by Sarah Bruni
After an entire spring of solitude, it felt good to run his eyes over the letters the girl’s hand had produced again and again. The girl’s handwriting slanted down to the right, lopsided. Her letters were fat and lightly rendered. You looked like you really needed the sleep, the girl had written. She wrote, Please just stay there until I get back. Novak stared and he waited. He blinked at the page. It had been a long time since anyone had thought to write him a note.
THE COYOTE WAS HUDDLED over something in the yard when Sheila came for it. She approached with a map and a flashlight—courtesy of Jake Novak’s coffee-table cabinet—and saw that there was some living thing in the grass there beside the coyote.
“Hey,” Sheila said, “what do you have?”
It was difficult to say at first. It was a small rabbit, still alive just in the hind legs. It must have been very young, unable to run even from a tethered coyote. Its tiny eyes were flat and black though its leg continued to twitch in the animal’s mouth. Well, that was the food chain for you—gruesome, unforgiving stuff. Sheila stepped back and allowed the coyote to finish with the rabbit, checking with the flashlight to be sure. Then she untied the coyote and began to walk toward the place where she planned to release it.
The coyote looked frightening with its blood-stained mouth, but Sheila supposed her ratty ponytail and her industrial-strength flashlight made them a fine pair. Besides, it wasn’t more than an hour and a half walk to a decent-sized park with some forested areas. The two walked on in silence. Really she didn’t need the flashlight to consult the map as she expected she would. She was still expecting Iowa. Here there were streetlights everywhere.
The radio in Jake’s living room had used the word wanted. The radio said police were gathering an investigation team presently, that it was only a matter of time before Seth Novak would be located and apprehended. The radio listed his offenses: grand theft auto, larceny, the kidnapping of a minor—one Sheila Gower—and the crossing of state lines. She had tensed again upon hearing herself identified as the kidnapped minor, for it meant it was Peter they were coming for; Sheila Gower was only the victim who got caught up in this mess. But she had started to think of herself as Gwen Stacy, and Gwen Stacy operated on a wholly different set of rules.
A month ago, if she had seen a man who was supposed to be dead walking down the street, Sheila would have thought she’d seen a ghost and probably would have run. In other words, she wouldn’t have, say, pointed a gun at the guy’s chest and demanded answers. But even the gun was getting more comfortable in her hands. It had been in her handbag the whole time she had sat on the street and spoken to Jake and the coyote, so once she’d finally worked out just where she’d seen his face before, her first instinct was to believe she’d been lied to about his death for a reason, that she was in possible danger. So, yeah, she had pointed a gun at the guy. But Jake Novak was a very strange guy. In fact, at first he had given her the creeps.
It took a whole afternoon of interrogation and crossexamination in the kitchen to establish that Jake was as scared of her as she was of him. He appeared genuinely perplexed by her presence, by her knowledge of his past, so that it seemed pretty unlikely that she had walked into some sort of strange pact or scheme between brothers. She had to consider the possibility that she had discovered Jake on her own, independent of anything Peter had planned. How this related to the man who was the one they were searching for, she still couldn’t say, but for the time being, it hardly seemed to matter. Back at the house, tied up in his kitchen, was the brother Peter thought he had lost twenty years ago; Sheila had found him without even looking. She considered all this as she walked. It was important to take it one thing at a time. The coyote was the first thing. It gave her time to be alone and think everything through.
The rope went taut and Sheila turned to find the coyote had paused to smell a tree.
“Don’t stop,” Sheila ordered. “We’re very close now.”
It was another ten minutes before they reached their destination. As they walked on, the lawns became better manicured; the cars parked along the street became larger, more menacing and tanklike. Then they approached the forested expanse of the park.
“Home sweet home,” Sheila said to the coyote. She started to slip the rope away from the animal’s neck.
But once free, the coyote made no attempt to wander from her.
“Love makes this house a home,” she announced. “Home is where you hang your heart.”
The coyote looked at Sheila strangely, showed some teeth.
