The Wolf Wants In

by Laura McHugh

  “Mom seems like she’s doing okay today,” Becca said. “I think it helps, having the kids around. She didn’t mention Shane.”

  “They’re definitely a good distraction,” I said, though we both knew Mom’s silence didn’t mean Shane wasn’t on her mind. His car still sat right outside the front window, where she could see it from her chair. She had covered it with an old canvas tarp.

  “Leola said I can talk to Charlie when he’s back in town,” I said. “And I called Dave Gorecki, the guy we met at the funeral. I’m going to stop by and see him tomorrow when I take Lily back. He probably spent more time with Shane than anyone—five days a week for the last ten years. Maybe he can tell us something useful.”

  “But do you think we’re making it worse for ourselves, and for Mom?” Becca said. “Digging into his private life? Is that what he would have wanted?”

  “I don’t know.” I couldn’t help thinking that if we found the right pieces, it would all fit together and make sense. I couldn’t move on, not knowing.

  I peeked in on Mom, who was snoring lightly in the recliner, Hoarders turned back on, the volume too loud. I moved closer, wanting to get another look at the piece of paper—to see if the letters were truly clear enough to read, or if my mind had just been putting shapes together and forming words that weren’t there—but it lay clasped in her hands, her fingers curled protectively around the edges.

  * * *

  —

  On the way back from dropping Lily off on Sunday (early, so she could go with Greg and Heidi to the Nutcracker matinee), I took the beltway to the south outer suburbs. After twisting through a labyrinth of subdivisions, I found the Goreckis’ tidy split-level, one of two dozen nearly identical homes that had probably been surrounded by fields when they were built decades earlier, but were now crowded by a proliferation of chain stores selling mundane necessities—Batteries Plus Bulbs, Big O Tires, Mattress Firm—things everyone had to buy but didn’t enjoy shopping for.

  Four concrete stepping stones, each decorated with a child’s name and handprint, sat among frozen mums in the flowerbed next to the tiny front porch. Gorecki answered the door dressed in church clothes. It looked like the same gray suit he’d worn to the funeral—noticeably tight, shoulders pinched, waistband cutting into his soft belly.

  He nodded hello, his lips pursed, his bulbous forehead and small round eyes reminding me of a parakeet. He pushed the screen door open wide, ushering me in from the cold. Once inside, he didn’t invite me up or down the split stairs, so we stood awkwardly in the cramped foyer. Four school-bus-shaped frames on the wall chronicled the Gorecki children’s young lives, each window in each bus representing a new school year, new teeth, new haircuts, new blemishes. Two of the buses were nearly full. I admired the Goreckis’ organization and follow-through. I’d had good intentions, evidenced by all the scrapbooks and picture frames I’d bought over the years and stashed in a closet, but I’d never even finished Lily’s baby book.

  “I’ve got to pick up my wife and kids about noon,” he said. “When Sunday school’s over.” He held up the church bulletin clutched in his calloused hand.

  “I won’t take much of your time,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you before, at the funeral, but I didn’t get a chance. The whole day was a blur. I meant to thank you for coming. I know you probably had to take off work to be there.”

  “It was a lovely service,” he said.

  He was lying. Being kind. We had expected that Shane would be buried near family, but Crystle had chosen a cemetery in Kansas City. The service was quick and impersonal, the funeral director mistakenly calling Shane “Shannon” several times. As we sang “Amazing Grace,” a deer had emerged mere feet from the tent and stepped unhurriedly across the lawn. The peaceful animal had appeared for a moment like a sign from Shane, ruined when the funeral director grumbled that the place was overrun with them, a nuisance they couldn’t keep at bay.

  We were rushed away from his casket with a warning that reminded me of the bartender’s closing-time classic: “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” Now please, they’d said, move your cars or they’ll be towed. They were on a strict schedule that didn’t allow for tearful lingering.

  The entire time, Crystle’s family had crowded on one side of the tent while we were on the other, like at a wedding except in reverse, the couple arriving together and then separating, the words till death do us part ending not with a kiss but with one of them going into the ground.

