Annie and the Wolves

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  She lifted the tray up. There was a larger space beneath, full of printed photos. The eyes in the top photo seemed to be staring straight at Ruth. The girl was in white underwear and a training bra. Twelve or thirteen at most, with glazed eyes and a woeful expression. Beneath that, the same girl, in a progression of poses, some with minimal clothes and some without. This was no Sears catalog.

  Ruth swiftly inhaled, and then she felt the sharp pinch at the side of her throat.

  “You’re an intruder,” Vorst said softly, breathing into her neck. “and based on that spilled fluid I smelled outside, an arsonist. With a gun. I’m defending my cabin.”

  Ruth still had the gun in her hand. But she didn’t know what to do with it. Whatever he had in his hand—a box cutter, scissors, maybe just a pencil—it was sharp and pressing hard on the side of her throat.

  “You fucking monster,” she whispered.

  “No,” he said. “Everyone has their weaknesses. I’ve helped a ton of kids, and they love me. You wouldn’t understand that kind of love.”

  He grabbed onto her right elbow, trying to pull her arm back to take the gun. She pushed free, hard, and aimed the only direction she could: straight up, firing into the ceiling.

  Even as she twisted, she felt the sharp tug of something tearing at her neck, but she focused only on trying to empty the gun so there wouldn’t be any ammunition left by the time he pulled it out of her hands.

  Two.

  She would rather those bullets enter his body, pierce his flesh, make him suffer. But the position was wrong, the timing was wrong and there was only this one chance to empty the rounds before he tore the gun away.

  Three-four.

  Much as she’d wanted to. Burned to.

  Her hand was slipping. He had her elbow up so high she cried out in pain and squeezed the trigger one last time. Ruth knew that not all revolvers were six-shot.

  Five.

  Some held six cartridges. Some, like Annie’s favorite 1881 Smith and Wesson, seven. Others eight or even nine.

  With the last tug, Vorst had managed to spin her around. Now he pushed her backward so she fell onto her back, hands trying to protect her face, just as the door opened and Scott rushed inside, with Reece and Caleb behind him.

  They had been outside—that was the sound, the glimmer—waiting as long as they could, calling for emergency help that hadn’t yet arrived.

  Vorst spun toward the sound of the door opening, lifted the revolver and aimed.

  For a moment, Ruth thought she understood. This was how Scott would die—a fatal shot, no matter all that she had done to try to save him.

  But when Vorst squeezed, nothing happened.

  A five-shot. .44 Magnum. It could have been a six-, but it was a five-, and she’d known it. Being right felt good. Being alive felt even better.

  Then it was over. Reece tackled Vorst. Caleb piled on as well. Scott was trying to pull Ruth to her feet while shouting instructions to Reece, to pin Vorst’s arms behind him and to look for the X-Acto blade he’d plunged into her neck.

  “Is that what it was?” she asked before passing out.

  53

  Ruth

  Saturday

  She was in a hospital bed with tubes taped to her arm. All signs were good.

  “How do you feel?”

  She thought about it, knowing what answer they—Scott, the nurse and doctor—all wanted:

  Fine.

  Okay.

  Better.

  Relieved.

  Happy.

  Safe.

  She opened her parched lips, ignored the burn in her throat and pushed out the first word anyone had heard her say all day:

  “Angry.”

  54

  Ruth

  "Still,” she said six months later, when she and Scott had their last argument—a quiet one—and he began to pack his belongings into boxes again. “Yes. Still angry.”

  “But why? He’s being prosecuted. Reece is doing great. Caleb is safe.”

  “I just am, that’s all.”

  They were in the kitchen of her mother’s house. Someone had just made a low-ball cash offer that Ruth was going to accept. All the cabinet doors and half of the drawers were open. The table was covered with his share of utensils, glassware, small appliances. It was a mess, but a mess that suggested change, at least—a final, belated end to the pretense of some unsustainable status quo.

  “You’ve got a good lawyer.”

  “It’s not about that.” Yes, she had some legal troubles, not that they weren’t worth all that had followed, opening the door to an investigation of Vorst.

  “I don’t get it. Your health is better, your work prospects are better,” Scott said. “You’ve even got a publisher.”

  “Fiction. They’re insisting I write it as fiction.”

  “Well,” Scott said sensibly, as always, “how else could they publish that sort of book?”

  She’d told him everything. His reactions to the full story of Annie’s abilities and Ruth’s visions had been . . . mixed. It was like two people of different religions marrying each other, agreeing on certain moral principles but not on the nitty-gritty details that simply demand faith.

  And there were unignorable timeline differences. In the version of life that he recognized and relied upon, which for her was only one of several possible versions, many events, from Kennidy’s death to the beginning and also first ending of their relationship, had all happened later. Yet they had happened. Which didn’t mean they were celestially predetermined, but rather overdetermined, caused by more than one factor or circumstance, so that removing or rearranging life’s dominoes didn’t stop their final cascade.

  It was off-putting for one person to remember a spring courtship or a certain fall moving day that for another person never existed.

