Beth’s parents are sitting beside him, staring into space. They didn’t like Todd much—nobody did, to be honest, but Beth. Todd in his coffin being lowered right now into the grave with a series of unseemly clanks and jerks. Who was Todd anyway? Todd in the Adirondacks, so indifferent to the flaring trees, the silken lakes, the shell-pink skies.
And then, at last, and not a minute too soon, it’s over. The bugle has fallen silent. The marines have shouldered their rifles, swiveled about in their boots, and marched into the distance. The black cars have opened their mouths and swallowed the other mourners, whoever they were—Louis has no idea. Todd’s mother has been whisked off by a friend. And suddenly he, Flanner, Beth, and her parents are alone, standing by his car on this wildly beautiful day, the October sun and dancing foliage seeming to have no other purpose than to mock them.
“Performance over,” Beth says. “I need a drink.”
24
PATIENCE
Tariq and Juney are lying on their backs in the grass, talking about colors. October has edged into its third week by now and Tariq is trying to convey to her the wonder of watching the leaves change by the day. “You know how fire feels?” he says. “It’s like that for your eyes.”
“Warm and flickery and a little scary?”
“Warm and flickery, yes. Scary, no.”
She wriggles deeper into the leaves, listening to them crackling beneath her, the sound somewhere between the snap of flames Tariq was just talking about and the crunch in her head when she chews a celery stalk. She picks up a leaf and sniffs it: maple. “This one is . . .” She runs her fingers along its veins, the brittle edges and sharp points, the moist and flappy middle. “This one’s turquoise. Here.” She feels for Tariq’s face and balances it on top of his nose.
He leaves it there and they stop talking a moment, both of them splayed faceup, as gangly as foals. At school, Tariq has noticed that some of the older girls aren’t so gangly anymore, having returned from summer with new soft curves on their hips and round bumps under their shirts. Juney, though, is still all child, and this makes him feel warm and safe and protective all at once.
“What does fall smell like to you?” he asks her.
She rolls over and pokes her nose into the ground. “Grass and worms and a little like burned sugar.” She rolls back again. “Summer smells like steam and sun lotion and rot. Winter’s burning wood and wet wolves. Spring smells like my mom.”
He sits up. “Let’s go see Gray. I want to see how thick his coat is now.”
They stand, take each other’s hands, and walk over to the fence, Juney calling her wolf cry again. Gray runs up right away, looking bigger than ever now that his two layers of thermal coat are growing: the downy, insulating layer underneath and the waterproof guard hair on top. Ebony shows up, too, his black coat also thicker now and tipped with even more of those shimmery threads of white. But Silver is nowhere to be seen.
“Is Silver here?” Juney asks. “I can’t smell her.” She has explained to Tariq that every wolf has its own scent, depending not only on what it eats but what it rolls in, like Gray with his fish scales. But then, Tariq supposes, every human must have its own scent, too.
He peers through the woods: the thick trunks black and mossy; the dense crochet of leaves between. “I don’t see her.” He watches Gray and Ebony a moment. They seem uneasy. Gray is particularly agitated, pacing back and forth, glancing now and then into the woods behind him. “I think something’s wrong.”
“Let’s go tell Mommy.”
They make their way to the barn, where Rin is bent under the hood of her car, cleaning spark plugs and scraping corrosion powder off her battery. She has decided to get the old Buick into the best condition possible so that if and when Flaherty or the DEC show up, she can send them into the woods to take their chances with the wolves, bundle Juney in the car, and escape. Better to run than to have her witness the wolves being kidnapped, or worse.
“Mommy?”
Rin pulls her head out, her arms smeared with grease. The children are standing in front of her, their faces serious.
“Hey, you two, what’s up? You hungry?” She glances at her watch.
“Silver’s disappeared,” Juney says.
Rin puts down her tools. “What do you mean?”
Tariq answers this time. “We called the wolves but only Gray and Ebony came. You think something’s the matter, Mrs. Drummond?”
She frowns, wiping the grease from her hands on an old towel. Striding over to a shelf, she takes down her medical kit. “Come.”
