Kihyana is sixteen and wears CDG and thrift store jeans three sizes too big. She likes stompy boots with spikes. She occasionally dyes her hair red.
Kihyana is the hero of this story.
In a different family, she could be the prodigal daughter, or Homer’s Odysseus, traveling the world to slay Cyclops and save villages. She would return home safe and sound to a family who welcomes her back from her adventures with joy.
“Once upon a time there was a dear little girl who was loved by everyone who looked at her, but most of all by her grandmother.”
Kihyana’s life is more Cinderella than Little Red Riding Hood: whenever she calls me, she is cleaning the kitchen or babysitting her two sisters. When the youngest, Khiyumi, was born, she asked me, “But Grandma, isn’t three too many?”
Kihyana gets stuck watching Khloee and Khiyumi because their mother needs her beauty sleep and can’t miss her favorite TV reality shows. And where was her father – my son -- in all this? (Where was Little Red’s father, when her mother was sending her out through the woods to bring goodies to her sick grandma?) Milo had been sentenced the summer before she was born, and went to jail a month after Kihyana’s birth. War on drugs. Other kinds of goodies. Now, he plied the grey market trying to feed a family of five in a Red State tough on crime. I sent all the money I could, trying to keep them off the streets from 800 miles away.
The wolf-dog was the only stability in Kihyana’s life. I don’t think her escape will involve being saved by a huntsman or a prince. I hope she will live happily ever after.
“Grandma, I pierced my lip.”
“Why, sweetheart, why would you hurt yourself like that?”
“Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me get it pierced, so I took a needle and did it myself.”
I am appalled that my granddaughter – the gentlest, most vulnerable child, who saves turtles lost in the road and wouldn’t hurt a spider – has mutilated her body. In the Instagram post she sends me, her chin and throat dripping with blood, superimposed with “Kihyana Must Die.” Zuko the wolf-dog nuzzles her leg in the background. I want the blood to be fake. I want to be supportive, so I don’t ask.
The mother, who was named Carly or Cardi (you never knew which of her stories were truth, which delusion) but changed her name to Kharlie, “because Kharlie sounds like a celebrity’s name,” treated Kihyana as her doll, as if she owned her daughter’s body. She bleached and straightened four-year-old Kihyana’s hair until clumps fell out; pinched the pimples on her teenage daughter’s face, leaving dark spots on her nose and forehead; and posed her draped provocatively in mini skirts and tube tops to get likes on YouTube.
What is most important is that the children look fashionable: “Clothes express who they are.” Kharlie insisted on picking out what the children wore until Kihyana refused, shredding the chosen garments and using them to pad the bed of her guinea pig’s cage. She pulled out the box braids Kharlie made her sit still for hours to put in, and started wearing her father’s undershirts and baggy jeans. This sent Kharlie into a rage. She cannot tolerate any hint of her daughter’s separate identity. “Kihyana is just like me.”
Kihyana has grown taller than her mother, but she still winces at Kharlie’s wrath. The last time I saw her, Kihyana was wearing Kharlie’s “tummy trainer.”
I stared in disbelief.
(Grandma, what big eyes you have.)
“Why would you wear such a thing?”
“Mom said it would give me an hourglass figure.”
“But it’s squishing your organs and cutting off your breath.”
“I can breathe fine, Grandma.”
What daughter doesn’t want her mother’s love and attention?
“Instead of mangling your body, can’t you express yourself through singing? You’ve always loved music.” Kihyana sings to herself all the time, while she scrolls through videos on her phone, while she washes the dishes and cleans her sisters’ bedrooms, when she locks herself in her room to mute her sisters’ tantrums, her parents’ fighting. She memorizes the songs to musicals, knows all the words to Wicked and Six, belts out 1980s songs of her parents’ generation: “Through the Fire” by Chaka Kahn and the Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.”
Kharlie says “Kihyana has the voice of an angel.” Then: “She doesn’t need school; she can get an agent and make millions.”
