Tell the Wolves I'm Home

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  “Greta, come on. Get up.” I sat her up and leaned her against my arm. I pushed the soggy leaves off her chest and tried to shake her awake.

  She let out a groan and tried to lie back down, but I held her tight.

  I looked behind me and couldn’t see even the faintest glow from the fire anymore. Someone must have put it out. Everyone must have left. There was only Greta and me.

  I shoved Greta’s dirty glasses and the flashlight into my pocket and one more time I tried to wake her. I shook her by the shoulders and shouted, “Greta. Michelle. Elbus. Wake. Up.”

  Her eyes fluttered and she twitched her shoulders to push my hands away.

  Usually I would give anything to shrink, to be small and graceful like Greta, but on that night, under that nearly moonless sky, I was glad to have strength and size. I dragged her to the tree trunk and propped her up in a sit against it. I slung my backpack onto one shoulder. Then I crouched down in front of her, my back to her belly, and stretched her arms around my neck.

  “One . . . two . . . three,” I said, then leaned forward and teetered to standing. Her fingers were weak, drunk person’s fingers, so I stayed stooped over to stop her from falling off. I thought of all the times when it was the other way around, Greta piggybacking me around the backyard when we were little.

  I didn’t know what I would do when we got home, I just knew that I had to get us there. I chewed a piece of gum until it was soft and then put it in Greta’s mouth, which I know is gross, but it was the only way I could think to hide her breath. Then we left, just me running with my sister, the wolves at our backs. It was like we were a story, us two. A real story, not just one I made up.

  I walked, stopping to set Greta down a few times when I started to get tired. I stayed in the woods for as long as I could before coming out onto Evergreen Circle, where I knew I could cut between the Morellis’ house and the Kleins’ and onto Young Street, which connected to our own. Right there, in that stretch of weedy grass between those two houses, Greta whispered into the back of my neck.

  “Remember invisible mermaids?” she said. Her voice was hoarse and tired. It sounded like someone else was talking, not Greta. I was breathing hard. I stopped to catch my breath.

  I nodded. I did remember. There was this tropical fish place in Queens. Neptune’s Grotto. A huge dim room, like a warehouse. Fish tanks stacked at least six high, almost right up to the ceiling, towering over the heads of Greta and me. Yellow tangs, lyretail mollies, emerald rainbowfish, kissing gouramis.

  Greta would grab my hand and we’d run between the aisles. The story we had was that all the fish had been trapped and we were free because we were invisible mermaids. We would hide, even though nobody was looking for us. The owner of the place was a friend of my grandfather’s, so even though we didn’t live anywhere near Queens anymore, my dad was still the accountant for that place.

  “Remember the blue place? That little blue room,” Greta mumbled.

  I nodded. That was the fish nursery where they kept the newly hatched stuff.

  My back ached and I wanted so badly to put Greta down again. She was awake. She could stand. I could set her down on the curb and we could talk about invisible mermaids. But I knew if I did that, the moment would be over. As soon as she saw my face, she’d remember to be mean. She’d remember who she was.

  “What about it?” I said.

  “I don’t know, just sometimes . . . sometimes I think about things like that. What it used to be like.”

  I almost told her that it could be like that again. That if she stopped being so mean we could go back to being like we used to be. But I didn’t say it. I wasn’t sure it was true.

  So instead I said, “Maybe we could try to go there sometime.”

  “Yeah. We could, couldn’t we?” And right in my belly I felt how much I’d been missing her. The real Greta. The old Greta.

  “Greta?” I felt her nod. “What did Mr. Nebowitz want the other night?”

  I knew asking her was risky. She struggled free of my back and stumbled onto the street. She pulled her coat tight around herself and looked down at the ground.

  “Nothing,” she mumbled. “He didn’t want anything.”

  “Did he, like . . .?” I gave her a look that implied whatever she needed it to imply. That whole idea seemed to wake her up, to turn her back into herself.

  “Ugh, June. Don’t be so gross.” She waved the back of her hand at me in a kind of drunken flap.

  “Well, what, then?”

  She eyed me up, then suddenly her frown turned into a big leery smile. “Opportunities, June. Opportunities galore.” Then she twirled around and headed down the street toward home. A few seconds later she stopped and turned to face me. She must have spun too fast, because she lost her balance and ended up grabbing on to somebody’s mailbox to stay upright. When she’d steadied herself, she focused on me.

  “You know what Megan said when I told her my uncle died of AIDS? Guess. Take a guess.”

  “Come on, Greta. We have to go.”

  “No. This is the best, June. You’ll love this. Megan looked at me all serious and said, ‘Wow, that would be a great college essay. You’d be a shoo-in with something like that.’” Greta laughed and laughed. She sat down on the road, shaking with laughter until she started coughing and coughing.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “But it’s funny, right? Right?”

  “Yeah, really funny, Greta. Hilarious.” I reached for her hand to pull her up, but she snatched it away. She stopped laughing and her face went suddenly hard.

