For fear of further damaging my health, I decided to resist the desire to skip back until I felt stronger, but every day when I checked the mail and saw no reply from you, my resistance weakened. Indignation rose up to take its place. Yet even with that poisonous emotion restored, I have not managed to break out of these cycles of coming and going, of losing my prey to the forces of indecision.
I do worry about Frank and the toll this bitterness has taken on our marriage. For years he has taken on the duty of hiding me from view during my melancholic times, so that my reputation and our income might be preserved. But to think of him and only him is to take my eye off the target.
Dear H.D.,
My mind has worn down the trail so much that at any mere thought, I immediately slip into the past now. I have had to feign illness for fear that a thought will take me and that I will suddenly appear to be in a trance, my mind in some long-ago time while my body remains in the present.
A new trial is in three days, so I must sort out my mind.
I will keep fighting the urge. But already, there have been strange effects of resisting. Dammed water still spills over, and in strong wind, a kite will lift from your hands—or tear—if you don’t let it go.
Scott mumbled sleepily into her ear, “What are you looking at?”
Ruth pulled the phone down lower, cloaking the light with the sheets. Only one letter was left. “Nothing. Couldn’t sleep.”
“Time?”
“I don’t know. Past two. Go back to sleep.”
She waited for him to settle and kept her phone low, listening to him breathe.
“I keep thinking about the boy,” he said in the dark. “The one they thought was going to do something stupid.”
“You said it was a false alarm.”
“Probably. Caleb will have lots of eyes on him now. Some teachers aren’t going to want him to come back. And others will use this to push their own agendas: increased security, more drills . . .”
“I thought the school was slashing budgets.”
“This time we have a veterans’ group offering to patrol outside, armed, for free.”
“For free?”
“They’re part of a national . . . group.”
Ruth could hear him suppressing any judgmental or political words, anything that would betray bias. This was his faculty meeting voice again. Civility was in such short supply these days, and yet she knew he shared her view that a bunch of wound-up, self-important, politically motivated guys toting guns near the school couldn’t possibly be a good idea.
“Go on,” she said.
“Everyone thought they were bonkers until last year, and now some of the teachers think it’s a lesser evil than arming faculty, because at least vets theoretically know what they’re doing. Plus, if they’re going to do it anyway—”
“Do what?”
“Patrol just beyond school property.”
“But they need permission for that, don’t they?”
“Depends on the mood of the troopers and the local police. So if they’re going to do it anyway, might be better to have them organized under the school auspices, names and phone numbers written down, proper ID badges. Right? That’s going to be the argument at 7 a.m. tomorrow.”
“Sounds tricky. You should really try to get some sleep.”
He burrowed down under the covers. She waited.
The last thing he said—quietly, more sleepily again—was, “I missed this. Knowing if you wake up with a problem, there’s someone right next to you.”
“I’m guessing you had someone next to you, at least some of the time.”
“Well, yes. But it was never the same, or I wouldn’t be here.”
Scott had thrown an arm over her waist in his sleep. Ruth could sense the presence of her phone on the nightstand. She tried to resist, knowing she could read the final scanned pages in the morning.
She thought about the lesson of this last week: that one could assume nothing, that the universe was stranger than we thought, and that even so, it was the smallest, simplest things that mattered most.
Forget the phone. Forget the email.
She lay in the dark under the weight of Scott’s arm still, trying to memorize every possible sensation. The rhythmic lift and fall of his chest. The coolness of a twitching toe that happened to brush her calf, making her smile.
They had slept in each other’s arms every night in the first weeks of their courtship, when sleep mattered less to her than the electricity of human contact. But following that, they’d migrated, step by step, to their own sides of the bed. He moved a lot and kicked off the covers in his sleep. She was easily awoken and needed a pocket of motionless space, sheet and blanket snugged up to her neck. It made sense to stop intertwining arms and legs—they couldn’t simply become insomniacs—but at the same time, she’d forgotten the pleasure of forsaking sleep, the miracle of trust and the joy of simple human touch.
This would be heaven, if she allowed it to be.
Well, it would be more heavenly if she could be just a touch warmer.
The sheet was stuck to her hip by one of Scott’s hands, which she tried without success to dislodge. Also, she had to use the bathroom.
Never mind.
She got up and grabbed her phone on the way out.
In the kitchen a moment later, Scott touched her shoulder. She jumped.
“You’re up?”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“Come back to bed.” Scott took her hand and gave it a light, seductive tug.
Dammed water still spills over.
Ruth asked, “You sure that Margot won’t be upset to find out we’re back together?”
“She might be.”
He was still pulling, with a mischievous look on his face.
“Does she ever behave . . . unpredictably when she’s upset?”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t everyone?”
He caught Ruth’s expression.
“No, Ruth. She’s not someone we need to worry about.”
“Okay, you’re right.” Ruth knew she was sensing danger everywhere, even where it didn’t exist. But then again, even paranoid people were right sometimes.