“No, Mom; you’re the one who wants to be a star.”
Kihyana loves the K-Pop band BTS, despite her mother’s taunting and purposefully mispronouncing their names. “Why do you want to sing those foreign songs?”
“Grandma, will you get me Lingodeer, so I can learn Korean?”
I sent her links for high school exchange programs, hoping for her escape.
She surprised me by filling out the applications on her own.
“You know, I could never let Kihyana leave me; she’s my baby. What would I do without her?” It’s true that Kharlie needs Kihyana: to watch Khloee and take care of Khiyumi, make dinner and do the laundry, feed the pets and walk Zuko, even though he weighs twice as much and pulls her down the road. Kihyana is her mother’s maid, nanny and confidante. When Kihyana FaceTimes me to help her with homework, Kharlie yells at her to clean the kitchen, or grabs the phone to tell me her plans to “live off the grid” in Alaska.
Kihyana is failing high school. She’s attended 13 different schools since Kindergarten, having moved continuously and never spending more than one year anywhere. She started ninth grade already seven classes behind, and didn’t pass any of tenth grade. Milo thinks I care too much about school, and Kharlie wants Kihyana to become rich and famous on TikTok. I told Kihyana I would help her study for her GED. “But Grandma, I want to finish high school.”
***
For years after they moved to Georgia, I begged her parents to let Kihyana visit me. I wasn’t sick, but since COVID I spend a lot more time in bed. The Arboretum near my house is more Tree Museum than darkened woods. What danger did they fear in allowing her to leave the house and visit her grandmother for a week or two? She could even bring the wolf-dog.
When she finally made it to my house last summer, Kihyana immediately shed her designer outfit and put on my T-shirt and sweatpants. When she leaves, I have one less pair of socks. She amazes me with her knowledge of other countries and languages, always has a new craft project she learned from YouTube. The last time I saw her, she was watching tutorials on installing lined finger escapes in Fursuit paws and sewing a white and purple wolf head with Mochi Indoor Sock Paws. That was years ago. At sixteen, she has outgrown furry animals, and asks me for an electric guitar and a Basquiat skateboard.
Kihyana and I were close when she was little. After moving back and forth across the country, Milo stayed in California trying to get his grow business off the ground after graduating from Oaksterdam University, “America's first cannabis college.” Kharlie brought three-year-old Kihyana to me on the Greyhound bus, arriving in what was then a bad part of town at 10 p.m., with no other clothes but the outfit she was wearing, boots with no socks even though it was April. I put her in Milo’s old pajamas and the next day bought her shirts with hearts and “Best Granddaughter Ever.” She picked out Brown Cow yogurt, chamomile tea and her favorite red panda stuffed animal. I rubbed her feet with lavender oil, recited fairy tales and sang her lullabies until she fell asleep in my bed, murmuring, “The better to eat you with, my dear.” After a week, Kihyana stopped having night terrors. She never asked for her mom and dad.
Kharlie’s Great Aunt Agnes had called me in the middle of the night to tell me mother and child were robbed at gunpoint: “you have to go and get that baby, or they’ll come back and take her, too!” Agnes only spoke in crisis and hyperbole. I couldn’t tell how much was truth, but I wasn’t going to wait to find out. I told Kharlie she, too, could stay with me, but she insisted on going straight home: “I can’t just leave my clothes and things.” I told her it would all work out. “I’ll keep Kihyana, so you and Milo can have space to figure out your lives.”
Kharlie had moved to Atlanta with Kihyana the year before on a whim, hoping to become a star in Black Hollywood. Agnes said she was selling hair extensions and made friends with some shady clients. Agnes was lying and delusional, certainly a big part of where Kharlie got it from. According to Kharlie, she, her brother and sister were raised by “Grandma” Agnes, their grandfather’s sister, after their mother became hooked on crack. Their mother was also raised by Grandma Agnes, because the real grandmother was a teenage groupie who followed their famous grandfather and his band, not fit to raise the daughter she had at eighteen. I don’t know how much of this was true, nor did I get the full story of the robbery, just a three-year-old’s heart-rending description: “The robbers took my toys and the computer and stuck their gun in mommy’s nose. They took my puppy and pierced his ear, Grandma.”
