Tell the Wolves I'm Home: A Novel

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  “I’m sorry,” Ben said.

  That’s all. He didn’t ask any probing questions, and I was very grateful for that.

  The next day at school I wore all my old-fashioned stuff—my Gunne Sax dress with a sweater over the top, a pair of thick woolen tights, and, of course, the boots. I had my usual braids, but that day I’d tied them back with a red ribbon I’d cut out of an encyclopedia. I didn’t care what anybody said. Everywhere I went, Finn’s note was there, puzzling around and around in my head, and those clothes, that other me, felt like a way to hide from it.

  My last class of the day was computer lab, and I plunked myself down in one of the swivelly desk chairs. There were kids in my class who were allowed to move on to programming in Fortran, but I was still stuck in Basic. Week after week, I tried to design a program that would figure out percentages if you typed in plain numbers, and still somehow my program jammed up. I didn’t even bother to work on my percentage program that day, because all I could think about was Look after him. For me. I typed in the only program that never failed:

  10 print “What should I do?”

  20 goto 10

  30 run

  I watched, hypnotized, as the words scrolled on and on down my screen. I waited, hoping somehow the computer would be smarter than me. That somehow it would stop the stupid waterfall of words I’d forced it to spill over its screen and spit out an answer. But of course it couldn’t. It just played out my dumb question over and over again, until Mr. Crowther came over and told me to do some real work.

  After school, the red light on the answering machine showed two messages. I dumped my backpack on the table and listened. My mother’s voice came first.

  “Okay, girls, just calling in to say we’ll pick up pizza on our way home. Be there about eight-ish. So don’t worry about dinner. Get your homework done. Back soon. Love you.”

  Then Greta’s voice came on.

  “Hi. Mom? Well, whoever’s there. I’m having dinner with Megs at the diner. Okay? Rehearsal’s ’til nine . . . at least. See ya.”

  That night my parents brought home a mushroom pizza and a big Greek salad, all of which I usually loved, but instead of digging in I told them I thought I might be getting sick. After taking turns pressing their palms against my forehead, they let me go up to bed.

  I spent the next hour turning slowly through the pages of the Book of Days three more times, searching for some more writing, something to tell me exactly what I was supposed to do, but there was nothing.

  I heard Greta come in at about nine-thirty. With my ear against the wall, I could hear her turn on U2, “New Year’s Day.” I heard her singing along so I pressed my ear to the wall. I loved to hear Greta sing, especially if she didn’t know I was listening.

  I slipped the Book of Days under my pillow and picked up the two cans of Yoo-hoo I’d stopped to buy after school. Then I knocked on her door. She didn’t answer, but I went in anyway.

  Greta had her back to me because she was changing into her pajamas, which were flannel and plaid. Grandma Elbus always sent us matching flannel pajamas for Christmas.

  “What?” Greta said.

  “I don’t know, I just wanted to talk.”

  “You have time for that in your schedule, do you?”

  “Forget it.”

  “No,” Greta said. “I’m just being a dweeb. Close the door.”

  I pulled the door shut and put the cans of Yoo-hoo on her desk. I moved some clothes onto her bed and sat on the desk chair.

  Greta worked her bra off and pulled it out through her sleeve. When she was all safely dressed, she turned around. When she saw that I was wearing the same pajamas, she rolled her eyes.

  Greta was the only one I thought I might be able to tell about the book. About what Finn had asked me to do. She was biting her nails, which I hadn’t seen her do for years, and I sat there trying to make up my mind about whether to trust her.

  “Supposedly the choreographer’s coming tomorrow,” she said, “so we’ll be doing dance stuff all afternoon.” She turned away again and started brushing out her hair.

  “So is that good or bad?”

  “It’s just whatever. I don’t even care anymore.” She looked at me, then said, “You could come. Watch if you want.”

  “I don’t know. It might be weird. Don’t you think? Me being there all of a sudden?” The conversation felt fragile, like it always did with Greta.