“If it makes you feel any better, she left town to visit her sister this morning and will be there all weekend.”
“That’s convenient.”
“It is. But I’m not surprised. We had a talk last night about our needs and decided amicably—”
“Amicably, you hope.” Ruth knew Scott wasn’t right about Vorst. Why would he be right about Margot?
“I’m certain. We both needed to take a big step back. That happened after your phone call. You remember that call, from the motel? You were crying. With everything that happened yesterday, I realize how much I don’t want either of us to have regrets.”
One week ago, if Ruth could have written up her dream conversation with Scott, this would have been it. A dose of false terror had helped her win back what she’d thought she most wanted.
He was still holding her hand. Still pulling. But something else had an even stronger pull.
“I agree. Just let me just finish reading this one last thing, then I’ll come to bed. Promise.”
Scott wasn’t wearing his glasses. He looked down his nose with exaggerated incredulity, his eyes large and dark.
“I don’t want to wait.”
He had never been this playful, not since their first weeks together, and she had never felt so torn. It was all a test. The correct answer seemed obvious. She followed him back to the bedroom, where they still had two hours before his alarm went off. Her phone remained behind, screen darkening.
40
Caleb
Friday
Caleb had stolen his stepdad’s pickup, with the rifle under a tarp on the truck bed behind him
, hidden next to a pile of junk that his parents kept meaning to drop off at the donation center. He didn’t have his license yet, but he’d been practice-driving for six months, and he figured as long as he didn’t get pulled over, he could just keep going on 71 to Bemidji, the farthest he’d ever been with his family. He remembered not only ice cream shops, but backyards with docks and canoes just sitting there on mowed lawns, next to ponds and marshy river outlets. Not far beyond that, he knew, there were other, bigger lakes, and probably even less careful cabin and cottage owners. His stepdad talked a lot about Lake of the Woods, which was US on one side, Canada on the other and a whole lot of nothing in between. No one could stop him from getting lost somewhere up there.
He had driven forty miles before he pulled off the road and stopped fast, dust cloud slowly settling as he dug his foot into the brake.
He kept reliving the memory of the first time Vorst had dosed him. He tasted the vodka and Tang; he smelled the old man’s aftershave and sweat. He saw stills from that stupid movie on the TV screen beginning to blur in front of his eyes, felt the desire to sleep and the fear of losing control—the sudden desperation to be out of there and an equal desperation to stay, to get it all over with, and also to no longer exist.
It was a black hole, and Caleb knew he would try to claw his way out only to fall back in again and again. The only thing that broke his trance of self-pity and self-contempt was to think of Mikayla. Then he went from queasy to violently nauseated.
He turned the wheel hard and gunned the motor. He was going back to the campus.
41
Ruth
The sun hadn’t risen yet when Ruth kissed Scott goodbye in the doorway. They’d lingered long enough over coffee that he didn’t have time to go back to his apartment before work. He’d have to wear yesterday’s clothes: wrinkled pants and shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows to hide the lasagna stain on the cuff.
They hugged again out on the porch, the kind of slow embrace usually reserved for airports. He hadn’t bothered to put on a jacket; it was slung over his forearm. She held on to his elbows, under the porchlight. She tried to find that thread of silver again, but in this light, at this hour—his hair tousled, her eyes tired and full of sleep, and that right eye still wonky—she couldn’t see anything but chestnut-brown waves.
“See you tonight,” he said. “I’ll cook. Dinner at eight?”
“I’d rather not wait that long.”
That made him smile. “Come to the school, then. Spirit rallies and the year’s last football game are at four. The forecast looks good. Bring a blanket, and I’ll buy you some junk food. Like old times.”
“Okay,” she said. “Four o’clock.”
Scott had just pulled away when Ruth heard another car pull into her driveway and after a moment, four knocks, rapid-fire.
Margot.
Ruth steeled herself to wait it out. Let her bang or shout. But then Ruth heard a familiar voice.
“It’s cold out here. Come on!”
“Oh my god,” she said, opening the door to Reece.
“Finally,” he said, handing her the newspaper he’d picked up from the driveway. “I thought he’d never leave. I take it you’re back with Mr. W.”
She let the comment drop. “You’ve been waiting outside my house?”
“Fifteen minutes. Please tell me there’s coffee.”
It was 6:40 a.m. No normal teenager was up this early without a damn good reason.
“You must have heard about the false alarm yesterday,” he said.
“I did. You know the student, Caleb?”
“He’s got problems. I still plan to talk to him, once this all dies down.”
“Good. Do that.”
“But I don’t think he’s the problem. His house was mobbed by cops, anyway. It sounded like he was practically under house arrest.”
“According to whom?”
Reece rolled his eyes. “Facebook-addicted busybodies. Point is, it’s not just up to us anymore. The cops and his parents are going to be busy prying the facts out of him, and in the meantime, I don’t think he’s connected to what we saw. So I guess that’s that.”
