Annie and the Wolves

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “Anyone else being . . . ?”

  “An editor or a fellow researcher. Frankly, any adult.” She leaned forward, whispering. “Do you realize that my tentative belief in this basically spells out the end of my career as a historian?”

  “Do you have a career?”

  “Touché.”

  Reece slid the printout closer, skimming it. “I don’t know, I’m sure that as an academic, you could still write articles about the fact that Annie thought she could time travel. That’s the safe way to put it.”

  “Exactly. And I could point out that when H. G. Wells wrote about a time-travel machine in the 1890s—Annie and her generation weren’t unfamiliar with the concept—his character went into the future. Nearly a million years into the future. To talk with happy vegan dwarves. Whereas when a woman like Annie has a chance to time travel, she goes—”

  “To the past.”

  “Yes, to a realistic, traumatized past. Goodbye, time machine, that was a lark, and we don’t even need machines to travel through time if trauma will do the trick. Hello, dawn of psychoanalysis and the recognition that the past won’t leave us alone. The distant future is trivial by comparison. And then we have the rise of the modern, time-obsessed novel: Proust, just four years after Annie went to Vienna, if she did, and then there’s Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses—”

  “But then you’d have to read Ulysses.”

  “Who says I haven’t? And I could do analyses in terms of gender, different modes of scientific thinking, cultural concepts of time, the synchronization of railroad time and the adoption of Greenwich Mean Time in the late 1800s, the anxiety of the individual in the face of industrialization—”

  “But you’re not going to.”

  “No.” Ruth looked down into her coffee cup. “I don’t think I could tolerate burying the truth of Annie’s story under that kind of academic avalanche.”

  “Good. Because there’s no time to waste,” Reece said. How many times had he said that now—two, three?

  The girl with the broom was still hovering, sweeping under the table next to them. She mouthed the words, “Reece. Two minutes. You’re in big trouble.” He ignored her.

  “My guess,” Ruth said, pulling the printout back to her, “is that it’s a letter, even though the friend who gave it to me didn’t recognize it as such. I mean, obviously it could be a diary entry, too, but Breuer had suggested she send letters detailing any ‘hallucinations’ as a way to continue their sessions over distance.”

  “Do you think Breuer answered each time?”

  “We don’t know. If she was on a roll, he may not have had to say very much. A good analyst mostly listens. By this point, Sitting Bull isn’t encouraging her to keep making trips into the past. Or at the very least, he’s being ambiguous. So she has two mentors: a Viennese analyst who isn’t above giving advice but thinks she’s imagining her experiences, and a Lakota medicine man who believes everything she’s experiencing but won’t tell her what to do.”

  “Could Sitting Bull see into the future, too?”

  “He saw the Battle of Little Bighorn, but in an abstract way: white soldiers falling like grasshoppers from the sky. That supposedly spurred Lakota warriors on to beat Custer. Sitting Bull may have seen his own death, too, which didn’t stop it from happening. Maybe the difficulty is in interpreting these visions.”

  “Or maybe the visions simply don’t change things.”

  “Maybe.”

  A couple sat down at the small wooden table next to them.

  Ruth whispered, “You think it’s okay that we’re talking about this here?”

  Reece looked around. “This is exactly the kind of stuff that gets talked about here. I have to listen to it all the time.”

  “But won’t people think—”

  “That we’re planning a multiplayer RPG or outlining our plots for NaNoWriMo? Yes, that’s exactly what they’ll think.”

  “Okay,” Ruth said, trying to emulate Reece’s nonchalance. “So she’s physically present. People can see her and talk to her. She believes she can take action in the past.”

  “But should she? The butterfly effect and all that.”

  Ruth shook her head. “Not that. It’s more that, from the perspectives of morality and mental health, should a person really go back and seek revenge?”

