Tell the Wolves I'm Home

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  Greta sat in the row of seats in front of me, in a pair of pinstripe jeans with holes in the knees. I wore a black skirt and a giant sweater. I didn’t wear my boots from Finn. I couldn’t bear to wear those boots that night.

  The drive to Gasho was quiet except for the sound of my father’s Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits cassette. All my parents’ music came from greatest hits albums. It was like the thought of getting even one bum track was too much for them to handle. As we drove down the highway, I thought of all the other birthdays we’d celebrated. My dad’s thirty-fifth, in that dark Moroccan place Finn knew in the Village. Greta’s tenth where we got Il Vecchio to write Happy Birthday, Greta in peppers on top of all the pizzas. My twelfth, when Finn reserved a dining room in an old hotel and made us all play these Victorian parlor games he’d read about. He showed up in a top hat and tails and spoke in an English accent the whole time. By the end of the night we were all talking like that. Even Greta. It was all “pardon” and “would you mind terribly much” and “swimmingly” and finding excuses to call each other cads and bounders.

  Then there was my mother’s fortieth, with me sitting next to Finn at this fancy restaurant that had a jazz piano player in one corner and candles in these thick square glass candleholders on the tables. I was ten and Greta was twelve, and I watched the candlelight flickering against my mother’s cheek as she peeled back the wrapping paper from Finn’s present. That was something about a present from Finn. You always kept the wrapping paper because it was always more beautiful than any you’d ever seen. That particular wrapping paper was a deep dark red that looked like it was made of real velvet. My mother opened it slowly, careful not to tear the paper, and then, when she had one side open, she gently slid out a black sketchbook.

  That sketchbook ended up on a bookshelf in Greta’s room. Inside, Finn had written a little note that said, You know you want to . . . next to a tiny pen sketch of my mother with a pencil in her hand. What was amazing was that even though the sketch was only half an inch high, you could tell instantly that it was my mother. That’s how good Finn was.

  That night everyone else was talking. My dad was having a quiet argument with Greta because she didn’t want to put her napkin on her lap. The whole time, Finn sat next to me, folding and twisting his napkin until all at once he lifted it out from under the table and we saw that he’d folded it into a butterfly. We watched as he flew it over to Greta and said, “Here, I have somebody who needs a lap to rest on.” Greta giggled and took the butterfly from Finn’s hand and put it straight on her lap, and my dad looked over at Finn and gave him a smile. I remember thinking that I wanted a butterfly napkin too. I wanted Finn to fold something for me. I was about to ask him, but when I turned I saw that he was staring across the table at my mother. She had the sketchbook open to the inside cover and she was gazing down at that little drawing of herself. After a while she looked up at Finn. She lifted her head slowly, and she didn’t smile or say thank you like you normally would if somebody gave you a present. No. She just sat there, giving him a kind of sad, hard look then shook her head at him, her lips pressed together tight. Then she slid the book back into the wrapping paper and shoved it under the table. That’s one of those snapshot moments. I don’t know why some memories are like that, where everything is perfectly preserved. Frozen. But that memory—Finn’s eyes locked on my mother’s, my mother slowly shaking her head—is exactly like that.

  When we got to Gasho, we followed the hostess to one of the high tables and climbed onto our stools. Each table seated maybe twelve people around a big grill, and the chef was at the other end hacking up some meat with a little hatchet. My dad ordered two glasses of Japanese beer. Then he looked at us and asked if we wanted Shirley Temples.

  “I’m not, like, three years old, you know,” Greta said. “I’ll have a Diet Coke.”

  “I guess I’ll have a Coke too,” I said, even though really I would have liked a Shirley Temple.

