Peter stood with his face glistening and the greasy trails running down his chest. Neither knew what to say. The mystery of what another person may be thinking at any given moment. Then, by nameless stimulus, he dropped the steak to the floor and they fell into each other and held.
“What do we do now?” she said eventually.
“I guess we just stand here like this until something happens next,” Peter said.
She laid her face in the nook of his arm. He was clammy as though from a night of fever and smelled as bad as he looked and this sounded like a fine plan.
The front door was kicked in.
Peter seized Letha’s arm and pulled her out the back door. Not thinking, but heedless obeisance to his most basic instinct, the foundation upon which all others were constructed. The woods, always run for the woods. They raced across the deck and through the yard, but before they reached the tree line there was the report of the back door banging the side of the house and along with it the Jehovan command FREEZE.
They froze. They turned slowly. Neck was standing in the doorframe. He was in jeans and a sweatshirt but he had a sidearm aimed at Peter. Peter had heard of the big bang theory and the idea of the whole of the universe squeezed into one little black dot but it was never something that made any sense to him until looking into the barrel of that gun pointed at him. Nose appeared, also in street clothes.
“Hands up,” said Neck.
They raised their hands.
“You,” said Neck, indicating Peter. “Down on the ground, you sick fucking animal.”
Neck held the weapon on him as Peter lay flat on his stomach. The grass pricked his skin and it occurred to him now that it was a very cold day, how cold he was. The kind of cold like you feel you will never be warm again. Which Peter knew he would not. Nose came forward and roughly wrenched Peter’s arms behind his back.
“Be careful,” said Letha feebly.
Nose dug his knee between Peter’s shoulder blades and pulled out a pair of handcuffs.
“Peter Rumancek,” he said, “you have the right to remain fucked, you fucking deviant piece of shit.”
He stood, pressing extra weight into the knee. Peter gasped.
“You have the right to fuck yourself,” said Nose. “If you choose to waive this right, an ass-fucking will be provided for you in a court of law.”
He kicked Peter. Letha screamed for him to stop. He ignored her. He was just getting into his element. He hauled Peter to his feet. The bolt of pain in his shoulder socket was an unwelcome distraction from the pain of the metal biting his wrists.
“You have the right,” said Nose, almost singing, “to suck the hairy hose of whatever heathen god awaits you, buddy-boy—goddammit!”
Letha was trying to pry his hands from Peter. “I won’t let you,” she said.
“Stand away,” said Neck.
“I won’t let you.” She sounded stupid like a child and gouged her fingernails into Nose’s knuckles.
“Don’t,” said Peter. Her intervention before had saved him from a gang of boys, but these were men with guns and a mission and fighting it was only the difference between its happening here in front of her eyes or by the river somewhere, a bridge overhead like the underbelly of a snake. Assholes.
“Back off!” said Nose, shoving her. She fell to the ground and Nose snaked a forearm hard around Peter’s windpipe. Peter choked for air.
“Stay down or I break his goddamn neck.”
He jerked Peter toward the house. Letha watched, sunken by her own powerlessness. A condition that seemed to give people named Godfrey so much trouble to understand.
Peter met her eye and he tried to say several important things with that look. When you have nothing else, have dignity, he tried to say. Nicolae had always told him that and he never knew how he himself would do in practice.
Tell Lynda when the time comes that with my last spit I will spit in their eye and with my last breath curse them so their dicks fall off, he said with his eyes. Tell Lynda when she feels the wind just before the first rain of spring it’s me, that will be me checking to make sure she is still just as fat as she is today.
And Roman. Help Roman become a man on the path of light and love. Not the other way. Tell Roman … all the things I couldn’t.
You are as full of light and love as anyone I know, his eyes said. I’m sorry I will never see the baby hanging off your tits. I’m sorry I will never see your tits again. They’re good tits and I’ll miss them.
Nose threw a fist into Peter’s kidneys. “This one’s sweating like a nigger trying to read,” he said.
Behind the pain, this struck Peter as odd—didn’t he realize how cold it was?
There was a creak and Shelley emerged onto the deck. Neck looked over and said, “Christ, fucking perfect.”
“Go back inside,” said Nose.
Shelley didn’t move.
“Get back in the goddamn house,” said Nose.
Shelley began swaying from side to side. She made a low keening noise like an anxious ruminant.
“Fucking wonderful,” said Neck.
“Back in the fucking house!” said Nose.
“You don’t need to yell at her,” said Peter. He waited for the blow to follow and was obliged: the man’s fist landed on the side of his head. The keen became a muted wail as Shelley covered her face and reeled.
“Will you deal with that fucking thing?” said Nose, shaking out his knuckles.
But there was a noise inside and Neck stood to the side of the door out of view of anyone else who might join this party.
“You don’t have to do this,” said Letha quietly, still sitting on the ground. “You think you do, but you don’t.”
Nose’s face went red as a drunk’s and the veins in his neck stood out. “One more word and buddy-boy gets gutted like a fucking fish right here!”
Shelley began to flash discordantly.
