fic, original fiction: moonstruck (part 2)
Oh, it is, technically speaking; it’s once a month for a single night, only during the hours between rise and set of the full moon, that Dad physically becomes a monster. But there’s a lot more that the stories didn’t talk about, that they learn as they go along, and it’s just as hard. Much later, when Rae starts thinking about these things, she marks that first full moon as the beginning of the new normal, or at least the first time everything changes, because it turns out everything can change more than once even when you think you can’t get used to anything harder. The first time, it’s long before Rae thinks to start making notes, and everything’s still new, so when Dad sleeps nearly 20 hours straight and they don’t know what to expect, they’re afraid that maybe he’s gone into a coma and isn’t going to wake up. They’ve almost decided to risk calling the hospital-because exhaustion makes sense when his body’s been forced to do something that’s impossible, but not this much-when he finally does wake, and he’s still exhausted and ravenous and in pain everywhere (he doesn’t tell them this, but it’s obvious just from watching him move), but he’s alive, and that eclipses everything else.
Or at least it does for a while, even if Dad’s healing time has about doubled and he has less energy than before. But a month is a long time, and he goes back to work eventually, still moving slowly. Then the moon starts to grow again, and again Dad begins to get edgy, only there’s more to it this time. He puts a dent in the wall after Mom forgets to gas up the car when it’s still got over a fourth of a tank left, yells at Jeremy for spilling water on the floor, then starts spending all evening in the den, watching TV, using his computer, staring into space, eyes bleak and jaw hard, avoiding or ignoring everyone else.
Then the full moon rises again, and this time Dad spends the night in the shed, going out an hour before he needs to and refusing a blanket. Nobody sleeps much, again; Rae’s pretty sure she drifted off at some point close to dawn when the sound of a bloodthirsty wolf in a frenzy to escape finally died away, replaced not long after by the agonized transformation back. And again, Mom and Jeremy have to help him back into the house, and Rae catches sight of the bruising all over his skin before he collapses into bed.
He stays awake a little longer this time, though, grabbing Mom’s hand as she goes to leave the room, and his voice is a hoarse whisper: “Marilyn, listen, I’m…I know I’ve been awful this week, and I…don’t know what’s wrong with me, it’s like…I want to attack, like the wolf’s…taking over inside.”
“You mean,” Mom asks, and she sounds like she’s choosing her words very carefully, “you’ve started feeling the…compulsion to-to hurt people…before you change?”
“Apparently. Yeah. And I’m trying…I mean the last thing I ever want to do is hurt any of you, but I can’t-”
“So that’s why you’ve been yelling and stuff?” Jeremy says. “That’s, what, instead of physically attacking?”
Dad closes his eyes and nods. “Yeah. I’m…really sorry…”
“Kind of a raging case of PMS, then,” Jeremy offers. “Should we be giving you chocolate or something?”
Dad almost smiles, because at this point they can still find a little humor in it. “Something like that.”
It’s a lot less funny when it becomes a pattern, as much a part of the transformations as the physical change, and for a week or more leading up to each full moon, Dad becomes impossible to deal with, often angry or sullen with a hair-trigger temper; and after every full moon, there is again the inevitable exhaustion and recovery period, and then he is still withdrawn, only this time it’s because he’s too guilty over his behavior to look at them. He begins taking days off from work every month-the day of the full moon, of course, and the days before and after it-and that helps a little, at least because he has some vacation time saved up and doesn’t have to explain taking a sick day every single month.
Sometimes, the morning after, he is more than bruised; sometimes in his single-minded determination to get out of the shed and take down his prey, he pulls muscles or sprains ligaments, or gouges himself on stray nails and splinters, leaving long gashes that the wolf never notices. Sometimes this means more hospital visits, more recovery time at home, more days off work; and more than once Rae gets up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and hears worried voices from downstairs talking about medical bills and health insurance and what if somebody notices how often he’s sick or that there’s a pattern to it because somebody’s got to notice eventually and that would be bad-
Rae doesn’t really understand any of this, but she knows it’s bad, really bad, when Dad loses his job.
***
It’s a few months after the first full moon, at this point; Rae’s at least started marking things on a calendar by now, because then she has control over something, and she’s been learning about the scientific method and observation at school, so she’s begun taking notes too, because that’s another little semblance of control. She knows that the change happens precisely at moonrise whether or not it’s actually dark, and that while the worst of the emotional changes happen during the week leading up to the full moon, it starts more subtly than that as soon as the moon begins to grow. She isn’t surprised when she overhears Dad say that he received a semi-official reprimand at work, but writing this down doesn’t make it any easier to accept that somebody’s finally noticed and it’s going to get even harder to hide what’s wrong.
“I’ve got nothing to tell them,” Dad says. “They can send me to anger management or some crap like that if they want, but it’s not going to help, and if it was something else then maybe they’d have to accommodate it as a disability, but what am I going to say, that everyone has to leave me alone one week a month because I’ve got pre-transformation syndrome?”
He starts taking more time off, a day or two before each full moon and a day or so after, which eats into his vacation days until he has to start using sick days again. Then one day he‘s already home when Rae gets back from school, a fact she automatically compares against the lunar calendar to place it at four days before full moon, the same way she thinks of the moon every time something is different. He won’t answer when she asks why he’s home early, and before long he disappears into the den and doesn’t come out all evening.
Jeremy doesn’t even pretend to go to bed this time; Rae finds him sitting at the top of the stairs fully dressed when she gets up for the same reason. He shakes his head to answer her unspoken question-apparently Dad hasn’t even left the den yet-but several minutes later she hears a door open and Dad says flatly, “I’ve been fired. ‘Unacceptable behavior.’”
Something drops. “What?”
“Boss chewed me out for using so many sick days. Wanted to know what was going on. I said I just kept getting sick, he wouldn’t buy it and said I had to actually work to build up enough time for golfing or whatever I was wasting time on, and I lost it. I don’t even know what…I was yelling at him when somebody called security, I guess, so they got there in time to hear me say I could kill him.” Dad’s voice is almost a monotone, it’s so emotionless, as if he’s wrung every feeling from it so he can say the words.
