The Descendants of Monsters

“What’s going to happen to the alligators after you implant the electrodes?” We’d just finished family dinner the night before the road trip. Whatever Dad was studying this time, his research always involved electrodes.

“We’re going to use the biophysical data to study the cerebellum for—”

“No, I mean after, when they grow up?”

“Go pick a bedtime story,” my mother said unnecessarily loudly, nudging my four-year-old sister out of her chair.

I looked from Mom’s back to Dad’s blank eyes. “That doesn’t seem good.”

“March, young lady,” Mom said.

Kady clambered upstairs on all fours. Did she crawl around the filthy floor of Dad’s lab and wear the colorful tags he used for his reptilian experiments as jewelry or was that a core memory only I’d have?

Dad idly tapped the tines of a fork on the table.

“Kids are a bigger investment than gators, you know that right?” I said.

“You shouldn’t be so hard on your mother.”

I spluttered, shaking off the shock like a wet dog. He couldn’t even tell who I was mad at, well maybe both of them, but definitely more him. Freshman year of college, I’d gone from only child to big sister. But I didn’t actually meet Kady until she was 4 months old and Mom came to speak on the optimal pH for hydroponic strawberries. I didn’t know my New England liberal arts school had an Agriculture Department. The irony of getting back from Infant Brain and Language Development to find Mom and Kady asleep mid-feeding on my ratty Ikea lounger, the cheap leather stained with beer, was a little on the nose. 

“Since I was fourteen, you always said you’d support me no matter what. You had a choice, you didn’t have to do this.”

She should have slapped me, but she wasn’t that kind of mother. Plus it would have disturbed the baby.

“Remi—your sister is wanted. You can have a surprise guest and still be delighted to see them.”

I couldn’t believe that doing this all again was something she chose, versus Dad’s sloppy mishap that Mom was cleaning up the only way she knew how. I was younger then, though I still should have known better. But I was horrified by my new sister. Not Kady herself, but the idea of my ancient-looking parents taking her to kindergarten in a few years, professors reduced once again to changing dirty diapers, and that my parents were still having sex.

Then right before my college graduation, they called to say don’t worry, we’ll both be there, but we’re getting divorced.

I didn’t have a job or a plan for my BA in Linguistics so after the ceremony and the tearful goodbyes, I flew home with them. But so far it was anything but familiar—watching Mom pack an egg carton for craft Friday at daycare or buy two dozen organic, peanut-free treats for the little snot-faces. Tiptoeing past Dad sleeping in the guest room. I was allegedly an adult, but was sharing a room with a preschooler.

The road trip was something to do. Dad was paying me $1000 for just two days of babysitting—Kady and the thirty-one baby gators. The three of us would fly down to Florida and chauffeur back the subjects of his next experiment.

“Bring your sister up a glass of water please?” Mom called from upstairs. I left Dad at the table staring into space.

 

#

 

Every child has family lore they can’t outgrow.

Mine began innocuously, coloring at the kitchen table between spoonfuls of cereal. I was about four. Dad was probably reading a pre-pub of some scientific paper, the occasional clink as he sat down the ceramic coffee cup I’d painted for Father’s Day punctuating the scritch of my crayons.

“Were dinosaurs pink?”

Dad grunted the humming sound that I associated with his brain powering up. “Indeterminate but unlikely.”

“Why?”

“Fossils don’t record color, Remi. And pink has many disadvantages such as not camouflaging well.”

“Why?”

Dad sighed and set his cup in the sink. I wouldn’t have noticed then, but I’m sure he didn’t dump the dregs and rinse the cup. Just left it for Mom, also a tenured science professor albeit in the agriculture department, to deal with later. As he still does today.

He didn’t notice I was missing until he was ready to zip me into my windbreaker, stuff my little arms through the straps of my backpack, and walk me to the university daycare. Dad says my whereabouts were unknown for only fifteen minutes, Mom says closer to an hour because the daycare called her to ask if I was out sick.

But by the time they get to the punchline of the story, they both smile fondly. When they’d tell it at Thanksgiving, Dad used to put his hand on Mom’s forearm and she’d beam back at him. I’d crawled into an empty 50-gallon aquarium Dad used for bearded dragons before I was born. It was shoved mostly out of the way under a shelf in the hallway—he was going to take it to his office for a new experiment—and once I’d climbed inside, I hadn’t been able to get back out.

“Your chubby little cheek and bottom lip smushed against the glass…”

“Dad!”