The children hurry after her, holding hands again so Juney won’t trip. Gray and Ebony are still there, sitting on their haunches. The minute Gray sees Rin, he stands and makes a noise deep in his throat, a kind of gruntgreeting, walks a few paces toward the trees, and turns to look at her.
“I think he wants you to follow him,” Tariq says.
“I think so, too.” Rin puts her hands on the children’s shoulders. “Now listen. I need you both to be very grown-up here and calm. You understand?”
Tariq nods. Juney says, “Yep.”
“Good. I’m going in there to see if Silver needs help, so I want you to stay quiet and watch them. Tariq, if Gray or Ebony circles behind me, or if Silver appears from anywhere I can’t see, I want you to tell me right away. Don’t shout. Just say it calmly and clearly. Okay? And Juney, if you smell any change in them, you let me know, too.”
“Don’t worry, Mommy, it’ll be fine.” Juney sniffs. “Right now I smell they need you.”
Rin pats her shoulder. “Allright, here I go.” Unlocking the catch pen and then the inner gate, she walks through.
This is only the second time Tariq has seen her inside the fence with the wolves, and he watches her closely, half in fear, half in envy. He would love to go in there one day if she would let him, in spite of his assurances to his mother. He would love to pet Gray, bury his face in that magnificent coat and hug him.
For a long moment, Rin stands without moving, her hands by her sides, fingers tucked inside her palms, her breathing deliberately steady. Everything about her is trying to convey patience rather than threat.
Gray approaches her first, as always, ears pricked, snout thrust forward. Rin doesn’t flinch. He is clearly determined to give her a thorough inspection today, for he sniffs one curled hand, then the other, and then each of her boots and legs, taking his time while she stands still and quiet. Tariq draws in his breath and holds it, sending a message to Gray in their private language. She isn’t going to hurt you, Father Wolf, so please don’t hurt her. She is only trying to help.
Gray finishes sniffing, lifts his great head, and trots off into the woods, Ebony beside him. Gray stops, looks back at Rin just as he did before. Trots on.
She follows, step by slow step, Gray and Ebony leading the way. Neither of them circles behind her; neither of them turns to look at her again. They only lead her deeper and deeper into the shadows.
The trick is to keep calm and move steadily. Wolves are high-strung critters, as is Rin, so they all need to be careful of one another. She doubts Gray or Ebony would ever turn on her, not intentionally. But if they grow overexcited or afraid, or just in the mood to tussle, she could be in trouble. She has a long scar on her thigh to prove it.
Keeping calm is easier for her with wolves than it is with humans, but even so she doesn’t like venturing this far into the woods with them alone. When she pets Silver, she always makes sure to stay by the catch pen in case things turn rough, so right now she would be happier to remain near the kids. Tariq’s eyes on her back are her eyes at the moment and Juney’s sense of smell is not to be underestimated. But Gray has taken her far out of their range by now, whether she likes it or not.
She doesn’t catch sight of Silver until she and Gray have walked for nearly five minutes, and even then she is not sure what she’s seeing. Silver looks like a rolled-up shag rug lying there on her side, half-hidden behind a rock, her white fur tang
led with dirt and burrs. She is panting unhealthily fast, her ribs heaving up and down—she has deteriorated badly since Rin last saw her. Rin knows not to go up to her right away, though. She knows to stop first and wait for Gray to tell her what to do.
He walks over to Silver and smells her. He smells her all over, but mostly her snout and eyes. Wolves mate for life, and Rin can sense the sorrow in him as he hovers over her, whimpering. If Flaherty does succeed in taking the wolves away, she hopes whoever is put in charge will at least allow Gray and Silver to stay together.
Finally, after licking Silver’s nose, Gray leaves her be and walks a few paces away, followed by Ebony. Then they sit once more and wait for Rin to do what she must.
Slowly, keeping her eye on Gray, she approaches Silver from the front and crouches by her head, murmuring reassurances and holding out her curled fist. Silver sniffs it. Licks it. Whines.