  “No, it won’t. You can go join the geek squad and do lights. Go do whatever they do up there.”

  “Greta?”

  “What.”

  “Have you ever had a kind of situation where you’re not sure if you want to do something and, even if you decide you do want to do it, you’re not sure how to do it anyway?”

  Greta stared at me, squinting her eyes like she was trying to pry the real story right out of me. Then, slowly, a smile spread across her face. She came and sat close to me.

  “I knew it,” she said, slapping the bed. “There is someone. All the sneaking off. The makeup. Oh, my God, I knew you had some kind of secret boyfriend. You are so dead. If Mom finds out—”

  “I don’t. That’s not what I’m saying—”

  “June, listen to me. You should totally not have sex unless you are totally and completely ready. I mean it. That happened to Hallie Westerveldt, Keri’s little sister, you know? And she will be, like, regretting it for the rest of her life.”

  “It’s not sex. Really . . .” and suddenly I burst out laughing, because I was thinking about the idea of Toby being my secret boyfriend and how dumb that was.

  “See. I got you. I knew it. I can see it all over your laughing face.”

  “No. Shut up. There’s no secret boyfriend. Who would want to do it with me, anyway? Think about it.”

  “Good point, but somebody must. Ben? Is it Ben Dellahunt? It’s Ben, isn’t it? He told me he likes your boots.”

  “Well, he can do it with my boots, then.” We both started cracking up.

  “That is so gross, June. You are so gross.”

  The two of us in our matching pajamas, laughing our heads off in Greta’s room, felt so good.

  I was still laughing, but Greta had stopped, her face suddenly stern.

  “June, I’m serious, okay? Just don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Okay.”

  “Really. I mean it.”

  “Okay.”

  “And, no offense, but I can help you with makeup if you want. You’re a little heavy-handed.”

  I laughed again.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “So you’re definitely going to the party next Saturday, right?” I didn’t know anything about a party, and the surprise must have been all over my face.

  “In the woods again. Like last time. All the cast and crew and . . . Ben.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you are,” she said.

  And right then she reminded me again of the Greta she used to be. The nine-year-old Greta who would stand waiting for the bus with her arm around seven-year-old me. The Elbus girls. That’s what people called us. Like we didn’t even need separate names. Like we were one solid, unbreakable thing.

  I was glad I hadn’t brought the book in. It was normal things Greta wanted me to confess to. Boyfriends and sex and crushes. Things we might have in common. All I had was a strange man in the city, and secret trips to Playland, and pleas for help from the dead.

  Thirty-Four

  The greenroom was basically a pretty creepy place. Lonely costumes hanging on racks. Basement damp smell. Ripped old couches and chairs. Bare lightbulbs dangling from the water-stained ceiling. Creepy in all ways. But there were people down there all the time when a play was on, joking and messing around, so instead of seeming grim it actually had a great atmosphere.

  I came because I wanted to see Greta dance. I wanted to be able to tell her I’d seen her. And she’d asked me, which was nice. I walked down the narrow steps off stage left that went down t
o the greenroom. Looking around, I couldn’t see Greta, but I did see the back of Ben Dellahunt hunched over a school desk. He was wearing a long black velvet cloak that looked like part of a costume from an old play, and he had dice in his hand. He gave them a shake before letting them clack onto the table.

  “Three hit points!”

  Two other crew guys sat opposite him, looking glum. I was hoping to walk past without him noticing me, but he saw me.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  “You interested?” He pointed to a grid map on the desk. I was pretty sure it had something to do with Dungeons & Dragons.

  “No, just looking for Greta. You seen her?”

  Ben looked around. “Nope.”

  I turned to go.

  “Hey, wait a sec.” He nudged his head toward the game again. “Think about it. You could be anyone. Wolf Queen of the Outer Regions or—”

  “No, thanks. I . . .” I heard Greta’s voice echoing down the stairs. “I have to go.”