Eight months after Kihyana came to me, Grandma Agnes told Kharlie she had to come back because I was trying to take Kihyana away from her. In the car, I told Kihyana I was bringing her to her mom; she burst into tears and begged me not to go.
Her crying echoes in my head.
(Grandma, what big ears you have.)
***
I try hard to be kind to Kharlie, for Kihyana’s sake and because she must have had a difficult childhood herself. When he was eighteen, Milo first brought Kharlie home when Grandma Agnes kicked her out after she was expelled from high school for hitting another student. I let her stay with us, and I wrote a letter so she could take summer school math to graduate high school, but she didn’t follow through. I wrote a letter to Kharlie’s job at Leisure World because her boss was treating her unfairly. And a letter when she was pregnant and went to court for assaulting the driver on the bus. Kharlie was always the victim, never at fault.
I took her side against my own son the first times she called me crying to say that Milo was treating her badly. After she took Kihyana from me, and Milo brought them out to Oakland, I saw the bruises where she had thrown the phone at his head, the bite marks on his arms. Four-year-old Kihyana called to tell me she’d burned her arm but, “Mommy won’t take me to the doctor because she said they’ll take me away from her.” I flew to California and hired a lawyer.
“You can get custody of Kihyana and leave,” I told him.
(Grandma, what big teeth you have.)
***
Milo didn’t save himself. His own father had left when he was three, and to Milo, protecting your children meant not leaving. They moved back to Atlanta when Kihyana was ten, had two more children, two dogs, and a revolving cycle of miscellaneous found animals taken in, who eventually die.
The wolf-dog was Kihyana’s idea. She always loved animals of every kind. She smuggled home snakes, caught frogs on the swampy edge of the road, hid stray kittens in her closet and lied to her mother that they had mice in the house, so she could keep them. Kharlie hated cats. Cats had boundaries, which signaled to her rejection.
Milo never got the dog he begged for as a boy. Throughout his childhood, I was dealing with my own predators, my own demons. I had repeated my mother’s cursed life twice. Milo’s childhood was his father’s rejection, followed by a wicked stepfather, then moving multiple times, not across the country but to other countries, until I was finally able to break the cycle, alas too late to save him. I know better now, but the vindictive god I don’t believe in is punishing me for past sins by refusing me the chance to save Kihyana. Please let it not be too late for her to break free.
Resentful that I had refused to get him a dog when he was young, Milo capitulated immediately each time his own child asked for a pet. It was Kihyana’s idea, but Zuko was always Milo’s dog. Wolf. Wolf-dog. But you couldn’t see a trace of dog in him.
I asked Kihyana, “Does he howl at the full moon?”
“No, but he howls when anyone comes near Khiyumi. She’s the baby of his pack, so he protects her.”
This made sense. I always silently said the children were raised by wolves. At nine, Khloee howled if they took her phone away, or told her she couldn’t eat potato chips for dinner. Three-year old Khiyumi stayed up until two AM, jumping on the couch and strewing headless baby dolls across the living room floor. Kihyana learned to make her own meals when she was a toddler.
Now there was a real wolf in the house, more parenting than the human-wolves. Unlike in fairy tales, real-life wolves are not deceitful; the wolf is honest and straightforward in hunting its prey. The wolf is a pack animal, protective of its young. Zuko adopted the three girls and took care of his pack.
Because they wouldn’t let Kihyana come to me, I had to go to them. Even though I’d vowed never to stay in a home of Kharlie’s again. Every Christmas for three years I flew across the country to Los Angeles. Every year a different house, but always the same scene. Kharlie pushed and pushed, picked and picked, while Milo tried to head off a fight by agreeing, ignoring, or leaving the house to walk the wolf-dog. Eventually, inevitably, something Milo did, or didn’t do, set Kharlie off. I cowered with the girls in their room while she ranted; threw dishes, glasses, her phone; followed Milo screaming while he locked himself in the bathroom; and pounded on the door for hours.