Rin looks at Silver’s eyes, her extraordinary honey-gold eyes, glazed now with a milky film. Her nose is paler than it should be and clogged with mucus, her coat balding around her legs and snout. Her hip bones rise from her torso like sails.
Having made sure Silver doesn’t object, Rin feels her ears, examines the inside of her mouth, runs her hand over the soft hair on her flanks. Silver lies without moving, struggling to breathe.
By the time Rin returns to the fence, she is too saddened to hide it, even from Juney. Padlocking the gate behind her, she squats down to hold her. Tariq as well, now that the two of them are attached at the hip.
“Kids, it doesn’t look good. She’s just too sick.”
Juney grows still. “Too sick for what, Mommy? You mean she has to die?”
“Yes, little bean.”
“Isn’t there anything we can do?” Tariq says. “She can’t leave Gray all alone! He’ll be so lonely. She can’t leave him! She’s too beautiful to die!”
Rin pulls him closer. God, why did she do that to his mother?
“I know she’s beautiful, sweetheart.” She folds him into her for another hug. “But death happens to us all; you know that.” Of course he knows, more than most children his age—as does Juney. These fatherless kids in her arms. “Come on, let’s go inside. It’s time I called the vet.”
25
STAKE
Beth tucks herself into the corner of her cream-colored couch, her feet folded under her. “So why did you enlist?” she asks, leaning forward to pick up her vodka tonic from the glass-covered coffee table. She takes a long swallow. “I know why Todd did. But you? The money or what?”
Louis, who is pressed up against the far corner of the same couch, gazes into his own vodka, watching the ice cubes hollow out in the middle, tiny prisms of melting light. He learned long ago, when he moved to this mostly white town, to keep his private life to himself. But he has to say something.
“Money was part of it, yeah. And it wasn’t like there was a lot else going where I grew up.” He takes a sip.
“Where was that? Someplace Hispanic?” She uncurls and stretches out until her bare feet touch his thigh.
“Binghamton.”
“Oh.” She folds over her legs with her dancer’s ease and refills her drink. “Your family still there?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He pauses. “My parents split and . . . well, we all went our separate ways.”
“That stinks.” She rattles her ice around in her glass. “My family wasn’t too good at sticking together, either, specially not after I married Todd. They wanted me to dump him, you know. We had big fights over that.” She takes another swallow. “Maybe they were right.”
Leaning forward again, she strokes Louis’s hand—the good hand, not the mutilated one. “That have anything to do with you enlisting?”
“What?” Louis spends so much of his time with a woman he longs to embrace but can’t that the sensation of Beth’s fingers on his skin, her toes against his leg, is disabling his powers of concentration.
“Did your parents’ split have anything to do with you joining the army?” she repeats.
This being none of her business, he says nothing.
Withdrawing her fingers, she drains her glass and drops back against the cushions, an ache pressing against her eyes. Ever since those two ghouls drove up to her door with their scripted concern and rehearsed condolences (“First Sergeant McAllister died bravely, ma’am. And we can assure you that he died instantly and felt no pain whatsoever”), she has felt split in half, one minute hurting more than she imagined a person could, the next utterly numb. It is as if she married two Todds, one prewar, the other post, and now she has to be two widows: the widow who is going to awake every morning to an unbearable weight bearing down on her, and the widow who is so glad to be rid of him she can’t even face herself in the mirror.
“Louis?” she says, her voice quavering. “You think if Todd had been able to come home and stay awhile, he would have turned back into who he was before?”
Louis moves his eyes over the room. The never-used fireplace, the mirror above it a shimmering blank. The yellow walls. The thick white carpet as shampooed as a freshly groomed poodle. He has come to see Beth three times since Todd’s funeral, feeling duty-bound to offer comfort, and each time she has asked this same unanswerable question.
“I guess he would have mellowed out some, sure. Maybe he wouldn’t have been exactly the same. But parts of his old self would have come back. Probably.” He doesn’t believe a word he is saying.
“But what made him like that? Is it because he killed people? You think he did? Kill people, I mean?”