“When I lifted you out, you said, I only like pink and you only like dinosaurs, tears streaming down your face.”

I don’t remember the events firsthand. I don’t believe it because pink was never my favorite color. But Dad losing me means it’s probably true.

Not long after the fabled incident, I developed night terrors. Surely, someone must have asked what I was dreaming about, but I wouldn’t have had the words then to explain. I woke shrieking and damp in the dark from being chased by giant Triassic-era sea reptiles. The artistic renderings superimposed over dark, murky ocean backdrops from the children’s dinosaur encyclopedia come alive.

Dad enrolled me in a night terrors study conducted by a colleague from the psychology department. It probably wasn’t even therapeutic, just basic science research to reveal something about toddler brain development, or the underlying mechanism of blah blah blah. Contributing to the canon of human knowledge should have solved the bad dreams.

 

#

 

The flight down to Florida was Kady’s first flight since she was a baby as far as I knew. Nose pressed to the window, she was pretty stinking cute. Her curly-ish blonde hair had grown into a shaggy mullet—was the style intentional? Mom or Dad’s doing?

Once we were settled in the rental car—who knew Dad knew how to install a car seat—he put an address into the GPS and started driving, didn’t even ask if we were hungry.

“Did you explain about the, you know, to—” I tilted my head towards the backseat. “What if she freaks out when she sees….”

Liopleurodons, a disturbing Jurassic era animal with a crocodile head glued onto the body of a manatee-dolphin hybrid, was one of the recurring cast members from my night terrors.

“She’s just along for the ride, kiddo.”

It was demeaning, even if she was four, she was still a person. Though in Dad’s eyes I was a kiddo just along for the ride too. “Kady, do you know why we came to Florida?” I said.

“Mickey Mouse!”

How did she, forbidden from screen time, even know Disney World was here?

“We’re going to go pick up some baby alligators for dad’s research, his job, ok?”

Concerned by her silence, I turned around and she was licking her doll’s face.

“Maybe you’ve seen alligators at the zoo? They’re like big lizards—”

“They aren’t technically lizards…” Dad said. My teeth clacked together and Dad didn’t finish.

When I was little, I thought he studied dragons. He’d been trying to explain osteoderms, the bones embedded in alligator skin to me, and he pointed at a picture of a dragon in my bedtime story.

“Babies?” Kady said. “Babies!” She shook her doll violently.

“Yeah, I get it, kid.” I stretched back to ruffle her hair. I’d been reading studies from Nature on siblings, unsure what to feel for this small creature. One theory held that siblings were incentivized to behave divergently in an attempt to maximize parental investment, so maybe she’d grow up as different from me as possible. But I couldn’t find any studies of sibling bonds across litters, which was our situation really, wasn’t it? 

Dad pulled into a generic-looking strip mall and got out of the car. “Go get an ice cream. With your sister.” He pointed towards a convenience store and handed me a twenty. No one had told me how cute my daughter was yet, but I cringed at the possibility every time I held her hand.

When we came out a few minutes later, stacked inside the back of our SUV were five plastic tubs with holes in the sides that could be used to store sweaters. They were clear but frosted, inside vague, dark shapes churned. Kady’s red, white, and blue popsicle was dripping down her forearm as she chomped away happily. A snout poked out a silver dollar sized hole then disappeared. The sound of her little teeth on the ice gave me goosebumps despite the heat.

Dad shook hands with a guy wearing cowboy boots with a yellow snake draped across his shoulders—I didn’t look twice to see if it was real—then buckled Kady in and we headed north. We’d been cruising along the highway, Dad patting the steering wheel to the rhythm of the oldies station on the radio when I reached back for a water bottle in the cooler on the floor of the backseat.

“There are gators next to Kady!” A sixth box was next to her car seat.     

“Don’t scream at me while I’m driving.”

“Flimsy plastic is the only thing between her and monsters with razor-sharp teeth!”

“Chill out, Rem. They’re pretty cute. Kadie-bear loves that disgusting racoon so much. I’ll bet she gives the little buggers kisses on their snouts.”

Dad had told Kady the racoon that frequented the dumpster behind the house was a Prince, racoon royalty. Then she started trying to climb in the dumpster calling, “Pwincey Wincey.” Classic Dad, never foreseeing the consequences of his actions.

“What are snouts?” Kady said.

Now that I knew they were there, all I could hear was soft sandpaper wicker of their bodies moving over one another. It gave me a sensation along my spine like a spider had fallen down the back of my shirt. To block it out, I put my headphones in, leaned my head against the window, and closed my eyes.