“Sorry,” Sheila said. “My sister always says that kind of thing. But anyway, this is where you belong, like it or not.”
Not! the coyote’s eyes seemed to protest.
“Come on,” said Sheila. “Aren’t you supposed to want to conquer new lands? You want to be somebody’s pet? You want to be crazy Jake Novak’s puppy?”
The coyote began sniffing around again, on the trail of something, she hoped. Sheila started to wander in the other direction, at first slowly, the way one is told to flee from bears and other wild things, but then with more speed. It was a matter of minutes before the coyote was back at her side, looking up at Sheila as if for a cue.
It was getting a little annoying. Here she was, trying to do the right thing, and the coyote was turning the attempt into a replica of one of those heartwarming scenes from the movies. Sheila remembered primarily two veins of movies about canine-human friendship. There was the kind where the human tries to reinstate the wild animal to its natural habitat only to be reduced to yelling the kinds of obscenities appropriate for children’s programming (“Scram! Get lost! I never want to see you again!” the hero yells at the wild animal, holding back tears). There was also the variation where the canine-friend was domesticated at first, and the two were pals, but then the animal develops rabies and has to be shot, usually by the kid who raised it. What sort of stories were these to share with children anyway? And why for example was her entire fourth grade class forced to read Where the Red Fern Grows and watch Old Yeller back to back? Even the boys had sobbed.
Sheila turned around and sat down on a log. She counted the number of seconds it took the coyote to run from the patch of earth it was sniffing to the place where she sat. (Seven.)
“Scram!” She tried yelling, but the line fell flat.
The coyote cocked her head the way speakers of other languages sometimes do when you speak to them in English, the gesture of listening.
“Get lost!” It came out more like a question.
Then she tried something else.
“Patch?”
The coyote pounced beside her, quickly, half-violently, in a way that at first made Sheila gasp and draw away, but then the coyote rolled on her back, offering her belly.
“Seriously? You’re going to respond to that, Patch?” Sheila said, giving the animal a few test pets. It was the name she had heard Jake use to address it. “Hey good girl, Patch, okay good girl,” she continued mumbling, pushing her palm along the short fur of the animal’s belly.
Could it be possible that the animal was part dog after all? Sheila wondered. One of those hybrids, the offspring of two species? Could it be two things at once, regardless of the genetic material in its cells that determined the expectation for how it should act, what it should want?
She thought of the coyote in Macbride Hall, who had faced death as bravely as any animal, and then the horrible embarrassment of the afterlife, to be stuffed and set up, expected to act alive. To be asked to play a regular breathing mammal again, with legs and a language: an ordinary organism, but to have crossed into this other world, where everything was almost as it should be—business as usual with a few slight variations. And Sheila thought it made sense that the best ones to talk to were always those who could make a home for themselves anywhere, the ones who could look at a glass case and couple of rogue predators they’d really never be caught dead with in the natural world and say, yes, I think I could make this work.
It was while she was walking toward Jake Novak’s apartment, with the grateful animal beside her, that she decided maybe this was what mothers and therapists were trying to get at when they talked on idiotic television shows about finding “one’s place in the world.” The one part they had right was that it wasn’t a real place, like Paris or Iowa or something you could point to on a map and say, “the beaches there are lovely,” or “dead-end town.”
She was becoming an ace at calling the shots and making up the rules. Peter was right. She hadn’t seen that at first. When he’d made her try on the stupid dress, she had thought him dramatic, odd, obsessive. He had scared her with that ratty secondhand thing, the way he pressed his face into it. But when you understood things like that, like the plain fact that everyone was, by living in a body, completely alone—entering the world that way, leaving it that way—it made sense that it took little effort to know how to react to the will of another living thing.
She entered the apartment, turning the corner into the kitchen, and found Jake sitting at the table, exactly as she’d left him. He seemed genuinely happy to see her. “Hey,” he said. He smiled.
“Hey,” she said.
“Where’d you go?”
