Tell the Wolves I'm Home: A Novel

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  “Whose turn is it?” I asked Toby when I went back to the living room. I tried hard to keep my voice solid.

  “Look, I don’t even really know how to play chess, June. I should have said.”

  I looked at those little rat skulls scattered across the smooth black surface of the board, the two of us pushing them around like it actually meant something.

  “Me neither.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter, then. Move wherever you want.”

  I took my time, eyeing my pieces. I put my index finger on a knight and slowly slid it straight across the board, right up to Toby’s king.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Do what you have to do.”

  Toby pushed himself up from the couch and strode across the room. His back was facing me, and with one flick of my finger I bumped his king and knocked it off the edge of the board. Then, before he could turn around and see what I’d done, I quickly picked it up and set it back in its place.

  Toby asked if I was hungry, and before I had time to answer he was already putting his coat on and moving to the door. He stopped at Finn’s desk, opened the third drawer, pulled out a bunch of money, and stuffed it into his jacket pocket.

  “Ah, before I forget.” He spun around and ran down the hall to the bedroom. When he came back he was holding a small blue present.

  “For you,” he said. I took it and turned it in my hands. “From Finn. It was one of his things. He said to give it to you if you ever came to the apartment.”

  I could tell it was probably a book. It was wrapped in a silky kind of Chinese wrapping paper with blue butterflies all over it. I thought that if I held it or looked at it too long, I might cry right there in front of Toby, which I didn’t want to do. At all. So I just said “thanks” and walked over and slid it into my backpack. Then we left.

  As soon as we were out on the street, the wind and damp went right to my bones, making my teeth chatter like crazy. With Toby holding a big black umbrella over the two of us, we turned south on Columbus Avenue, then walked for blocks and blocks. After a while Toby stopped and pointed at a Chinese restaurant called Imperial Dragon. It was the kind of place with red lacquered lanterns and long fish tanks where lionfish swam over pagodas that sat on colored gravel. Toby ordered three meals, even though there were only two of us. And spring rolls. And wonton soup. And two extra bowls of crispy noodles with duck sauce. We ate everything like starved animals, not saying a word.

  We’d just about finished. I was loading some sugar into my little cup of Chinese tea.

  “Hey,” Toby said. “For you.” From under the table he pulled a gold colored napkin folded into a butterfly.

  I stared at it.

  That was Finn’s trick. Toby was stealing Finn’s trick right in front of my eyes.

  “No, thanks,” I said, sliding it back across the table.

  “Do you not like butterflies?” he said. He had the gold butterfly cupped in his palm. He was looking at it the way you’d look at a hurt bird.

  “There’s nothing wrong with butterflies,” I said.

  “Napkins, then? One of those rare cases of napkinophobia I’ve been hearing about?”

  I rolled my eyes. “So where’d you learn that from? Who showed you how to do the butterfly?”

  I was waiting for him to say, “Finn,” and then I’d say, “I thought so.”

  Toby set the butterfly down gently next to his teacup.

  “It’s only from an origami book. When I was a kid. It’s one of my fiddly-hand things. Card tricks, flea circus, guitar, origami. When—if you get to know me, I’ll show you some stuff.”

  All at once I had a picture of Toby teaching Finn how to make butterflies out of cloth. His hand guiding Finn’s. The two of them laughing when Finn got it wrong. The two of them, I thought, and a billow of sadness filled my whole chest.

  “Oh,” I said, not looking Toby in the eye. “I guess it’s just not my kind of thing.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, and in one motion he picked up the napkin and snapped it in the air. I watched as all the knots and folds fell from the golden cloth and the little butterfly disappeared, leaving Toby with a plain old napkin in his hand.

  But the sadness stayed with me. Not only sadness because I wasn’t part of Toby and Finn’s world but also because there were things about Finn that weren’t Finn at all. Now my memory of Finn making the butterfly at the restaurant was all wrong. What if everything I loved about Finn had really come from Toby? Maybe that’s why I felt like I’d known Toby for years and years. Maybe all along Toby had been shining right through Finn.