“Oh, God.”
“Yeah.” A chair scrapes across the floor, and someone sits heavily. “Means they don’t have to give me a severance package either. Health insurance lasts until the end of the month, though.”
“That’s it? They’re not going to press charges?”
“What, it’s not enough?”
“Well, he could, that’s-that’s still assault, isn’t it? Getting noticed like this-”
“I know, okay? I know.” A long pause; Rae can imagine him trying to massage away a headache. “He said something real magnanimous about PTSD and cutting me a break. You know, while the security guards are dying to march me out in handcuffs because they’re bored to death.” He sighs. “He was a bastard anyway.”
“Richard.”
“I know,” he repeats, but this time his voice is exhausted, as if he could barely hold onto his irritation as a defense, even fueled by the coming moon. “Can’t imagine how I’m going to get another job after this, and I can maybe cut down on the hospital visits but not enough to make a big difference.”
Another silence. “I’m only an adjunct at the college. I can get a second job if they won’t give me more classes. Their benefits aren’t the best, but it would be something…”
“Damn it, Marilyn, you shouldn’t have to-I did this. I’ll…I don’t know. I’ll fix it. Something. I don’t want you to pay for me not keeping my freaking temper.”
This time it’s Mom who sighs, and another chair scrapes against linoleum. “That’s not how it works.”
Later, Rae looks up health insurance online to figure out why it’s so important, but the tone of Dad’s voice has already told her plenty, if not the exact meaning. He will still be sick and hurt, and he will still need stitches and antibiotics and maybe more sometimes, and he won’t have the money for it.
And things change for a second time. Mom takes a second, full-time job waitressing nearly every afternoon and evening and sometimes late into the night, because the college won’t give her more hours and absolutely nothing better is available, and suddenly she’s gone more than Dad is, exhausted or sleeping when she’s at home. Dad barely has time for the lengthy interview process most good jobs seem to need, and anyway almost nobody is hiring. He lands a basic bookkeeping job before the first full moon, though, and if it’s way below anything he’s had for years, it’s a job, and he pretends to be satisfied with it, especially when the fuss raised over his immediately taking three sick days isn’t a huge one.
But that doesn’t mean any of the problems have gone away; they’ve just been delayed for a while. Rae figures that out as the next full moons come around. Dad seems to be doing a better job at reining in his temper at work, an effort that leaves him too mentally worn out to keep doing it when he gets home, and Rae learns quickly that the best thing to do as the moon nears is to keep quiet and stay out of his way. Mom often comes home when Dad is already asleep, so she gets to do that without trying, leaving Jeremy as the usual lightning rod for the rare times Dad tries to spend any time with the rest of the family during the waxing moon.
But they’re never far from another crisis now, and Dad’s increasing guilt over the way he treats his family now makes him try harder to clamp down on his temper at home so they actually manage a few civil conversations the day before the full moon. Jeremy tells Rae later that this makes him even more uneasy, and the reason becomes obvious before long: this month’s transformation is even more violent than usual, putting Dad in the hospital overnight to patch up half a dozen gashes and a patch of shredded skin where the wolf gnawed on its own hind leg in a frenzy of frustration. The additional sick days and need for a story anyone will believe about how he got hurt mean more job worries, and the strain of trying to stay in control of himself all the time is too much for someone already worn out with anxiety.
The job lasts all of five months (or moons, rather, because that’s pretty much how they mark time now). Dad is exhausted and a little bit ill all month, every month, and Rae barely sees him the week before each full moon, but he’s managing, getting through most days on not much more than caffeine and stubborn willpower. But the sick days are come too often and too regularly for someone who can’t explain them with a normal disease, and between the physical exhaustion of the transformations and the mental exhaustion of staying close to sane before them, he doesn’t have enough energy left to do a particularly good job.
“‘It’s nothing personal,’” he imitates the manager’s voice when he tells Mom about this, “it’s the economy, we have to cut back, have to look at production-as if it isn’t personal for me or something…”
It means no more health insurance, again, and more job hunting that’s even more fruitless this time, and more stress, and that almost always means worse transformations that land him in the hospital or at least take him longer to recover from. Jeremy gets an after-school job to help, now that he’s old enough, but it isn’t much, and every time Dad needs stitches, or an IV because he’s too sick to keep down anything stronger than water and sometimes not even that, more money goes toward hospital bills.
He goes to a temp agency, and that helps for a while, even after having been fired twice, but there are still the sick days, the near-constant exhaustion, the emotional instability. Rae makes a note of every time someone at work notices, because it might matter somehow (and she always knows, one way or another, since it’s usually in the form of a reprimand serious enough that he tells Mom about it, and she and Jeremy have advanced their eavesdropping skills to a science). He can’t get a good job and can’t hold down any job for more than a few months.
After an especially bad transformation tears most of the tendons in his arm and he needs surgery for even the tiniest hope of having healed enough by the next full moon so he won’t wreck that arm completely, Jeremy takes more hours at work and stops even bringing any of his schoolwork home. Rae is certain his grades are slipping, if for no other reason than that she’s often the only one with time to collect the mail and sees the notices the school keeps sending, but when hospital bills have eaten up most of their savings and getting by is a struggle, she can’t tell him to stop. She’d get a job too if she could; instead more and more of the cooking and cleaning has fallen to her as everyone else loses any time for it, and as much as this cuts into her own homework time or anything resembling fun, she doesn’t complain, because she has to help somehow, and anyway half the time there’s nobody around she could complain to.
Mom and Dad talk about money almost every night now, when they’re both awake enough, and Rae can hear voices from the bedroom long after she’s given up on listening and gone back to bed herself. Sometimes she wakes up past midnight to use the bathroom, and she hears them still talking, or catches sight of Dad sitting in the living room downstairs with maybe one light on, staring at nothing. (The lines in his face always seem deeper in the morning after nights like that.)