“I tried to release Patch into the wild,” Sheila said.
“Oh?” He looked disappointed. “I was kind of looking after her.”
“Well, she refused to go,” Sheila said, “so I brought her back with me.”
Patch walked into the kitchen, her nails tapping out a rhythm on the tile floor.
“Hey girl,” Jake said, but he didn’t make as if to pet her because his hands were still bound. Patch paused for a moment in front of Jake’s chair before collapsing with a huff on the rug in front of the kitchen sink. Jake turned toward Sheila. “I got your note.”
“Yes, good,” Sheila said, remembering.
Jake shifted in his chair. “The thing is,” he said, “I’ve been tied up here for hours now. It’s late. I need to use the bathroom.”
Sheila considered this. Of course the request was legitimate, but she couldn’t risk letting him get away either. She said, “If I let you go into the bathroom alone, are you just going to use the toilet? Or are you going to try to jump out the window to escape or something?”
Jake looked at the ceiling. “I’d say just the toilet,” he said.
Sheila stood behind the chair and began releasing the rope. The gun rested in the waistband of her jeans, and as Jake turned and touched the places on his wrists where the rope had bitten down, Sheila placed one hand on the gun. She said, “You have five minutes.”
But he was out of the bathroom within two. Sheila was standing in the kitchen, listening to the sound of the toilet flush, when Jake walked into the room and sat back in the chair, offered his wrists again.
“Maybe it won’t be necessary,” she said.
Jake shrugged. “Whatever you think.”
“Look me in the eye and tell me you won’t try to get away,” Sheila said.
Jake looked at her strangely. “This is my apartment. I live here. Also, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m twice your size,” he said. “If I wanted to get away, no offense, but it wouldn’t be that difficult.”
Sheila set the rope down on the kitchen counter. Jake Novak had a point.
In the cabinets she found a few boxes of macaroni and cheese, and she doubled the recipe, measuring twice the milk, twice the butter, to accommodate them both.
“Can I help with anything?” Jake asked. And sometimes Sheila would say, “Yeah, find me a measuring spoon,” and “Where do you keep the bowls around here?” But mostly she found her way around the kitchen and preferred him to keep sitting where she could see him. When everything was mixed together in the pot, she put the pot at the center of the table on top of a kitchen towel, and doled out servings in each of their bowls.
It was Jake who spoke first. “Hey, this is really great,” he said, tasting his dinner.
“It’s just macaroni,” she said. “It probably tastes the same when you make it yourself.”
Jake shook his head. “It never tastes like this when I make it,” he said.
“It seems like maybe you don’t take very good care of yourself,” Sheila said.
Jake shrugged.
He ate quickly, voraciously, like a stray unsure where its next meal would come from, and Sheila felt a little sad to imagine Peter’s brother eating alone at this table other nights, every other night. She said, “Don’t you ever miss your home?”
“This is my home,” Jake said.
“Not this,” Sheila said. “Iowa.”
Jake swallowed. “Of course,” he said.
“But you never went back.”
“There are too many things I am ashamed of.”
“Because everyone thinks you’re dead?” Sheila said.
His lip began to tremble a little then. It was hard to say if he already assumed this, or whether it hurt to be reminded. He set his fork on the edge of the bowl on the table. She didn’t know if she should continue, but he looked up at her now, eager to hear what other information she carried with her. Now that she had started to speak, it was clear the thing to do from here was not to stop.
“Your brother,” Sheila said.
Jake waited.
She tried again to find the words, the correct way to begin.
“Your brother,” she said again.
Jake reached across the table for her hand, and Sheila placed her small palm inside of his. She watched the way her tiny hand fit there, nested inside.
“He’s here,” she said. “In Chicago. He came here to find you.”
But only in saying it aloud did she understand that this was true, that sitting across from her at the table, his hand trembling around her own, was the man whose life they had come to intercept from the start.
