The Wolf Wants In

by Laura McHugh

  Junior would go out searching for her mother if she asked him, finding no irony or guilt in the part he played in his baby sister’s plight. We’re just middlemen, he’d explained to her matter-of-factly when she was old enough to realize that Pettit Brothers did more than fix fenders and salvage cars. He had no trouble squaring his part in the drug trade, where doctors sold prescriptions, pills were dispensed, cash collected. It was a business, one side of it blandly sterile—white-coated MDs writing scrips with scrubbed hands, pharmacists filling bottles. Her family was on the dirty side, where things got personal and decidedly more risky—face-to-face negotiations, wads of crumpled bills changing hands, the administration of punishment for unpaid debts and other infractions.

  Junior had never hooked Missy up and had scared most everyone else out of dealing to her, too (Denny had slipped one time and paid with a fractured jaw), but he reckoned that junkies, his sister included, would find a way to get what they wanted. It was something in your wiring, and while you might attempt to trip the circuit or ground the current, what you couldn’t do was rip it all out and start fresh like you’d do if you renovated a house. No matter what you tried, the old connections would still be there, waiting to spark, start a fire, burn you out. It was hard to find a family in town who hadn’t been touched by the scourge in some way. It had become an inescapable part of the landscape, and if there was no reconciling it, Junior figured, you might as well squeeze out a profit.

  Henley’s phone pinged, but it wasn’t her mother.

  What r u wearing?

  She didn’t recognize the number. Her muscles tensed, her eyes instinctively scanning the edge of the field. Who is this? she typed.

  Jason.

  Why are you texting me?

  Just wanted to give u a head’s up so u r dressed when I stop by. Unlike when u show up at my place with no warning. :)

  You’re coming by? A flutter of nerves was tamped down by irritation. So presumptuous. She hadn’t given him any encouragement the other day at the house, and while she’d mentally revisited the image of him sprawled in bed naked a few times and detailed it in her diary, he had no way of knowing that. He probably assumed every woman he met wanted to screw him.

  U ask a lot of questions. :) OK with me coming over? Just to say hi. If not I’ll keep driving.

  Fine. Come by. She figured it might be entertaining. A story to tell Charlie later.

  Headlights lit the corn moments later as Jason’s Ford pulled into the drive. He parked and walked up to the house, taking the three porch steps in one stride. “Howdy,” he said, the swing creaking when he lowered himself down next to her. “What are you up to tonight?”

  “You’re looking at it,” she said, tucking her feet up beneath her. He smiled at her and she cocked her head to the side. “Why are you here?”

  He stretched his arm out across the back of the swing, not touching her, not quite. “I was thinking about you. Have been since I opened my eyes and saw you in my room.”

  She’d been expecting him to make a joke, but he looked serious. She wasn’t sure how to feel about it. There was no doubt she found him attractive, but she still thought of him as the spoiled, ill-behaved brat Missy doted on at work, someone who seemed hell-bent on wasting all the opportunities he’d been given.

  “Don’t you have…friends to hang out with?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Don’t you?”

  She rolled her eyes. Her friends had scattered after graduation, getting married, starting jobs, moving to the city. Charlie had promised to come back for a visit as soon as he could, but he’d been too busy and didn’t have a car at school. She was bored. And so was Jason. He’d told her as much the other day when he invited her to swim.

  He gestured at the house. “Is Missy around?”

  She shook her head.

  “Want to go for a drive?”

  As much as she tried, she couldn’t think of a reason not to.

  They navigated a labyrinth of back roads, kicking up plumes of gravel dust, fireflies swirling in their wake, winding up at Lonesome Hill, an old cemetery out in the country where kids came to drink and play truth or dare and scare themselves with Ouija boards.

  Jason lowered the tailgate and they sat together, waving away mosquitoes. “You ever come out here?” he asked. “With all those friends of yours?”

  “Yeah,” she said, leaning back on her hands. “What else are you gonna do when you finally get to drive and realize there’s nowhere to go?”