  And that’s about the most conversation we had all night. I don’t think anybody in that restaurant would have been able to guess that we were out having a birthday celebration. My dad asked Greta how the play was going, and all she could say was “Fine.” My mother remarked on a change in the menu, but that’s as good as it got. None of us were Finn sort of people. I tried to remember one of the Victorian games, but nothing came to me. Maybe more was said, maybe some words disappeared into the sizzling peppers and onions, but that’s how I remember it. I sat there watching the Japanese chef with his high white hat frying our dinner and wondered what would happen to me without Finn. Would I stay stupid for the rest of my life? Who would tell me the truth, the real story that was under what everybody else could see? How do you become someone who knows those things? How do you become someone with X-ray vision? How do you become Finn?

  On the way home, I thought about the note from Toby again. I thought about how March 6 was only three days away and how stupid it would be for me to go meet him. Again I thought that I should go to my parents and tell them all about it. Tell them that this guy came right up to our door. That he’d asked me to meet him. That he’d asked me to keep it a secret. It wasn’t too late to tell them everything.

  My parents trusted me. I knew they did. And they were right to. I was a girl who always did the right thing. But this was different. I knew Toby had stories. He had little pieces of Finn I’d never seen. And the apartment. Maybe there would be a chance to see the apartment again. My mother would call it scraping the bottom of the barrel. Looking for the very last crumbs. My mother would call it being greedy, but I didn’t care. If you think a story can be like a kind of cement, the sloppy kind that you put between bricks, the kind that looks like cake frosting before it dries hard, then maybe I thought it would be possible to use what Toby had to hold Finn together, to keep him here with me a little bit longer.

  Nineteen

  “Party. Tomorrow night. One hundred percent. No cancellations.”

  Greta had come into the bathroom while I was in the shower and whispered through the coral pink shower curtain.

  “What?”

  Greta said it again, slower, as loud as she could without our parents hearing. I still couldn’t hear her right, so I turned the shower off and rubbed the water out of my ears with my palm. I stuck my head out from behind the curtain.

  “What?”

  She let out a frustrated breath, then said it one more time. That time I heard her.

  “Mom and Dad will be at work until seven and then we can just tell them you’re helping with the play again. Okay?”

  I nodded, but my thoughts were racing. The party was the same day as the meeting with Toby.

  “Okay?” Greta said.

  “Yeah . . . I guess. Okay.”

  “It’s in the woods behind the school.”

  My woods. The party was going to be in my woods. I smiled to myself. For once I’d know more than Greta. I’d be the only one there who knew anything about the place.

  Greta stood there with her hands on her hips, looking at me like she was waiting for me to say something. “You know those woods, right?”

  “I . . . yeah. The ones you can see behind the cafeteria.”

  She waited another few seconds, then nodded.

  I turned the shower on to full again, letting it pound against my neck.

  I could see the shape of Greta’s forehead through the shower curtain, and I gave her a poke. She poked back, trying to nab my shoulder. We both laughed, poking blindly at each other through the pink plastic.

  “Stop,” Greta said, but she was still poking.

  I reached a wet arm out from the side of the curtain and tickled Greta right under her armpit. We both couldn’t stop laughing.

  “Girls?” My dad’s voice boomed from downstairs.

  I pulled my arm back.

  “It’s okay,” Greta hollered.

  Every once in a while it was like that with me and Greta. Just for a minute or two. Just a glimpse of what we
used to be like.

  She stuck her head around the curtain, angling her face so she wouldn’t see me naked.

  “So you’re still coming?”

  “Yeah. Just go ahead. I’ll meet you in the woods.”

  Twenty

  I wrote down some ways to hate Toby. I wanted to be prepared. I didn’t want to show up all weepy and dumb. I wanted to be hard. I wanted to be able to tell him what was what.

  1) Remember that he is the one who made Finn die. Maybe on purpose.

  2) Remember that he is the one who sent the portrait, OUR portrait, to the paper without asking, even though it’s ours and it’s none of his business.

  3) Remember that only someone very creepy would send a fourteen-year-old girl letters and tell her not to tell her parents.

