, you think you can see faint shapes through it.
You come alive. Your brain is on fire, your heart beating so hard and fast that you can feel it in your whole body. It’s starting.
Your hands are shaking as you spread out blankets on the floor and gently move the chrysalis down. You’re happy, you’re unbelievably, ludicrously happy, so of course you start crying again. You’re starting to think you won’t be able to have any emotion without crying ever again, but after a while the tears stop and you’re left to watch and wait.
It takes longer than expected. Every couple of hours you blink yourself from a doze and the chrysalis is a little bit clearer. By the time it starts, you’re barely awake.
It’s just a little tremble but for some reason it rouses you and you immediately pitch forward, eyes fixed on the tightly-curled gray shape inside the almost-translucent exoskeleton. It shakes again, rolls a little to one side, and you see air bubbles appearing between the chrysalis and its occupant.
A moment later, there’s a little pop and a damp, dark-haired head appears. More splits appear and you hover in anxious wonder as small, chubby gray arms unfold slowly into fresh air.
You’re almost afraid to touch him, but you’re too relieved to refrain entirely. You stroke his head gently as the rest of him comes free and slowly uncurls. You’re taken aback for a moment by how…human he looks.
There are subtle differences, of course—the gray skin (there’s no sign of red now), and his horns are more noticeable than before, but as he slowly stretches out his limbs, you think he looks just like one of your nephews waking up in the morning.
Tentatively, you slide both hands under him and lift him onto your lap. His skin is damp too, and oddly velvety. He squirms and stretches in your grasp, little fingers flexing, and you feel the tears starting again.
It’s almost a quarter past four on Friday. You have Silas back.
He sleeps in your bed, a small, warm presence next to you. When you wake up around noon he’s still there, breathing deeply. You realize you can see his ribs and are immediately concerned; he’s been using up his stored nutrients for a month, after all. He needs food. And when you set him cautiously down on the floor, the first hesitant, wobbling steps he takes are in the direction of the kitchen.
He falls more times than you can count getting there, but he never cries, just gets to his ungainly gray feet and keeps toddling, determined. Following him, you realize abruptly that after food, he’s going to need clothes.
You try wrapping him in a towel but he just shakes it off and you haven’t the heart to pin it on him, so you hoist the nude baby troll onto a kitchen chair, which he stares at with sheer wonderment, as though the chair is some magical levitation device.
You watch him anxiously for a moment in case he shows any signs of falling off, but he just babbles loudly and bounces where he sits, smacking both hands down on the table. And then on the chair. Apparently enamored by the ability to make noise with his newly-developed limbs, he pats his own stomach repeatedly.
You make scrambled eggs to the sound of homemade percussion and delighted squeaks. Outside, a vividly blue sky peeks through the cloud cover. You are full of light and expanding, buoyant joy.
Silas has trouble holding forks with his new hands, so you patiently spoon scrambled eggs into his mouth. By the time you’re done, there are little yellow crumbles all over the table but at least he seems to be full for the moment, hands patting contently at the roundness of his belly.
This brings you, again, to the fact that he needs clothes. You remember the Crocker pamphlet’s page about clothes, and how much money they were asking for troll-tailored outfits.
Let them ask. You have a sewing machine.
“Silas,” you say, clearing the table, “I think we should go shopping today.”
You swaddle him in a blanket and he hardly complains, seeming tired again now. You don’t blame him. It was a long night for both of you.
He sleeps with his head against your shoulder as you shop. You only get a few second glances in the second-hand store, but you’re still self-conscious browsing the children’s clothing corner.
You buy him white button-up shirts and a couple pairs of trousers, and then, as an afterthought, a little coat. It’s almost more than your wallet can take, but in the end you squeak by with fifty cents to spare.
It’s worth it.
But before you try to get the clothes on him, it’s bath time. He’s still sticky from pupation, and there’s even a little bit of chrysalis still clinging to his hair. When you call him, he toddles eagerly over to the tub, bangs his hands on the side, and reaches out to feel the tap water.
He giggles and you laugh too, but when you move to lift him into the tub he squirms and cries out. You think at first that he’s just scared of the water, but when you deposit him in the tub he stops squeaking. Upon closer examination, you find that there are patches of thin, reddened skin on either side of his torso. Is he sick? Are they injuries?
But no, he seems well—he’s even purring as he settles into the water. You resolve not to worry about it, or try not to, anyway—it’s probably just a troll thing, that’s what you’re going to think for now.
You start scrubbing him down and get some shampoo in his hair, which is very thick and extremely soft, and you even manage not to get any in his eyes. The bath goes without incident until you’re done rinsing him, at which point he smacks his hands down on the surface of the water and babbles in wordless delight.
You realize, too late, that he’s discovered splashing. He does it again and water sloshes over the side of the tub. You hurry to pull the plug and say as firmly as you can, “Silas, no. No. Silas—”
He giggles and splashes again and you catch both his hands, moving them gently so that the waves are smaller—“Gentle, Silas. Gentle.”
As luck would have it, he takes an interest in the ripples and swishes the water back and forth around him until it’s all gone. He pats the bottom of the tub and looks up at you with a confused chirp, then stands up unsteadily, still chirping, and reaches for you.
…Oh.
There’s an odd lump in your throat as you reach down to pick him up, careful to touch his sides gently. You hold him tight against you, a little bundle of heat and life, still soaking wet, and when he starts purring it’s the same husky sound you remember from when he was a grub.
It’s good to have someone who needs you again.
It’s good to need someone again.