  But that wasn’t their main problem, not by far.

  Scott was still trying to convince Ruth of all that had gone right. He was an optimist to the end, or at least a contrarian. “You’ll certainly get more people interested in Annie Oakley.”

  “True.”

  Ruth had already published an excerpt of the manuscript online, summarizing just one aspect of her forthcoming book—that Annie had been analyzed in Vienna—and even without the full paranormal revelations that would be made in Ruth’s “novel,” the new angle had ignited interest.

  At the same time, Ruth had taken to writing opinion pieces about gun control and sexual abuse for newspapers and websites. The editors who knew Ruth’s topics of interest would keep coming back to ask her to write short-notice opinion pieces. Because shootings kept happening. And abusers and assaulters kept being yanked out of the shadows.

  “You’re finally making use of your expertise. You’re productive and delusion-free. I don’t get it,” Scott said, holding up to the light a juice glass with a hairline crack. One less thing to pack. He slam-dunked it into the trash.

  “I’m not angry about my work. Or my health.”

  “Then about what?”

  “About the world. About nothing changing.”

  Scott sat down on the nearest kitchen chair. “If everyone stopped living just because of things that don’t seem to change . . .”

  “No,” she countered, still standing. “I didn’t say I’d stop living. Or speaking. Or writing. Or reading the news. Or pursuing justice in the courts. Or doing all the things we have to do to fight men like Vorst—because no one thing works. We have to do all of it. What I said is that I’m still angry. Doesn’t someone have to be?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  They’d had this conversation many times already, about righteous rage, the pendulum swinging too far, people using topical issues as an excuse for impulsivity and incivility, the problems of noise and hate, the magnifying effects of social media, what exactl
y was or wasn’t productive. Ruth didn’t claim to be an expert. All she knew for sure was how she felt. On top of it all, she’d learned something from Annie: There’s no one answer. You have to try everything. The courts, telling your story, therapy, taking back power, facing your enemies squarely. Annie had done it all. Ruth wasn’t obsessed with Annie as a person anymore. She was simply determined to learn from her.

  Ruth said, “You used to be upset because my mind was always in the past. But now it’s in the present. I’m focused on today.”

  “A today that pisses you off.”

  “Sometimes.”

  Scott was still rubbing his forehead in frustration, eyes hidden.

  She said, “That’s the part you get to choose, whether you mind being with a woman who is angry. At least some days. At least this year.” She tried to smile and lighten her tone. “Or this decade.”

  He lowered his hands and met her gaze. “I do mind, actually.”

  55

  Annie

  1925

  It wasn’t so easy as I made it seem in the final letter I mailed to Vienna. I told Herr Breuer I had left the Wolf alone. I suppose I wanted the good doctor to think I was not only healthier, but also a moral person. The fear of being judged leads us to strange choices, as does the desire to flatter the person who is helping us. Furthermore, it is true that I never killed or even maimed my abuser. I did continue to hunt him, to haunt him—whatever you’d prefer to call it. To keep an eye on him, at least.

  This was in 1906. I had shown up for a normal trip to Greenville and the neighboring counties on another pretext, to see family and friends, when I discovered to my astonishment that the Wolf was still alive. He’d seemed so old to me when I was a child, in the early 1870s. But he must have been only forty or so. In 1906, he was in his middle seventies and still thriving, the damned fool.

  I didn’t expect the matter to be properly ended until he died of natural causes. I was no longer anywhere near as tormented as I’d been, but I wasn’t content, either. I considered, one last time, writing to Herr Breuer. Instead I did something unusual. I found the address for Miss Bertha Pappenheim.

  Feeling not entirely cured myself, I wrote asking her—with utmost temerity—if she had remained cured, following her sessions with Herr Breuer. I thought she might deny it, because her past travails were not something she advertised. Instead, she replied with the most delightful candor:

  Cured? No doctor cured me. Herr Breuer? He saw me only until 1882, and I went through even deeper turmoil in the months to follow and did not emerge from that tortured state for eight more years. The doctor himself once remarked that he wished I would die and be put out of my misery. That is how much he believed in my own powers of recovery, which is to say, not at all.

  I experienced institutionalization and went through many dark phases, but in the end I must insist that the most important cure was the one I effected by myself—and no, my friend—if I might call you a friend and wish you will call me the same—I will go further and say it wasn’t I who did it. It was the world of work which deserves the credit: hard and necessary work outside of the home or salon, raising my voice and dirtying my hands, taking on the causes that most invigorated me. After 1890, I immersed myself in the world of women’s rights, I stayed busy, I concerned myself with helping others, I challenged myself to learn new things for practical reasons, I allowed myself to feel deep emotions without fearing them.

  Please allow me to give you one piece of advice. Rest if you need rest and talk if you need talk, and if using words to describe the horrors in your mind gives you peace, then write and speak and do what you must. Certainly. But do not expect mere bedrest and talking for talking’s sake to heal you. Find yourself a challenging new task to embrace and immerse yourself in the problems of others so that you might forget—however briefly—your own dark past, as well as your present-day problems. Forgive me for being so blunt, but I know you are a woman of action, and I trust you will understand and not be offended.