  They gazed out over the lichen-covered headstones, sweeps of loosestrife growing wild in between.

  “You asked if I have friends to hang out with,” he said. “And I don’t really, not like I used to. I mean, I know people. But the guys who stuck around here are all farming, starting families. I don’t hang out with anybody from the grain elevator after work. Nothing in common, really. I’m just kind of on my own right now, you know?”

  “Yeah.” She’d felt it, too, since school got out, the vacuum that threatened to swallow anyone who didn’t leave right away. She was mired in small-town purgatory, a lonesome in-between that drove people to have babies or pop pills or take a job shoveling grain, anything for the sensation of moving forward in a place you couldn’t escape.

  “What about you?” he asked. “You have any big plans, now that you’re done with school? Missy was always talking about you wanting to get out of Blackwater. Kinda figured you’d be gone by now.”

  She shrugged. “I’m saving up.”

  “Okay. Let’s say you had a free ticket. If you could pick any place, where would you go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sure you do.”

  She carved her thumbnail into a bug bite on her thigh, pressing an X into her skin. Make a cross on it, Memaw used to say. Jesus’ll take out the itch.

  “By this winter,” she said, “I want to be out in Colorado, working in a resort town, learning how to ski. Figure I can get a job bussing tables or cleaning hotel rooms and take it from there.” She hadn’t told anyone that she’d decided on Colorado years ago when Ellie Embry, high on paint thinner, whispered in her ear that Henley’s daddy lived there. Whenever she asked Missy about her dad, her mother claimed not to know or care, but Ellie had always hinted otherwise. Henley loved the cold, and all it took was four rolling syllables, Col-o-ra-do, to set her fixation on the mountains. She imagined her father as a ski instructor for no particular reason—perhaps he’d moved there to train for the Olympics?—only realizing years later that Ellie had probably said it as a joke, to get her to shut up and stop asking.

  “That’s your big dream—to go somewhere else and clean up after people like you’re doing here?”

  She scowled at him. “You wouldn’t know, but most people have to start at the bottom. I’ll do whatever I have to do to get out of here.”

  “Relax, I’m just messing with you,” he said. “I think it’s cool. I wish I had some kind of plan.”

  “I don’t get it. Can’t you do whatever you want? I mean, if money’s no object?”

  “It’s not that simple,” he said, tapping his fingers on the tailgate. “My dad’s got me locked down these days. Trying to straighten me out, I guess. I don’t have access to anything but my paycheck, and he makes me put part of that in a savings account I can’t touch. He keeps threatening to revoke my trust if I don’t do what he wants, and basically what he wants is to turn me into him, you know? My only hope’s that he’ll keel over before he cuts me out of the will.” He smirked. “I used to wish sometimes that Missy was my mom. She was always so laid-back about everything.”

  “Yeah. Well. She’s got issues of her own.”

  He rearranged himself, folding up his long legs and turning so he could sit facing her. “She using again?”

  She flinched as though he’d probed a bruise. Jason had grown up with Missy, knew
her nearly as well as she did. There was no point in lying. “I guess,” she said. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her. I’ve been texting her but haven’t heard back.”

  “That must be hard,” he said. “I figured maybe she was done for good this time.”

  “Yeah, me, too,” Henley said. “Wishful thinking.” She’d been telling herself Missy would come back any day, that she’d find her mother on the couch, blasting her favorite Fleetwood Mac album, flipping through an old issue of People magazine, painting her nails with glitter polish. And if she didn’t come back, it wouldn’t matter, because Henley would be gone soon anyway. But Henley was still here, and Missy wasn’t, and that hummed in the background like the ever-present drone of combines at harvest time.

