Tell the Wolves I'm Home

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  “How did you meet Finn?” I asked.

  Toby frowned. He took a sip of whiskey, then tapped the edge of his crystal glass. “Oh, nothing interesting. An art class.” He stood up and walked to the bookshelf, turning his back to me. He ran his hand along the spines of those red field guides. “Finn said you two used to go to the Cloisters a lot.”

  I could tell he was trying to change the subject, and I didn’t want to let him.

  “I thought you didn’t do art,” I said.

  “No, I’m not good. It was just a class. That’s all. So, tell me, what do they have at the Cloisters, then?”

  “You’ve never been?”

  He shook his head.

  I turned away quickly, because I didn’t want him to see my smile. I didn’t want him to catch how happy it made me to know that Finn had saved that special place for me.

  “Go on,” Toby said. “Tell me what it’s like. I want to know.”

  “Really?”

  Toby nodded, and I started to picture the Cloisters in my head.

  “Well, it doesn’t look like much from the outside. That’s the first thing. But once you get in it’s like you’re not even in New York anymore. Not even in America.”

  I told him how the very second you got in the doors it was like you’d been lifted right out of the city and into the Middle Ages. I told him about the wide, curving stone steps that took you up to the main cloisters and how the walls were made of big blocks of stone, just like in a castle. Toby sat himself down cross-legged on the rug to listen, and I told him about the herb gardens in the courtyards. Lungwort and bryony and comfrey and yarrow.

  In my mind, I was there walking with Finn. Him rubbing a leaf between his fingers for the scent. Telling me about the doctrine of signatures, which meant that God had signed every medicinal plant so you could tell what it would cure. Red ones for blood disorders. Yellow for jaundice. Other plants I didn’t even remember the names of, with roots shaped like hemorrhoids or kidneys or the heart. Finn said it was all nonsense but that it was a nice idea. Nice to imagine someone signing their name to the world. I didn’t tell Toby about that. About Finn and me there. I stuck to the hard, graceful curve of the stone over the archways and the cobblestoned paths and the impossibly detailed tapestries. I never mentioned a word about Finn, but still, when I looked down, I saw that Toby’s eyes were wet with tears.

  “What is it?”

  He wiped his eyes and tried to put on a smile. “I don’t know,” he said, laughing a little bit. “Everything, I suppose.”

  And right then I felt my heart soften to Toby, because I knew exactly what he meant. I understood how just about anything in the world could remind you of Finn. Trains, or New York City, or plants, or books, or soft sweet black-and-white cookies, or some guy in Central Park playing a polka on the harmonica and the violin at the same time. Things you’d never even seen with Finn could remind you of him, because he was the one person you’d want to show. “Look at that,” you’d want to say, because you knew he would find a way to think it was wonderful. To make you feel like the most observant person in the world for spotting it.

  I sat down next to Toby on the floor, close enough so our arms almost touched. We sat there for what seemed like a long time, neither of us saying anything, until finally Toby broke the silence.

  “You do know that if you ever need anything, you can ring me, right? Anything at all.”

  I nodded. “You always say that.”

  “But I want you to know that I mean it. I’m not only saying it to be nice. You can ring me the same way you would have rung Finn. Just to talk or anything. Anything at all.”

  I told him I knew that he meant it, but I could tell the tone of my voice was saying that I’d never actually call. That he wasn’t Finn. And even though he sounded like he meant it, deep down I had a feeling he was just saying it to be nice.

  “I should probably get going,” I said.

  Toby offered to walk me to Grand Central. The weather had changed while we were buried in the basement. When I left school there were only a few clouds, but by the time we left Finn’s building the whole sky was dark. We’d only walked a few blocks when the first fat raindrops splashed down.

  “Shit,” Toby said. “No umbrella.”

  We ducked into a deli, hoping maybe we could wait it out, but after we’d made three rounds of the aisles, the guy behind the counter stepped out and asked if we needed any help. Toby told him we were just looking for some mints, and the guy pressed his lips together hard and pointed to the candy rack in front of the register.