  That letter from Bertha was priceless to me. Of course, I’d already been active in helping women before I read her advice, but I’d always questioned whether that was enough, not understanding that it could be enough for a few women and enough for me, and that was how the world sometimes works, a woman or ten or one hundred at a time. We do what we can. Most important, I hadn’t truly credited those activities for all the healing they might impart. She’d told me something that fitted well with my own constitution, for I was never a talker or a writer to begin with.

  Even so, I did send the Breuer family a condolence letter when he passed away. Perhaps he would never have cured me entirely, but he did listen that day I burst into his waiting room, a strange woman he didn’t know with an even stranger story to tell. That was a kindness I’ll never forget.

  56

  Ruth

  Two and a half years later, Ruth ran into Joe at a bookstore in Seattle, though it wasn’t really so random as all that. Her book launch was well publicized, and she’d posted about it on social media knowing that he’d moved to the city and hoping he would come.

  He invited her to stay at his house for the weekend before she moved on to other events in Portland and northern California. It didn’t sound like a romantic invitation, especially since his sister Justine was also visiting, from Spokane.

  “You sure it won’t be too crowded?”

  Ruth had to remind herself often not to mention his wife Christine, because he had no wife. They’d never married. He hadn’t even met her, because he’d been dating Ruth at the time he and Christine were supposed to have met, in one of the alternate past timelines that she still remembered faintly and about which he understood nothing at all.

  As soon as she arrived, Ruth took turns holding baby Thomas and chasing three-year-old Reka in and around the blanket-and-chair-forts the toddler had constructed in Joe’s basement. Ruth did the dishes whenever she could and, as the first one up, walked Custer, the rescued beagle with a morose face, because it was the best way to be helpful in this busy house where she was the outsider.

  Only on the final night, after everyone else had gone to bed, did she and Joe stay up drinking a high-quality port from Trader Joe’s in place of the cheap red wine they’d drunk in grad school. They listened to a windstorm building outside, thrashing at the tall cedar trees in Joe’s yard. Joe had lit a candle on the table and had a flashlight nearby, ready in case the electrical lines went down.

  “So, I have to tell you,” she said after he poured them both a second glass. “I wanted to kill him. Vorst, I mean. Not Scott.”

  “I figured.”

  “And it scared me, Joe. If I could have controlled the gun better, if he hadn’t overpowered me . . .”

  “But you had time before he got his hands on you. You were adamant about that. You spent a long time at that kitchen table, pointing the gun without using it.”

  “Because I wanted more answers.”

  “Which you didn’t get.”

  “You’ve always been straight with me, and I need to be straight with you.”

  “Okay.”

  “I just need someone else to know what I was capable of. I don’t want you thinking I’m a better person than I am.

  He leaned in close. “Listen,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, you never have to be anyone other than the real Ruth McClintock.”

  She felt a lump in her throat.

  The wind gusts got stronger, rattling the house. “That’s gonna wake up the baby.” He got up and opened the kitchen windows to let in the air that was making the panes shake. “Sometimes it’s better to just let the storm do what it wants to do.”

  When he returned to the table, Ruth served them both more port. “I’m not getting us drunk, I promise. These are just really small glasses.”

  “They’re delicate. We’re high-class now.”

  R
uth took another breath, inhaling the fresh green smells from outside: bark, resin and even the tides, even though the ocean was a mile away.

  “I learned so much from Annie, and I believe she found a better way to heal. She seemed gratified with the work she continued in her fifties and early sixties with Frank. Midlife was the low point. After that, she seemed less haunted.”

  “And would you say that you’re less haunted?”

  “Me?”

  “About Kennidy.”

  Ruth chose her words carefully. The truth was, her own interpretation kept shifting. The extra time that Kennidy lived had seemed inconsequential at first. Not so now.

  “She was loved. Bob was a good man.” Ruth could remember more, day by day. She alone had two timelines, two sets of staggered memories that were equally real, clear in her mind. In both timelines, Ruth was still away at graduate school when Kennidy died. They hadn’t had much more time together, only the occasional visit, but Kennidy had graduated high school, and now, Ruth could remember that happy occasion.

  “So. That’s good.”

  “But . . .” It was a wound she couldn’t stop picking at. “When I was sitting in Vorst’s cabin, I was scared of my own anger. I wanted to see him suffer. I wanted him dead.”

  “But since you confronted him, you’re doing other things. That conference you’re keynoting is pretty exciting—”

  “Joe, I’m not talking about speeches and books. I’m trying to understand something about history here. If it’s so full of lessons, why do we still have to go back into the trenches and keep reliving the worst parts and repeating everyone else’s mistakes?”

  “Santayana. You know the quote.”

  “But it’s incomplete. ‘Those who don’t read history are doomed to repeat it.’ Sure. But even those who do read history are still doomed to repeat it.”