The Hybrid Project

Chapter 1: Call Me May

May's POV

There are three kinds of quiet on the Mayhew farm...

The first is the quiet I make.

It lives in the balls of my feet, because I have walked on tiptoe for so long that flat-footed feels like shouting. It lives in my breathing, in the way I lift the latch on a door instead of letting it fall. In the way I can cross the kitchen floor without the third board from the stove ever learning my name...

The second is the quiet that means someone is angry.

That quiet is thick and waits. If you listen closely, you can hear it deciding where to land...

The third is the quiet of the barn before sunrise. When the cows breathe slowly, and the whole world smells like hay and warm milk. Nobody wants anything from me in those quiet moments, and I would live in that quiet if I could.

I would build a small house in it.

I’m mute, so I’ll admit I’ve had a great deal of practice listening...

I woke on the floor, in the corner farthest from the window, with my back to two walls and my knees pulled up.

That was where I slept.

There was a bed in my room, narrow and iron-framed, and I made it every morning so Ma wouldn’t have anything to find fault with. I hadn’t slept in it since the night Dean thought it would be funny to set it on fire.

It was funny, apparently...

I could tell, because all four of them laughed so hard that Pa had to sit down on the porch steps.

The bed and I had not spoken since...

The floor, on the other hand, had never once betrayed me. It was hard and honest. I think more people should try it.

I carefully took my boots and carried them down the hall in my hands.

Past Calvin’s door, which was closed.

Past Harlan’s, which was open, with Harlan sprawled across the bed like something that had been dropped from a height.

Past Dean’s room, where the snoring had a whistle in it.

Past Eli’s room, the biggest one, with the best window, where a lamp was still burning because he was still afraid of the dark and no one in the house was permitted to say so.

Past Ma and Pa’s door, which I did not dare to breathe near at all.

The stairs had eleven steps.

Four of them creaked.

I knew which four the way other people know the names of their cousins.

Only when I reached the kitchen did I finally slide my feet into my boots, without lacing them. Because laces make a sound,

The Mayhew kitchen had rules...

I had learned them the way you learn where the ice is thin on a pond: by going through it, and remembering...

Rule one: the fire was to be lit, and the oats were on before the sky had decided what color to be.

Rule two: Pa’s beer was poured and waiting on the table the second he stepped through the door.

Not a breath after!

And most definitely not while he was still looking for it...

A mug from the cellar crock, filled to a finger below the rim, set at his place, with the handle turned toward his right hand.

Once, when I was fourteen, I’d been a few seconds late, and I found out that the back of John Mayhew’s hand has very firm opinions on the subject of timing. And the ring on his finger was made from stronger material than my front tooth, which had cracked from the impact.

I was never late again...

Rule three: breakfast was finished and on the table before Ma came downstairs.

This one was the worst, because it wasn’t a question of if she would find something wrong. If the oats were on the table and the eggs were ready and the bread was cut, she would find something else wrong...

But if she came into the kitchen and breakfast was not ready, she would scream.

Not at me, exactly...

At the situation! In a voice that could have stripped paint, until every window in the house rattled and every person in it was awake and furious. And then the whole house would be in a foul mood, and all of it would be traced back along the line of blame, the way water finds the low place in a field.

To me!

It was always me...

So I moved quietly and quickly, and I made the kitchen look like nobody had been in it at all.

Pa came in first, as he always did. With the dawn behind him and the smell of tobacco and old sweat arriving a half-step before he did...

The mug was already on the table.

He didn’t look at me.

He sat, took a long drink, and grunted. In the Mayhew house, that counted as a warm greeting. I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding and went back to the stove, with my shoulders folded in and my eyes on the pot.

John Mayhew filled a room the way damp fills a cellar. He was heavy and red in the face, with gray eyes set small under a heavy brow. In my head I called him John, never Pa, because “Pa” was a word for somebody who had at some point been fatherly. And I liked to keep my words accurate, even the ones nobody could hear...