  Ruth didn’t know the answer. Joe had once told her about First Nations’ attitudes on revenge—a concept they didn’t use, exactly. It was more a question of rebalancing things. But this was easier in a closed community or where there was real justice. It was harder when your enemy was distant or institutions failed. Revenge was a last resort, and it might have a terrible price. The question for Ruth was, who paid it?

  None of that interested Reece at the moment. “I want to know the mechanics,” he said. “I’m starting to think that when trauma bounces someone forward toward another trauma, it’s like a laser hitting a mirror. The person bounces back.”

  Ruth nodded slowly. “But that’s just the how of it, not the why—or the why us. Maybe we’re focusing too much on what’s happened to us—my car accident, Annie’s train crash, your suicide attempt—and forgetting to think about what kind of people we are.”

  “And what kind is that?”

  “Did your parents make you practice dance as a kid?”

  “Actually, they tried to stop me. So you’re saying we’re obsessive.”

  “In Annie’s day, they just called it hard-working. But yes, we’re prone to intrusive thoughts, compulsive searches. And on the upside, discipline, perfectionism. You said you were always like this. I might’ve had a touch of it, but it definitely took over my life after the accident. The physiological side could be the other part of what allowed us to travel this . . . route, I’ll call it, that doesn’t exist for everyone.”

  Ruth was beginning to see it, finally, as a nearly physical thing: a path discovered, like a game trail, and then reused and worn deep. Sci-fi and the supernatural weren’t her thing. History was.

  Ruth did a quick search on her phone and showed Reece a picture of the Natchez Trace in Mississippi: a path used by animals and Indians, and later robbers and slave traders, dug amazingly deep by travel alone, so that, with the trees bowed overhead, shading the trail, it looked almost like a tunnel or chute.

  She scrolled to a particularly haunting image. Through that chute flowed bodies, hope and terror. It was only a trail, no people, but the forces of history—millions of footfalls, a single-file progression of the greedy, the unlucky, the unwilling—were visible in its distinctive, hollowed-out shape. “Maybe misery digs the deepest groove of all.”

  Reece said, “I’ve read about certain Native visions, the kind they saw after sun dances. They would cut themselves and dance to exhaustion.”

  “That’s right. You and I shot forward and then slid back after experiencing fear. Like the Lakota sun dancers, Annie was willing to suffer in order to see more. She marched back and forth again and again, to keep the route open and even lengthen it. She said that she had to relive the physical pain of her train accident many times before she started seeing an earlier past.”

  “How many times have you had your vision?”

  Ruth had to think. “Maybe a dozen, but the recent ones are the most detailed. When they first started happening, I did whatever I could to shut them down. And then I stopped seeing Scott. Being away from him may have reduced my triggers.”

  “So,” Reece said, “Annie Oakley was willing to put up with pain. She was supremely athletic. She already knew breath and pulse control. She was no stranger to fasting. Drugs and alcohol, not so much?”

  “Make that none. Teetotaler.”

  Reece kept ticking off his mental checklist, “Extreme focus. Deliberate practice. Visualization.”

  “Of colors,” Ruth said, her mind filling, as soon as she sa
id it, with a sudden scarlet flash. It had never rocketed into her mind like this—a quick pulse, invited—because she had never allowed it. She had fought it with every ounce of her being. She added, “The white of the oncoming train light. The yellow of the grass by the Wolves’ cabin.”

  “Purple,” Reece said quietly. “The first thing I ever saw was a comforting sea of purple.”

  “Red,” Ruth said. “Red red red.”

  Ruth closed her eyes. Across the room, the hiss of the espresso machine started up. Next to them, a couple was talking softly. Farther away, a chair scraped against the wooden floor. She noted each sound and let it go, still seeing, behind her closed lids, that singular color.

  “But as for the rest of it,” Reece said, “how far her time travels went and the consequences—for that, we need the rest of the letters. We have to get in touch with Nieman. Look at this.” When she opened her eyes, he pointed to his small notebook. “You’re a historian. You need to talk to him the old-fashioned way.”

  “Believe me, I want to. But he won’t give me his phone number.”

