an hour, but when she told me it wasn’t even really a punishment, because a girl my age ought to be able to brush her own hair and it was a travesty that my mother hadn’t taught me, I’d muttered that she couldn’t even brush my hair, and look how old she was, and just like that one hour turned into six.
In the bathroom, Allison and I pretended that we’d been confined to our cruise ship cabins because of stormy conditions and choppy water. We sang “Kokomo” at the top of our lungs over and over again, and when that got old we ran the bathtub full of water and splashed each other until we were soaking, complaining that the storm was so bad our cabin was flooding. When my grandmother finally let us out, my hair looked the same as it had that morning, only damper. Insufficiently chastised, we collapsed at her feet giggling and shouting Land! Land! What did it matter, what chores she made us do or how many hours a day she forbade us to leave the house, when we had each other?
A month into the summer, my grandmother had a brainstorm. She sat us down in the family room after dinner one night, and told us that we absolutely must stop disobeying her and running off, that she’d become very worried about us, and that the next time we disappeared, she’d have no choice but to call the police. We nodded our assent, but were doubtful. Our grandmother had worried about what the neighbors would think when the gardener took a week off and dandelions had sprouted in her yard; we could only imagine what she’d do if people spotted a police car in her driveway. Sensing our skepticism, she leaned forward in her chair, looking first me and then Allison in the eyes.
“Do you know what’s living in that lake?” our grandmother asked.
I thought we did. Minnows. Tadpoles. Mosquitoes we regularly slapped off of ourselves.
“Snakes,” said my grandmother. “Snakes are in that lake.”
I giggled. We’d seen the occasional small brown garden snake; my mother had told me before she left that there were a lot of them where she grew up, and I shouldn’t be alarmed, because they were perfectly harmless. I repeated this to my grandmother.
“Tell your mother,” said my grandmother, “that when you leave a place for twenty years, a lot changes. They’ve got these pythons that love water. Some idiots imported them as pets, and now they’re taking over. A Burmese python can grow to be the size of the both of you put together, and can get you from twenty feet away. Sometimes they lay eggs in drainpipes, and the baby python will travel through the sewer pipes and come right in through a hole in a wall and eat their prey alive. When a python eats something it eats everything, even the bones. Crushes them completely. Lately there’ve been a lot of cats and dogs lost, even a huge Saint Bernard—vanished. I’d hate to lose a granddaughter. There’d be nothing left of you to find. Tell your mother she has never had any idea how easy it is for something to be destroyed.”
Two weeks after that, I fell out of a bunk bed. My grandmother, sensing she’d gotten to me, had begun elaborating on the latest exploits of the Burmese python after dinner every night. A Burmese python had been caught in a child’s bedroom in Orlando. A Burmese python had eaten an alligator in Lake Jackson; a tourist had gotten a picture of it happening, before he ran. A Burmese python came out of the pipes in a Miami kitchen; a plumber only narrowly escaped with his life, and only because he was too fat for the snake to get his jaws around. Three cats were missing from the house at the end of the block: they’d gone out in the morning as usual and simply never come back.
I consulted the books my parents had left me, contemplating metallurgy and purification rituals as forms of protection. Actually undertaking any of them was impossible, especially when I refused to leave the house. It wasn’t just the outside world I was newly afraid of: I was haunted by what my grandmother had said about baby pythons, and imagined one growing and swelling inside the walls even now. My grandmother had won one battle—I stayed where she could see me, I tracked no more mud into her house—but she hadn’t bargained