Ma came down at a quarter to six exactly, because she liked to catch me in the middle of things. The oats were on the table. The eggs were in the pan. The bread was cut. I had set out four spoons, then added the fifth, then moved it a hair to the left.

And held my breath again...

Evelyn Mayhew stood in the doorway, thin as a fence post, with her pale hair scraped back so hard it lifted her eyebrows.

She looked at the table.

She looked at the oats.

She looked at me, as if she hadn’t really expected me to be there and was already disappointed that I was.

“Is that burnt?”

I shook my head.

“It looks burnt!”

I shook my head again, slower this time.

It wasn’t...

I had stirred it the whole time. But I had learned that when Eve decided something was burnt, the oats became burnt in a larger and more philosophical sense. And that the argument had never been about oats.

She came closer.

Lye soap, and the sour thing underneath that never washed out, assaulted my senses. But I remained motionless. She then turned her attention to the pot and sniffed. Said nothing, which was her way of saying I will find it later.

Then she sat down beside John with her back very straight and folded her hands, and I felt the day settle onto its first rail.

My birth-giver didn’t beat me often. I want to be fair about that. Pa did the beating when he was in the mood. What Eve did was sit across the room, with her hands folded, and not see it.

She had a talent for it.

I think she could have not-seen a house fire, if it were burning in my direction...

Then the boys came down, and the room became theirs.

I knew them by their feet, which I suppose is an odd way to know your brothers. But I had spent my whole life looking at the floor; I barely knew what the house looked like three inches above the floorboards...

Calvin came first. Quiet, even steps, unhurried. He took the chair on John's left, the one beside the head of the table, and he smiled at me.

“Morning, Mary.”

He was twenty-seven, the oldest, and the handsomest, with short golden hair and blue eyes as clear as a summer morning. Strangers adored him. Traders left a little more money than they’d come with. Women at church asked Ma how she’d raised such a polite young man.

I nodded, and I looked at the table.

Rule four: Never look Calvin in the eye!

Not because he would hit me. He almost never hit me. It was that when Calvin looked back at you, he was doing arithmetic.

You could feel him adding you up...

Once, when I was thirteen, I’d made the mistake of holding his gaze for a heartbeat too long. And something behind his eyes had brightened, like a lamp being turned up.

It was then I found the barn cat's kittens. He'd cut off their limbs, tails, and ears, leaving them to die a slow and painful death. Then, he'd grabbed the back of my neck so hard I couldn't breathe.

"If you ever look at me again, you filthy w***e, I'll do the same thing to you!"

I never looked at him again.

After that I started noticing things...

Things that happened to the kitchen. Things that happened to the rabbits when the men went hunting. And what he did before he finished them. I noticed what he did when he thought no one was watching.

So I kept my eyes low and my face blank.

I am extremely good at a blank face.

A blank face is a thing you can’t take hold of...

Harlan was next. The floorboards announced him from the stairs. He was twenty-five, with dirty blond hair and a body like a barn door, and he took the chair across from Calvin and drank his milk in a single swallow.

Harlan wasn’t clever.

Harlan was large!

I measured him the way I measured weather; by what he could do to me. And the answer was always the same: a great deal, and very fast...

His fists hurt worse than anyone’s. I avoided him the way you avoid a bull in a pasture. With a wide berth and a lowered head and a firm conviction that if I was small enough, he’d forget I was there...

Dean came in last of the three, already laughing, though nothing had been said yet. He was twenty-two, the shortest of the brothers, which is still about a foot taller than me, with long golden hair he was inordinately proud of and spent a great deal of time arranging.

Dean was the one who made the jokes.

Dean was always making jokes...

And most of them, I’d come to understand, were about things I didn’t understand...

“Morning, Mary,” he said, dropping into his chair, and winked at Harlan. “Sleep well? Anyone keep you up?”

Harlan snorted into his cup...

