Tell the Wolves I'm Home: A Novel

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  I’d told him it was my turn to take him somewhere. At first I thought of the Cloisters, but I wasn’t ready to give that away yet. So it was the zoo. Toby said I could drive if I wanted to. He held out the keys.

  “I don’t exactly know how. I don’t have my permit or anything.”

  “I’ll teach you.” Toby lit a cigarette, but he only managed one breath of it before he started coughing. The keys fell from his hand and I picked them up. Before I could hand them back, Toby had slipped into the passenger’s seat. This wasn’t what I had in mind, but I didn’t want to act scared about it, so I opened the driver’s door and sat down. Then I saw the Smurf hand, that little Smurf hand Finn had glued on the gearshift, and I saw my way out.

  “It’s stick shift. There’s no way . . .” I laid the keys on the dashboard.

  Toby was still coughing, but he nodded. He picked up the keys and walked around to the driver’s side.

  We parked in the Bronx River parking lot, which meant that we came in through the North America section. North America was the most convincing. The big trees and grassy fields with deer and bison and wolves looked good. Like some kind of super condensed version of all the American wildlife there’d ever been. Like every kind of thing we’d killed off had been ushered back into the world.

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s like Playland. There’s something I want to show you. Not just the animals. Come on.” I turned back. Toby looked old. Older than last time I’d seen him, and I saw that he was trying hard not to walk slow. “Come on,” I said again, pretending not to notice.

  Then, in a big burst of energy, Toby threw his arms out and bolted toward me, laughing. He looked like some kind of crazy animal like that, in that big gray coat. I laughed too and ran ahead. We raced through North America, past the meadows of deer and wolves, past the World of Birds and the World of Darkness, until after a while the woods and meadows gave way to the more exotic shrubbery of the Asia section.

  “Here,” I said, pointing down a flight of stairs lined with bright red and yellow Indian flags.

  Toby leaned up against the railing. He couldn’t seem to stop coughing. His back was bent over like an old man’s. A little dart of panic hit my stomach, because I didn’t know what to do. I had no idea how to help someone who might be really sick. I gave him a lame pat on the back. All the while Toby kept trying to smile between coughs, pretending like he was okay. When he finally caught his breath, I asked if he wanted a drink.

  “No. Let’s go,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  We walked down the stairs. At the bottom we walked past a pen where they had camel rides. The camels were all decked out with lush carpets the colors of cinnamon and paprika and mustard under their saddles. A couple of them were toting around toddlers, but the rest stood there looking bored.

  I pointed to a booth farther down the path. “This way,” I said. “Promise me you’ll like it.”

  He didn’t answer for a second, and I was waiting for him to do what I’d done that day at Playland. To say he couldn’t promise something like that. But he didn’t.

  “I promise,” he said. “Even if I hate it, I promise I’ll like it.”

  I paid for the monorail tickets, and we stood waiting under the thatched grass roof of the platform. At the other end, a bunch of little kids on a school trip were hanging off the low wood guardrail. When the train pulled up, we waited for them to pile in before choosing a quieter car at the other end.

  The seats in the monorail were set up almost like a small theater: two rows tiered, and instead of facing front and back, they all faced the side of the train, which was entirely open. The ride goes for only twenty minutes or so, but the voice on the intercom makes out like you’re going all around Asia, and if you don’t let yourself look out too far, if you focus on the trees and water just below the train, you can believe it. You can believe those black musk deer are really in the south China hills and the elephants are really roaming over the plains of India.

  The train moved out. Right away we were crossing the muddy Bronx River, and a woman’s voice came over the speakers saying we were in India, crossing the Ganges. I looked over at Toby and saw he was grinning, and I gave him a nod.

  “Don’t look out too far,” I said. “It wrecks it.” Greta always looked out too far. She was always the one who would point out the places where you could see the real Bronx through a gap in the trees.

  On the way back across the Bronx River, the woman would say it was the Yangtze and we would be in China. Now she told us about antelope and tigers and three kinds of deer.