Not five minutes later, the car rolled a little too hard into the curb and came to a lurching stop.

“What the—?” I pulled out one earbud. We were parked in front of Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

“The guy said if they got rowdy, to knot each one inside a pillowcase. They’ll sleep in the dark, but breathe fine. Go buy them, I don’t want the precious cargo overheating in the car,” Dad said.

Calculating the price of the pillow cases x 31 gators, I was glad for Dad’s credit card. I emptied the shelf of purple and navy into the shopping cart. And then added a light blue set decorated with yellow ducks, a tantalizing snack the gators couldn’t eat. Which made me think—I hoped there weren’t live mice somewhere in the car.

Dad popped the trunk and opened the lid of the first box. The extra space to move excited them and they shifted into turbo-mode like a cold-blooded wriggling puppy pile. A wide-eyed Kady stood next to him, sucking her thumb. Dad extracted one gator and held it uncertainly. Holding it securely one hand behind its front legs and one at the base of its tail, left no hands to get it into a pillowcase, but this wasn’t my problem. Each time he let go to reach for the pillow case, the gator lashed its tail and whipped its head around, mouth open and gnashing, inches from Kady’s face.

I dragged her away and sat down on the hot cement curb and called Mom.

“It’s worse than I expected,” I whined.

“Everyone’s fingers and toes accounted for?”

“Yeah.” Though it felt insufficient.

I tried to get Kady to sit on the curb between my legs. “Ow, hot,” she said and squirmed away from me. She squatted on her heels, in the boneless way of small children, to pick at some melted gum on the asphalt.

“How far have you gone?”

“Like ten minutes.”

Mom laughed a sharp bark.

“Remember when dad enrolled me in that night terror study after I got trapped in the aquarium?”

“Dad didn’t enroll you in that study. I did.”

“What?”

“I was sleeping with Alan at the time.”

“What?! Who the f…reak is Alan?”

“The psych prof ran that study.”

I silently twisted a strand of hair around my finger, an anxious habit from when I was Kady’s age.

Eventually Mom carried on, “Don’t misunderstand, that’s nothing to do with why we got divorced. We both had our dalliances. Life is long and we got married young, that would be a silly thing to get divorced over. Call if it’s truly an emergency. You’re an adult now, Rem. Maybe the only adult in the car. I love you. You’ll be ok.”

Kids will self-report they want to be animals when they grow up, real like dolphins or imagined like unicorns, until around age six. According to developmental milestones, I’d persisted in this response several years too long. “I want to be a narwhal-macaw so I can swim and fly.” My therapist at college had asked, “What do you think it means that you wanted to grow up to be the subject of your father’s science instead of a scientist?”

Surprisingly, the rest of the day’s drive went smoothly. The gators stopped rustling and Dad remembered to stop for lunch and didn’t grumble much about the breaks required for a toddler-sized bladder. I shepherded Kady into the public restrooms—she’d only crawled under the stall to peek at the woman next to us once.

The last hour before we pulled into the parking lot of a time-worn motel just off the highway, Dad was singing along to the Grateful Dead, Kady was coloring exuberantly, and I was counting things—cows, out of state license plates, the money I was earning per mile. Over greasy plates of meatloaf and scrambled eggs at the diner next door, I helped Kady write her name with crayon on the paper placement. Sometimes when I looked at her, a song tickled the back of my brain—something compact and rhythmic, like the wheels on the bus go round and round. But the exact words and melody were elusive.

“Do the gators have to eat?” I said.

“They’ll be fine for a few days until we get them settled in at the lab. They eat every three to four days at this age,” he said.

I took a relieved sip of milkshake.

“Why did you give me that dinosaur encyclopedia, Dad? It just showed up on my bookcase one day. Every time I read it, I got nightmares of monsters swimming below me, chasing me. Did mom say I was too young but you gave it to me anyway because you wanted me to be a scientist?”

“What encyclopedia?” His eyes were focused and curious.

“The kids’ dinosaur one. The plesiosaurus in particular—”

Kady threw a ketchup covered home fry onto the floor of the dinner and giggled at the wet sound. Dad’s head traced the arc like it was a tennis ball.

“Sweetie, no!” He wiped her hand with a napkin. Distractedly he said, “Dinosaurs by definition only lived on land. Plesiosaurus was a marine reptile.”

Splat went another potato and he hurried to the counter to pay.