I didn’t know what was funny. I knew it was a sort of funny that lived somewhere below the table. In a place I’d never been told about.

But I’d learned the rule long before I understood the jokes...

Rule five: when they laugh, you nod!

“I heard the Barrow girl got herself a husband,” Dean went on, buttering a roll. “Wonder if he knows what he’s getting. Wonder if she does.” He turned to me with his eyebrows up. “What d’you think, Mary? You’d know what to do with a man, wouldn’t you? Little thing like you?”

I nodded...

I didn’t know what I was agreeing to. But I’d tried shaking my head once, and Harlan had rearranged my face to the point where I couldn't see out of my left eye for a week.

Nodding was safer...

Nodding was almost always safer. It cost nothing but my dignity, and I’d learned to keep that somewhere else.

The table erupted.

Dean slapped the wood.

Harlan laughed so hard that he coughed.

“See?” Dean said, wiping his eyes. “Best thing about Mary is she can’t argue. Never answers back. Perfect woman!”

“Perfect,” Harlan wheezed.

I turned to the stove so that no one would see my face and stirred the pot a little more than it needed.

Dean wasn’t the cruelest of them. He was the loudest. He had never put a hand on me, not really, and I think he felt that this made him gentle. But he could make me small with a single sentence, and then do it again a second time just to see me try to shrink.

Eli came down last, because the day didn’t properly start until Eli was in it.

He took the largest chair and the largest bowl. He was seventeen, two years younger than me, and wide in every direction. He had sandy golden hair and a mouth already shaped for complaining. Ma rose a little in her seat when he entered, as if his arrival had lifted her, and her whole face did something it never did for anyone else.

“There he is,” she said softly. “There’s my boy. Did you sleep well, baby?”

“The lamp went out,” Eli replied, his lower lip already wobbling.

“Mary! Did you let the lamp go out?”

The accusation came as a whip.

I shook my head the second she finished the question. I had never touched his lamp. But it didn’t matter. It was the question that mattered, not the answer. And the right response was to look sorry for something I hadn’t done.

The rule with Eli was simple: Never, ever upset him!

The trouble with Eli was that this wasn't the same thing as pleasing him...

I’d tried every method!

I’d made his eggs soft, and he’d said they were runny. I’d made them hard, and he’d said they were rubbery. I’d made them exactly as he’d asked, to the second, and he’d looked at them and whined:

“I didn’t want eggs!”

There was no winning...

I understood that now. The point of Eli’s complaints wasn’t to be satisfied.

It was to be heard!

And somebody had to be at fault when he wasn’t, and somebody was always standing nearby...

He picked up his spoon.

He looked at the oats.

His face crumpled.

“Is there any honey?”

There was none...

We’d run out Tuesday. He had finished the last of it himself, standing in the pantry with a spoon, while I watched through the crack in the door. But I’d learned long ago that none of that was information anyone required.

“There’s no honey,” I thought, as loudly as I could. “You ate it, you absolute toad.”

Out loud, I did nothing.

Because I couldn’t...

And because of that, the family could pretend that I’d never thought it at all...

Eve stood and spat insults at me that I didn't understand half of, because it was my fault that we’d run out of honey. I didn't understand all of her words, because noone had ever bothered explaining them to me. But I did get the meaning that I was useless and unwanted. I supposed "cunts" and "wench" were definitions of that...

After she'd torn half the kitchen apart, and I then helped her locate the sugar, she went back to her "little man" and spread some sugar over his oats.

And sure enough, now he wanted bacon and eggs.

Only, Dean had taken the last of the bacon...

With some more insults and threats, I produced more from the pantry and cooked it, listening to Eve comfort the starving, wee bummer lamb.

For a while, they ate...

Plates and spoons and the low, comfortable noise of a family at breakfast. John talked about the north field. Calvin talked about a new man at work. Harlan talked about nothing, and Dean told another joke.