  “Hey,” Toby said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Come here.” Toby patted the spot next to him on the bench, and I scooted over. He put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me in so my face was pressed up against his big coat.

  “Breathe in.”

  I didn’t know what Toby was trying to do at first, but I took a long slow breath of his coat and there, like magic, was Finn. The exact smell of Finn. Not only lavender and orange but other things too. The mild citrus smell of his aftershave. And coffee beans and paint and things I didn’t know the names of but were just part of Finn. I didn’t want to move. I sat nestled against Toby, my head buried tight in his coat. Toby held me and pulled me closer and closer, and I felt in the soft tremble of his shoulders that he was crying. I closed my eyes and it was like I was flying over the Ganges, clinging to Finn. This Finn’s arms gripped me tighter than Finn’s ever had. I thought of all the different kinds of love in the world. I could think of ten without even trying. The way parents love their kid, the way you love a puppy or chocolate ice cream or home or your favorite book or your sister. Or your uncle. There’s those kinds of loves and then there’s the other kind. The falling kind. Husband-and-wife love, girlfriend-and-boyfriend love, the way you love an actor in a movie.

  But what if you ended up in the wrong kind of love? What if you accidentally ended up in the falling kind with someone it would be so gross to fall in love with that you could never tell anyone in the world about it? The kind you’d have to crush down so deep inside yourself that it almost turned your heart into a black hole? The kind you squashed deeper and deeper down, but no matter how far you pushed it, no matter how much you hoped it would suffocate, it never did? Instead, it seemed to inflate, to grow gigantic as time went by, filling every little spare space you had until it was you. You were it. Until everything you ever saw or thought led you back to one person. The person you weren’t supposed to love that way. What if that person was your uncle, and every day you carried that gross thing around with you, thinking that at least nobody knew and, as long as nobody knew, everything would be okay?

  I took another deep breath of the coat as the monorail leaned smoothly into a curve, out of India, into Nepal, and I dreamed it was all true. That I was clinging tight to Finn. That the ache had been lifted right out of my belly and been made into something real. That I could open my eyes and see Finn smiling right at me.

  Toby had leaned his cheek against the top of my head, and a stream of his tears ran down my forehead and onto my face, trickling over my eyes so it must have looked like I was crying. They fell down my cheek and over my lips. I didn’t know if you could catch AIDS from tears, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t afraid of things like that anymore.

  We stayed like that for the rest of the ride, and I wondered if Toby’s dreams were the same as mine. I wondered if he’d been turning me into his one true love.

  The monorail pulled back into the station, and neither of us moved. I turned my head to look down the car, wiping my cheek against the rough wool of Toby’s coat. The mother of a family of four was staring at me. I looked straight into her eyes and I saw what we must look like, Toby and me. I saw how wrong we must look, but I didn’t care. I tugged at Toby’s sleeve and we both stood, our arms still tight around each other. Nobody knew our story, I thought. Nobody knew how sad our story was.

  We walked out of Asia, back through North America. Back pas
t the wolf exhibit. You could never see any wolves in there. They hid, probably trying to pretend they weren’t in a cage. Probably knowing that they looked just like plain old dogs when they were behind bars. We stood for a while, leaning up against the fence, staring out over that little version of the Great Plains. Opposite the wolf field was a fake totem pole, just about the size of a man. Blue and red paint was chipping off the heads of the eagle, bear, and wolf. I stopped.

  “What is it?” Toby said.

  “Give me the coat.”

  “No. Why?”

  “Just please, okay?”

  Toby frowned. He had a pleading look on his face, but I stood with my hands on my hips, and after a moment he slowly unbuttoned the coat. When it was all open, he hung his head. I tugged the coat off his shoulders and draped it over my arm. Then I walked over to the totem pole, wrapped the coat around it, buttoned it up so that the eagle’s head poked out of the top. I stood back, tilting my head and squinting.