After two months straight of no work, Dad gets desperate enough to go back to the doctor. It takes a week of late-night arguments to settle him on the idea, even though what Jeremy said a long time ago is still true: it would only take a full moon to convince any doctor that Dad’s not crazy. He still doesn’t like it.
“Assuming they even believed me enough-I mean, if I time it wrong and I’m in a psych ward, or a doctor’s office, or anywhere that can’t hold me, or…God, a hospital waiting room…I would kill someone. Maybe lots of people.”
Mom agrees reluctantly: “And you’d probably end up getting shot. Which is…probably the natural response to a wolf running around the city. But there has to be a way to make sure-I mean, even bringing somebody out here-”
“Awesome. Let’s start a freakshow, I can be the main attraction. Maybe that’ll pay the bills.”
“I’m serious.”
“Well, I’d be suggesting that seriously too if I thought it would help. Look, I just…assuming everything went well and somebody was convinced-aside from the fact that it would have to be a really, really important somebody for anyone else to believe them too, and I don’t know anyone that important-what could anybody do that would help?”
“I don’t know…drugs, maybe, or maybe there’s actually a cure somewhere and nobody knows because nobody believes this is real…” Mom pauses. “Are you…afraid you’d be carted off for secret government experiments or something? This isn’t Hollywood.”
“Well, if all the werewolf stories started somewhere, the government cover-up stories probably did too. That’s what science does with anything it doesn’t understand-it makes it disappear.”
Another silence. “Watergate and UFO conspiracies are not exactly in the same league.”
Dad makes a noise that’s uncomfortably close to a growl. “I’m only crazy once a month. Doesn’t mean I’m a paranoid loony. I just…I can’t take the risk. Not that…” He sighs heavily, and when he speaks again his voice is very level in a way it only gets when he’s struggling not to break down. “I’m also well aware that you’d all be better off without me.”
“Richard-”
“I said you shouldn’t have to deal with this-any of you-and I meant that. With…the bills, and…the way I act and everything…you’d have a much easier time taking care of the kids if you didn’t have to worry about me too.”
“Okay,” Mom says, and now her voice is a little shaky too, “maybe, but…in sickness and in health, I meant that too, even if I wasn’t really expecting…this.”
But eventually they agree on telling part of the truth, so Dad goes back to the doctor who treated him after the very first attack (it seems like an awfully long time ago now, even to Rae, but from the way Dad looks, it must feel like decades) and tells him about nightmares, insomnia, changes in personality, depression, drastic mood swings. He comes back with drugs, medications the doctor said can help with PTSD, and again Rae doesn’t realize at the time, but that marks the beginning of something else different, if not exactly another new normal.
Dad finally gets a graveyard-shift job stocking new inventory at Walmart, because nobody there really cares that he needs sick days every month or that he’s been let go several times and it doesn’t require much human interaction, and even if it’s several steps below any job he’s had since college, at least it pays, which is better than nothing. A little better than nothing. He sleeps most of the day so he can work most of the night, so almost nobody sees him anymore; and there’s still no health insurance, so after the first drugs do little except make him sicker after the full moon, he starts going to different doctors in different hospitals, collecting free samples of every antipsychotic and antidepressant they suggest.
Rae, the only one home most evenings when Dad gets up and sometimes the only one there at moonrise, can see better than anyone else what the drugs are doing. She checks medication levels in his medicine cabinet to see which one he’s trying when, and she writes that down too, along with any effects she observes, which doesn’t help at all when she comes home to find Dad haggard and hollow-eyed from two days without sleep or watches transformations so violent he ends up soaked in his own blood.
Because that’s what the drugs do, mostly: some make him depressed and withdrawn, some actually heighten the mood swings and hair-trigger temper, some make him sick even during a waning moon, some have him nearly falling asleep on the ladder at work and some don’t let him sleep at all. It takes a while, because there are a lot of drugs and nothing works instantly, but as more months wear on it becomes increasingly obvious that none of the drugs are really going to work. Sedatives and tranquilizers of any kind make him violently ill, and even the ones that don’t seem to affect his human side at all usually make the transformations worse. Lithium evens out his moods to the point of flattening them into apathy and disinterest, but it also sends the wolf into convulsions, blood coming from his mouth as he gasps for breath. In the morning-after a sleepless night of pacing and worrying and helplessness, because what are they supposed to do, call a vet who would probably end up getting turned or killed?-his transformation back ends in muscle cramps so vicious that his shoulder dislocates and two ribs crack. That’s one more hospital visit they can’t afford, plus the danger of losing even this job now that he has to be careful what he lifts, and a couple days later Rae finds the medicine cabinet cleared out and all the pill boxes in the trash.
After that, Dad is always tired. He sleeps a little more on his days off, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference, especially when he allows himself barely enough time to rest during his workweek and almost never stops moving when he’s awake, scouring the inside of the shed and cleaning up the yard from his last transformation as soon as he gets home from work. Rae thinks she understands a little of this, because sleeping pills work about as well as any other medication (even Tylenol makes him sick if it’s too close to the moon) and when you’re tired enough you don’t have to stare at the ceiling every night, thinking about everything you spend all day trying not to think about. It makes more sense when even the waxing moon isn’t enough to produce the same level of restless energy the full moon usually brings and the mood swings are muted by exhaustion.
But this has a price too: the wolf isn’t tired, not after waiting a month between every appearance, and it’s even more vicious than before, and when he comes back Dad can barely stay conscious long enough to get into the house. He sleeps longer, too, and harder, and more than a day later when he‘s supposed to get up to go to work, they can‘t wake him up. Rae calls his manager to say he’s sick, and the harried woman says that’s great timing, right after his four days off and it would be when they’re short-staffed and maybe he should stop getting sick so much, and Rae’s pretty sure she can hear her just barely keep from putting finger-quotes around “sick”.
So Dad has to scale back on how much he can exhaust himself before the full moon, but to make sure that he can still wake up in time for work, after, he can't do enough to take the edge off his moodiness; he only gets tired enough to get even snappier. Rae thinks everyone else would probably be deliberately avoiding him if their schedules didn’t already do a good enough job of it.