  We walked downtown in the rain, both of us sucking on those hot, spicy mints we hadn’t meant to buy. When the spiciness started to kick in, I almost spat mine out, but then I didn’t. I thought it was good to test yourself sometimes. It was good to see how much you could take.

  Toby asked me for one of my Finn stories. I hesitated for a few seconds, deciding, then finally I told him about how once on Thanksgiving, when everyone else was watching the football game, Finn and I snuck out of the house and walked into the woods until we were lost. “Just the two of us,” I said, “because we hated football.” I told Toby how good the woods smelled and that Finn made us a little campfire using only sticks and then we sat huddled in close and Finn taught me what all the Latin words in the Lacrimosa part of Mozart’s Requiem meant, and we sang it over and over again in our wobbly singing voices until I knew all of it by heart. I said that Finn told me he wanted to stay there forever, that he never wanted to go back to the city again, but he knew he couldn’t. Then, I said, we followed our tracks home and saw that we weren’t even very lost at all. When we got back, my mother had two pieces of pumpkin pie with Cool Whip saved for us, and we ate them without telling anybody where we’d been.

  “Hmmm. That’s quite something, June.”

  “Yup.”

  Toby started telling me about this time Finn tried to disguise himself so he could go to an exhibit of his own work and hear what people were saying about it. Toby rambled on with his story, but I was drifting away until all of a sudden the shiny roundness of a rain-slicked manhole caught my eye and I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.

  Toby kept walking.

  “Hey,” I shouted to him. “What do you know about those buttons? Those black buttons on the portrait?”

  Toby was a few steps ahead, but he heard me and stopped. He didn’t turn right away. For a few seconds he just stood there. When he finally did turn around, he had a pleading expression on his face. He looked guilty and embarrassed, and I could see that he knew exactly what I was talking about.

  He pulled me over to the side, so I was standing under the little awning of a building while he stood right out in the rain. Then he started apologizing again and again before he told me what happened.

  “All right,” he said, like he’d reached some kind of decision. He breathed out long and slow. “This is really hard.” He paced across the sidewalk before spinning around and coming back.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I said, though I didn’t mean it.

  He seemed to think about that for a moment before shaking his head. He paced away from me then back again before saying anything. “Okay, well . . . The portrait looks good, right?”

  I nodded.

  “But Finn didn’t think so. ‘It has to be perfect. More detail. It needs more detail.’ That’s what he kept saying. He’d get me to bring it to him. Next to the bed. He could hardly see, hardly lift his head. If you’d seen him . . . It was all he could talk about, June. Do you see? And so I promised. I said I’d do what I could. I’d make it perfect.” Toby hung his head. “There. All right? Now you know.”

  I pictured those clumsy buttons, and even I couldn’t believe that Toby would think they made the painting better. He must have seen the look on my face, because right away he said, “Yeah. I know. I completely bollocksed it. But you don’t know what it was like. It was just the two of us that afternoon, and then . . . and then it wa
s just me.” I watched his face, and I could see he was going back to that day. “It was so, so quiet, and I thought if I could only make something right. One thing . . . and I couldn’t even do that. Not even black buttons.”

  My heart was pounding because I couldn’t help picturing the apartment on that day. Finn suddenly still and gone. Toby desperate and fumbling. I bit my lip because I could feel the twitchiness at the corner of my mouth that meant I was going to cry, and I didn’t want to cry in front of Toby. Rain dripped from my soaked hair down across my face, and Toby’s dark eyes were staring into mine, waiting for my response. I wasn’t going to cry. I wasn’t, but then all at once the tears were there, unstoppable.

