The First Wild Axolotl

It is during the fourth month of rain that the axolotl arrives. It is not ordinary. An ordinary axolotl will have black pinhead eyes, unblinking, ringed with a nuclear neon glow. This axolotl’s eyes are blue, gray-flecked, framed by a fringe of lashes. They blink: seeing, unseeing; seeing, unseeing.

I recognize my daughter immediately.

She is present in the smile, too: that slim, eerily stoic grin; mirth in mouth alone. It is Darla’s I-know-something-you-don’t grin that she’d started flashing as a teenager, the one I found so disconcerting I’d sometimes wonder if within my daughter lived a whisper of some awful, other-than-human charm. It’s a smile that still appears in my dreams; I wake strangled by my own breath, heart a breakbeat in my chest. Dreams, still—even with Darla decades gone.

The rain has been falling longer than usual this year, thunder like marbles spilled across the roof, the earth in a slow slide toward its lowest elevation. The last remaining tree in the yard didn’t topple over so much as it merely lay down, tilting incrementally as its roots were pummeled loose by endless, bullet-sized drops. It lies there now like a dark body, sinking further into the muck. Within it, a smear of pink across a rain-slimed branch: Darla.

I thought at first—impossibly—that she was a bird. Instincts leftover from the years when that’s all a flash of color through the branches of a tree was: a bird. Through the bars of the rain-rivered window at the front of the house, she seemed to flit, flutter. But birds have been gone from this part of the world nearly half as long as Darla. Instead, this is a personal miracle: my child returned.

Outside, I crouch to the level of the fallen tree, taking in every inch of her, assessing. Two delicate pink forelimbs cling to a slender branch, while her hind limbs kick desperately at leaves that are more rot than foliage. Her long, paddle-like tail flops behind her, threaded with veins visible through her pale skin. I measure what I see against Darla as I last knew her. Eyes. Smile. I search, irrationally, for more to recognize—so long that the rain begins to hurt. My nightgown is soaked through, my knees stiff, my hair heavy and snarling wetly down my back.

Darla finally manages to pull the length of her 6-inch body onto the branch, the four digits at the end of each limb spread wide. Her back mists in the rain. I question why I didn’t help her. Maybe because the Darla who left was a twenty-year-old girl, an age that stubbornly required no help from her mother. Or maybe, because, although she is Darla, she is an axolotl now, and I am squeamish about amphibians.

Darla rasps something, her small voice lost in the rain. I lean closer.

“Water.” There is something unnerving about a tiny, smiling mouth begging for water, a face vacant of the request’s urgency. I examine the scene we find ourselves in: water. Water, everywhere.

Darla’s eyes plead.

I realize too slowly that, of course, she needs different water. Not rainwater, infinitely polluted. Not tap water, noxious. Something akin to aquarium water: dechlorinated, brackish, cycling through a filter.

Balancing against the tree, I remove the boot from my right foot. Cautious not to squeeze, I pluck Darla off the branch between a finger and thumb. Her skin is colder than I expect, all rubber and mucus. I force myself not to shriek, not to flick her from my fingers, horrified by my capacity to recoil at my own child. With an inadequate apology, I gently drop her into the boot, searching my mind for information about an axolotl’s sense of smell.

Cradling the boot to my chest, I plod across the sodden yard back towards the house. The mud nurses at my toes, all suck, no swallow. This feels nothing like holding Darla as a baby, when I kept her warm against my breasts, careful not to cuddle or clutch or press too tight. Back then, I believed that if I let it, the force of my love might crush her, subsume her entirely. Now, Darla is little more than a finger-length of flesh, all vertebrae and heartbeat. So much easier to crush.

The front door groans as I step inside and shake off my remaining boot, pruned feet sliding on the linoleum. In the kitchen, I grab a plastic tub drying next to the sink. It still smells like the last thing stored in it—a salty marinara, past its consume-by date—and is ringed in orange around the bottom. I suppose Darla did always liked spaghetti.

A 5-gallon water filter stands on the peeling Formica. In the cabinet below, piles of disaster manuals, survivalist literature, off-grid guides, and emergency handbooks sit moldering. I haven’t touched most of them in years. Maybe there’s a recipe for aquarium water somewhere.

I place the tub on the table and slowly tilt the boot over it, giving the heel a few light taps. After a moment, Darla slips out, landing wetly against the plastic. There is lint stuck to her belly, her feet; a strand of long white hair chevrons across her tail. I move to brush her clean, hesitating long enough that I know I’m not ready to touch her again. Instead, I put a bottle cap of filtered water in one corner of the tub, hoping it is better than nothing.

The guides are—predictably, infuriatingly—human-centered. Many are woefully outdated. Others disintegrate in my hands, the print faded beyond legibility. I carry a stack to the table, moving a chair near the radiator below the window, where the light is better. Darla touches her nostrils to the capful of water and blinks at me. How often did she used to look at me, unimpressed? Like she couldn’t believe how the obvious eluded me. She lifts herself up the side of the tub, peering at me over the lip. Darla’s eyes move from my creased face, skin a slack bag, to my mottled hands. My hair, once brown as hers had been, is now long and white and matted. There’s a forward arc to my back, a bow between my legs. On my bare feet, thickened toenails yellow at the tips.