They get used to this, like they’ve gotten used to everything else; and just like before, there’s another crisis around the corner.
The wolf has been working at one corner of the fence for months, clawing and biting at the wood; it’s strong enough to hold for a good long time, so that even Dad, who regularly checks and maintains the fence and the shed to make sure he can’t escape, hasn’t noticed anything. Then one cold, rainy full moon, the plank gives way just a little, cracking into a gap above the ground big enough for the wolf to fit one paw through. He’s got his front leg through up to the shoulder when the change takes him, and by the time it’s over, most of the skin from his elbow down has been scraped away, his shoulder’s dislocated again, and his arm is broken, a shard of white bone stabbing upward through the skin.
Dad gets back from the hospital with his arm covered in an awkward plaster cast that doesn’t even let him bend his elbow, sick and groggy from the surgery needed to set the bone. What little has gone into savings covers the bill, but only just, and nobody talks about what they’ll do next full moon when the cast isn’t ready to come off and the bone isn’t healed, or about the fact that Dad’s ability to do his job has gone down by about half. He can’t tolerate pain meds, so he can’t sleep, either, and his mood deteriorates even faster than usual as the month wears on.
Half a week before full moon, for once everyone’s schedules coincide to put them all at home for supper, something Rae feels guilty for not being glad about-but tension seems to radiate from just about everybody, and when they’re all thinking about the coming moon but no one wants to bring it up, there isn’t much to talk about. Dad’s sawing at his chicken as if it’s personally offended him, which maybe it has, because the meat’s tough enough already and his cast makes everything almost impossible.
“Want me to do that?” Mom finally asks. Dad doesn’t respond except to glower at her and bear down harder on the knife. It hits bone and slips, metal screeching against the plate, and Dad’s hand slips too, his elbow knocking over his glass. Milk splashes everywhere.
Rae jumps up to grab a roll of paper towels, glad of an excuse to get away from the table, but Dad’s already on the floor trying to clean up the mess one-handed with the few napkins on the table. She crouches next to him and starts wiping up the milk.
“I don’t need help,” Dad snarls, “I’m not five. Give me the roll and I’ll do it.”
“It’s okay, I’ve got it,” Rae says, and reaches past him for a puddle near the leg of his chair. She overbalances just a little and bumps into Dad, jostling his still-painful arm.
Something seems to snap-Rae wonders later if she actually did hear it, something breaking loose, or if maybe she’s finally going crazy too, because she knows very well what breaking bone sounds like and this isn’t it-and he shoves her away, so hard she slams into the wall and collapses to the floor.
She lies still, dazed, and thinks she must have hit her head too and not realized because everything seems vague and very slow while her thoughts are going way too fast. She is certain Dad didn’t mean to shove her that hard, she has plenty of time to decide this-he has never really gotten used to what the moon does to him untransformed, so if he’s stronger than he realizes this close to the moon, at least he wasn’t trying to hurt her (and she still has time to see the parallels between this thought and the kind of rationalizing abuse victims do, and enough time to crush the idea away, because she knows Dad better than that). By the time her vision clears and she’s done thinking this, she recognizes that no time at all has passed, really, and everyone is frozen: Mom still at the table, looking stunned, Jeremy standing above Rae where she’s lying on the floor, between her and Dad; and Dad, who hasn’t moved, but he’s staring at Rae, horror-stricken.
There’s a long silence, and still nobody’s moving. Rae sits up very slowly, wincing when her bruised body protests, and then Dad pushes his chair back with nearly enough force to knock it over and limps out the door. The pickup’s engine grinds to life and roars away from the house until they can’t hear it anymore.
Jeremy crouches to help Rae up. He’s breathing hard and he looks furious, more than she’s ever seen him before, but he doesn’t speak and neither does Rae, because what are they supposed to say?
***
Dad comes back without his cast the day after the full moon, saying the pin in his arm held, he’ll make up something to get a new cast put on, and he’s going to spend full moons up at the cabin from now on. And he starts looking away every time he accidentally meets Rae’s eyes. It really doesn’t help, of course, that she actually did hit her head on the way down, or rather the bone under her eye, and the bruise is still dark and ugly days later. She finally corners him to say that it’s okay, she knows he didn’t mean to do anything, but that just seems to make it worse.
If Dad’s finding more reasons to avoid everyone, Jeremy’s hardly home at all for several days; sometimes he doesn’t get back until just before Rae gets up for school, and the barely restrained anger in his eyes warns Rae off from asking any questions. Then he comes home right after school for the first time in over a week, and takes the stairs two at a time without sparing Rae a glance. She gets a glimpse of something he’s holding under one arm, something long and dark, and she’s following Jeremy to his room before she even realizes she’s scared.
She sees the gun before he can hide it and stops just inside the doorway, a sick feeling swooping through her stomach. “What…what’s that?” she asks, even though it’s obvious.
He grunts and turns back to the weapon on his bed. “What’s it look like?”
“Where did you get it?” Rae doesn’t know much about guns, but she’s pretty sure there are laws and Jeremy’s too young to get a gun legally. “Did someone sell that to you?”
“Gun show.” He rests the rifle’s butt against his shoulder, aiming out the window, testing its weight in his hands. “No background checks from private sellers. Don’t even have to ask for ID. And-” His tone turns sardonic. “I don’t look 15. Thank Dad for that.”
“That’s not his fault!”
“Nope.” He swings the guns down and his hands move over it; something clicks. He checks the sight again. “But it’s somebody’s fault.”
She backs up against the doorframe, heart thumping, putting all her mental effort into not thinking about what he’s going to do with the rifle. “You lied to get that,” she says, because she isn’t thinking about what else he’s going to do and can’t tell him not to do it if she isn’t thinking about it. “My Sunday school teacher said liars go to hell.”
Jeremy expresses his opinion of that idea with a word Rae knows Mom wouldn’t want him using. “You know who should go to hell? Every damn werewolf in the whole damn world.”