After dinner, we wheeled the motel’s squeaky luggage cart to the car and piled the six boxes on. One wheel on the cart rotated erratically, causing it to jerk to a halt and the gators to whimper like puppies. I coughed to cover the noise.

Three people to a crummy motel room was the cramped side of cozy, even if Kady wasn’t a full-sized person.

“Why do you get the bed? Kady and I could share it. That would be just as fair.”

But I was on the couch with the scratchy polyester bedspread as my blanket, and Kady was on a rickey cot covered in military-green fabric. Dad spread the boxes of gators around the floor of the small room to maximize their airflow.

Through the gap in the curtains, I made out three stars in the sky. Pinpricks of light that disappeared in headlights from the frontage road next to the highway, but then doggedly reappeared once the car passed.

Should I be grateful for the chance to watch my parents’ parent? Every day I was less sure who they even were. Was how they were with Kady how they had been with me? Or was it all different because they were older, times had changed, and maybe she was a different kind of kid? Dad nonchalantly kissed boo-boos and half-watched as she climbed over the railing on the swinging bridge at the playground. A horrified mother or nanny always ran up to nudge her back to safety. Winthrop Niles Kellogg raised his kid alongside a baby chimpanzee in the hopes the chimp would acquire human language. Instead, his child started barking like an ape and his wife called the whole thing off. Was Kady an experiment, an accident, or just an impulsive choice? Had either of them learned anything from raising me to apply to this next round?        

Dad was snoring, and I had that uncertain feeling—had I fallen asleep or just tossed and turned on the liminal edge of unconsciousness?—when Kady started fussing. I waited for him to get up. Her complaints grew in volume.

“Dad,” I hissed.

He grumbled something that wasn’t words.

“Your daughter’s crying.” The sentence felt weird in my mouth. I was his daughter.

“You could help her too.” He rolled out of bed with a soft groan.

A wave of guilt washed over me. Was big sister basically a surrogate mother, at least in this case? Dad was so old. But it wasn’t my fault they had an after-shot baby; it wasn’t my fault I’d been at college the whole time she’d been alive. Everyone said I looked like the spitting image of my mom, but I didn’t want to because being a woman was a constant low-grade buzz of worries—are the gators too cold from the car A/C, when did Kady eat last, does she color too aggressively, is it a sign of some kind of personality disorder or a normal kid thing, are there too many gators in a box, are they scared or just confused and mildly unhappy, do they miss their mother, is this animal abuse, is Kady upset about the divorce, does she even understand it? Sometimes I wanted to be like Dad, and sometimes I nearly hated him. I imagined the inside of his head was nothing but ringing silence and occasional deep thoughts about the corpus callosum, the Roman Empire, or some shit like that.

He shuffled towards Kady like a bat echolocating to her wails, not bothering to turn the lights on. Then a thwack, clatter, and Dad swore, surprising Kady into silence. I got up and flicked on the room lights.

Kady was standing, sniffling, on the rickety cot, lifting her arms towards no one, wanting to be picked up. Dad was hunched over, hand on his thigh. He lifted his foot up and rubbed his big toe. But then losing his balance, he hopped twice like a human pogo stick, tottering erratically side to side. In slow motion, I saw him hop a third time, land on the edge of the open tub, and catapult the alligators out. Dad yowled and collapsed to the floor. Around him, pillowcases squirmed in every direction like drunk college kids who couldn’t agree on the next bar.

From her perch on the edge of the cot, Kady bent over to peer at the curl and stretch of their bodies. The duck pillow case walked in front of her cot, bumped blindly into the edge of a box and course corrected. Then she reached with her soft arm, tiny index finger extended, pointing, trying to touch? And like the final drop of water that breaks the surface tension and overflows the cup, the far side of the cot lifted into the air. Kady tipped forward onto her head, somersaulting to land on her back. There was that classic pause, the stunned silence you dared hope meant nothing was amiss, before she screamed bloody murder. Dad and I both rushed towards her, but I scooped her up and away from the gators.

“Support her neck,” Dad screamed.

“Is she ok?” I was crying, looking to Dad for reassurance.

Kady sat up in my arms and projectile vomited chocolate milkshake and meatloaf. It splashed onto the pillowcases and Dad’s feet.

I nestled her on the couch and with shaking hands typed, “what to do if kid falls on head.”

I checked her temperature, back of my hand to her cheek, a useless gesture, and searched her eyes for some sign. She gnawed on the ice wrapped in a washcloth I had given her instead of holding it on the bump growing just below her hairline. The internet said as long as she didn’t vomit again, she probably didn’t need to go to the hospital.