  “I don’t remember my mom much,” Jason said. “I feel bad about it. Like, I should remember. There are pictures of her all over the house, you know? But I barely remember what it was like, having her around. One time, I was crossing the quad up at school, and I thought I smelled her. Sounds stupid, right? She’d been gone for like twelve years. But this lady walked by, and something clicked in my brain, and everything came flooding back. She smelled exactly like my mom, this random combination of who knows what—hair spray, dryer sheets, some kind of lotion she used to wear, I don’t even know what it was called. And I followed this lady, not even thinking about it. Followed her all the way to her car, freaked her out. I don’t know what I thought I’d do when I caught up to her. Give her a hug?” He smiled half-heartedly. “Crazy, right?”

  “No,” she said. “I think of my pawpaw when I smell Brylcreem. If I close my eyes, it’s like he’s there.”

  He brushed a moth from her hair, and it left dust on his fingers. “Missy might not be here now,” he said, “but she’s still out there. That’s something.”

  They talked until she began to drowse, her head nodding, and she would have stretched out in the truck bed, luxuriating in the cool predawn breeze that swayed the loosestrife, and slept, but Jason murmured that he had to get back. They drove along the empty country roads, the sun firing up the eastern fields by the time they parked at the farmhouse.

  “I’d like to see you again,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  He threaded his fingers through hers and traced his thumb across her palm. “ ‘Yeah’? Such enthusiasm.”

  She had imagined once or twice what it might be like to kiss him—a harmless mental exercise that she’d indulged in, understandably, after seeing him sprawled naked in his bed—but she hadn’t anticipated the rush it would bring, the sense of disorientation after he pulled away, as though the world had tilted and clicked back into place at a slightly different angle. Jason leaned across her to open her door and she slid out of the truck, her legs wobbly as she climbed the porch steps and watched him drive away. She went upstairs without peeking into Missy’s room to see if she’d returned and fell into sleep without thinking of her.

  I was surprised to see a message from Hannah in my inbox three days after I’d written to her: There is something you can do for me. I need cigarettes. I’m staying out at the farm and I can’t hardly leave the house.

  I wrote back to let her know I’d come by right after work, and to ask if I could bring dinner, groceries, or anything else, but she didn’t respond.

  I left work slightly early in an attempt to beat the evening crowd at Walmart, but the dark parking lot was already congested by the time I got there. Judy, the elderly greeter who always seemed to be working no matter what time or day I came in, nodded from her scooter as I walked inside. She looked a hundred years old, her back painfully humped, thin peach-colored fuzz on her shiny scalp, garish splotches of blush smeared on her sunken cheeks. I smiled and asked how she was doing, but she didn’t respond. She never did. I wondered if she worked because she liked being around people or because she couldn’t afford not to.

  I grabbed a few things I needed for the office and then took a detour across the store to pick up some of the margarita pouches like the ones I’d had at Becca’s. On the way to the register to get Hannah’s cigarettes, I passed the lingerie department, such as it was. I chose a tiny training bra for Lily, hoping it would suffice even though it wasn’t from Pink and regretting it when the cashier accidentally rang it up with the work supplies and had to call someone to split out the transactions. While we waited for the manager to arrive, the lane light flashing, the cashier stared at my assortment of purchases, as though trying to figure out how the cigarettes, liquor, tiny bra, zip ties, and industrial stapler fit together.

  Hannah’s family farm was on the north side of Shade Tree. Her grandparents had still lived there the last time I’d visited, when we took Macey and Lily to see a litter of newborn kittens in the barn a lifetime ago. The grandparents had both passed away in the intervening years, and I didn’t know who lived there now.

  The yard was still decorated for Halloween. There was a giant inflatable spider staked by the driveway, half deflated. Cheesecloth ghosts dangled from the trees, and a jack-o’-lantern had rotted into mush near the porch. Broken remnants of gingerbread trim hung from the eaves of the old farmhouse like loose teeth, and a plastic tarp had been draped over the steep front gable to keep the roof from leaking.

  A woman I recognized as one of Hannah’s aunts cracked the door a few inches, a squirming, half-naked toddler in her arms.