  I ran into Greta on the stairs. She was trailed by three or four girls I didn’t know. Word had started to spread about Greta’s part in Annie, and even though she hadn’t officially been given the part, people seemed to be treating her like she was already famous. I’d see her in the cafeteria at lunchtime surrounded by a whole bunch of kids from her class, boys and girls, all gazing over at her. I couldn’t tell if she liked it or not.

  As I walked up past her on the stairs, I made sure she saw me. I wanted her to know I’d come to see her dance. We didn’t say hi or anything, but she saw me and we scraped shoulders as I went up and she went down. Then I saw her glance over at Ben, and a little smirk flashed across her face.

  I stood at the back of the auditorium and watched. Greta came on late, and when she was onstage she looked disinterested. Halfhearted. Like she was trying not to be as good as she could be. Maybe I was the only one who noticed it though, because she was still excellent. She couldn’t help it.

  Thirty-Five

  “I don’t need jeans. I hate jeans.”

  “Of course you do,” my mother said. “Everyone needs jeans.”

  It was the weekend of Macy’s big spring sale. It was something that my mother and Greta and I used to do together. Now Greta just got my mom to give her money and went with her friends. I didn’t want to go at all. Not at all.

  My mother stood in front of my closet. She tugged at a hanger that had two brown corduroy skirts hanging sloppily from it.

  “Look at these.” She ran her hand over both of the skirts. “It looks like you’ve been crawling around in mud. What do you do to get them into this state?”

  I was still in my pajamas, snuggling down under my covers to hide from the sun beaming in my window.

  “They’re okay,” I said. “They’re fine.”

  My mother rooted deeper into my closet, and I remembered the teapot and the tapes and the notes and everything else that was back there. In a panic, I pulled up to a sit.

  “All right,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ll go.”

  I sat on a bench and my mother stood in front of me, looking down the track. Her hair was cut short, and because it had all turned gray when she was twenty-three, she always had it dyed a deep chestnut brown. It was that color all over except for a super thin stripe at the top of her head, where the gray showed through. Sometimes I wanted to touch that place on my mother’s head, that thin crack where her real self had forced its way through. Just then, in the cold March sun of the train station, it felt like if I put my finger right there, everything might go back to normal. There would be no more secret meetings with Toby. No ghosts telling me who to look after, telling me to do things I couldn’t even imagine how to do. No more strange changing portraits in underground vaults. No more sisters who disappeared on you in the dark night woods. I could forget everything and go back to being a regular girl who went to Macy’s with her mother and dreamed of living in the past.

  I stood and took a few steps toward my mother.

  She smiled at me, taking my ungloved hands between her two gloved ones, giving them a rub for warmth.

  “This will be like old times, Junie,” she said.

  There were only a handful of people waiting for the train that morning. A few families. A group of older kids from my school. A man in a suit. My mother and I sat in seats opposite each other. She had on lipstick, which she almost never wore. My mother didn’t even wear makeup to work. Only for going out at night or for going into the city. She stared at me like she was building up to something. Then, finally, she came out with it.

  “How about Horn and Hardart for lunch?”

  I shook my head.

  “June.” She let out a long sigh.

  “I just don’t want to.”

  “Honey, I know you don’t want to. And I know why you don’t want to.” She reached over and put a hand on my knee. The train felt like it was squashing in on me, and I knew I was trapped. My mother had lured me here to talk about getting over Finn, and I was stuck.

  “If you know why, then why would you want to make me do it?”

  “Because one way to stop things from feeling so raw is to blanket over the memories. If we go to Horn and Hardart, then it’ll be like throwing a thin blanket over the other times you were there with Finn. Each time you go, a fresh memory will lay on top, until your times there with Finn will be muffled under it all. Do you see?”

  “Some other day.”

  “And the Cloisters. The same thing with the Cloisters . . .”

  It was like she couldn’t hear me. The Cloisters? The idea of going to the Cloisters with my mother was so completely wrong. That birchwood Mary eyeing me up, all those tight stone corners that could hold a word for centuries. All the thickest, woolliest blankets in the world couldn’t cover the ghosts of Finn and me in that place.