  “Perfect,” I said with a huge smile, but when I looked over at Toby, I saw that he was still standing in the same spot. I saw that there was nothing left of him. He was wearing the same dinosaur-bones T-shirt he’d had on that first time at the apartment, and his arms were covered with dark scabby marks. He stood there in the warm April sunshine, looking like a skinned animal. He stood there with his head down not saying a word.

  “They’ll watch over it for us. Right?” I said, pointing to the wolf field.

  Toby moved his big hands over his arms like he was holding the pieces of himself together.

  “I just thought, maybe we’re supposed to try to, you know, move on,” I said.

  Toby glanced up. I thought he’d looked older when I saw him earlier, but now, without the coat, he seemed younger. Shrunk down to nothing. He cocked his head and stared at me with a puzzled expression.

  “But where would we move to?”

  I didn’t know, and right then I felt so stupid for having said it. I felt like a traitor to Finn. There was Toby, the loyal one, the one who would never move even an inch away from Finn’s ghost. And there was me. The one with the threadbare love. Move on. What a cliché. What an embarrassment. I felt my face go hot. I stared at the coat, which a minute ago seemed like such a clever thing and now looked like something a kid would do. A stupid little kid who had no idea what real love was.

  I bowed my head and silently unbuttoned the coat. I threw it over my arm and handed it back to Toby without looking at him.

  He slipped the coat back on, and all of a sudden I felt the truth again. Of course Greta was right. There was no “us.” Toby was doing what Finn asked him to do. No more. No less.

  In the car, Toby reached across me and opened the glove compartment. He took out my passport and laid it on the dashboard.

  “Don’t forget to take this.” He looked away from me when he said it.

  The dark-blue book reflected onto the windshield so it looked like there were two passports. Two little reminders of my dumb plan. I picked it up and flicked through the pages. I saw that Toby had peeled the note off my picture, and my half-smiling eleven-year-old face squinted up at me. Stupid stupid stupid. I tossed the passport onto the floor next to my backpack. Then I shoved it away with the toe of my boot.

  I turned to Toby. “I know you met Finn in prison.”

  For a second he looked confused. Like he hadn’t heard me right. And the truth is, the prison thing didn’t bother me at all. Greta thought it was this big trump card, but I felt just like Nellie in South Pacific. Nellie didn’t care that Emile was a murderer. She could forgive that right away. Like it was nothing. It was the other stuff, the crimes he didn’t even know he’d committed, that she couldn’t get over.

  Toby clasped his hands together and gently tapped them against the steering wheel. “You know that, do you?”

  I nodded.

  “And you’re still here?”

  I nodded again.

  “And you want to know what I did, right?”

  I shrugged.

  “There’s nothing to be frightened of.”

  “Like I’d really be scared of you,” I said.

  Toby gave me a look. Then he stared down the row of parked cars. When he turned back to me, his face was serious. “If I don’t tell you, you’ll imagine all kinds of things, and I don’t want that.” He looked worried. Or maybe trapped. He threw his head into his hands. “Ugh, this is so utterly stupid. This is from another lifetime.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “All right. Here it is, then. I was a student at the Royal Academy. For music. On scholarship, of course. No money at all from my parents, who generally tried to pretend I didn’t exist. So I’d busk in tube stations sometimes, and . . . and there was this one night . . .” He let his breath out slow. “This is what I’m trying to tell you. There was this one night, a Saturday, and I was down there, late. There were a bunch of drunken lads, and there I was with no place to go, playing guitar. I even remember what I was playing, because it was this Bach fugue, you know?” I nodded, even though I didn’t think I knew any Bach fugues. “And I was lost in it. Sometimes that’s what it’s like. Sometimes I could forget where I was and just slip away into the playing, adding things to it and playing with it, and it was staving off the cold. But then, out of nowhere, there was a kick right to my ribs. Hard. And I flew backward, trying to hold tight to the guitar because that guitar was from my grandfather, my mother’s father from Spain, and it was all I had then. I knew my body, it could heal up, but the guitar, that I couldn’t replace. There were four of them, big lads, drunk, and one was taking his jacket off and another punched me in the head, and I could hear the train coming. There’d be a thud to my body and then the high scream of the train cutting through the blows. That’s what I remember it like, like that train was calling me. One of them tried to pull the guitar from my hands and then I heard the train again, and all my strength poured into that one thing, that one moment, and I pushed him, June. I pushed that man onto the tracks. I didn’t even know my ankle was broken—I didn’t feel anything. I just plowed right to the edge, shoving and yelling, and he went over. Right onto the tracks, just a few seconds before the train pulled into the station.”