And suddenly there are tears coming, and she doesn’t want them and can’t seem to help it. “Not Daddy, he’s not a-not a bad werewolf, he didn’t do anything wrong, he didn’t mean to-”
“No,” Jeremy says, relenting. “Not Dad. Of course not Dad,” and he’s her brother again and nothing is wrong.
The rifle goes under Jeremy’s bed as she leaves the room, though, and as much as she wants to, she can’t forget it’s there.
***
Or at least it does for a while, even if Dad’s healing time has about doubled and he has less energy than before. But a month is a long time, and he goes back to work eventually, still moving slowly. Then the moon starts to grow again, and again Dad begins to get edgy, only there’s more to it this time. He puts a dent in the wall after Mom forgets to gas up the car when it’s still got over a fourth of a tank left, yells at Jeremy for spilling water on the floor, then starts spending all evening in the den, watching TV, using his computer, staring into space, eyes bleak and jaw hard, avoiding or ignoring everyone else.
Then the full moon rises again, and this time Dad spends the night in the shed, going out an hour before he needs to and refusing a blanket. Nobody sleeps much, again; Rae’s pretty sure she drifted off at some point close to dawn when the sound of a bloodthirsty wolf in a frenzy to escape finally died away, replaced not long after by the agonized transformation back. And again, Mom and Jeremy have to help him back into the house, and Rae catches sight of the bruising all over his skin before he collapses into bed.
He stays awake a little longer this time, though, grabbing Mom’s hand as she goes to leave the room, and his voice is a hoarse whisper: “Marilyn, listen, I’m…I know I’ve been awful this week, and I…don’t know what’s wrong with me, it’s like…I want to attack, like the wolf’s…taking over inside.”
“You mean,” Mom asks, and she sounds like she’s choosing her words very carefully, “you’ve started feeling the…compulsion to-to hurt people…before you change?”
“Apparently. Yeah. And I’m trying…I mean the last thing I ever want to do is hurt any of you, but I can’t-”
“So that’s why you’ve been yelling and stuff?” Jeremy says. “That’s, what, instead of physically attacking?”
Dad closes his eyes and nods. “Yeah. I’m…really sorry…”
“Kind of a raging case of PMS, then,” Jeremy offers. “Should we be giving you chocolate or something?”
Dad almost smiles, because at this point they can still find a little humor in it. “Something like that.”
It’s a lot less funny when it becomes a pattern, as much a part of the transformations as the physical change, and for a week or more leading up to each full moon, Dad becomes impossible to deal with, often angry or sullen with a hair-trigger temper; and after every full moon, there is again the inevitable exhaustion and recovery period, and then he is still withdrawn, only this time it’s because he’s too guilty over his behavior to look at them. He begins taking days off from work every month-the day of the full moon, of course, and the days before and after it-and that helps a little, at least because he has some vacation time saved up and doesn’t have to explain taking a sick day every single month.
Sometimes, the morning after, he is more than bruised; sometimes in his single-minded determination to get out of the shed and take down his prey, he pulls muscles or sprains ligaments, or gouges himself on stray nails and splinters, leaving long gashes that the wolf never notices. Sometimes this means more hospital visits, more recovery time at home, more days off work; and more than once Rae gets up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and hears worried voices from downstairs talking about medical bills and health insurance and what if somebody notices how often he’s sick or that there’s a pattern to it because somebody’s got to notice eventually and that would be bad-
Rae doesn’t really understand any of this, but she knows it’s bad, really bad, when Dad loses his job.
***
It’s a few months after the first full moon, at this point; Rae’s at least started marking things on a calendar by now, because then she has control over something, and she’s been learning about the scientific method and observation at school, so she’s begun taking notes too, because that’s another little semblance of control. She knows that the change happens precisely at moonrise whether or not it’s actually dark, and that while the worst of the emotional changes happen during the week leading up to the full moon, it starts more subtly than that as soon as the moon begins to grow. She isn’t surprised when she overhears Dad say that he received a semi-official reprimand at work, but writing this down doesn’t make it any easier to accept that somebody’s finally noticed and it’s going to get even harder to hide what’s wrong.
“I’ve got nothing to tell them,” Dad says. “They can send me to anger management or some crap like that if they want, but it’s not going to help, and if it was something else then maybe they’d have to accommodate it as a disability, but what am I going to say, that everyone has to leave me alone one week a month because I’ve got pre-transformation syndrome?”
He starts taking more time off, a day or two before each full moon and a day or so after, which eats into his vacation days until he has to start using sick days again. Then one day he‘s already home when Rae gets back from school, a fact she automatically compares against the lunar calendar to place it at four days before full moon, the same way she thinks of the moon every time something is different. He won’t answer when she asks why he’s home early, and before long he disappears into the den and doesn’t come out all evening.
Jeremy doesn’t even pretend to go to bed this time; Rae finds him sitting at the top of the stairs fully dressed when she gets up for the same reason. He shakes his head to answer her unspoken question-apparently Dad hasn’t even left the den yet-but several minutes later she hears a door open and Dad says flatly, “I’ve been fired. ‘Unacceptable behavior.’”
Something drops. “What?”
“Boss chewed me out for using so many sick days. Wanted to know what was going on. I said I just kept getting sick, he wouldn’t buy it and said I had to actually work to build up enough time for golfing or whatever I was wasting time on, and I lost it. I don’t even know what…I was yelling at him when somebody called security, I guess, so they got there in time to hear me say I could kill him.” Dad’s voice is almost a monotone, it’s so emotionless, as if he’s wrung every feeling from it so he can say the words.
“Oh, God.”
“Yeah.” A chair scrapes across the floor, and someone sits heavily. “Means they don’t have to give me a severance package either. Health insurance lasts until the end of the month, though.”
“That’s it? They’re not going to press charges?”
“What, it’s not enough?”