A set of claws encased in a wiggling vomit-covered pillow case scrabbled across the top of my foot. I screamed; Kady covered her ears with her hands and started crying again. “Fuck! Dad! Do something.”

“Remi, watch your language. Little ears.” At a time like this, he felt the parental urge to reprimand? But he tipped the box on its side and tried to shoo the alligators inside. The alligators couldn’t see him because of the pillowcases and they didn’t care anyway.

Dad had always been surprisingly squeamish of bodily fluids for someone who implanted brain electrodes for a living. He used the entire supply of fresh bath towels to ferry the vomity gators one by one into the bathroom, placing the beasts into the tub. The image of them scrabbling in vain up the ceramic walls gave me the heebie-jeebies. Sometime in the future, someone, perhaps a harried mother wanting just 5 minutes of peace, would recline naked in that tub. Never in her wildest imagination could she conjure what had come before her.

Dad swore under his breath, so much for little ears, as he rinsed squirming alligators in the sink and tied them inside cheap white pillowcases stolen from the bed. I remember thinking the thing you’re not worried about is just as dangerous as the ones you are.

We fell asleep eventually, me on the couch, Kady in dad’s lap in the armchair next to the desk and all woke cranky and sore in different ways. Kady kept tentatively touching the knot on her forehead and Dad was rubbing his lower back. My neck hurt and I had a vague recollection of thrashing myself awake in the middle of the night, trying to shake a dinosaur-sized alligator off my leg. I splashed water on my face in a vain effort to feel human and saw the pile of stained towels and pillowcases Dad had left in the tub. I pulled two twenties from his wallet and left them on the nightstand for whoever would have to clean up his mess this time.

At the free motel breakfast, I held Kady tight as she stood on a chair to help pour batter into the waffle maker on the counter. Other than the goose egg on her forehead, she seemed normal. As she smeared syrup around her mouth, Dad said conspiratorially, “Remi doesn’t remember this, but she took two dives out of her high chair when she was even younger than you and she turned out fine.” He winked at me. It was hard not to smile back. Should I give him more credit?

 

#

 

475 miles until home, the final leg. A bug went splat on the windshield, a loud sound from such a small creature. Dad sprayed wiper fluid, and the blades went swish-swish-swish, but that just gave the yellow splat a smeary comet tail.

Out the windshield, the flat horizon never got any closer, the comet floated on top. Chicxulub, the Gulf of Mexico, swimming, thrashing, death, extinction, maybe it had been a mosasaur, a horrifying alligator-whale mashup in my nightmare last night. And its tiny descendants were in the car with us. Dad would dispute this, they’re more like cousins, they’re both archosaurs which means ruling reptiles, but whatever.

“How many boxes opened up last night?” I said.

“Just one,” Dad said.

“Did you count them?”

“What?”

“Did you count how many gators you put back in the box?”

“Uh, five I think,” he said.

“One box has six. Thirty-one gators, five boxes in the trunk, one next to Kady. One box should have six gators,” I said flatly. I could see the pile of stained towels and dirty pillow cases piled in the tub. One gator still in a pillow case could so easily have been missed in that mess. A maid cleaning the room, reaching unwittingly into the pile of dirty linens—surely a baby gator could sever an adult finger?

“So, should we stop? And count them? To make sure?” My voice was high, turning everything into a question in spite of my efforts to stay calm. When my voice got like that, like a little girl, Dad never listened to what I was saying.

He stared straight ahead at the road, his hands perfectly on the wheel at ten and two. “Odds are it’s fine. There’s only one box of six. I’m sure it’s fine,” he said. Classic Dad, certain even the laws of probability were on his side.

Each time I pulled the dinosaur book off my shelf as a kid I told myself this time I’d be fine, this time it would be different. Look I’m not scared, I’d say as the sun shone in the window. But nightmares aren’t something you decide. I don’t know what happened to the book. Did I conveniently lose it down the side of a booth at a restaurant? Did it terrorize the next child who discovered it?

“Dad, pull over.”

“We’re not turning around.”

There were so many fucked up things in the world I couldn’t stop. But I didn’t have to be complicit in this, I could sit in back with Kady and put the gators up front with Dad. Why hadn’t I thought of it sooner?

“I mean it, pull over.

He rolled his eyes, but smacked the turn signal with the side of his hand, and the careening of the world slowed a little.