  “I’m sorry about this. All of it,” Toby said after a while. “I promise that if you come again it won’t be as bad. The worst is over, all right?”

  I didn’t believe him. The worst would never be over as far as I was concerned. But just like at the train station, Toby promised he had more stuff to give me. Stuff Finn wanted me to have.

  “I’ll pick you up, all right? I’ll find you. You don’t have to do anything.”

  I shrugged. “If you want to.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, whatever, but it has to be a Thursday. That’s the only day I can do it.”

  “Thursdays, then.”

  “A Thursday, not Thursdays.”

  Toby smiled and put his hands up like he was surrendering. “All right. A Thursday. We’ll start with that.”

  Toby popped open his umbrella and we stood outside Imperial Dragon while he hailed me a taxi. When one pulled up, Toby put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me back so I wouldn’t get splashed.

  “Careful,” he said.

  That was nice. That one little thing. But instead of saying, “Thanks,” I shrugged his hand off my shoulder and said, “I know how to wait for a cab.”

  “I know you do,” he said. Then he leaned his head in and forced me to look at him. “You know if you need anything . . . anything at all . . .” Then he opened the taxi door for me and I got in. As the cab waited to pull away, Toby knocked on my window. I rolled it down. “Anything at all,” he said. “Really. I mean it—”

  Then, with a hiss of tires against the rain-soaked street, the taxi drove off, leaving Toby standing there mid-sentence. It didn’t matter anyway. I couldn’t imagine what I would ever need Toby to do for me. I couldn’t imagine that at all.

  Thirty-Two

  When I was twelve and a half, just before I found out that Finn was sick, I got to spend four whole days at his apartment. It was over Fourth of July weekend. Greta was away at summer camp in Rhode Island, and my parents had made plans to go on a getaway to Maine with the Ingrams and one other couple. They’d tried to find somewhere else for me, but nobody was around, so I lucked out. I had to go to Finn’s.

  Every night Finn would pull down Joy of Cooking from the bookshelf in the kitchen. He’d hold it up and say, “So what shall we feed the crocodile tonight?” He’d tap his finger against the book like he was about to look for a recipe. But I knew his trick. Finn had hollowed out that book and turned it into a secret box, and inside was where he kept menus from all the best places in the city. Every night it was like that. We’d sift through until we found exactly what we were in the mood for. A different country every night. That’s how it was at Finn’s. It wasn’t like Finn couldn’t cook. What he said was that he didn’t want to step on people’s toes. “People should do what they do best,” he said. “We’re only helping them, right, Crocodile?”

  On the Fourth of July I asked if we could go see fireworks somewhere. Finn shrugged.

  “I’ll be honest, June. I’m not a big fan. I can’t see the point of it.”

  “Well, it’s Independence Day.”

  “Independence from what, exactly?”

  “You know. The English.”

  “Well, tell me what’s so wrong with the English?”

  “I don’t know. They were taxing us and stuff, right? They were bringing all their tea over here and then making us pay all kinds of taxes on it.”
>
  “Taxes aren’t the end of the world.”

  “Tell that to Mom and Dad.”

  We both laughed. Finn’s hair had been getting long and he’d pushed it behind his ear, but every time he laughed a few strands fell down. I wanted to reach over and tuck them back in, but I knew it would be weird.

  “I have lots of English friends, June.” He paused. “You know, one of my best friends is English.” He looked at me, like he was hoping I was going to ask him about this friend. And I almost did. That’s the one moment I can think of when I could have found out about Toby. In all of the eight years, that’s the only moment like that. I would have asked and maybe Finn would have spilled everything. But that day was like every other. I didn’t want to think about Finn having other best friends. I wanted to imagine that he was like me. That all we had was each other. So I didn’t ask. I let the moment go. Instead, I rolled my eyes.