  “Hi,” I said, awkwardly waving the carton of cigarettes. “I’m Sadie. Hannah’s expecting me.” She didn’t make eye contact, though she moved aside so I could squeeze into the dusky foyer, the child shrieking. A narrow staircase and narrower hall split the space.

  Once the door was shut, she took the cigarettes from me and jerked her chin toward the back of the house. “Go on and sit. I’ll see if she’s up to it.”

  The dark hall led to a living room. A SpongeBob cartoon played on a bulky console TV in the corner, the sound turned low, and a man looked up from the tattered velvet sofa, his feet propped on a coffee table, e-cigarette in his mouth. Even in the dim light, his hair and beard were a vibrant red. The room held a faint stench of decay, like the inside of my car when Lily had left a half-eaten yogurt under the seat.

  “Oh, hey,” he said, blowing out a cloud of candy-scented vapor.

  A little girl dressed in footie pajamas and a tutu burst into the room, hollering. “Hi! Hi! Look at this. Look what my doll can do!” I smiled at her as she held on to the headless doll’s arms and flipped its body around like it was doing gymnastics. As I glanced around the room, I noticed more dolls. Doll parts would be more accurate. Doll heads with spiky cactuses poking out of the top; a string of pink plastic torsos hanging in the window; disembodied arms and legs glued together to form a picture frame.

  The guy noticed me staring. “My girlfriend sells those on Etsy,” he said, pulling out his wallet to offer a business card. “I’m Chad, by the way. Hannah’s cousin.”

  I perched at the opposite end of the couch, on the verge of introducing myself, when the little boy Hannah’s aunt had been holding earlier barreled into the room and knocked his sister down. They both started wailing. Chad didn’t attempt to intervene, though from their reddish hair, I guessed the kids belonged to him.

  “You’re Sadie, right?” he said. “Shane Keller’s sister?”

  The kids stopped crying as quickly as they’d started and began working together to pull ancient volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia off a tall, flimsy bookshelf that I hoped was not about to fall over and crush them.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Did you know Shane?”

  “I did, I did. Hey, I was sorry to hear about what happened.” Chad sucked on his e-cig and blew fog up toward the ceiling. “It’s a shame.”

  The girl scooted up onto the couch next to me and bounced her doll in my lap.

  “I like your dolly,” I said. “What’s her name?” The girl dug down between the couch cushion
s and collected a handful of grit, cat hair, and what looked like Lucky Charms cereal and stood up to sprinkle it over Chad’s head with a gleeful squeal. I covered my mouth, trying not to laugh, and she beamed proudly at me.

  “Molly. The grown-ups are talking. Go play with Granny.” Chad clenched his e-cig between his teeth and eased the girl off the couch. He brushed crumbs off his face. “Kids, you know?”

  Molly clutched her doll to her chest, spinning in circles. She reminded me of Lily at that age, when she would drive me crazy talking nonstop all day long, constantly imploring me, Look, Mommy. Watch me. The thing she had wanted most in the world was my attention. I wondered if it made things harder for Hannah, having a little girl here.

  “I’m so sorry about Macey,” I said.

  Chad’s expression darkened, and he shook his head. “Roger always was a waste of flesh.”

  Hannah’s aunt hollered down the hall: “Go on up.” I guessed she was talking to me, so I said goodbye to Chad. His daughter followed me to the foot of the stairs and wrapped her arms around the newel post, watching wide-eyed as I headed up the steps.

  Hannah was waiting in a doorway and closed the door behind me as I came in. Her eyes were rubbed raw, her light strawberry hair matted like she hadn’t brushed it in days. She wore pajama pants and a ratty cardigan that she wrapped and rewrapped around her narrow rib cage, pulling it close to her neck as though she couldn’t get warm enough.

  “I’m so sorry, Hannah.”

  “Thanks,” she said mechanically, tearing open a package of Marlboros.

  “I hope those are okay,” I said. “I didn’t know what kind.”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “You want one?”