Everyone laughed---

And I stood beside the stove with my hands folded and my back against the warm bricks, because there was no chair for me at the table...

I would eat later, standing at the counter, after they’d finished. There was always enough.

Mostly...

The cold crusts, the scraped bowl, whatever Eli had pushed away...

I didn’t mind.

Or I’d taught myself not to...

The advantage of eating last was that nobody could take it from me.

“Clinic’s paying double this month,” Calvin was saying. “Harlan and Dean and I put in extra shifts, and the doctors said they’d see us right.”

The three of them worked up the valley now, in a big pale building with a high fence, guarding something. Calvin said it was a clinic. Dean said the clinic was full of “freaks and rich people’s problems.” And John had told him not to speak ill of work that paid.

I’d once wished I could ask what needed so much guarding. But I'd learned long ago that my questions were never wanted...

“Good,” John said, and I could see him calculating all the booze he could buy for that money. “That’s good money!”

"Our strong, fine boys growing into fine young men,” Eve agreed, as her whole face softened and patted Calvin’s hand.

“Calvin’s got a head for it,” John nodded in agreement. “Harlan’s the strongest man in three villages. Dean’s got his charm. And Eli---” He looked down the table at his youngest son, with something I could only describe as pride, and I felt my own chest tighten. “Eli’s going to be the best of the lot. I can tell!”

“He is,” Eve once more agreed in a baby voice, and put a hand to Eli’s cheek. “Lord knows I did my part. Four boys! And the good Lord saw fit to put one girl in the middle of them. And a mute one at that.” She sighed, the way you might sigh over a stone you’d found baked into a loaf. “Thank heaven for Eli.”

Eli made up for it, John said once, years ago, in the barn, looking at me the same way you regard trash.

He had said it the way you’d talk about paying off a debt.

I was the disappointment...

I had known it since before I understood the word. In my family, the four sons were the pride of everything!

And then there was me...

I was the wrong shape, the wrong size, the mistake between Dean and Eli. A thing they hadn’t ordered. A thing that couldn’t even say "thank you" for being kept...

I turned to the sink and started to do the dishes and let my mind go to the one place none of them could ever touch. Somewhere between the second round of porridge and Dean’s third joke about the Barrow girl, a part of me slipped out of the kitchen on soft feet and climbed the ladder into the barn loft, where seven comic books lay wrapped in a flour sack behind a loose board.

I found them when I was twelve.

It had been a wet spring. The kind where the lane to the farm turned to soup, and a peddler’s wagon, loaded to the brim, had gotten stuck in the mud at the end of our road. John had gone out with the mule and got him loose, and the peddler had left in a hurry, swearing, with the wagon lurching.

One crate had slid from the back.

It burst open in the ditch.

Out of it spilled a hundred soaked and ruined things.

And one oilcloth bundle, which had kept dry...

I picked it up because it was there!

I didn’t know what it was, but I carried it into the barn under my apron, and I waited three days for someone to come looking for it.

No one did...

When I finally dared to open it, there were seven thin books inside, with brightly colored covers, and on every one of them was the same woman.

She was standing on a rooftop. Behind her, a sunrise broke over a city of smokestacks. She wore a red coat with a short cape, and a pair of goggles pushed up in her hair. She had a very stubborn chin and was looking at something just outside the page with an expression I’d never seen on anyone’s face before.

She wasn’t afraid...

Or no--- that wasn’t quite it!

She was afraid!

You could see it in how her hand gripped the rail.

But she was going anyway...

I couldn’t read the words. Nobody had ever taught me. The letters sat on the page in tidy rows like small black birds, and I stared at them for a long time and learned nothing from them but their shapes.

So I did the only thing I could.

I read the pictures...

I read them so many times I could have drawn them with my eyes shut.

I didn’t know her name, since the name was one of the black birds. So I gave her one. She’d been standing against a sunrise, after all, and there was something in the way she looked at the dark, as though she’d made up her mind about it.