“What the Christ?” said Neck.
Roman emerged then from the house. Everyone but Shelley was silent. Roman surveyed the scene. He did not see Neck.
“There is,” said Neck, “a gun pointed at the back of your head. Do not, repeat, do not turn around.”
Roman turned.
“Back off,” said Neck.
Roman looked in his eyes. “Put the gun in your mouth,” said Roman.
Neck put the gun in his mouth. Nose started to come at Roman, but Roman cast a finger at him without taking his eyes from Neck and said, “If he moves, pull the trigger.”
Neck’s eyes bulged and he grunted hoarsely and Nose stopped. Roman went to Shelley. He put his hands behind her head and pulled her to a crouch so his forehead touched hers and he breathed with her down to a gentle lull. He was calming because he was calm himself. He had made mistakes out of confusion but just now, when he had pulled up out front, he had heard the sound of his sister needing his help and this was all the focus he needed.
Letha stood by Peter. She did not understand what she had just seen happen but did not need to. She reached for Peter’s face and smoothed the bangs from his eyes and tucked them behind his ear. She needed to do that.
Roman addressed Nose. “Uncuff him.”
Nose hesitated.
Roman looked at Neck. His face beaded sweat and he panted through his nostrils.
“If he’s still handcuffed by the time I count to three, pull the trigger,” said Roman.
“One,” said Roman.
Nose freed Peter’s hands. Peter rubbed the red rings on his wrists. Nose cast his eyes fierce and fearful to the ground, the mirror of an adolescent dealing with a hated cop.
Peter took Letha’s hand. He saw Shelley observe this small intimacy and waved with a pinkie. No one’s forgetting you.
“You will go to your car,” Roman instructed Neck. “That faggot will take 19 to the Allegheny County line.”
“There’s no reason to call him a faggot,” Letha said.
“That … knucklehead will take 79 to the West V
irginia state line. At that point you can take the gun out of your mouth. And you”—addressing his partner—“punch yourself in the nose.”
* * *
“Someone told her,” said Nurse Kotar. “We were going to wait until you came to decide how to handle the … situation. But she knows.”
Godfrey breathed deeply and tried to think of all the reasons not to put his fist through the drywall but the only one was habit. He didn’t anyway.
“What’s her condition?” he said.
“Catatonia. Not crying, not speaking. I had to double-check to make sure she was blinking. And Doctor. Her hair.”
He went to Christina Wendall’s room. She was in the armchair and her feet were flat on the floor and her hands were in her lap. Normally she was so full of nervous energy that in the moment he could not remember seeing anything sadder than her hands being still. Her hair had gone uniform white. Godfrey shivered, the window was open. But her arms were bare. She was wearing a spaghetti-strap shirt and her skinny arms and shoulders were indifferent in the chill.
“Christina,” said Godfrey. She looked at him but he expected no response and she gave him none. His heart wasn’t in it anyway. The thing between her and him right now was greater charity than any he might provide. He took the blanket from the bed and tucked it around her shoulders. This paternal reflex gave rise to another he probably should have curbed. But he was a father and a human, and he was tired. He brushed the hair from her face and kissed her cheek.
The door opened and Godfrey quickly straightened. Nurse Kotar stood in the threshold.
“Why is this window open?” said Godfrey, misdirecting his own impropriety.
“I’m sorry, Doctor, I don’t know. But your daughter is on the line. She said it was an emergency.”
Wisdom Is Where the Brain Meets the Heart
The chapel stood against the tree line under the gray of the sky, near enough in shade that it could have been an afterthought from the same brush. In the sanctuary, dusk light filled the chapel and cobwebs stretched between the crossbeams and the outside air sent small dust devils up the aisle as Dr. Godfrey shut the heavy oak doors. He assessed the situation and soon after took Roman back across the campus to the main facility on a supply run, Peter still needing clothes and Godfrey needing information that separating the suspects was more likely to provide. Godfrey put an arm around his nephew.
“Good to see you walking, kiddo. Now what the hell is going on?”
“Sometimes…” said Roman, and then he stopped, hesitating.
“Sometimes what?” said Godfrey.
“Sometimes a wolf goes crazy and doesn’t eat what it kills.”
Godfrey’s first impulse was to consider this an evasion, but something older and deeper told him otherwise.
“When you say a wolf, what exactly do you mean?”
“I mean a werewolf.”
Godfrey considered this. Any other day of his adult life and he would have been detaching himself and analyzing the cause of this shared delusion—plainly enough, it wasn’t a lie. But he had resolved in the blue dawn, looking into his coffee and seeing the whorl of cream and knowing absolutely he was witness to the transmigration of two souls, knowing it had happened again and it hadn’t happened to her and being as thankful as he was for anything, he had resolved to emerge from the world of shadow and come to a Rational Explanation for what was going on, and now in light of day it was necessary and impractical clarification he finally achieved. There was no such explanation. So, unfettering oneself of irreconcilables, where did this leave one? A werewolf loose in Hemlock Grove. How offensively obvious. And more striking than simple credulity was the realization that in a dark and hermetic corner of his mind he had of course known already.
