Annie and the Wolves

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  No one had told her to take less. In fact, everyone—including Scott—had counseled her to take more. Her physical pain was real. Her brain damage was documented. Scott had been mad about her going off the clozapine.

  Breathe.

  The heater ticked on, blowing at the cheap orange drapes.

  She was cleaner than she had been in two years. Exceptionally clean for the last few days—not even a Xanax, not a single wine or beer. Yet this week, she’d had the strongest visions yet. Intoxicants couldn’t be blamed.

  Every time she started to wonder if this was just her own personal history and chemistry, she had to remind herself that she wasn’t the only one. Reece had had a vision, too. What he’d seen was different: no Scott in the frame, no clear sense of a shooter. Only panic, Ruth’s words to him, and something gone wrong. But it was a vision of something bad happening at the school all the same.

  But what high school kid wouldn’t have nightmares? They’d watched training videos about active shooters and rehearsed the motions of hiding and fleeing. They’d been primed to have disturbing thoughts and dreams. There was nothing supernatural about that.

  She texted Reece.

  You there?

  Yep.

  Everything normal?

  He sent a thumbs-up.

  She texted: You got the news before? Talked to Bert.

  Great. Finishing practice.

  That was an unusually mellow reply. She’d expected him to be ecstatic.

  Still?

  It was nearly 11 o’clock.

  Guy bailed. Redoing choreography.

  She kept staring at the phone, wanting to tell him more—also wanting to make sure that he perceived no signs of trouble. But he would tell her if he knew something.

  Good luck.

  His reply was swift. We’re going to the diner soon, but after. After a moment he added, I’ll check in.

  She texted back, That’s okay. I’ll see you tomorrow. Holloway’s class.

  33

  Reece

  Caleb had ditched practice. Reece was irritated, because they needed him, and also because Reece had wanted to talk to him about Vorst standing behind him in the college-application video.

  That night at Rockets, when they’d finished their late practice and squashed eleven people into two cars to go to the Waffle House, he’d asked Raj, Gerald, Justin, Courtney and Vanessa if any of them had ever heard about Vorst’s car getting keyed.

  “His red Kia Stinger? Are you kidding me?” said Raj, who had grabbed the front passenger seat. “If anything happened to that car, even the smallest scratch, the whole school would hear about it.”

  “Right,” Reece said, steering with one hand and batting away Raj’s hand from the radio’s volume knob with the other. “Caleb told me he did something to Vorst’s car, but I guess he didn’t.”

  “Guy’s a liar,” said Gerald from the back. “Like when he said I was giving him a hard time.”

  “He didn’t say that,” Reece corrected Gerald. “I guessed it. I was just trying to figure out why he looked so miserable.”

  “Because he is miserable. I mean, look at the guy. Wouldn’t you be miserable?”

  “Oh, come on,” Vanessa said. “Give him till next year.” When Gerald started hooting, she cut him off. “I remember how you looked in eighth grade, Gerald, and I still have our yearbook from junior high. Don’t make me bring it to school.”

  “Let’s go talk to Caleb,” Reece said. “He used to wash dishes at Bettini’s, right?”

  “That was in the summer.”

  “But his house is really close, right? Raj, you carpooled with him last year.”

  The back seat exploded with groans and pleas, claims of desperate hunger and exhaustion and unfinished homework.

  Raj said, “He didn’t even bother coming to practice, and you’re going to drive around town looking for him? We don’t need him. We’ve got Mikayla, we’ve got freshmen who want to join. We’ve got Justin here.”

  Justin, the smallest of the four people in the rear seat, squashed against the window, was mostly hidden behind Courtney, who was unbuckled and sitting half on Justin’s lap and half on Gerald’s, whooped at the sound of his name.

  “So fuck him,” Raj said. “He’s done.”

  Reece didn’t want to talk Caleb into being on the team anymore. That wasn’t the point.

  “But you know where he lives,” Reece said again.

  “I never went inside his house,” Raj said. “You don’t want to mess with his stepdad.”

  “I’m not messing with anyone.”

  “Then?”

  Meanwhile, Courtney started harping on her favorite subject: trying to change the name of the club to something better than Rockets.

  Gerald said, “No one cares about the name.”

  From the back seat came Justin again. “Coach V thinks it’s an okay name.”

  The whole car erupted in laughter.

  “I take it back,” Gerald said. “If V thinks it’s good, it’s definitely gotta change.”

  Reece tried to get everyone’s attention. “Anyone seen Caleb get a ride with the coach?”

  Courtney made a disgusted noise.

  Justin replied, “At least twice. Are you saying . . . ?”

  “I’m not saying anything,” Reece said. “I was just asking.”

  “That means you are saying,” Justin repeated.

  “Everyone hold on tight here,” Reece said as he made a hard left into the Waffle House’s parking lot.

  Gerald leaned hard against Justin, punishing him until he squealed.

  34

  Ruth

  Midnight, and Ruth couldn’t sleep.