“Well, he could, that’s-that’s still assault, isn’t it? Getting noticed like this-”
“I know, okay? I know.” A long pause; Rae can imagine him trying to massage away a headache. “He said something real magnanimous about PTSD and cutting me a break. You know, while the security guards are dying to march me out in handcuffs because they’re bored to death.” He sighs. “He was a bastard anyway.”
“Richard.”
“I know,” he repeats, but this time his voice is exhausted, as if he could barely hold onto his irritation as a defense, even fueled by the coming moon. “Can’t imagine how I’m going to get another job after this, and I can maybe cut down on the hospital visits but not enough to make a big difference.”
Another silence. “I’m only an adjunct at the college. I can get a second job if they won’t give me more classes. Their benefits aren’t the best, but it would be something…”
“Damn it, Marilyn, you shouldn’t have to-I did this. I’ll…I don’t know. I’ll fix it. Something. I don’t want you to pay for me not keeping my freaking temper.”
This time it’s Mom who sighs, and another chair scrapes against linoleum. “That’s not how it works.”
Later, Rae looks up health insurance online to figure out why it’s so important, but the tone of Dad’s voice has already told her plenty, if not the exact meaning. He will still be sick and hurt, and he will still need stitches and antibiotics and maybe more sometimes, and he won’t have the money for it.
And things change for a second time. Mom takes a second, full-time job waitressing nearly every afternoon and evening and sometimes late into the night, because the college won’t give her more hours and absolutely nothing better is available, and suddenly she’s gone more than Dad is, exhausted or sleeping when she’s at home. Dad barely has time for the lengthy interview process most good jobs seem to need, and anyway almost nobody is hiring. He lands a basic bookkeeping job before the first full moon, though, and if it’s way below anything he’s had for years, it’s a job, and he pretends to be satisfied with it, especially when the fuss raised over his immediately taking three sick days isn’t a huge one.
But that doesn’t mean any of the problems have gone away; they’ve just been delayed for a while. Rae figures that out as the next full moons come around. Dad seems to be doing a better job at reining in his temper at work, an effort that leaves him too mentally worn out to keep doing it when he gets home, and Rae learns quickly that the best thing to do as the moon nears is to keep quiet and stay out of his way. Mom often comes home when Dad is already asleep, so she gets to do that without trying, leaving Jeremy as the usual lightning rod for the rare times Dad tries to spend any time with the rest of the family during the waxing moon.
But they’re never far from another crisis now, and Dad’s increasing guilt over the way he treats his family now makes him try harder to clamp down on his temper at home so they actually manage a few civil conversations the day before the full moon. Jeremy tells Rae later that this makes him even more uneasy, and the reason becomes obvious before long: this month’s transformation is even more violent than usual, putting Dad in the hospital overnight to patch up half a dozen gashes and a patch of shredded skin where the wolf gnawed on its own hind leg in a frenzy of frustration. The additional sick days and need for a story anyone will believe about how he got hurt mean more job worries, and the strain of trying to stay in control of himself all the time is too much for someone already worn out with anxiety.
The job lasts all of five months (or moons, rather, because that’s pretty much how they mark time now). Dad is exhausted and a little bit ill all month, every month, and Rae barely sees him the week before each full moon, but he’s managing, getting through most days on not much more than caffeine and stubborn willpower. But the sick days are come too often and too regularly for someone who can’t explain them with a normal disease, and between the physical exhaustion of the transformations and the mental exhaustion of staying close to sane before them, he doesn’t have enough energy left to do a particularly good job.
“‘It’s nothing personal,’” he imitates the manager’s voice when he tells Mom about this, “it’s the economy, we have to cut back, have to look at production-as if it isn’t personal for me or something…”
It means no more health insurance, again, and more job hunting that’s even more fruitless this time, and more stress, and that almost always means worse transformations that land him in the hospital or at least take him longer to recover from. Jeremy gets an after-school job to help, now that he’s old enough, but it isn’t much, and every time Dad needs stitches, or an IV because he’s too sick to keep down anything stronger than water and sometimes not even that, more money goes toward hospital bills.
He goes to a temp agency, and that helps for a while, even after having been fired twice, but there are still the sick days, the near-constant exhaustion, the emotional instability. Rae makes a note of every time someone at work notices, because it might matter somehow (and she always knows, one way or another, since it’s usually in the form of a reprimand serious enough that he tells Mom about it, and she and Jeremy have advanced their eavesdropping skills to a science). He can’t get a good job and can’t hold down any job for more than a few months.
After an especially bad transformation tears most of the tendons in his arm and he needs surgery for even the tiniest hope of having healed enough by the next full moon so he won’t wreck that arm completely, Jeremy takes more hours at work and stops even bringing any of his schoolwork home. Rae is certain his grades are slipping, if for no other reason than that she’s often the only one with time to collect the mail and sees the notices the school keeps sending, but when hospital bills have eaten up most of their savings and getting by is a struggle, she can’t tell him to stop. She’d get a job too if she could; instead more and more of the cooking and cleaning has fallen to her as everyone else loses any time for it, and as much as this cuts into her own homework time or anything resembling fun, she doesn’t complain, because she has to help somehow, and anyway half the time there’s nobody around she could complain to.
Mom and Dad talk about money almost every night now, when they’re both awake enough, and Rae can hear voices from the bedroom long after she’s given up on listening and gone back to bed herself. Sometimes she wakes up past midnight to use the bathroom, and she hears them still talking, or catches sight of Dad sitting in the living room downstairs with maybe one light on, staring at nothing. (The lines in his face always seem deeper in the morning after nights like that.)
After two months straight of no work, Dad gets desperate enough to go back to the doctor. It takes a week of late-night arguments to settle him on the idea, even though what Jeremy said a long time ago is still true: it would only take a full moon to convince any doctor that Dad’s not crazy. He still doesn’t like it.
“Assuming they even believed me enough-I mean, if I time it wrong and I’m in a psych ward, or a doctor’s office, or anywhere that can’t hold me, or…God, a hospital waiting room…I would kill someone. Maybe lots of people.”