  “You think I didn’t want to keep going to Finn’s because I didn’t care? You really think this person who I’ve known forever is dying and I don’t care?”

  Before I could say anything, she pushed herself up from the street. She flailed her arm at me dismissively and then she ran. I watched her lurching ahead, body on the edge of tipping over, stumbling down the road toward home.

  The night air revived Greta enough so she could walk upstairs without falling, change into pajamas, and get into bed.

  I changed out of my smoky clothes, then went down to tell my parents that everything was okay.

  “You know, June,” my mother said, “I can’t tell you how glad I am that you and Greta are starting to do things together again.”

  It felt like even nodding would be a kind of lie.

  Twenty-Three

  This is what was in that brown paper bag from Toby:

  4 cassette tapes of Mozart’s Requiem

  1 note

  I scooted onto my bed and pressed my ear against the wall. When Greta and I are in our beds, our heads are right next to each other. If the wall wasn’t there, we’d be lying side by side. I listened for a minute to make sure she was asleep, and when I heard nothing I unzipped my backpack and spilled the tapes out onto my bed. I recognized them right away.

  They were from this one Sunday when Finn took me to Tower Records’ Classical Annex on 4th Street; he bought four different versions of Mozart’s Requiem so we could decide which one was the best. I didn’t even know that it came in other versions until Finn showed me.

  He said it’d be like the Pepsi challenge, where we chose without knowing which version was which. I had this bad feeling that they’d all sound the same to me and I’d have to look stupid in front of Finn, but that’s not what happened.

  “You’ll be surprised how different they all are,” he said. He had a little half smile, and I could tell that he’d seen what I was thinking.

  We took a taxi back to Finn’s apartment, and when we got there he made a pot of tea in the Russian teapot and put out a great big bowl of red-shelled pistachios. Then he pushed the coffee table out of the way so we could lie flat on our backs on his beautiful Turkish rug. And then we listened.

  Two of the versions were so different it made me angry. They actually had different endings, which Finn told me later was because Mozart never really finished the whole Requiem before he died and ev
en now people argue about which part he didn’t write and how those parts should go. But I didn’t care. It just sounded wrong to me. Even the other two weren’t as good as our old version, the one we listened to most of the time, and I said that to Finn.

  He looked kind of sad after that. He patted me on the shoulder and told me that he knew what I meant. That usually the first version you hear is the one you’ll love for the rest of your life.

  The other thing in the bag was a note. This is what it said:

  Dear June,

  If you’re reading this, then it means you met me at the train station, and I want to thank you for coming. So . . . thank you!

  I will admit that I had a peek in the bag and I saw those tapes, and it made me think that there are probably so many things you know about Finn that I don’t and so many things I know that you don’t. There are loads of stories we could tell each other. But then I thought that probably it’s not going to happen.

  Everything is the same, though, if you’re interested. Same address, same phone number. Same as Finn’s. I don’t go out much. I’m usually here.

  With Affection,

  Toby

  After I read the note, I spilled out all the money Toby gave me. There were all kinds of bills—ones and fives and twenties and even fifties. It came out to $763, which was more than I’d ever had in my life. I felt like a thief with all that money. Like a thief once removed, because it felt to me like Toby was the real thief.

  I put everything in the back of my closet with the teapot and the first note from Toby, and then I fell asleep. The bed was warm and ordinary and perfect, and it had been such a long, long day. Probably the longest day of my life. I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds, if you want them to be there.

  Twenty-Four

  “Get a look at this.” My father handed a folded-over page of the Sunday New York Post to my mother. She was at the kitchen counter, chopping mushrooms for omelets.

  “What is it?”

  “Just have a look.”

  She wiped her hands on a towel and leaned over my father’s shoulder. He raised the article up. As she read, lines formed on her forehead. She turned away.

  “No, thank you,” she said.

  “It’s something to think about though,” my father said.

  Greta was still asleep so it was just me and my dad at the table, waiting for our omelets. We both liked mushroom and Swiss. I sipped my orange juice from an old scratched-up Welch’s jelly-jar glass that had bits and pieces of Fred Flintstone’s orange caveman suit on it.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” my mother said. “Put it away.”

  My dad gave me a helpless look, like if it was up to him I could have seen the paper. He held on to it for a second.

  “She’s fourteen, Danni.”

  “I don’t care.” My mother snatched the page out of his hand. “And that’s that.”

  I took the last sip of my juice.

  “I’m not a baby,” I said, to back my father up.

  My mother sighed and put down her knife. She looked me up and down and sighed again. “I know, Junie. I know.” She glanced at the paper, then back at me. “Here,” she said, and put it in my hand.

  I was expecting another article about the portrait. What I wasn’t expecting was a big headline about some soldier who’d done it with both a man and a woman even though he knew he had AIDS. Now all three of them had AIDS, and the soldier was probably going to jail for it.

  “So?” my father said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “That man—that Toby. It makes you think.” My father didn’t look me in the eye.

  “You think he should go to jail?” I thought of the train. I thought how he’d brought those tapes to me all the way from the city. I thought how he didn’t seem so bad.