  She turned on the light and looked in the motel mirror, to one side of the television. Her face still looked strange, her features out of alignment. She lifted a finger toward her eyebrows and noticed her right hand trembling. She dropped her arm and leaned on the desk to still the tremor. She tested the weak arm, leaning forward. She couldn’t support her own weight. Of all the body parts injured in the car crash, her right arm had never been a problem. She lifted both hands out in front of her, palms down. The right arm drooped, tired before the left.

  Ruth looked at her face again. Then she thought to cover her right eye. Now, her face looked closer to normal. She covered her left eye. This was the blurry side. The image in the mirror stuttered like a weak flame about to go out. Was she having mini strokes?

  Aloud, she said, “I am so, so fucked.”

  She hated hospitals, the ER especially. Doctors had rarely believed her symptoms were real, and what would they make of these latest ones? Yes, she’d had a brain injury from the car accident—already noted. They’d already told her what to do: stay off the computer, avoid screens, don’t read too much, don’t work too hard, try to get more sleep.

  Scott’s voice came to her. You’re fine. You’re just really tired.

  Whereas Joe would have said, Damn, woman. What’re you gonna do about it?

  She missed Joe. They’d had a good run in those few months together, however long they had been and however exactly they had ended.

  “I’m not even sure anymore,” she said. And now she was talking to herself.

  But at least she wasn’t hearing those old phrases from long ago, the ones she hadn’t mentioned when Dr. Susan asked with her annoying degree of perceptiveness, “Any voices? Specific words or phrases?”

  She hadn’t heard or thought lately, for example, Open the cabin door. If it had meant only that she should look deeply into not only Annie’s past but her sister’s, maybe Ruth had opened it. Maybe she’d opened it and left it open, rusted hinges squeaking, the door banging in the wind.

  Ruth felt the need to get out of bed. She went to the motel door, fingers reassured by the flip of the bolt. Lock
ed. Yet she still had that feeling, as if she’d left a car window open with rain in the forecast.

  Her car was back home, undriven, windows closed. In the garage.

  Still standing near the foot of the bed, Ruth could sense the image of Scott hovering close to her consciousness, like an optical illusion—faces on either side of a lamp—that invited you to choose how much you were ready to see. She thought of crawling back under the covers, but instead lowered herself to the ground, sitting cross-legged, in a meditative posture. A way to tell her brain, This is on purpose. This is not panic. This isn’t a nightmare, either. I’m not afraid.

  Without resistance, the image appeared more gently, in slow motion. A remembered image, not a lived one. There was Scott’s face and the upper half of his body, wearing a white button-down shirt. This was not Scott at his heaviest, the summer before last. This was Scott as he’d looked since beginning to date again. He was wearing the newer eyeglass frames she’d noticed him wearing at her house when he’d come to move his boxes.

  Ruth kept her eyes closed. There was nothing to fear and no reason to hurry.

  She allowed her inward gaze to sweep across Scott’s face and torso in even slower, measured movements, like a lighthouse beam. Her eyes continued around the outline of the frames and over to his left temple, where she noticed for the very first time, a thread of silver. She paused there. If she had noticed this detail two years ago, she would’ve been able to place the image better as something not belonging to the pre-accident recent past or present, but without a doubt to the future.

  Scott Webb, you have gray hair.

  Ruth sighed, on the edge of a smile.

  And then, maybe because her attention had traveled back to earlier memories—the two of them on Ruth’s thirtieth birthday, laughing about the vanity of aging—his image vanished. She tried to recall any part of it: his face, his body, the ground on which he was standing, the sky or grass. Nothing.

  She started all over again, but it was as if her shift toward another memory had displaced the entrance to wherever she had been. The way was blocked, but she also felt oddly relaxed, and perhaps it was this very feeling—the sudden, utter lack of anxiety—that made any more visualization impossible.

  There was no way to tell when the image, now vanished, was from. It could be a week from now, yes. But it could also be five years away, or ten. Perhaps she’d missed an important lesson in all this: that even if some dark vision in the future were true, we couldn’t worry about it every day, throwing away any potential happiness in the process.

  For the moment, she believed Scott was safe. She couldn’t muster a deep-seated anxiety she didn’t feel or head toward a target she couldn’t see.

  35

  Reece

  Thursday

  At 10:45 a.m., Reece was walking behind two girls on the way out of math class, about to hand a test back to Mr. Webb, when the math teacher put his arm out to stop anyone from leaving.

  They’d all heard it: the crackle of the intercom, followed by a storm of heavy footfalls in the hallway. A door slammed. A girl shrieked.

  “Get back to your seats,” Mr. Webb said, before he pulled the door shut. “Procedures,” he barked. Two steps forward, two steps back, sheaf of tests still in his hand. “Lockdown. You know what to do.”

  But they didn’t remember, not at first.

  “Blinds,” Mr. Webb called out to Tory, a girl who was standing in the back corner of the room, but she didn’t move. The school had just replaced the blinds in all the rooms the previous fall, switching from old metal blinds to a solid blackout fabric.

  A different student called out, “Locks, lights, out of sight.”

  Mr. Webb shut off the lights. Now it was dim, with only traces of brightness seeping in from around the windows and doors, as if they were about to watch a movie.