  “Since you would have been among the last people to see him, I wondered if you could tell me about that last day—what happened, anything he might have said, whatever you remember. Really, anything is helpful.”

  “Uh, sure,” he said, brushing back his thin straw-colored hair with his palm. “It was a normal day. He clocked in on time—he always did. About an hour into the shift, he said he wasn’t feeling too good, that he was going home. He looked a little sweaty, maybe, a little pale.”

  An orange cat appeared at the top of the stairs, a bell tinkling on its collar as it moved. Gorecki glanced up at it and flinched slightly when the cat hissed at him.

  “Did Shane say anything specific about his symptoms?” I asked.

  “Not that I recall. I figured he must be pretty miserable to leave work over it, though. He didn’t like to use sick time unless it was absolutely necessary. Got perfect attendance the last couple years.”

  “Was that the first day you noticed him being sick?”

  Gorecki squinted, tapping the church bulletin against his palm. “He wasn’t a big complainer—not the type to make a fuss about feeling poorly. But he’d seemed a bit off for a while,” he said. “Quieter than usual. I just assumed he was…you know. Going through a rough patch with Crystle again. He never liked to say too much about personal matters, but he’d tell me things now and then, when he thought I might have some insight. I’ve been married going on twenty years. I told him the first year’s a big adjustment, that it takes some work, but it’s worth it.” His gaze flicked to the school bus frames on the wall, all those pictures of his children.

  “Rough patch? What happened between him and Crystle?”

  Gorecki’s face pinked up a bit. “He didn’t tell you?”

  “What did he say?”

  He hesitated, absently rolling the bulletin into a tight scroll with his stubby fingers.

  “Please? I know he might have told you in confidence, but we’re just trying to make sense of what happened. It’s been really hard on our mom, not knowing.”

  He looked down at his shoes, worn-out oxfords, the leather deeply creased across the toes, yet freshly polished. “I guess it doesn’t matter now. He’d thought she was messing around on him a while back. She denied it was what it looked like, blamed it on the guy. Said he was harassing her, wouldn’t leave her alone. Shane was pretty upset over it, but I think they worked it out.” Gorecki wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and swallowed hard. The orange cat zipped down the stairs and disappeared into the lower level, its bell jingling madly. “With the way he was acting, I thought that might’ve come back up again.”

  “Who was the guy? Did he say?”

  “I don’t recall. It’s been a while.” Gorecki looked me in the eye. “We didn’t spend much time together outside of work—a beer now and again—but he was there every day, worked hard, always had a smile ready, or a joke, always listened when I talked about my kids, which I probably did too often. It’s different without him there. I miss him. I’m really sorry.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m glad you were there for him, that he had someone to talk to.” The wind shrieked outside, a bitter draft sheeting in under the front door. I tried to remember if Shane had ever mentioned Gorecki by name and couldn’t. Another piece of his life that had been invisible to me.

  Back in the car, I cranked up the heat and called Becca t
o give her the update, and we decided it wouldn’t hurt to tell Kendrick, even if she wasn’t likely to listen. I was grateful that the detective didn’t answer, so I could lay out my concerns in a voicemail without her interrupting to tell me that I’d been watching too much TV. Crystle’s lack of tears wasn’t a crime, but combined with her infidelity and the financial concerns, it seemed like it might add up to something, or at least warrant a closer look at Shane’s case.

  There was a mark down the side of her face where she’d struck the bedpost; no longer red, as it had been the day before, but the blue hint of a bruise. The oval mirror above Henley’s dresser was an antique that had belonged to Memaw. It was tarnished with black spots where moisture had damaged the silver backing, the edges covered with stickers Henley had affixed to the glass when she was younger. She studied her clouded reflection, wondering how she would look in ten years, twenty, fifty. If she’d still be seeing herself in this same mirror, in this room, in this house.