He gestured to a bench and sat.
“Is it Peter?” he said, cringing inside.
“It’s not Peter.”
“Peter isn’t a werewolf?”
“He is. But it’s not him.”
Godfrey was unsure how he felt about this.
“I was with him last night,” said Roman.
Godfrey nodded. “And you’ve been trying to find this … bad werewolf?”
“He’s not really bad, he’s just sick,” said Roman.
“But you didn’t find him?”
“I was in a coma.”
Godfrey chuckled. Oh that.
“Supposing,” said Godfrey, “you were to sum up as much as you’ve actually learned that we can use.”
Roman thought about it. He shrugged. Godfrey waited for something to follow but realized the shrug itself was his answer.
He patted Roman’s knee and squeezed. “I believe,” he said and nodded at the chapel, “they’ll be able to keep themselves entertained long enough for us to step into my office and have a drink.”
They stood and continued.
“So we have another month to find the bad wolf,” said Godfrey.
“Vargulf,” said Roman.
“Gesundheit,” said Godfrey. “In the meantime keeping that one away from the torches and pitchforks?”
Roman nodded. More or less.
Godfrey flicked the edge of a withered holdout birch leaf. So, a goal. Or something. And compared with living day to day with your head in a lion’s mouth of cloying and impenetrable nothing, what was there to say? Wisdom was where the brain met the heart and what he felt right now was the literal difference between life and death. He felt something that he hadn’t felt since his aborted attempt to break things off with Olivia. He felt like drinking to be more and not less awake.
“Where’s your mother?” he asked.
Roman looked off down the path.
“She’s with Shelley.”
* * *
It was nearly dark and the two of them were alone. Dr. Godfrey would return after nightfall to bring food and take her home. They lay on a pile of blankets on the altar, Peter wearing scrubs and Godfrey’s sweater and Letha in his arms. Above them the stained glass was pelted by a light rain.
“They were in their beds,” said Letha. “The sheriff was on a call. But he had a car outside, and they didn’t see anything. Whatever it was got in without being seen and … did that. That’s no wild animal. What kind of person has it in them to do that?”
The cat leaped onto the windowsill and sat; his dangling tail flicked, keeping time. Peter slipped his hand up under her shirt and ran his hand in slow hemispheres over her stomach. She toyed with the snake ring encircling her finger.
“Do you think plastic has a consciousness like stone or wood?” she said. “Do you think it remembers where it’s been?”
She took his arm and pulled it over her snug and they lay listening to the rain for a while. She thought about the life that grew inside her and the shadow of all this death. That if a thing is defined in contrast that’s what life is, the shadow of death. So the mystery of death couldn’t be the bad thing, because without it there wouldn’t be life. The badness was life, just life happening, as essential a part of the good as the good. And what was there to do but to take it as it comes and to hope, to hope constantly and carnally and with no time to lose.
She pulled his hand over her breast.
“In … church?” he said.
Afterward they fell still, glowing and panting. She lay over him, unmoving, in routine feminine disregard for the man’s body heat situation in such circumstances, but earlier in the day he had known he would never be warm again so he’d take it. Suddenly a black blur caught Peter’s eye, the cat bolting from the window. And he looked over just in time to notice movement on the other side of the glass, a fleeting apparition disappearing before he could make anything out but the red-stained shock of white hair.
* * *
Shelley still seemed shaken when Roman got home so he tucked her in for a nap and said he would make dinner. The steak package was still on the kitchen counter, dried pink on the white diaper pad, and the meat on the floor had been stepped on. He cleaned up and was running
hot water over the mop when Olivia said, “What happened to the front door?”
Roman turned. She wore a long white cardigan with the sleeves hanging girlishly past her thumbs and her hair was in a ponytail, and there was nothing in her demeanor to suggest she had been missing a night and a day or all the things that had happened in that time.
“Where have you been?” he said.
“The institute. I had a bit of a spell. But Johann says it’s nothing to worry about.”
They looked at each other.
“I feel much better now,” she said.
Roman wrung out the mop.
* * *
At the other Godfrey household Marie was waiting for her husband and daughter to arrive. Dr. Godfrey had a sinking feeling, confronted with her in the foyer. She had known Letha was with him and even called twice to verify when they would be home. So what now?
“It was the soonest we could get away,” he said, preempting his defense.
She did not respond. She came forward, that tension deliquescing like snow packed in a tight fist, and she seized Letha and held tightly. There was a tremor in her shoulders. She had not been angry, she just needed to hold her daughter.
Letha went upstairs and Godfrey sat in the armchair in the living room and exhaled. Long day. Long long day. Marie sat on the arm of the chair and rested a hand on the back of his neck and squeezed. They didn’t look at each other, he just sat and felt the good pressure on his neck.
“Have you eaten?” said Marie.
Godfrey shook his head.
“I made you a mouse,” said Marie, making her voice nasal in an impression of the actress Ruth Gordon. “A nice chocolate mouse.”
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