  I looked at the list, but I couldn’t make it work. I couldn’t seem to hate the guy. Finn didn’t hate Toby. Finn might have even loved Toby. And Toby was probably the very last person in the world who’d talked to Finn, who’d seen him alive. So I added this:

  4) Toby was the last one to talk to Finn. Toby was the last one to hold Finn’s hand. The last one to hug him. Not me. It was Toby.

  That’s when the list started working. I wanted to be the last one. Not some gangly English guy with a watery voice.

  Twenty-One

  If you stand on Sumac Avenue where it bridges over the train tracks and look out over the railing, you can see the whole train station platform. I turned up late, and I was freezing cold because I’d stuffed my stupid light blue puffy coat in my backpack. I’d taken the long way, up past the bike shop and the Mobil station and then across the weedy fields near the Lutheran church. As I got closer, I started to think that maybe Toby himself wouldn’t show up. Maybe he would hide somewhere and watch and wait to see if I would come, just like I’d decided I was going to do to him.

  I peered over the edge of the railing, trying not to get too close. I wasn’t sure I would even recognize him, but I did. I saw him right away. He was sitting on a bench at the far end of the platform, his knees pulled up to his chest, his fingers fidgeting with his shoelaces. I could see that he was skinny, but not exactly in an AIDS way. He didn’t look the way Finn did at the end. He looked like he’d always been like that.

  I stood for a while, watching him. Every now and then he snapped his head up and looked around. Almost like he was spooked. Like he could tell I was there somewhere. Each time he did that, I jumped back out of his line of sight.

  Toby looked younger than Finn. Younger than my mother or father. If I had to guess, I would have said he was around thirty, but I’m not good at that kind of thing. From where I was I could see his skinny neck and his oversize Adam’s apple poking out; his hair looked soft, like baby bird feathers dusted over his head. Toby stood up and paced down the platform. He wore a small blue backpack and he had on jeans and sneakers and a thick gray sweater with a red woolen scarf, but no coat. He didn’t seem like anything special, and I wondered why someone like Finn would go out with him. He stared down the track, then glanced at his watch. I heard the noise of the train edging in.

  Toby peeked down at his watch again, and then, before I had time to think, he looked right up to the spot where I was standing. I jumped back before he saw me, and right then I decided I wouldn’t go down there. I wouldn’t meet Toby after all. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. What would I say? No. I wouldn’t go down. I’d watch from above. I’d wait for the train to take him away. He’d get the message.

  I inched back to my place and peered down. What I saw was Toby, looking straight back up at me, staring right at my spot. One hand was shading his eyes, and when he saw me he spread the fingers of his other hand and raised them in the smallest of waves. Before I could decide not to, I did the same. I edged a hand barely above the top of the railing and spread my fingers.

  Then I smiled. It was only the barest of smiles, and it came out without me wanting it to. I don’t know how I could have smiled at the man who killed Finn, but I did, and that seemed to seal something. It felt like that smile had locked me in, like it was some kind of promise that made it so I had no choice but to walk down that flight of steps to the platform.

  Toby kept staring up at me with a sort of worried look. The way the light was pouring down on his face, the way his hand stayed raised, made it look like he was in a medieval painting, shielding his eyes from something bigger than himself. He pointed to the platform and nodded his head downward. And before I could stop myself, I was nodding back and walking to the covered stairway. It felt like I was moving in slow motion. Like the stairs might keep going down and down forever.

  But when I walked onto the platform, it was light and warm and the train had just pulled in. Toby was walking toward me, with a smile that wasn’t one of those adult smiles that’s too big with no thinking behind it. It was a real smile. Like he was so glad to see me he almost couldn’t believe his luck.

  “Come on,” he said, like we already knew each other.

  It was a strange time of day. Most people weren’t done with work yet, and if they were they were mostly headed north, coming home from the city. I walked onto the southbound train, trying not to think too hard about what I was doing.

  The carriage we picked was almost empty. Toby pointed to a set of four seats, two facing two. “Here?”