  She hadn’t been able to stop herself from fantasizing, briefly, about what it would be like to marry Jason Sullivan, how her life would instantly change. She would move into the big brick house, and she would hire a designer from the city to redecorate and some poor girl from town to clean. She would learn to cook, making use of all the heavy pans and casserole dishes Daphne Sullivan had left behind, serving meals in the formal dining room, having babies to fill the bedrooms, getting her nails manicured at the strip mall out on the highway or maybe even a salon in the suburbs with massaging chairs. She would lunch at the Blackwater Country Club, drive an Escalade through town with her hair blown out, wear tasteful outfits ordered from a fancy department store.

  That was how it looked when she imagined it, when she filled up the pages in her journal, but she knew it would never happen. She couldn’t go back to the Sullivan house now, and even if she could, she wasn’t sure if she wanted those things. Even if she swallowed her doubts like a mouthful of gravel and patterned her life after Daphne, becoming the matriarch of the next generation of Sullivans, it would never be more than a game of pretend. No matter what she wore or drove or how she carried herself, she would always be a Pettit underneath. It would show through, her shiny new veneer rubbed off like a cheap finish.

  The only way to escape it was to get out of Blackwater, to go places where no one thought they knew who and what she was, places where she had no past. Where she could make herself into anything she wanted, disappear and resurface, coming up clean. The longer she stayed, the deeper she’d be drawn into things she wanted no part of, the knotted threads of her family’s misdeeds, her identity an inseparable piece of the whole, all of it sullied.

  She wondered if Jason would try very hard to convince her to stay. Surely he understood, as she did, that the very things that made their relationship exciting meant it couldn’t last. Its improbable nature, its blistering intensity, all of it transpiring in secret. Small towns liked to keep you in your place, and that extended to Jason, too. She tried to imagine him bidding on pies at the Fourth of July auction, sponsoring the Little League, taking over Sullivan Grain. He’d be miserable in Earl’s shoes, would probably chew off his own feet to escape.

  Her phone chimed, barely audible over the TV show she’d turned up to drown out the unbearable silence in the house. It was Earl. He’d called her seven times since yesterday, letting it ring until it went to voicemail but not leaving a message. She pressed Decline. Probably he was calling to apologize, though an apology wouldn’t fix anything; it wouldn’t change the fact that she had scrubbed her lips with a nailbrush until they stung but could still feel the wet intrusion of his mouth, the phantom weight of his body pressing against her every time she lay down on her bed.

  Her bitterness toward Earl wasn’t the only thing eating away at her. She was mad at herself, because she wouldn’t have been in Earl’s bedroom when he came home had she not considered—if only for a moment—stealing Daphne’s jewelry, and she was angry at her mother for setting her on this course to begin with, encouraging her to take her place at the Sullivans’. She wondered if Earl had ever tried to kiss Missy, and whether Missy had let him. Her mother had worked in Earl’s home for years and had never said anything about him acting inappropriately. Surely Missy wouldn’t have pushed her to take the job if she thought Earl would lay his hands on her.

  She punched the power button on the remote, and the sudden silence unnerved her. The phone rang again and she answered. “Stop calling me,” she said, her jaw clenched.

  “Wait,” he said.

  “What do you want?”

  “Listen. Just listen.”

  She clamped her tongue between her teeth, not quite hard enough to draw blood. She would give him five seconds, which was more than he deserved.

  “I want to make this right,” he said. “I have something for you. I’ll bring it by, and we can forget this whole thing.”

  Forget. As though it were that simple.

  “Whatever it is, you can leave it in the shed. I don’t want you in my house.”

  “I want to talk to you in person. It’ll only take a minute. Please.”

  “Fine. I’ll meet you outside.”

  When the call was over, the phone slick in her sweating hand, she realized he hadn’t said he was sorry. He had offered her something, but it was still all about him, what he wanted, and what he wanted was for her not to tell.