  “Did he . . .?”

  Toby shook his head. “Both legs.” He looked down and away from me. “So that’s it. That’s why I went to prison. You can decide for yourself if you want to stop visiting me.”

  “But it wasn’t your fault,” I said. “They started it.”

  He shrugged. “It was a bad thing.”

  “But . . . but they stole all those years away from you. They—”

  He paused for a long time. Then he said, “But they gave me Finn.”

  He said it like maybe it was worth the trade. Like it was something he would do again if he had the choice. Like he would take a man’s legs and give away years of his own freedom if it was the only way. I thought how that was wrong and terrible and beautiful all at the same time.

  I was ready for the story to end, but Toby started up again. It didn’t even feel like he was talking to me anymore. It felt more like he was talking just to let the story of him and Finn out into the world. He told me he was twenty-three when he met Finn. That Finn was thirty, in London doing a master’s degree in art, and part of the course was community work. Finn chose this art-in-prisons project, where they ran classes for inmates.

  “So it’s his first day and we’re in a classroom. There’s me and then there’s this room full of real criminals. And Finn standing up front. I can see he’s trying not to look lost. He’s scanning the room and I can’t stop watching him, his face, the way he’s biting nervously at the corner of his lip, his perfect little narrow shoulders. And I’m thinking, ‘Look at me. I’m the only one here who matters.’ And the room is starting to get restless. There’s this one wiry cockney wanker—oh, sorry, June. This one guy who shouts up to Finn, ‘Art is for homos,’ and the room goes quiet. Everyone’s waiting to see how this art tea
cher will play it. I see a smile come up on Finn’s face—you know that smile—and he looks down, trying to hide it, but then he decides not to. He decides to take a risk. He looks the guy straight in the eyes and says, ‘Well, you’re in the right place, then,’ and right away he had the whole room—well, the whole room except for that one guy. Everyone’s laughing, banging on the desks, all sorts. Not me, of course. I sat there quiet, and that’s when he noticed me. I looked at him, trying to tell this man, this stranger, everything with my eyes. He cocked his head just the tiniest bit, and I stared back. For a few frozen seconds we were the only ones in the room, and I took my chance. I had to. I mouthed, Help me, knowing that he’d probably turn his head away, embarrassed. But he didn’t. He kept looking at me. That’s how it started. We wrote letters, and I never missed one of his classes. He would brush by me, casually running his hand against my back. Or he would drop a pencil and touch a finger to my ankle as he stooped to pick it up.” Toby closed his eyes and smiled, like he was going back there. “There was something so electric about it. So dangerous. Those little touches were everything. I lived for them. You can build a whole world around the tiniest of touches. Did you know that? Can you imagine?”

  Toby’s eyes had started to water. I wanted to say of course I know that. I know all about tiny things. Proportion. I know all about love that’s too big to stay in a tiny bucket. Splashing out all over the place in the most embarrassing way possible. I didn’t want to hear any more of the story, but I couldn’t help listening. The pain of it almost felt good.

  “He saved me, you know? He stayed in England far beyond his visa. He waited for me. He was already known. He was already selling his work for an absolute fortune. He could have gone anywhere, but he waited. For me. The day I got out—”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  Toby looked embarrassed. He put his hands up in apology. “I understand,” he said.

  “What do you understand?”

  “Your feelings for Finn. I’m sorry. It wasn’t sensitive. I’m an ass—”