  I nodded and sat down. Toby sat in the aisle seat, diagonal from me. His knees poked out across the space between us, forcing me to lean in toward the window to avoid touching him.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said. I could see him trying to make eye contact with me, but I didn’t want that. I kept my head turned away, staring out the window at an Absolut vodka billboard on the platform. On the bottom someone had written Def Leppard Rokz, but someone else had crossed out Rokz and written Sukz in its place.

  “It’s okay,” I said, still staring out the window.

  “You’re not scared or anything, are you? Because I know what I must have seemed like on the phone and I know what your family thinks of me, and I was trying so hard to find some kind of way to talk to you.”

  The train pulled out of the station, slowly rocking side to side.

  “No. You’re not scaring me.”

  “Good. That’s good.” He stared over at the empty seat across the aisle, then slowly turned back to me. “Did you tell your parents you were coming?”

  At first I didn’t answer. Then I turned and looked right at him and said, “That’s kind of a creepy thing to ask, isn’t it?”

  Toby seemed worried for a second. He gave a tiny wince, like he knew he’d made a mistake. But then he laughed. “You’re right. It is creepy. Very creepy. That’s not how I meant it.” He rolled his eyes. They were dark brown and soft in a way that reminded me of an animal’s eyes. Like the big brown eyes of a horse. “Finn used to say . . .”

  I sat up straighter when he said Finn’s name. My whole body went tense, and Toby must have seen that, because he frowned and gave me a kind of pleading look. “Oh, it’s nothing,” he said, waving his long hand in the air. He tilted his head, trying to catch my eye again. Trying to see if I was trusting him.

  “Anyway, the answer’s no. I didn’t tell anyone about it.” I had a Swiss Army knife in my coat pocket with the corkscrew already out. Just in case.

  Toby reached into his backpack and pulled out a crumpled Dunkin’ Donuts bag with a cruller in it. He twisted off a chunk and gave it to me. The sticky glaze had melted a little, making the whole thing a mess. I didn’t want to take it from him, but I’d come straight from school and I was starving.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I sat there untwisting the two strands of donut, and when I looked up I saw that Toby was doing the same thing. We both smiled, nervous, not knowing what to say. Then I was sorry that I’d smiled, because I didn’t want him to get the idea that we were friends or anything.

  The train slowed. The doors slid open and a blast of cold air drifted through. Toby didn’t even seem to notice th
at we’d stopped. I thought it must have been almost four o’clock by that time, but I didn’t want to say anything. I’d already said I wasn’t scared, and I wasn’t. The doors closed again and the train pulled out.

  “It’s like DNA, isn’t it?” Toby held the half-separated donut up to the window. “You know, double helix.”

  It was the kind of thing Finn might have said to me, and I couldn’t help smiling. There was something that felt familiar about Toby, and I couldn’t help carrying it on. “Dunkin’ DNA, Dunkin’ blood cells, a twleve-pack of Dunkin’ eyeballs—”

  Toby threw his hand over his mouth to keep from spitting out his donut. His lips were coated in sticky glaze. “And Dunkin’ bacteria and Dunkin’ viruses . . .”

  I could tell he hadn’t meant to say that word. Viruses. I looked away. Toby looked down, and when he looked back up his face was serious.

  “Hey,” he said. “I miss him, you know.”

  I ate the last bite of my donut and stared out at the fenced-off backyards of the houses that bordered the tracks. Through some of the windows you could see people in their kitchens, cooking dinner. I rubbed my sticky fingers against the cloth of the seat.

  “Me too,” I said after a while.

  “He talked about you all the time,” Toby said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  I could feel myself starting to smile and blush, and I turned away fast. Then I understood what it meant. I hadn’t been a secret. Toby knew about me.

  “Yeah, right,” I said, shrugging like I didn’t care.

  “It’s true.”

  We sat there in silence. I saw Toby fidgeting with his train ticket. Folding and unfolding it again and again.

  “So . . . are you some kind of artist too?” I said.