  “Everyone down below window level.” Still they froze, a third of the class seated at desks and two-thirds standing, backpacks in hands, still fighting the urge to head toward the door. He shouted again. “Down, and I mean all the way. Down and quiet!”

  From the hallway, more feet could be heard. Through a vertical slot-shaped window in the door, they saw a gym teacher and a security guard run past. Reece took out his phone, and the action sparked a flurry of imitation as everyone in the room with a phone sent and pulled up texts, took photos and started taking videos, though nothing was happening yet.

  “No cell phones,” Mr. Webb said.

  Reece glanced at his teacher’s face to see if he would enforce the rule. He wouldn’t.

  Good call, Mr. Webb. Who wanted to be the guy who cut people off from getting safety information or sending a final goodbye?

  Five minutes. Ten.

  “Hey, Mr. Webb.”

  He didn’t answer.

  In the drills, there had been a constant stream of PA system announcements. This seemed like a false alarm, but even so, there should be more information. Panic mellowed into suspense, edging toward skepticism.

  Guys who had shrunk back into the corners duck-walked toward the center of the room to talk with friends, slapping each other on the back, teasing each other about how they’d looked when they first heard the footsteps and the shriek. Girls who had willingly flattened to the ground under desks without complaint now scooted into cross-legged sitting positions. They started to take selfies and braid each other’s hair. Grooming, Reece thought. We’re all just a bunch of nervous primates.

  Again, Reece looked at Mr. Webb, who was sitting on the floor with his legs extended in front of him. He still held the stack of papers in his hands, crunching them without noticing, their edges bent between his sweaty fingers.

  Reece would feel much better if Mr. Webb didn’t look so worried. Maybe “worried” wasn’t the right word. He looked heartsick, like someone who couldn’t believe this moment was finally happening, that his life had brought him to this: sitting in a dim room, waiting, and not because of a tornado, but because it now seemed normal to assume that someone might be running around with the intention to kill.

  A bullhorn in the hallway squawked, and a girl in the class screamed, then covered her mouth with her hands, giggling maniacally. A public announcement echoed down the hallway, “Stay in position. Police are on campus. Stay in your classrooms. Do not open the doors.”

  Reece closed his eyes and tried to conjure the dream images again, if only to reassure himself none of this had anything to do with what he had seen.

  Another half-hour passed. Kids began to complain about needing to use the bathroom and wanting to eat lunch. Mr. Webb took a brief call. Finally, they proceeded in single file down the hall and outside, where they waited in the cold autumn air, leaning against the brick wall, under the pool sign, while police continued to do a sweep of the building.

  Reece closed his eyes and smelled the chlorine wafting from the heavy double doors they’d exited. Nope. That smell wasn’t familiar, just as this location wasn’t. None of it triggered the déjà-vu feeling.

  Gerald leaned into Reece’s shoulder to whisper, “I just heard Kale’s name.”

  “What?”

  “They were looking for him. Caleb. He left school early. They found a note.”

  “Where?” They didn’t even have lockers anymore. Too dangerous. First, they’d zip-tied them shut, then removed them altogether, replacing them with sports trophy display shelving.

  Another guy next to them overheard. “We’re fucking freezing out here because of a note?”

  Gerald said, “Someone thought he had a bomb or something. A freshman told the police.”

  “Naw,” a senior next to them said. “Bomb scare would have meant evacuating the building, not keeping us holed up inside.”

  “Unless it was in his car,” Gerald said. “Then they’d keep us in here.”

  Reece said, “Caleb doesn’t have a car.”
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  “Anyway. He’s a suspect.”

  “I think you mean ‘person of interest,’” Reece said. “But I doubt he’s even that.”

  As soon as Reece had heard Caleb’s name, he’d thought of them all crammed into his car last night. He remembered Raj bad-mouthing Caleb and Justin claiming he’d seen Caleb get rides from Vorst. He remembered his own good intention to confront Caleb tactfully—to at least ask about that strange Rockets’ rehearsal that had been captured on video. Instead, when Caleb skipped practice, Reece started asking around. That had been a mistake. The rumor mill was starting up again and . . . well, now this.

  The facts were few. Caleb had left school early—that was the most solid one. Reece hadn’t ever seen Caleb start a fight. Mostly, he walked away from them. He wasn’t a conflict-seeker. He was an avoider. Even when he claimed to do something aggressive, like keying a car, it was all in his head.

  “Come on,” Reece said. “Give the guy a break.”

  Gerald said, “A break? I’m going to break his legs for making me stand out here all day in the freezing cold.”

  Reece bummed two cigarettes from a girl who was pacing up and down the edge of the curb like a tightrope walker. He gave one to Gerald. The teachers were standing too close to light up, but he turned his back to them, faced the wall, and put the cigarette in his mouth, unlit. Just for the feel and the flavor. Shit, he really was an addict now. If he didn’t stop soon . . .

  “When’s the last time anyone saw him?” Gerald asked.

  “I think it’s all fine,” Reece said. “He’s fine. We’re fine. End of story.”

  “How do you know?”

  Reece checked his gut again: no tickles, no whispers. This wasn’t the day or the place. He just knew.