  “Yeah, of course he should. He is a murderer.” The voice came from the doorway. Greta stood there, leaning against the wall. There’d been a rehearsal the night before and she had gray smudges of makeup all around her eyes, which made her look like some kind of ghoul. She stared right at me. “Isn’t he?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Greta hadn’t said a thing to me since the party two days ago. Now she stood with a cup of coffee in her hand, thinking she was cool. She’d started drinking coffee only a couple of weeks ago, but she acted like she’d been drinking it her whole life.

  “Why does everything need to turn into an argument with you two?” my mother asked.

  Greta only smirked.

  Later that same Sunday, Greta and I were sitting at the kitchen table, finishing off homework. It was snowing, just lightly, and my mother had made us both mugs of hot chocolate. She was hanging around the kitchen looking like she was waiting for something to happen. She’d been like that a lot since Finn died. Once, when she didn’t know I was watching her, I saw her pick up the phone receiver, hold it up to her ear, and stand there like that, waiting. She never dialed. Now she stood there, staring at the toaster.

  “Girls,” she said after a while. We looked up. “These are for the two of you.” She held out two little brown envelopes, one with my name on it and the other with Greta’s.

  “So what’s in them?” Greta asked.

  “Keys.” My mother pressed an envelope into each of our hands. “If you go to the Bank of New York on North Street, you can look at the portrait anytime you want. Either of you.”

  I peeled my envelope open and let the key slide out onto my palm.

  “Box number 2963. That’s all you have to tell them. Then they’ll take it out and put it in a private room and you can take as much time as you want.”

  “Like I’m ever going to do that,” Greta said.

  “Nobody’s saying you have to go, Greta, but it’s your painting. Yours and June’s, and you should be able to see it whenever you want. That’s all.”

  I dropped the key back into the envelope. I thought I would put it in the back of my closet with the notes from Toby and the teapot and those tapes of the Requiem. I thought I might never go to look at the portrait, but I wasn’t sure.

  Greta slugged down the last sip of her hot chocolate, said, “Whatever,” picked up her key, and walked right out of the kitchen without looking at me once.

  After dinner, after everybody had forgotten all about the newspaper, I pulled out the page about that soldier. I read it again and I hated him. How could someone be so selfish? I would never get on a train with someone like that. I would never take a donut from him.

  I folded the article up, put it in an envelope, and wrote Toby’s name and Finn’s address on it. I got a stamp from the desk drawer in the living room, licked it, and stuck it on. I looked at it. I could send it just like that, but I didn’t. I wrote my name and address in the top left corner. I wanted Toby to know it was from me.

  A few days later I got a letter back. I was usually the first one home to get the mail, but Toby didn’t know that, so he’d gone through a lot of trouble disguising it. The envelope was big and brown and had a return address from the League of Young Falconers typed out on the front, which made me smile, but only for a second, because almost right away it bugged me that Finn had told him about the falconing thing. At first I almost thought it was junk mail, except that my name and address were handwritten. Inside were a few folded sheets of blank paper, to bulk the letter up and make it look real, and one sheet with writing on it.

  Dear June,

  That’s not how it happened. I promise you.

  With hopes that this will make a difference,

  Toby

  Twenty-Five

  There’s this statue at the Cloisters that Finn showed me the first time he took me there. It’s a Virgin Mary with a very plain face made of birchwood. She’s sitting down, and the look on her face isn’t exactly sad, but she’s
not smiling either. She’s sturdy and strong, and sitting on her lap is what looks like a small doll of herself. But it’s not. It’s Jesus as a kid, and Mary’s holding him with two hands, like you’d hold a book. The main thing you notice about that statue is that Jesus is missing his head. Instead of a head, he has a thin splintery stick of wood poking out of his neck. He’s holding a book, and Mary is looking out at you like she hasn’t even noticed her baby’s head is gone. Or maybe it’s that she knows all about it, but she’s daring anyone to mention it. Or maybe it’s neither of those things. Maybe that solid look on her face is there because somehow she already knows everything that’s going to happen to her only little boy.

  Finn and I stood together looking at that statue for probably the ninety-seventh time, listening to the rain kissing down on the old stone courtyard.

  “I’d like to paint a portrait,” he said. “Of you. You and Greta together.”

  “Why?”

  “Just because. Because you’re at the right age for a portrait and I haven’t painted one in a very long time.” Finn tilted his head and squinted one eye at the statue.

  “Thirteen is the right age for a portrait?”

  “Of course it is,” he said, turning his squinted eye on me. “It’s the moment right before you slip away into the rest of your life.”

  “Then what about Greta?”

  Finn laughed. “Well, I’ll have to try to catch her before she slips away completely.”

  I didn’t really want to be in a portrait. Even one of Finn’s, which I knew would be great. But I nodded anyway.

  “How long would it take?” I asked.

  “Oh, that all depends,” he said.

  “On what?”

  Finn looked at the Mary statue again. Then he pointed at it. “How long do you think it took to make her?”