  “The English aren’t evil anymore. Of course they’re nice and harmless now.”

  Finn reached over and patted my back. “You’re right. Go get your coat. I know a rooftop where we can see the fireworks.”

  That night Finn held my hand and we walked through the balmy city together. I knew my palm was sweating, but Finn didn’t say anything about it. If there was something or someone we wanted the other to see, we’d give a squeeze. Not too hard, just enough so we knew to look. We’d been doing that as long as I could remember. Usually it was Finn squeezing my hand, because he always saw things first, and then I’d have to quickly scan around until I spotted what he meant. But that night there were so many crazy people around that we kept squeezing at the same time, our hands clenched together, palms pressed tight. Sometimes I would squeeze even when there was nothing there, just because I couldn’t help it. I’d watch Finn look up and around until finally he’d give up and look at me all puzzled. Then I’d laugh and he’d bump his shoulder against mine. I loved that.

  I was on the 3:37 train home. It had that commuter smell—perfume and sweat and newsprint—and it was almost full. I lucked out and found two empty seats at the end of a car. I knew I shouldn’t, but I put my backpack on the other seat so nobody would sit there.

  In my lap was the small gift, wrapped in blue butterfly paper. I didn’t open it right away, because it was frightening to open something from a dead person. Especially a dead person you loved. Opening a present from a live person was scary enough. There was always the chance that the gift might be so wrong, so completely not the kind of thing you liked, that you’d realize they didn’t really know you at all. I knew it wouldn’t be like that with this present from Finn. What was scary about this was that I knew it would be perfect—completely, totally perfect. What if nobody ever knew me like that again? What if I went through my whole life getting mediocre gifts—bath sets and boxes of chocolate and bed socks—and never ever found someone who knew me the way Finn did?

  I ran my fingers over the silky paper with my eyes closed, then I peeled the tape back as carefully as I could. It was fancy wrapping paper, sturdy, so it wasn’t hard to get the tape off clean. The paper would go in the back of my closet with everything else that was secret and precious.

  I slid the book out onto my lap.

  The Medieval Woman, An Illuminated Book of Days

  The cover was maroon and had a painting of medieval men and women picking apples and pears. Right in the middle of it all was a woman with a basket of apples balanced on her head. She had one hand on her stomach, like maybe she’d eaten too much fruit.

  I pressed the book against my lap, scared to open it, because Finn was the kind of person who always wrote something inside books and I didn’t want to find myself crying on the train. So instead of opening the inside cover, I flipped through some of the pages in the middle.

  It was a nice book. There were paintings on one side and then a weekly calendar on the facing page. In July there were woman sculptors, a woman baker, and a pair of women beekeepers. In August there was a woman selling leeks, three women masons building a city wall, and a woman surgeon performing a cesarean section. In that picture, the baby is halfway out and looks like a confused eight-year-old girl instead of a newborn, which gives the whole thing a very creepy look.

  I kept flipping through because it was a good book. I thought it was maybe the best book I’d ever owned. Then I landed on the week of September 13 through 18, and it was like catching a spider crawling up my sleeve. There was Finn’s handwriting, his thin lines crawling over the page. I slapped a hand over his words and slammed the book shut.

  A woman across the aisle peered over at me.

  “You okay?”

  I nodded, and she turned back to her magazine.

  I eased the book open. The handwriting was a mess. Scrawly and uneven.

  Dearest June,

  I need to tell you.

  Everything so wrong. Toby has nobody.

  Please Crocodile believe me. He is good and kind.

  Look after him. For me.

  Need new hands. These are all used up! Can you read this?

  Will haunt the Cloisters for you if I can.

  With so much love,

  Finn

  On the opposite page was a detail of a French painting from the fifteenth century. It was called “Nurse Feeding Sick Man.” The man was in a bed, all tucked under a sea-blue blanket in a room full of beds. The man looked pretty bad—gray and bald, his hand on his chest like he was trying to catch the very moment his own heart stopped beating—but the nurse, she looked even worse. She was spooning something into his mouth, and her face was all panicky and even grayer than the man’s.