  I started to walk away, but then I turned back. I decided to stop even trying to hold back the tears. I decided to stand there under an awning on Madison Avenue and let Toby see me. Let him understand that I missed Finn just as much as he did. And once I started, there was no way of stopping. Everything that had been squashed down and pressed into a hard tight ball in the center of my heart came undone. I stood there, shaking and heaving on Madison Avenue in front of Toby, waiting for him to run away or shove me into a taxi, but he didn’t. He stepped in, put his long arms around me, and leaned his head on my shoulder. We stood there under that awning until I could feel that he was crying too. The click of Toby’s mint against his teeth, and the high squeal of car brakes, and the rain plinking on the canvas over our heads all joined with our low deep sobs to make a kind of music that afternoon. It turned the whole city into a chorus of our sadness, and after a while it almost stopped feeling bad and turned into something else. It started to feel like relief.

  When we pulled apart, I couldn’t look Toby in the eye.

  I heard him whisper, “Sorry.” I heard him say, “I’m not an artist, June. I’m so sorry . . . for everything. All of it.”

  I gave the tiniest of shrugs, then I spat my mint into my hand and tossed it onto the sidewalk.

  “These are gross,” I said.

  Toby smiled.

  “Yeah,” he said. But he didn’t spit his out. He kept it in his mouth, where it must have burned at his tongue until it was all gone.

  Thirty-Seven

  It was late at night. That same day. Way after everybody was fast asleep. I was sitting in the kitchen, on the floor, with the Book of Days open on my lap. I cupped my hand around the phone receiver and whispered.

  “I’m calling to tell you that I made it all up.”

  “Oh . . . right. You what?” Toby’s voice sounded dopey, like I’d woken him from some thick kind of dream.

  “The story. My Finn story. It wasn’t true.”

  “Oh. It’s you, June. Hi. What time is it?”

  “Late. Sorry for waking you up.”

  “I wasn’t sleeping. Just resting with some brandy.”

  I laughed with my mouth closed, trying not to make any noise. I reached over to the cabinet next to the dishwasher. The thin one that was my parents’ liquor cabinet. I looked around until I saw the brandy. I set it on the floor next to me and tapped my finger against the top of the bottle.

  “Anyway, so I still owe you a story.”

  “Are you sure yours wasn’t true? I, for one, believed every word.”

  I smiled, even though I thought Toby might be making fun of me. “Come on.”

  “No, really. Very good use of detail. Top marks.” Toby was whispering, even though he was all alone on his end.

  We were both quiet for a few seconds, then Toby said, “You know, it’s all right, June. You don’t have to give me one of your stories if you don’t want to.” I heard him take a sip of his brandy.

  I unscrewed the bottle in my hands, dipped a finger in, then touched it to my tongue.

  “No. I want to. Next time.”

  I could almost hear Toby smiling on the other end.

  “Come whenever. Whenever you can. You know that, right? If you need anything . . .”

  I thought that if I was drowning in the ocean, Finn would be like a strong, polished wooden ship with sails that always caught the wind. And Toby? Well, Toby was more like a big yellow rubber raft that might pop at any moment. But maybe he’d still be there. That’s what I was starting to think.

  I nodded and tipped the bottle to my lips. The brandy shot through my body with so much heat that for a second I felt like my insides might have turned to lava.

  “I know,” I whispered.

  Again, quiet.

  “Well . . . Good night, then,” I said.

  “Good dreams, June.”

  I stretched out flat on my back on the cold linoleum floor and held the receiver against my chest. The only sound in the kitchen was the ticking of the yellow clock high up on the wall over the sink. It must have been a minute or two like that, and then in that quiet dark kitchen I heard my name.

  “June.”

  I put the receiver to my ear.

  “Yeah.”

  “Go to bed.”

  “Okay,” I whispered. “You too.”

  Then I hung up, leaving Toby all by himself in Finn’s apartment.

  I didn’t know how to seal a promise with a dead person. With someone who isn’t dead, you can get a pair of scissors and snip a tiny little cut into your clothes. The clothes can’t be scrappy clothes. They have to be newish ones that you wear all the time and that you’d be in huge trouble for cutting. The cut can be anywhere. Just on the inside hem or in the armpit, and it can be as small as you can possibly make it. That was one of the tricks. Learning to make really small cuts. Those are the rules Greta and I used for sealing promises when we were little. When we were too scared to use blood.