  “Can we just not talk about it?” I asked.

  “June, it’s been over a month now.”

  I leaned back in my seat. I closed my eyes, crossed my arms over my chest, and let my breath out slow. When I opened my eyes again, I looked at my mother.

  “Tell me a story about you and Finn. When you were kids. One story, and I’ll go to Horn and Hardart.”

  “Oh, June . . .” But I could tell she was already thinking about being a kid. I could tell that she wouldn’t be able to help talking about it.

  My mother ended up telling me about the beach on Cape Cod where she and Finn used to go on vacation when they were kids. I was pretty sure it was the same beach Toby told me about. The difference was that my mother could really tell a story. She told me how my grandparents would sleep late and how she and Finn would run across the street to the beach by themselves as soon as the sun came up. How the sky would glow the warm pink of fevered cheeks at sunrise, and how they’d have the whole beach to themselves. Like it was another time, she said. She said they’d turn the world upside down. Pretending sand was cloud and sea was sky. She told me about how Finn once found a horseshoe crab the size of a watermelon and how they’d dared each other to help it back into the water.

  “It was prehistoric, June. It was like something right out of a movie.”

  I could tell she was there. She was right back there in that pink sky summer with Finn.

  “And then what?”

  My mother smiled. “Then Finn flipped it over on its back with his foot and lifted it up like a big cooking pot and carried it to the water.”

  The train trundled on through White Plains and Fordham, past the school in Harlem that had no windows and the 125th Street station that I’d never gotten off at. After that, it slipped into the dark mazy tunnels that wind their way under Manhattan into Grand Central.

  “Why did Finn stop painting?” I said, without looking at her.

  All the windows had turned into mirrors in those dark tunnels, and when I looked up I saw my mother’s reflection watching me. Her face had hardened, and the way the light hit
the windows made it look like she was a painting. In the window she was just bright lips and eyes, with no texture to her skin at all.

  “Toby,” she said.

  “Toby?”

  “I hold that man personally responsible for destroying Finn’s life.”

  “He can’t be that bad. Finn wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t let someone force him to stop painting.”

  My mother crossed her arms over her chest. It seemed like a long time that she sat there, saying nothing.

  “He has a past, June. Do you understand? This Toby, he’s not all innocence and light. One day you’ll understand this better than you do now. Love conquers all, right? Family, art, you name it. Finn was in love with Toby, and that meant nothing else mattered to him anymore.”

  Nothing else mattered. I didn’t matter.

  “Well, how come I never knew about him?”

  “Because I didn’t want you or Greta to have anything to do with that man. Finn knew that was the deal. If he wanted a relationship with his nieces, he would have to keep Toby out of it. You can’t just take up with a derelict and expect everyone around you to be fine and dandy with it. You can’t have everything. That’s something Finn never understood.”

  I didn’t understand either. Why couldn’t you have everything?

  “You made him choose?” I asked. She turned away. She wasn’t going to answer. “You . . .” I couldn’t believe she would do something like that. It didn’t seem like anything I’d ever seen her do. It made me actually feel sorry for Toby.

  “Enough. I’ve had enough of this talk.”

  “But—”

  “Really, June,” she said, “I’m the one who should be sad. He was my little brother. I was the one who took care of him when we were kids. Do you know what it’s like to have a father in the military? Do you? Moving base to base. I was in charge of making sure Finn was okay. I was expected to look after him. Me, June. I simply will not allow you to continue moping around the way you’ve been. It’s out of all proportion. This feeling-sorry-for-yourself business. I’m the one who should be a mess, June. I’m the one who lost a brother.” She pressed her palms against her eyes. “You think I don’t know what it is you’re listening to up there in your room every night? You think I don’t know it’s the Requiem? Who do you think showed that music to Finn? He’s not the only one who knows about beautiful things.”