Captain Dawn!

Nobody told me it was wrong. Nobody was there to. And in a house where I’d never been allowed to name anything, it was the first thing that was entirely mine.

So that morning, as the Mayhews ate, and I stood by the stove, and Dean told the one about the preacher’s wife for the third time, I let myself have it...

The kitchen door flew open.

Not the way John opened it, or Calvin.

It exploded!

Off its hinges with a crash that shook the pots on their hooks. In the doorway, backlit by a huge gold sunrise, stood Captain Dawn!

The red coat.

The cape snapping in a wind that couldn’t possibly exist indoors.

The goggles.

The chin.

Every Mayhew froze with their spoons in the air.

"Put. Down. The. Spoon."

She had a voice like a bell.

A big one.

The kind that rings across a valley!

John Mayhew’s mug slipped from his fingers. Captain Dawn crossed the kitchen in three strides, and she put her face directly in front of his, and said: “A man who has to hit a child to feel tall is a very short man indeed.”

John went the color of milk.

She turned to Eve, who had begun a sentence about respect, and said: “You sat there. You watched. Do you know how much worse that is?”

And Eve, who had never in her life been told off by anyone, just opened her mouth and closed it again, like a fish.

She told Harlan and Dean that their jokes weren’t funny. They were just loud. She told Eli that honey didn't grow on shelves and that if he wanted something, he could get it himself like a person with legs. Eli started to cry, and for the first time in my life, nobody comforted him.

And then she turned to Calvin.

He was still smiling.

He was always still smiling.

But Captain Dawn walked right up to him and looked him dead in the eye, and held it. Didn’t blink, and didn’t flinch, and didn’t do arithmetic. And after a few seconds the smile slipped. And after a few more, he looked away first.

That was my favorite part.

I went back to it often...

Then Captain Dawn turned around, and she saw me, standing by the stove with my hands folded and my back against the bricks.

Her whole face changed.

It went soft and sure...

“There you are,” she said. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

She held out her arms, and I ran into them. She swept me up off the floor as if I weighed nothing at all. The cape closed around us both.

Through the shattered doorway, the sky was gold. And then we were flying, up over the farm, over the Sweet Acre and the barn and the long gray road. Over every fence and field I’d ever been told to stay inside.

I never worked out how, since Captain Dawn was only human, with no magic and no wings.

The details weren’t important.

It was my daydream, and I’d decided the cape was load-bearing...

We flew to a place where nobody’s footsteps frightened me. A place with no rules, no beer to pour, no oats to burn. A place where I could say my own name out loud and someone would simply hear it.

I was almost there...

I could feel the wind on my face---!

"Mary!"

The kitchen came back all at once.

The smell of oats. The scrape of spoons. The heat from the stove, pressing at my back. Eve was looking at me with her mouth in a thin, tight line, and a spoon held in the air like a verdict.

"Mary," she said again. “Are you deaf as well? Eli’s milk is warm. Fetch him a cold one from the cellar. Now!"

I hated being called Mary...

“Mary,” like a rule.

“Mary,” like a chore.

My name was May!

But I didn’t argue.

I didn’t even look up...

I set my spoon down, and I went to the cellar door, quick and quiet, on the tips of my toes.

I hate it when you call me Mary, I screamed.

Inside, I screamed it!

With everything I had.

It filled my chest and my throat and the whole length of my body....

I hate it!

I hate it!

My name is May! Please, please!

Just call me May!

On the stairs, in the dark, I stood very still with my hand on the wall...

I couldn’t make a sound.

And even if I could have, I knew, with that old gray certainty that lived in my bones, it wouldn’t have mattered.

They would never have listened.

I could have shouted it from the roof of the barn, and they would have looked at me the way they looked at the weather: something that happened, and was not their concern.

I took the cold milk up the stairs.

I set it in front of Eli.

He stared at it.

“It’s too cold,” he said...