  I stood and pulled a postcard of Miami Beach off the bulletin board and tossed it onto the counter. I held the thumbtack in my hand and poked it into my index finger, squeezing until a drop of blood sat there like a tiny jewel. I read Finn’s note one more time, then pressed my finger down hard right in the middle of it.

  Finn was right. I could tell. Toby had nobody. But it was okay. It was all sealed. He had me now.

  Thirty-Eight

  March was going out like a lamb. Just like in the saying. The trees were still bare, but other than that and the scrappy remnants of snow in the corners of big parking lots, winter seemed to be gone.

  Posters for South Pacific had started to go up all over town. They put them up early so that if enough performances sold out, there would be time to schedule a couple of extra nights. It was Beans who won the contest to design the posters. She’d made the S of South and the P of Pacific look like palm trees, and the whole poster was shaped like a tiki hut. It was pretty good, and I thought I’d make sure to tell her that next time I saw her.

  Everything was starting to feel springy except my parents, who were entering the haggard phase of tax season. The gray stripe in my mother’s hair was getting wider, and I hadn’t seen my father clean-shaven for days and days. Greta and I were on the verge of stew poisoning, which, we used to say, is when your blood actually turns into gravy.

  I left school and walked straight downtown to the bank.

  Gold leaf—real gold leaf—is expensive, but gold paint can sometimes look just as good and it’s the same price as any other color. I bought a tiny bottle of gold paint and a thin paintbrush from Kmart. I’d been keeping them in the side pocket of my backpack, right next to the key to the safety-deposit box.

  This time, Mr. Zimmer didn’t say anything about AIDS. He acted normal and took me right down to the basement.

  “We’ll be closing up in about half an hour,” he said, looking at his watch. “I’ll give a knock so you have some time to pack up, okay?”

  “Thanks. That’s great,” I said.

  I laid the painting flat on the desk and touched a finger to each black button. One at a time. They didn’t look so ugly now. Now that I knew their story, they were almost kind of beautiful. Shiny black pearls. Then I traced the skull on Greta’s hand with my finger.

  I propped the painting up
against the wall and smiled at it. Finn would like—no, he would love this thing I was going to do. I pulled out the jar of paint and the brush from my backpack and set them on the desk. It took some effort to unscrew the lid, but I got it after a few seconds. A light whiff of paint fumes filled the room and I breathed in deep, because that smell reminded me so much of Finn. Then I dipped the brush into the jar and scraped it against the edge. I stopped, my hand hovering over the surface of the painting, suddenly scared to touch the bristles to the canvas. But I knew Finn. I wasn’t like the people who tried to finish the Requiem for Mozart. I knew what Finn would say.

  So I started, lightly at first, dragging the brush down a strand of my hair in the portrait. Then I did one of Greta’s. I stepped back and looked, like artists do. Tilting my head like I’d always watched Finn doing when he was trying to size something up. I didn’t want to do too much. I knew how easy it could be to get carried away. I dipped the brush again, and in that little underground room I tried to imagine Finn’s hand guiding mine, barely touching, his soft palm against the back of my hand. I imagined that and let the brush slowly stroke down the length of my painted hair, the hair Finn had made. His work. How close did Finn have to look to make this other me? What did he see? Could he tell that I always wore Bonne Bell bubblegum lip gloss when I went to see him? Did he see me studying his bare feet while he was working on the canvas? Could he read my heart? I’d like to think he couldn’t. I’d like to think I had enough skill to keep that much hidden.

  I did a few more strands of my hair, then a few more of Greta’s. I stepped back again. What I was going for was something like the wings of the angels in one of the illuminated manuscripts downstairs at the Cloisters. Something a little bit like that but not exactly, because we didn’t have wings, only boring straight hair. But illuminated. I wanted that painting to beam with gold. I wanted it to sing out about Finn and how much I loved him. The way Toby’s buttons did, if you knew the story.