  I shut the book and shoved it in my backpack. Then I slid the pack under the seat in front of me. I stared out the window for the rest of the journey. Building, tree, car, car, van, wall, vacant lot, van. I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I kept looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand.

  Thirty-Three

  Sometimes I play this game where I pretend I’ve been knocked out of time. Like I’m really a girl from the Middle Ages walking around in 1987. It works anywhere. School. The mall. The more modern, the better. It’s a way to see everything for what it is. The last time I did it was in Grand Union, getting some groceries for my mother. It was the day after I’d been down to see Toby, and I was trying anything I could to get the note from Finn out of my head.

  As soon as I got home from the city, I’d shoved the Book of Days as far back in my closet as I could. Then I slammed the closet door. My plan was to ignore it. If I pretended not to have ever read it, then it wouldn’t matter. Who would ever know?

  But of course it didn’t work. Once you know a thing you can’t ever unknow it, and the book sat there like a fire in my closet. Like something I had to put out. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if my memories of Finn hadn’t just been ripped to pieces. Or if he was asking me to look after somebody, anybody, other than the guy who’d pulverized everything.

  I left school with my mother’s shopping list in my pocket. In Grand Union I stared up at the ceiling and thought how the panel lights looked like heaps of stars that had been rolled out like pastry dough. How the shopping carts would be good for hauling wood if they had bigger wheels. How bananas and mangoes and kiwifruit looked like nothing I’d ever seen before. I was holding a banana in front of my face, staring at its waxy skin, mumbling to myself, when all of a sudden Ben Dellahunt was standing next to me, staring at me like I was the biggest weirdo in the world. My face went hot and I could tell I was blushing like crazy.

  “What is this thing you earthlings call banana?” he said in a Mr. Spock voice.

  A million different explanations fired through my head. I was ready to give Ben any one of those lies, but then I decided not to. Why should I? I had more important things to worry about. Let Ben think what he wanted to think.

  I turned and looked him straight in the eye and said, “I’m weird.” I could te
ll it wasn’t what he was expecting me to say, because a huge smirk spread across his face. “Sometimes I go around pretending I’m a medieval kid dropped into our time so that everything around me looks strange and fresh and ridiculous. Okay? Now that you know just how weird I am, you’re free to laugh or tell all your friends or whatever. Go for it. No questions asked.”

  Ben stood there stunned, the smirk still pasted on his face. He nodded slowly like he was trying to come to a decision.

  “I like it,” he said after a while.

  Ben’s response caught me off guard, and my moment of bravery disappeared. I found myself blushing again, trying to avoid eye contact.

  “Well,” I said, “you’re not supposed to.”

  “Ah, supposed to—my least favorite words.” Ben was so nerdy that it actually made me feel cool for a few seconds. I tried to subtly slip the banana back into the pile, but of course I knocked two more down in the process. Ben bent to pick them up. Then he said, “I wouldn’t tell anyone. I’m not like that.”

  “Thanks.”

  “June?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Your uncle . . . I saw that article in the library.” Ben looked away for a second. “He really had AIDS?”

  I nodded. A few people had come up to me in school after they’d seen the article. I guess we were the first people to have any connection to this huge thing that was always on the news. The first ones anybody knew about, anyway, and it seemed to fascinate people. When they asked me about it, there was always a slight tone of awe in their voices. Like Finn having AIDS had somehow made me cooler in their eyes. I never tried to take advantage of that. When people mentioned it to me, they thought they were talking about some casual relative of mine. For most people that’s what an uncle was. They had no idea how I felt about Finn. No idea that hearing them talk about AIDS, like that was the important part of the story—more important than who Finn was, or how much I loved him, or how much he was still breaking my heart every single hour of every single day—made me want to scream.