PETRA AND LENKA SPOKE no English. They lived further west of the park, in a one-room apartment with slanted floors. Iva had called them right away. She had explained that they owed her a favor, and it would inconvenience no one for Peter to sleep there a few nights. No one would think to look for him there. But Peter had his doubts. When Iva had knocked on the door, Lenka opened it only a crack to admit her, and Peter was instructed to wait in the hallway. He waited there for five minutes of audible negotiations before Iva opened the door and announced, “It is okay.” Inside, there was one queen-size bed, which the women presumably shared, and there was a mattress pad, a bit thicker than a sleeping bag, stretched out on the floor of the kitchen, which Peter understood to be for him. Now Iva had gone back home, and Petra and Lenka were playing cards at the kitchen table, while Peter sat across the room in an armchair and pretended to watch television.
On the television, a group of people were living on a remote deserted island surrounded by sharks, and they had to try to get along or the sharks would eat them one at a time, one at the end of each episode. But they still couldn’t do it. Every day they tried to get along; they tried team-building exercises like preparing food and going on scavenger hunts, but it just wasn’t working out, they explained to the camera. “At the end of the day,” one man said, “it’s us against the sharks, and the sharks don’t give a sh** about getting along. As far as the animal kingdom is concerned, getting along is a f***ing waste of time.” The other people on the island agreed that this comment was bad for team morale before the show cut to commercial. Peter stood and switched off the television. He didn’t think anyone had really been watching it, but instantly Lenka turned from the kitchen table and looked at the empty screen, as if confused.
“Is it okay?” Peter asked.
Petra scowled and mumbled something in Czech.
Peter retreated and turned the television on again.
He shifted in his chair and continued to wait. Every once in a while Lenka would say something to Petra that would make her laugh, and Petra would look at Peter, or at the television, it was hard to say which.
It was evening, nearly din
nertime, and Peter sat listening to the people on television trade insults before the next scheduled shark attack, thinking that if Gwen didn’t show up soon, it would be too late. Iva had promised to continue to monitor the apartment for any further activity, but he couldn’t help feeling helpless, sitting across town, waiting for something to happen. He had seen a bar at the corner when Iva dropped him off, and he thought this would be a better place to wait. If he was going to be trapped here, he at least was going to have a few drinks. He stood from his chair, and Petra and Lenka looked up from their cards.
“I’m going out for an hour,” he said.
“An hour,” Lenka repeated, trying on the words like a misfit sock or glove, and Petra smiled and hid her mouth behind her cards.
Peter took a step forward. “One drink,” he said. He held up one finger, then tipped two fingers in front of his mouth to gesture toward the act. Petra and Lenka stared at him, like a painful game of charades in which no one had seen any of the same movies, read any of the same books. Two words, two syllables. Sounds like … “ One beer,” Peter said slowly.
Petra’s eyes widened at Lenka, as she made the same tipping gesture in front of her small pink mouth. Lenka rolled her eyes. “Pivo,” she said. Then both women threw down their cards and began to laugh.
“I’m coming right back,” Peter continued, emboldened by this tiny success in communication. “Please don’t lock the door.” He opened the door and pointed to the lock. “Please,” he said again. Why hadn’t he asked Iva the word for please? But finally Petra nodded. Lenka said, “Door, okay,” and she waved him off. Peter decided to take this as confirmation that he would find his way back inside, and so he smiled, in a way he hoped looked sincere, and felt confident enough to step through the door and let it shut behind him.
“What’re you having?” The bartender hobbled from her seat at the end of the bar and threw a coaster in front of him.
He ordered a scotch, then another. The televisions were on here too. There were several of them; there was no escaping them. But the volume was muted so Peter kept his eyes close to the ground. Even now, late in the day, the weather was temperate, and the back door was propped open with a phone book. Without the distraction of communication, Peter’s thoughts reorganized themselves toward contemplating the many errors that needed his attention. He sat at the bar and thought only of Sheila. Sheila lost, Sheila drowned, Sheila missing. Sheila’s eyelashes, her neck, the perfect spaces between the tiny bones along her spine.