Tell the Wolves I'm Home: A Novel

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  “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?”

  I didn’t know. It wasn’t a very delicate carving. Not many lines. It wasn’t complicated, but it had a certain feeling. Like you wanted to keep staring at Mary’s face. It could have taken a day or a year to do something like that.

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Exactly,” Finn said. “You can’t tell until you get started.”

  “Yeah, well, I still don’t know about it though.”

  “Come on now, Crocodile. Let me do this for you. For you and Greta.” Finn gave me this sad look he could turn on whenever he wanted. And he called me Crocodile, which made me smile inside. “Let’s go sit in the courtyard,” he said. “I brought two cans of iced tea. You can have a think on it.”

  Finn seemed to be in such a good mood that day. It reminded me of the way you feel right after you finish one of those huge jigsaw puzzles, the kind that has thousands of tiny pieces that all look almost the same. That’s the kind of happy he seemed that day.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll meet you out there in a sec.”

  I stayed with the statue for another minute, looking mostly at the headless Jesus and wondering if there was somebody in the world who had his head. Wondering if Jesus and Mary even wanted to be art. I’ll bet they didn’t. Being art seemed like it might be like having a disease. Suddenly you became some kind of specimen to be discussed, analyzed, speculated on. I didn’t need people staring at me, trying to figure out what I was thinking. Look at the bigger girl, the one with the braids. Look how obvious it is that she’s in love with the artist. How sad. How pathetic. I didn’t need that at all.

  Twenty-Six

  The next time I saw Toby, he was waiting for me right outside my school. He was sitting on the hood of the same small blue car I’d seen him get into at the funeral, which I suddenly understood was the same car I used to see parked outside Finn’s building. I always thought it was Finn’s car, because sometimes he’d go down and get things out of the trunk like canvases or, once, a green raincoat.

  When Toby spotted me, he stood up next to the car and started waving his long arms like crazy. Like he was shipwrecked or something. A rush of pins and needles shimmied up my back because, even though I knew how wrong it was, I was kind of thrilled to see that Toby had come looking for me.

  It was a bright, crisp day. The bell had just rung and kids were streaming out the doors. For a second I thought about walking the other way, but I knew I had to get Toby to stop signaling to me. I didn’t even want to think about what would happen if Greta saw him there waving at me like we were best friends or something. I quickly looked down at what I was wearing—my boots from Finn (good), a long black corduroy skirt (iffy), and a maroon sweater that my mother said was three times too big on me (good). I
glanced around again and then I jogged over to the car, head down, trying to look as casual as I could.

  When I got to the car, Toby grabbed both my hands in his like we were long lost cousins.

  “June, fantastic. I didn’t realize it might be hard to find you,” he said. “Come on, get in.”

  I stood next to the car for a few seconds, looking it up and down. My head was thinking that I shouldn’t get in a car with this guy who was almost a complete stranger, but my heart was thinking, What if there’s a dropped pencil in there or a stray box of Good & Plentys or a single strand of dirty blond hair or the imprint of the place Finn used to sit? What if there’s a single atom of the air Finn used to breathe in there?

  I was still eyeing the car when Toby climbed in. He reached across the passenger seat, plucked the lock open, and pushed the door open for me. I looked over my shoulder. Kids were coming from every direction, but I couldn’t see anyone who might care what I was doing. And so I threw my backpack onto the floor of the car and climbed in.

  The car smelled of cigarette smoke and berries. Fake strawberries. I saw that it was because Toby was chewing a huge wad of bubble gum. He was wearing a too-small tweed jacket, and underneath it he had on a green T-shirt with big saguaro cactuses printed all over it. I could tell that Finn had made that shirt, and I must have stared at it a little too long, because Toby tugged the jacket close around his body.

  He gave me a sly smile and nodded. “I knew you wouldn’t ring.”

  “Well—”

  “No, no, don’t worry. I understand. I’m just some stranger to you. It’s my fault.”

  I gave Toby the barest narrowing of my eyes. “Well . . . I’m just some stranger to you too, right? So whatever.”

  “Of course you are,” he said. He stared at me for a few seconds, like he was considering telling me more. Then he smiled and twirled his hand in the air. “You’re right. Like you said, ‘Whatever.’”

  Toby reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a chunky piece of gum and offered it to me.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He looked out the window.

  “I suppose it was a bad idea. Me coming here.”

  I shrugged. “You’re an adult. You can go wherever you want.”

  I regretted it right away. It was such a little kid thing to say. I waited for Toby to call me on it, but instead he smiled. Then he turned to look at me.

  “And what about you, then?”

  “What about me?”

  “Well, can you go wherever you want?”

  I looked down at my backpack. My heart raced. This whole thing was so far beyond my normal life. Here I was in Finn’s old car with this boyfriend of Finn’s, who everyone in my family seemed to hate. Here I was doing something really, really wrong. But when I looked up, there was Toby’s warm smile, and his brown eyes, and a look that was somehow saying that if I said yes, everything would be okay. But how could that be right? I glanced around the car, and at first I couldn’t see any signs of Finn. I looked across the dashboard and at the steering wheel and on the floor. Then my eye caught the gear shifter, and a smile welled up in my chest. Glued right there, right on top of that gear stick, was a tiny blue hand. The tiny hand of a Smurf. I reached out and laid a finger on top of it. There was a brand-new piece of Finn I’d never seen before. I peeked over at Toby and thought that this must be just the beginning. There must be hundreds of little things like this—thousands, maybe—and Toby was my way in to see them. And so, with the barest tilt of my head, I nodded.

  “Of course I can,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I be able to go wherever I want?”