Mom agrees reluctantly: “And you’d probably end up getting shot. Which is…probably the natural response to a wolf running around the city. But there has to be a way to make sure-I mean, even bringing somebody out here-”
“Awesome. Let’s start a freakshow, I can be the main attraction. Maybe that’ll pay the bills.”
“I’m serious.”
“Well, I’d be suggesting that seriously too if I thought it would help. Look, I just…assuming everything went well and somebody was convinced-aside from the fact that it would have to be a really, really important somebody for anyone else to believe them too, and I don’t know anyone that important-what could anybody do that would help?”
“I don’t know…drugs, maybe, or maybe there’s actually a cure somewhere and nobody knows because nobody believes this is real…” Mom pauses. “Are you…afraid you’d be carted off for secret government experiments or something? This isn’t Hollywood.”
“Well, if all the werewolf stories started somewhere, the government cover-up stories probably did too. That’s what science does with anything it doesn’t understand-it makes it disappear.”
Another silence. “Watergate and UFO conspiracies are not exactly in the same league.”
Dad makes a noise that’s uncomfortably close to a growl. “I’m only crazy once a month. Doesn’t mean I’m a paranoid loony. I just…I can’t take the risk. Not that…” He sighs heavily, and when he speaks again his voice is very level in a way it only gets when he’s struggling not to break down. “I’m also well aware that you’d all be better off without me.”
“Richard-”
“I said you shouldn’t have to deal with this-any of you-and I meant that. With…the bills, and…the way I act and everything…you’d have a much easier time taking care of the kids if you didn’t have to worry about me too.”
“Okay,” Mom says, and now her voice is a little shaky too, “maybe, but…in sickness and in health, I meant that too, even if I wasn’t really expecting…this.”
But eventually they agree on telling part of the truth, so Dad goes back to the doctor who treated him after the very first attack (it seems like an awfully long time ago now, even to Rae, but from the way Dad looks, it must feel like decades) and tells him about nightmares, insomnia, changes in personality, depression, drastic mood swings. He comes back with drugs, medications the doctor said can help with PTSD, and again Rae doesn’t realize at the time, but that marks the beginning of something else different, if not exactly another new normal.
Dad finally gets a graveyard-shift job stocking new inventory at Walmart, because nobody there really cares that he needs sick days every month or that he’s been let go several times and it doesn’t require much human interaction, and even if it’s several steps below any job he’s had since college, at least it pays, which is better than nothing. A little better than nothing. He sleeps most of the day so he can work most of the night, so almost nobody sees him anymore; and there’s still no health insurance, so after the first drugs do little except make him sicker after the full moon, he starts going to different doctors in different hospitals, collecting free samples of every antipsychotic and antidepressant they suggest.
Rae, the only one home most evenings when Dad gets up and sometimes the only one there at moonrise, can see better than anyone else what the drugs are doing. She checks medication levels in his medicine cabinet to see which one he’s trying when, and she writes that down too, along with any effects she observes, which doesn’t help at all when she comes home to find Dad haggard and hollow-eyed from two days without sleep or watches transformations so violent he ends up soaked in his own blood.
Because that’s what the drugs do, mostly: some make him depressed and withdrawn, some actually heighten the mood swings and hair-trigger temper, some make him sick even during a waning moon, some have him nearly falling asleep on the ladder at work and some don’t let him sleep at all. It takes a while, because there are a lot of drugs and nothing works instantly, but as more months wear on it becomes increasingly obvious that none of the drugs are really going to work. Sedatives and tranquilizers of any kind make him violently ill, and even the ones that don’t seem to affect his human side at all usually make the transformations worse. Lithium evens out his moods to the point of flattening them into apathy and disinterest, but it also sends the wolf into convulsions, blood coming from his mouth as he gasps for breath. In the morning-after a sleepless night of pacing and worrying and helplessness, because what are they supposed to do, call a vet who would probably end up getting turned or killed?-his transformation back ends in muscle cramps so vicious that his shoulder dislocates and two ribs crack. That’s one more hospital visit they can’t afford, plus the danger of losing even this job now that he has to be careful what he lifts, and a couple days later Rae finds the medicine cabinet cleared out and all the pill boxes in the trash.
After that, Dad is always tired. He sleeps a little more on his days off, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference, especially when he allows himself barely enough time to rest during his workweek and almost never stops moving when he’s awake, scouring the inside of the shed and cleaning up the yard from his last transformation as soon as he gets home from work. Rae thinks she understands a little of this, because sleeping pills work about as well as any other medication (even Tylenol makes him sick if it’s too close to the moon) and when you’re tired enough you don’t have to stare at the ceiling every night, thinking about everything you spend all day trying not to think about. It makes more sense when even the waxing moon isn’t enough to produce the same level of restless energy the full moon usually brings and the mood swings are muted by exhaustion.
But this has a price too: the wolf isn’t tired, not after waiting a month between every appearance, and it’s even more vicious than before, and when he comes back Dad can barely stay conscious long enough to get into the house. He sleeps longer, too, and harder, and more than a day later when he‘s supposed to get up to go to work, they can‘t wake him up. Rae calls his manager to say he’s sick, and the harried woman says that’s great timing, right after his four days off and it would be when they’re short-staffed and maybe he should stop getting sick so much, and Rae’s pretty sure she can hear her just barely keep from putting finger-quotes around “sick”.
So Dad has to scale back on how much he can exhaust himself before the full moon, but to make sure that he can still wake up in time for work, after, he can't do enough to take the edge off his moodiness; he only gets tired enough to get even snappier. Rae thinks everyone else would probably be deliberately avoiding him if their schedules didn’t already do a good enough job of it.
They get used to this, like they’ve gotten used to everything else; and just like before, there’s another crisis around the corner.