“Beth . . .”
“Innocent people?”
Louis shifts around to face her. “Stop torturing yourself like this. You must have thought of all this before, right? When he joined up? And while he was away for all those deployments? There’s no point now.”
She stares into her glass. “It’s just hard to know that he died before he got a chance to turn good again.”
“He was good. He was a brave marine. Just be proud of him and let it rest at that. Just try . . .” But Louis falters here because he doesn’t know what to advise her to try. If he tells her that Todd despised himself for who he’d become, that he was glad to be taken away so he couldn’t hurt her anymore, surely that would only make her feel worse. Anyway, Louis has mourned enough people to know words don’t help. Nothing helps. Nothing but a long, cruel burn of time.
“I know he was brave,” Beth is murmuring. “It’s only . . . well, I never wished him dead or anything. But it feels like I did.”
“Beth, don’t do this to yourself, it isn’t . . .” He trails off because she is gazing into his face now with a new, curious expression.
“What color do you call your eyes?” she says in an entirely different tone. “I’ve been trying to figure it out forever. I’ve never seen anyone with eyes your color before.”
Louis looks back into his drink. “Green, I guess.”
“No. They’re not just green. Look at me.”
He glances at her, then away again.
“I said look.” He does. She leans forward and peers right into his irises, and for the first time he notices a light dusting of freckles over her nose: Flanner’s freckles. “They’re so clear, like beer-bottle glass. I see a little yellow in there, too. . . . Moss! That bright star-shaped kind—that’s the color they are. You have star moss eyes! Where did they come from? Which parent?”
“Uh, my mother. A lot of my Dominican side has eyes this color.”
“So, you are Hispanic! Was your mom white?”
“Not exactly. A mix, you know.”
“What about your dad? Was he Dominican, too?”
“No. Haitian—well, his grandparents were.”
“Ah, so you’re a mutt!” She leans back into the pillows with a lopsided smile, and he realizes she is drunk. “Mixed-race people are supposed to be the best-looking and the smartest, too. Did you know that?” She angles her head and examines
him. “The looks part certainly applies. Don’t know about the rest.” Chuckling, she stands up and peers around the room. “Where’s the vodka?”
It’s still on the coffee table, but he picks it up while her back is turned and puts it out of sight on the floor. “Beth, I think you should go to bed. You’ve had a hell of a week.”
She hesitates, then nods. “Maybe you’re right. I should check on Flan first, though.”
“It’s almost midnight. He went to bed hours ago. Come on.” Louis rises. “You want some help getting upstairs? You need to sleep.”
“Huh, yeah. Probably do.” Beth is not as drunk as he thinks, but she leans into him for the comfort, curling her arm around his waist.
He walks her over to the staircase, her pelvis moving under his hand, her left breast brushing his arm. He draws her closer and, hip-to-hip, they gingerly mount the stairs.
At the top of those stairs, in his narrow bedroom, Flanner is staring in terror at his doorway. His father is standing there, a stake through his chest like a sword.
“Why did you do this to me, Flan?” his father moans.
Flanner struggles to open his mouth. I didn’t mean it, he tries to say. I didn’t, I promise! But his voice won’t speak and his mouth won’t move. He is as paralyzed as if encased in cement.
Louis maneuvers Beth into her room and helps her onto the bed. “I’ll get you some water,” he says, trying with no success whatsoever to stop his eyes from roaming over her supine body: the slender hips, the divide of her vulva clear under her jeans; her breasts reaching to him from beneath her white sweater, which has risen to reveal an enticing wedge of belly. He has a powerful urge to bury his face right there in that strip of velvety skin, and then down and down till he makes her moan.
Out in the hallway, he stops to listen at Flanner’s door to make sure he is asleep and, seeing a new fall of rain outside, shuts the landing window. In the bathroom, he washes out the toothbrush glass and fills it with water, scowling at himself in the mirror. Louis Martin, she’s drunk. You’re not. She’s a mess of a new widow. You’re not. Don’t you goddamn dare.
Wolf Season Page 21