  * * *

  —

  The tin-roofed tractor shed sat beside the house at the edge of the cornfield, though it hadn’t sheltered a tractor in years, not since Pawpaw’s John Deere had been sold at auction. It was home now to an abandoned deep freeze, stacks of wood from the dead elm Uncle Raymond had cut down, colonies of field mice nesting in decaying hay bales. A sodium lamp spread a sallow pool of light on the gravel drive, and Earl parked his truck just beyond its reach, probably hoping no one would drive by and see him there. Henley waited by the shed, spiderwebs netting her hair, catching in her lashes. Earl walked up, his boots scraping gravel, and in the slice of lamplight, she saw that his eyes were muddled, saliva crusted at the corner of his mouth. His breath was sharp with menthol and whiskey, as though he’d been sucking cough drops to mask the liquor.

  Earl’s broad hands were empty, and that made her nervous, but they swung loosely at his sides as he shifted on the heels of his boots.

  “I picked you,” he said, his voice deep and rasped. “Because your mother wanted me to. For the Emily Sullivan Prize.” He chuckled harshly, and Henley flinched. “Your essay was fine, but it was no different from the others. They’re always the same. It’s like a penance, reading those things.”

  Henley couldn’t believe it had never occurred to her that she’d won because of Missy, that her mother had acted so proud of a prize she had rigged. Not that it mattered now. It had been years ago.

  “I loved my sister,” Earl said. “And I envied her. I was the one—did you know?—I asked her to hide in the hay. I thought it’d be funny to have her jump out and scare Daddy, and she’d do anything to make me laugh. But part of me hoped she might get in trouble. That he’d be mad. He got mad sometimes, if we were goofing around, usually at me. He was strict. I saw him with the pitchfork and I didn’t say a word. I kept still like she’d told me, so he wouldn’t know we were there. Even when her blood was soaking into his overalls, spilling all over the hay, I didn’t move. Her eyes were wide open and she looked at me and blood poured out of her mouth. And then I ran,” he said, his voice rising in wonder, like he couldn’t believe it himself. “I ran.”

  Henley felt sick, saliva rising under her tongue. Earl took a fat envelope from his back pocket.

  “We didn’t understand what was going to happen,” he said. “We were just kids. It was an accident. But I knew at the core that I was responsible for a horrible thing that I could never make up for, and all my life I’ve been filling that same leaky bucket, trying t
o atone and knowing I’ll come up short.”

  “Why’re you telling me this?”

  He shrugged. “I wanted you to know that I didn’t mean you any harm. It was a misunderstanding on my part. I’m not as good a man as I’d like to be. I drink too much, and I make stupid, shameful mistakes, but I had no ill intentions. I’m sorry, for what it’s worth.” He held out the envelope and she grasped it, but he didn’t let go. She recoiled when his fingers touched hers.

  “I’m not trying to send you away—job’s still yours if you want it. But I know you were saving up for a trip. That’s what your mama said, anyway.” He cleared his throat, an uneasy, guttural scrape. The wind shushed through the fields, ghost voices murmuring in the stalks. “Should be enough to get you far away from this place, if that’s what you want.” The light glowed behind Earl, his face unreadable in the dark. “Sometimes I think about that myself,” he said. “What it might be like to leave and never come back.”

  He sounded weary, like he had no choice in the matter. His silhouette was imposing as ever, but she sensed the weakness in him. It had a smell, like day-old whiskey sweat. The money might have been a pathetic means of assuaging his guilt, but that wouldn’t stop her from taking it. She snatched the envelope from his hand and told him to get out, her voice sharp and unwavering. He took a few unsteady steps backward and then turned toward his truck, skirting around the circle of lamplight to walk in the cover of darkness.

  It was rare, living so far out in the country, for anyone to knock at my door unexpectedly, especially at night. I startled at the sound, scraping my chair back and nearly catching Gravy’s ear. He didn’t stir, and I carefully got up from the kitchen table and crept to the front door, as if my silence mattered. Whoever it was could see me through the glass, illuminated by the living room lamp. I flicked on the porch light, thinking that it might be Hannah.