“I guess it is.” She searched Reece’s face for any signs of anxiety. “But you could have texted me about that. You came by instead?”
“I wanted to check on you. It felt like we made it to the end of something and our team won and we didn’t high-five, you know? Just wanted to make sure everything’s okay on your end.”
“Everything’s . . . great, actually.”
He pushed his way into the kitchen and opened cupboards until he found a plastic travel mug. “It feels like we stopped it somehow.”
“Yes. We must’ve.”
He poured a cup to go, took a sip and sneered. But he didn’t toss the coffee down the drain.
Ruth thought of telling him about the latest letters, the Annie Oakley updates. But all that could wait. He was just a teenager, living in the moment, as he should be.
“How have you felt since the lockdown yesterday?” she asked.
“Good. I’m nervous about today’s performance, but good.” He screwed up his face. “This is gonna sound cheesy, but I feel like I got a second chance. You know?”
“I do.”
Reece looked at his phone. “I gotta run.”
She followed him to the door. “You’re taking my cup?”
“You can come get it from me after the game this afternoon.”
“How do you know I’m coming?”
He stopped and stared. “Ruth. Please. You’d miss our performance?”
She smiled. “Okay. I’ll get my cup then. See you this afternoon.”
At the door, Reece paused one last time. “I need to return something I took from you. It’s been bothering me, because I’m not a thief. I can’t even blame some dream or voice. I didn’t plan to take them. It was just this random one-time compulsion.”
She had no idea what he was talking about. He pressed the envelope into her hand. “I took these from the little brown drawers in your bathroom.”
“Oh,” she said, and smiled. It was a relief, actually, to know she hadn’t taken them without remembering. “Maybe you were just looking after my health. Just like me trying to get you to quit cigarettes, right?”
“Exactly.”
My body is a temple. But what about the rest of the messages? All those other things he’d said to her—was supposed to say to her in the future. Would they all fade from their memories in time? Ruth remembered how Annie had talked about the McKinley assassination that was supposed to happen in June—how once it changed to September, once she knew it had changed, the details had begun to fade. Maybe that took time.
“You and Mr. Webb make a good couple,” Reece said.
“Gee, thanks.”
“No, really. At school, he looks so uptight. When I saw him come out of your house, I thought, ‘There’s a guy who’s finally learned to loosen up.”
“What do you mean?”
“He looked rumpled, but happy. I’m not saying I know what you spent the last eight or twelve hours doing, but it made a difference.”
“Reece!” She winced, laughing. “Is it that obvious?”
“It’s all right. It’s a good thing.”
42
Annie
1905, 1871
I will him to turn and look over his shoulder. I even dare to push my toe into the snow-dusted roadbed, to make a little scuffling sound, as I hold my breath. But he is engrossed in his task. His collar is turned up. His black-brimmed hat is pulled low over his red ears. He is muttering to himself, “All the luck.”
He will turn, and I will say: “You shouldn’t have done it. I hate you for what you’ve done.” He’ll look angry at first, surprised by my presence here, then incredulous at what I’m aiming to do, t
hen afraid. But I can’t think about that, because when I imagine too much, my stomach gets weak.
In all my years: so many feathers, so many exploded puffs of fur, so many bloody pawprints in the snow, so many glazed eyes and skinned bodies, the flesh always redder and the body smaller than one would imagine. A rabbit’s body: all muscle. When we are flayed, we are all so much smaller than one would think. Dead and skinned, we’re all such little, little things. Hardly worth the ground we stand on.
Better to pull the trigger without him looking. Let him turn and look as he falls. But just as I feel the pressure mounting, ready to pull, I slide out of time again. Back to the woodstove, next to Missus, late at night.
“What if he never comes back?” I whisper into the fire and hold my breath, waiting, for the reply.
She slaps me. A flying palm in the near-dark.
“How dare you say such a thing?” she says, tears in her voice.
“I’m sorry. I thought—”
“That I’d be better off? That my sweet boy and I would be better off?”
I hold a hand against my stinging face and lean back, in case there’s a second slap coming. “You couldn’t be much worse off.”
There is an intake of breath. The Missus says, “There is so much you don’t know about this world. He was a handsome man, once.”
“That isn’t saying much.”
“He was a good man.” The Missus says it defiantly, daring anyone to doubt. “When we married, twenty-seven people came to the wedding, and every one of them said we were the prettiest couple they’d ever seen. We lived in town for a year, did you know that? We used to have three horses. He used to call me his Angel of the Morning.” Her voice cracks.
I don’t argue with her. I wouldn’t dare. But she still goes on.
“He used to smile so much people would ask him what trouble he was brewin’, and he wasn’t brewin’ anything at all. He just was glad to be alive. We once stayed in bed for two days without getting up, and I don’t mean that we were sick. I mean we ate our dinner on top of the blankets. I mean we were happy. I mean we were newlyweds.”
Annie and the Wolves Page 29