“BURN IN HELL UR WHOLE FAMILY”
The last Christmas I spent with them, Kharlie threatened to take the children away in the middle of the night. I called her sister to try to talk her down, but it was only because the car wouldn’t start that she ended up staying.
It is not the wolf holding us hostage.
I am apprehensive in their house, anticipating Kharlie’s unavoidable outbursts. The house seethes with tension. Milo speaks on tiptoe, apologizing until Kharlie succeeds at making him snap. The children act out their emotional distress physically, each in a different way. At the teen theater camp Kharlie asked me to pay for three years ago, Kihyana started having neck and shoulder pain, fell off her chair, couldn’t remember what happened. Now, Kihyana shakes and can’t stop; every few weeks she has seizures. The school calls Milo to come pick her up and brings her to the car in a wheelchair. The neurologist told him to take her to a psychologist, but Kharlie convinced Kihyana not to go: “You don’t want to talk to strangers about our business.”
The middle one hardly talks at all. Khloee compulsively plays Roblox on her phone with Internet strangers. Kharlie created a fake account that says she’s thirteen, because nine-year-olds are not allowed on the platform. “Khloee, put the phone down to eat. Put the phone away so you can sleep. Leave the phone so you can do your schoolwork.” The tantrums they gave into when she was two and then four are now a full-fledged person’s explosion. Kharlie makes Khloee stand in the corner to feel ashamed that she spilled chips on the rug. Instead, Khloee thrashes her body and shrieks a bloodcurdling cry until she exhausts herself and collapses on the floor. She pulls the blankets off the couch and hides underneath.
For now, Khiyumi is the good one, can do no wrong in her mother’s eyes. “What did Khloee do to you? Why won’t Kihyana let you play in her room? Khiyumi is my sweetest baby. You give her your phone or I’m taking it away. Clean up your sister’s room; it’s a pigsty.”
Kihyana says she wants to move with her friend Cammy to Brooklyn and do musical theater on Broadway. I tell her I will do anything I can to help her. We are sitting on her bed, a rare peaceful moment. An enormous snout pushes the door open, golden eyes, pointed ears and long, bushy tail.
“Will he let me pet him?”
“If he thinks you’re part of his pack.”
(Zuko, what big teeth you have.)
But he never bit, not even the underage kitten Kihyana had snuck home. Khiyumi named the kitten Smoke; don’t ask me why. Khloee loves Smoke and holds her in a death grip, the only thing aside from Roblox she can call her own. Zuko loves Smoke, too, in a similar way to Khloee. All day long we hear the cat mew, a plaintive appeal to save her from the girl and the wolf. Smoke spends her days squeezed to Khloee’s chest or dangling from Zuko’s mouth. He knows not to crunch her, though, or she would have been gone in an instant.
***
I dreamed I was in the New York Public Library reading fairy tales to the children, and there was a mother wolf with cubs. Suddenly, the Wolf Mom had latched onto me with her teeth and wouldn’t let go. We began to merge, transforming the pain and anguish of those children into strength and fierceness. Awakened by the dream, I started looking up Brooklyn apartments for rent.
Saturday afternoon I text Kihyana about the theater class she asked me to sign her up for. Her homework was to pick three movies from different time periods and say how they identified with the characters.
“Which movies did you decide to use?”
“For the 50s movie I chose a Swedish movie, Sommaren med Monika.”
“Wonderful! Ingmar Bergman is one of the best directors.”
“I liked it a lot.”
“Did you identify with Monika?”
“Not really. she started acting like a feral wolf-person.”
“I love it when she steals the roast and runs away to the woods.”
“when she became a wolf! she doesn’t really become a wolf she just acts like one”
“Maybe that was her way of escaping the bonds of society,” I say. “She wanted to be free.”
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