My body is a map of the entirety of the years between us—the distance between not just the twenty-year-old girl who left and the axolotl before me, but the great, gaping terrain between the thirty-eight-year-old me and the creaking crone I live inside now. I wonder—as I wondered the first two decades of Darla’s life—how she sees me, while understanding I will never really know.

Turning back to the guides, I scan indexes until my vision swims, flip pages until my eyes sting. I imagine Darla reduced to nothing but a desiccated pink prune.

* * *

The absence of sound wakes me. It is a moment before I realize the rain has stopped. The rain. Stopped. Oh.

The plastic tub is empty. The bottle cap, too.

Papers and pamphlets cascade from my lap, settling like spent leaves at my feet, as I make to stand. It takes an agonizingly long time to get moving, pins and needles running down my legs, my left hip like a cog jammed at 90 degrees.

“Darla!”

I don’t know what response I expect, but I am struck by two terrible realities: Darla is gone, and an amphibian is loose in my house. A knot whirls through my stomach. My skin prickles. I grab the tub, which now gives off a faint briny odor.

“Darla?”

Finally, a sound. A rhythmic slup I follow to the front of the house. Water has pooled in the hallway, where the linoleum buckles. Here and there, mushrooms over-bloom from the baseboards, bursting in puffs of powdery spores at my footsteps. A large puddle tendrils from beneath the front door. Slap, slup. A noise like waves, lapping to get in.

When I open the door, water pours across my feet, rising inches above the front steps. It covers everything outside as far as I can see, has swallowed most of the fallen tree. Farther out, it appears even deeper. The surface is unlike any body of water I have seen before—iridescent and teeming with frenetic, irregular movement. Like a sea crawling.

Axolotls. I am looking at a vastness rippling with axolotls. Thousands of them, scrambling on and over one another, feet atop flat faces, forearms batting against tails. Many are pale pink, like Darla. Even more are copper, black, inky green. Here and there, I see the flash of a gold back, the flick of an amethyst tail. Everywhere, cherry-colored stalk gills emerge from the water like six-fingered hands reaching toward the sunlight.

The plastic tub slips from my hands and lands upside down in the water. It bobs past the steps, where a flurry of axolotls climb aboard, sinking it beneath their weight. Everything in me wants to go back inside, seal the door, forget what creatures churn just beyond it. But Darla is out among them. I know she is. Axolotl or not, I want her back—I have been waiting my whole life for her.

I press myself off the steps. Swimming feels like falling. I revulse at the many more axolotls suspended beneath the surface of the water, bile rising at the back of my tongue, a scream burning in my throat. They touch me everywhere, their skin like the membrane of milk film. The water gets deeper faster than I expect—that, or I have grown shorter than I know, the years compressing my spine into itself like an accordion. I search frantically for Darla, pinching one pinky axolotl after another between my fingers, staring it in the eyes before flinging it back into the water. Some seem distressed at my touch, emitting minuscule yips before being released. None of them is Darla.

The water is up to my chin when something beneath it glides against me—something much larger than an axolotl. I yell, lose my balance, and go under. Clouds of oil blind my vision as water fills my mouth, all grit and metal, like swallowing a nosebleed. There is not even enough air in me to choke.

I try to right myself, but can no longer find the earth beneath me, nor the air above. I flail and thrash, searching for something—anything—in the turbid water: something solid to hold on to, a flicker of light to follow. The pulse of a thousand surging axolotls pounds in my ears.

Then, hands grasp mine. Human hands, hot and steady and so recognizable to my own. I feel knuckle bones, firm and knobbed, and the pulse of warm blood. I hold on so hard a joint cracks, then another. I try to blink, my eyes grainy and inflamed. I bring the hands to my face, and though I know human beings can’t smell underwater, I am at once flooded with the milk-cream sweetness of Darla’s palms and the scent beneath that one, salty and sour.

I reach blindly, my hands landing on a pillar of neck, the angle of a jawbone. Feeling all the ways it is Darla’s face beneath the water, opposite mine—is and isn’t. She is not an aged Darla, a decades-gone-by Darla, but the same girl she had been right before she disappeared from my life. The gapped grin that lived only on her lips. Those smooth, round cheeks. The fingertip-sized dip at the bridge of her nose. The shock of bangs feathered above an unlined forehead. I want to pull her into my arms, carry her out of the water and into the house, wrap her up in my lap next to the radiator like I had when she was born, a toddler, even when she was seven, eight, nine, all lanky limbs dangling.

With the roar of my own blood in my ears, we surface. I am breathless, my eyes burning with tears. I am primed for reunion: Darla and I, treading water to graze kisses across one another’s faces, paddling back to the house in a half-hug, shoulder-to-shoulder. But when I look closely, all I see is the smile of an axolotl swimming across her chin, the translucent pink shimmer of her skin, vermillion veins webbed beneath.

It begins to rain again. Gigantic drops run in rivulets down my face, hammering the backs of the axolotls, the surface of the lake a violent, discordant dance. The air above the water crackles electric, sending my hair on end. I feel myself released. In a flash, Darla is gone, and my mouth is filled with thunder.