  “Antfarm.” Reece smiled, turning to a page filled with his neat, tiny script. “That’s where I started. There’s an Ant Farm and Myrmecology Forum online. But I didn’t think that was it.” He turned to another page: all caps, tiny letters, rows of checkmarks. “Ant farm, as in antiques farm. Like, an antique shop that’s near a farm, or in a barn. Sounds like Vermont, right? Maybe he’s the owner.”

  “Nieman is a collector—a buyer. Not necessarily a seller.”

  “Aren’t a lot of buyers also sellers? If you buy enough crap, at some point you end up also selling it. Seems like a vicious cycle to me.”

  “Not vicious and not crap—we hope,” Ruth conceded. “But you can’t just phone every antique shop in Vermont.”

  “No. I could only call one hundred forty-two of them, so far. I got the names from the Vermont Antiques Association Directory. There was no Bert Nieman listed, but I figured it could be a pseudonym, so I’m just going to keep dialing and asking around.”

  “That’s great, Reece.”

  “It will be once it works. What’s your next step?”

  “I sent another email to Sophie, my foundation contact. Leaned on her a little harder. The foundation has closed files, and I want to make sure we’re not missing something there.”

  The café door opened and two girls entered, bringing a gust of cold wind with them. It smelled of late fall: moldering leaves, a touch of rain, the promise of snow. Reece glanced their way with a worried look on his face. Ruth expected his eyes to track the girls as they slowly made their way to the counter, still talking, phones in their hands, but his gaze stayed on the slowly closing door, sensing something—the same thing she was sensing. That stark familiarity. The urgency.

  “Red,” whispered Ruth, smelling the cold fall air. She was starting to see it. She was letting herself see it.

  “Purple,” whispered Reece.

  Neither of them noticed the woman approaching their table until she was there, standing right next to them. Sixty-something, gray hair pulled back, solidly built, arms folded over an apron with the café’s name.

  “I don’t mean to interrupt whatever word game you’re playing. Meet me in the back office, honey. If you don’t mind.”

  When Reece didn’t stand up to follow, the lady turned to Ruth.

  “Listen. I don’t know if you’re a family friend, teacher or what, but I’m friends with his mom, and we’re doing everything we can to keep him focused and out of trouble. A job helps with that.” She gave Reece a thin-lipped nod. “He knows the rules. No phone, no wandering off to use someone else’s phone, no wandering off to sit in a corner with a friend. And now this. I’m stumped.”

  Ruth stood so she was eye to eye with the woman, who seemed to be blaming her for Reece’s behavior. A moment ago, this corner of the café had been cold. Now it was blazing hot. She tugged at the zipper of her fleece vest, desperate for air.

  The woman said, “This was a place where he could get away from electronic screens and work on the impulse-control issue.”

  “Was?” Ruth put a hand to the back of her chair to steady herself. She was tense, and she didn’t think it was due to being confronted by a stranger.

  “I’m sorry,” Ruth said, aware her words were slurring. “I didn’t mean to distract him. I assumed his shift was”—she closed her eyes—“done.”

  “He’s a bright kid,” the manager said, but it sounded like the words were coming through a long tube. “But three strikes, you know?”

  Three strikes, Ruth thought in echoing slow motion, counting them out. One, two . . .

  “I’m just going to sit down, if you don’t mind.” The chair was suddenly too far away. The floor was better: cool, comfortable, quiet.

  She saw the lady’s face, and Reece’s looking down at her from above.

  Ruth wanted to be alone so she could do what she always did. Try to move past it. But then she remembered: There’s no reason to rush. Watching isn’t going to hurt you.

  Just as they’d always tried to tell her in those Harm OCD sessions, the ones she thought had nothing to teach her. Suppression will only make it stronger. Thought isn’t action. You aren’t doing this thing. You aren’t really there. And she wasn’t in a bathtub, either. During the attack yesterday, she’d seen so little.