The wolf has been working at one corner of the fence for months, clawing and biting at the wood; it’s strong enough to hold for a good long time, so that even Dad, who regularly checks and maintains the fence and the shed to make sure he can’t escape, hasn’t noticed anything. Then one cold, rainy full moon, the plank gives way just a little, cracking into a gap above the ground big enough for the wolf to fit one paw through. He’s got his front leg through up to the shoulder when the change takes him, and by the time it’s over, most of the skin from his elbow down has been scraped away, his shoulder’s dislocated again, and his arm is broken, a shard of white bone stabbing upward through the skin.
Dad gets back from the hospital with his arm covered in an awkward plaster cast that doesn’t even let him bend his elbow, sick and groggy from the surgery needed to set the bone. What little has gone into savings covers the bill, but only just, and nobody talks about what they’ll do next full moon when the cast isn’t ready to come off and the bone isn’t healed, or about the fact that Dad’s ability to do his job has gone down by about half. He can’t tolerate pain meds, so he can’t sleep, either, and his mood deteriorates even faster than usual as the month wears on.
Half a week before full moon, for once everyone’s schedules coincide to put them all at home for supper, something Rae feels guilty for not being glad about-but tension seems to radiate from just about everybody, and when they’re all thinking about the coming moon but no one wants to bring it up, there isn’t much to talk about. Dad’s sawing at his chicken as if it’s personally offended him, which maybe it has, because the meat’s tough enough already and his cast makes everything almost impossible.
“Want me to do that?” Mom finally asks. Dad doesn’t respond except to glower at her and bear down harder on the knife. It hits bone and slips, metal screeching against the plate, and Dad’s hand slips too, his elbow knocking over his glass. Milk splashes everywhere.
Rae jumps up to grab a roll of paper towels, glad of an excuse to get away from the table, but Dad’s already on the floor trying to clean up the mess one-handed with the few napkins on the table. She crouches next to him and starts wiping up the milk.
“I don’t need help,” Dad snarls, “I’m not five. Give me the roll and I’ll do it.”
“It’s okay, I’ve got it,” Rae says, and reaches past him for a puddle near the leg of his chair. She overbalances just a little and bumps into Dad, jostling his still-painful arm.
Something seems to snap-Rae wonders later if she actually did hear it, something breaking loose, or if maybe she’s finally going crazy too, because she knows very well what breaking bone sounds like and this isn’t it-and he shoves her away, so hard she slams into the wall and collapses to the floor.
She lies still, dazed, and thinks she must have hit her head too and not realized because everything seems vague and very slow while her thoughts are going way too fast. She is certain Dad didn’t mean to shove her that hard, she has plenty of time to decide this-he has never really gotten used to what the moon does to him untransformed, so if he’s stronger than he realizes this close to the moon, at least he wasn’t trying to hurt her (and she still has time to see the parallels between this thought and the kind of rationalizing abuse victims do, and enough time to crush the idea away, because she knows Dad better than that). By the time her vision clears and she’s done thinking this, she recognizes that no time at all has passed, really, and everyone is frozen: Mom still at the table, looking stunned, Jeremy standing above Rae where she’s lying on the floor, between her and Dad; and Dad, who hasn’t moved, but he’s staring at Rae, horror-stricken.
There’s a long silence, and still nobody’s moving. Rae sits up very slowly, wincing when her bruised body protests, and then Dad pushes his chair back with nearly enough force to knock it over and limps out the door. The pickup’s engine grinds to life and roars away from the house until they can’t hear it anymore.
Jeremy crouches to help Rae up. He’s breathing hard and he looks furious, more than she’s ever seen him before, but he doesn’t speak and neither does Rae, because what are they supposed to say?
***
Dad comes back without his cast the day after the full moon, saying the pin in his arm held, he’ll make up something to get a new cast put on, and he’s going to spend full moons up at the cabin from now on. And he starts looking away every time he accidentally meets Rae’s eyes. It really doesn’t help, of course, that she actually did hit her head on the way down, or rather the bone under her eye, and the bruise is still dark and ugly days later. She finally corners him to say that it’s okay, she knows he didn’t mean to do anything, but that just seems to make it worse.
If Dad’s finding more reasons to avoid everyone, Jeremy’s hardly home at all for several days; sometimes he doesn’t get back until just before Rae gets up for school, and the barely restrained anger in his eyes warns Rae off from asking any questions. Then he comes home right after school for the first time in over a week, and takes the stairs two at a time without sparing Rae a glance. She gets a glimpse of something he’s holding under one arm, something long and dark, and she’s following Jeremy to his room before she even realizes she’s scared.
She sees the gun before he can hide it and stops just inside the doorway, a sick feeling swooping through her stomach. “What…what’s that?” she asks, even though it’s obvious.
He grunts and turns back to the weapon on his bed. “What’s it look like?”
“Where did you get it?” Rae doesn’t know much about guns, but she’s pretty sure there are laws and Jeremy’s too young to get a gun legally. “Did someone sell that to you?”
“Gun show.” He rests the rifle’s butt against his shoulder, aiming out the window, testing its weight in his hands. “No background checks from private sellers. Don’t even have to ask for ID. And-” His tone turns sardonic. “I don’t look 15. Thank Dad for that.”
“That’s not his fault!”
“Nope.” He swings the guns down and his hands move over it; something clicks. He checks the sight again. “But it’s somebody’s fault.”
She backs up against the doorframe, heart thumping, putting all her mental effort into not thinking about what he’s going to do with the rifle. “You lied to get that,” she says, because she isn’t thinking about what else he’s going to do and can’t tell him not to do it if she isn’t thinking about it. “My Sunday school teacher said liars go to hell.”
Jeremy expresses his opinion of that idea with a word Rae knows Mom wouldn’t want him using. “You know who should go to hell? Every damn werewolf in the whole damn world.”
And suddenly there are tears coming, and she doesn’t want them and can’t seem to help it. “Not Daddy, he’s not a-not a bad werewolf, he didn’t do anything wrong, he didn’t mean to-”
“No,” Jeremy says, relenting. “Not Dad. Of course not Dad,” and he’s her brother again and nothing is wrong.
The rifle goes under Jeremy’s bed as she leaves the room, though, and as much as she wants to, she can’t forget it’s there.
***