  Right away, Toby’s smile went up to full beam, and he tapped his hands against the steering wheel like this was the best news he’d had in years. And that felt good, making someone happy. There aren’t many people who get a buzz out of a simple nod of my head.

  Out the window I saw Diane Berger, who I have math with, heading across the parking lot in our direction. I slunk down low in the seat.

  “Look,” I said, “can we go somewhere else?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure.” Toby revved the car up. The tires squealed as he pulled away from the curb, and I slunk down even lower. He laughed. “Oops.”

  We drove right through the middle of town. Past the Lutheran church and 7-Eleven, then out onto Youngstown Road. Toby turned onto the Taconic Parkway heading south.

  “So . . . well . . . I was thinking . . . how about Playland?”

  “Playland? With the rides?” I said.

  “Yeah. But not the rides. There’s something else there.”

  “Like what?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The Taconic is a narrow highway and Toby wasn’t a very good driver. He sped the whole way down, driving so close to the guardrail that sometimes I had to close my eyes. I clutched tight to the seat. I had no watch and I had no money. All I had was my backpack, with my geometry book in it and a very short book report on To Kill a Mockingbird, which I got a B+ on.

  A list of questions I wanted to ask Toby started piling up in my head, but when I looked over at him, ready to ask, it struck me how stupid I would sound. I should already know the answers. If I mattered at all, somebody would have told me those things. Then I remembered the article I’d sent to Toby, and sitting there in the tight little car with him, I felt embarrassed that I would have done something like that.

  “I’m sorry about that article. It was mean.”

  Toby’s long fingers tightened around the steering wheel. “It wasn’t like that,” he said. “I just want you to know.”

  I thought about asking what it was like. Exactly. But I didn’t think I wanted to hear the answer. So instead I changed the subject.

  “Was this Finn’s car?”

  I thought this was a pretty easy question, but Toby didn’t answer right away.

  “Well, I suppose Finn did buy it,” he said after a while. “But it was mostly mine. Finn couldn’t drive. Did you not know that?”

  I tried to ignore the did you not know that, even though it felt like a sharp little needle.

  “So you’d drive,” I said. “If the two of you went somewhere together?”

  Toby nodded. “Yeah. Well . . . all right, I don’t technically have an American driving license, but I can drive. You don’t have to worry or anything.”

  “I’m not worried. I’m just asking.”

  I ran my hand over the seat under my legs. Finn had sat right here in this spot. Finn’s fingers might have held on tight to the seat in the exact same place where I was touching. I wanted to open the glove compartment and look inside, but it didn’t seem like the right thing to do, so instead I rolled down my window. The sky was so so bright and here I was, driving down the highway with Toby, nobody in the world knowing where I was. I wanted to touch the wind.

  “You’re English, right?” I said.

  I saw Toby answer, but with all the wind I couldn’t hear, so I rolled up my window.

  “What?”

  “Half.”

  “What’s the other half?”

  “My mother, she was Spanish.”

  “That makes sense,” I said.

  “Does it?”

  “Your eyes. They’re so dark.”

  “Mongrel eyes.”

  “No,” I said. I looked out the window for a few seconds, then without turning back I said, “I like them.”

  I didn’t know why I said that. I never said things like that. I tugged my sweater over my knees. I glanced over at Toby and caught him smiling, even though I could see he was trying to hide it.

  We switched onto 287, which was wide and not nearly as scary as the Taconic. I loosened my grip on the seat edge. Toby sped up and, without indicating, pulled into the left lane to pass a big supermarket truck.

  “Hey, I brought something for you. Have a look in the back.”

  I twisted around. There, on the seat, was a black folder.

  “This?”

  “Yeah,” he said, gl
ancing away from the road.

  “What is it?”

  “Just look.”

  I opened the folder slowly, cautiously peeling back the cover and readying myself for what might be inside. I saw right away they were sketches. Finn’s sketches. I glanced over at Toby. He smiled and nudged his head toward the folder.

  “Go on,” he said.

  The first page was filled with small pencil drawings of knees. Knees with just a bit of leg above and below them, each one angled in a slightly different direction. There were only a few lines in each of the sketches, but still they were better than anything I could ever do. The next sheet was covered with elbows. Some straight, some bent. Then a mouth. My mouth. That’s what I realized after a couple of seconds. I flipped back to the knees and elbows, and on second viewing it was obvious that these were mine too. Mine and Greta’s. I flipped through the pages faster. There was the hem of Greta’s skirt, a thin edge of my ear poking out from my hair, one of Greta’s dark eyes, the curve of her eyebrow above it. It was all us. Every piece of paper had a little detail from Finn’s portrait. Me and Greta chopped up and shoved into a folder.

  I kept flipping through the pile. I came to a sketch where the space between my arm and Greta’s arm, the shape of the place between us, had been darkened in. The negative space. That’s what Finn called it. He was always trying to get me to understand negative space. And I did. I could understand what he was saying, but it didn’t come naturally to me. I had to be reminded to look for it. To see the stuff that’s there but not there. In this sketch, Finn had colored in the negative space, and I saw that it made a shape that looked like a dog’s head. Or, no—of course, it was a wolf’s head, tilted up, mouth open and howling. It wasn’t obvious or anything. Negative space was kind of like constellations. The kind of thing that had to be brought to your attention. But the way Finn did it was so skillful. It was all in the way Greta’s sleeve draped and the way my shoulder angled in. So perfect. It was almost painful to look at that negative space, because it was so smart. So exactly the kind of thing Finn would think of. I touched my finger to the rough pencil lines, and I wished I could let Finn know that I saw what he’d done. That I knew he’d put that secret animal right between Greta and me.