  Be curious. No, more than curious. Confrontational. Demand to see. Demand to understand.

  She tried to think of the bravest person she knew. Joe came to mind. She wanted to save Scott. But she wanted to be Joe.

  Ruth tried to block out the faces above her, all the people in the café, surely staring at her by now. She closed her eyes and attempted to stay with the image.

  She was cold, with wind on her face, and squinting at something: a figure, prone on the ground, face down, head covered from behind by a hood. She could see only the slim hips: could be a boy or a girl. The jeans and shoes offered no clues, either.

  And then Ruth’s view took in the tall golden grass on all sides of where the person was lying—or hiding. Beyond it, where the grass ended, there was a strip of shorter, patchy, trampled grass, and beyond that, a white line. Then, ultra-short green grass or Astroturf. It was the school, no question: wilder parts unmown, the transition of shorter grass where people walked, the manicured football field.

  Near the edge of that field stood Scott, waving his arms. His expression was one of concern. The white shirt. The red shirt. That image again, but starting earlier. Filled in with more detail.

  She saw Reece, his silhouette familiar to her now, in the distance, standing next to the bleachers, surrounded by other kids his age, all in purple shirts. But maybe she was seeing that only because he’d described it for her. Maybe she was seeing him because even now, in the café, Reece was talking to her, asking if she was all right, if she needed water or fresh air.

  She was suggestible. Everything was getting mixed in: all the possibilities, all her anxieties. Look, there was her own neighbor, the one with whom she’d just had the one-sided conversation about the hole in the yard. He stood only fifty feet from Reece. Everyone was here, it seemed.

  Visions couldn’t be trusted in all their details, could they? You brought your own experiences into them, projected your culture, your personality or your emotions. Sitting Bull’s vision: soldiers, falling like grasshoppers from the sky.

  Two people could see the same thing and interpret it differently. The Lakota people had prophesied a “black snake” coming to their lands. Modern-day activists in the Dakotas believed that black snake was a proposed pipeline. More than a hundred years earlier, poor Bertha Pappenheim, “Anna O.,” had prophesied a black snake, too. For her, it was associated with the death of her father.

  But Ruth wasn’t seeing grasshoppers or a black snake. Her vision was more like a dream or crudely recorde
d video, shaky and blurred, but with recognizable figures and faces. She had to see them. She forced herself to pan across the sport field and see who was shooting and being shot, looking for clues as to when this was happening.

  Keep watching. But the vision was quickly fading. Ruth tried to store up everything she could, tried to look around again, like a swimmer underwater, running out of oxygen, trying not to break through the surface until the last possible moment.

  As she tried to hold on to the vision, Ruth’s blood pressure plummeted and her ears filled with roaring static. She knew how she looked, lying there, pale and sweaty, eyes dilating like a drug addict having some kind of fit. She struggled to lift her feet and felt her heels knock against the legs of a chair until she managed to prop them up higher, on the seat. That was better. She felt the blood return, and with it, the image faded, her heart speeding back up to normal.

  “I’ll call 911,” the manager said.

  “No, she’s had these attacks before,” Reece said. “She had one just yesterday. Isn’t that right?”

  Ruth nodded her head, eyes still closed. Two days in a row. That had never happened before. Normally they came weeks apart.

  “It’ll pass,” Reece said. Give it to teenagers to take blackouts in stride.

  The manager asked, “Are you sure?”

  Ruth managed to open her eyes fully. “I’m fine. Just let me rest a minute.”

  “I still think we should call,” the manager said.

  “No.” Ruth reached a hand up and let Reece pull her into a sitting position. “No ER.”

  “See? I’ll drive her home,” Reece said. “She’ll be more comfortable there.”

  “Okay,” the manager said, eager to be relieved of any responsibility. “And Reece, this doesn’t change anything. Leave your apron. You may be doing a good deed, but this is still your last day of work.”

  23

  Ruth

  He helped her into his car, moving a pile of library books from the passenger seat to the space at her feet.