Tell the Wolves I'm Home: A Novel

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  “Why didn’t you just say that to me?”

  “What? Say, ‘I’m terribly sorry to disappoint you, but I crippled a man for life and I’m also an illegal immigrant, so leaving the country wouldn’t be such a brilliant idea for me at the moment.’ What would that have sounded like to you? You might have been gone.”

  I thought about what he was saying. “So is that what it was all about? Keeping your promise to Finn? All our time together?”

  He shook his head so slowly it was barely perceptible. “Is that what you really think?”

  I looked away. “Sometimes.”

  “Don’t you see? It’s like we’ve known each other all these years. Without even seeing each other. It’s like there’s been this . . . this ghost relationship between us. You laying out my plectrums on the floor, me buying black-and-white cookies every time I knew you would be coming over. You didn’t know that was me, but it was.”

  It was true. There were always soft, sweet black-and-white cookies from a bakery over on 76th Street when we went to Finn’s. In a white box tied with red-and-white cotton string.

  “Do you know how Finn would fix things for you sometimes? A windup clock once, and that music box. That little music box shaped like a cupcake that played ‘Happy Birthday’ when you opened the top. There were teeth missing, some of those tiny metal teeth.”

  “That was you?”

  Toby nodded and held up his hand. “Fingers,” he said.

  “Why are you telling me all this now? Why are you waiting until right now to let me in on this?”

  He looked away. “Because maybe I don’t want to leave the planet invisible. Maybe I need at least one person to remember something about me. And . . .”

  “And what?”

  Toby closed his eyes and breathed in deep. I thought maybe he was about to fall asleep, but then he reached over for my hand again and looked right into my eyes. “He was both our first loves, June.”

  The words hung there and I felt my cheeks getting hot. I turned away so Toby couldn’t see my face.

  “We’re bound together. Do you see?” He stopped, waiting for my reaction.

  I couldn’t meet his eyes. “I should go . . .”

  “Don’t, June. It’s all right.”

  I turned to him then. “Finn was my uncle.”

  “I know,” he said, looking at me like he felt completely sorry for me.

  “Uncles can’t be your first loves.”

  Toby nodded slowly, his eyes closed. “Nobody can help what they feel, June.”

  “I . . .”

  “He was so beautiful and patient and so clever and talented. And maybe for you he was two people. Do you see? Who could resist the two of us all squashed into one beautiful person, right?” He smiled. His voice was getting hoarser and hoarser, but still he kept talking. “I told him, you know. I told him he would make you fall in love with him, and he didn’t believe me. He never understood that he had that kind of power. And I was like you. Always doubting myself. Always wondering why he would be with me. June, I think if you say it, if you get it out, you might be free. He was my first love too, June.”

  I was going to tell him that it wasn’t true. That Finn was just my uncle. That uncles can’t be your first loves. But suddenly the weight of it all felt too much. Suddenly I couldn’t understand why I’d been carrying it around with me for so, so long.

  “Okay,” I said in a rush. “Okay, I was in love with Finn. There. Okay. Okay?” I couldn’t look Toby in the eye, but I felt him pull me to him. His hand on my arm.

  “That’s better, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. And somehow it was.

  We stayed like that for a while. Me perched on the edge of Toby’s bed, slowly rubbing his thin arm, him squeezing my hand. Like the oldest of couples. That’s what it felt like. Like we were two people who’d known each other forever. People who could tell each other anything or just sit there saying nothing at all.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  “Let’s go. I’m taking you home. To my house. You can’t stay here.” I hadn’t known that would be my plan until the moment I said it, but when I did, I knew it was right. I knew it was the perfect thing to do. I unwrapped myself from the blanket and walked over to push the door closed. I spilled the bag of clothes out on the chair.

  “June, I can’t go there. Your parents . . . your mother.”

  “Shhh. We can do whatever we want. That’s what you said, right?” I gave Toby a huge smile. Then I offered him my arm. He winced as he swung his legs around the side of the bed.

  “I’m starting to think I never should have said that. I’m starting to think it was a bit on the open-ended side.”

  I laughed. “Here.” I handed him an orange-and-black-checked button-down shirt that I’d never seen him wear. There’s something about picking out clothes for someone else that made me want to choose the things I’d never seen before. Like maybe there was a chance to catch a glimpse of a whole other version of a person buried in the bottom of a dresser drawer. Toby held the shirt away from his body and looked at me.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “I’ve never seen you in it.”

  Toby gave me a look that said there was a good reason for that, but then he slipped the shirt over his head without bothering to undo the buttons. I’d brought him a regular pair of jeans, which he seemed relieved to see. I turned my head away as he slid out of the hospital gown. When I turned back he was still sitting on the edge of the bed and he’d changed into the jeans, but he was hunched over, like just changing clothes had exhausted him. I sat next to him on the bed and leaned my head over so I could press my ear to his chest. There was so much rasping and wheezing it was hard to see how he was getting any air at all. Then I remembered the oxygen tank, and I reached across the bed, grabbed the mask, and passed it to Toby.

  He nodded and pressed it over his nose and mouth. A look of relief spread across his face.

  I followed the tube from the mask, hoping it would lead to some kind of little tank I could pick up. Instead the tube connected to a pipe that ran right along the wall and seemed to be connected to the building itself.

  “We won’t be able to take this,” I said. “Maybe it’s a dumb idea.”

  Toby moved the mask away from his face and shook his head. “No, it’ll be all right. We’ll be in the fresh air.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded, but in my heart I knew he was making a choice. I knew what it meant.

  “Toby?”

  “Mmmm.”

  “You . . . You don’t mean Finn was your first love ever. You don’t mean real first, right?” I turned away, embarrassed to be asking. But I needed to know.

  He didn’t say anything for a long time. I sat there listening to his wheezy breathing, thinking it was probably wrong to ask a question like that. That maybe sometimes what’s private should stay private. I was about to tell him to forget it, but then he picked up my hand in his and spoke in a small thin voice.

  “Finn never knew. It’s just between you and me now, all right? It doesn’t matter. It’s nobody’s fault.”

  I felt his fingers squeeze my palm, and it was like he was pressing this secret into my hand. Suddenly all the smells in that room—rubbing alcohol and pine disinfectant and raspberry Jell-O—grew harsher and brighter. Like they were trying to obliterate this revelation that changed everything and nothing at all. Toby had closed his eyes, but mine were wide open and I couldn’t stop staring at him. This is what love looks like, I thought. Then I squeezed his hand back.

  “It’s safe with me,” I said. “I promise.”

  With his eyes still closed, he smiled. “I know.”

  I was right about Bellevue. It was the kind of place you could walk right out of without anyone noticing at all. I took a blanket from Toby’s bed and a wheelchair from near the nurse’s station and wheeled Toby into the elevator. A few nurses glanced at us, but they all seemed too busy
to care. I left him in the lobby, then went out to hail a taxi. It didn’t take long. I told the taxi driver to wait, then I ran back in for Toby.

  When we got out there, the taxi driver stared at the two of us, and I could see he was trying to figure out who we were to each other. I thought of Playland, of how the woman there thought we were some kind of weird couple. I knew there was no way anyone could come to that conclusion now. No way at all. And maybe it was some of Toby’s mischievousness rubbing off on me, or maybe it was just that I wanted to test the word on my lips—I wanted to see if my lips could hold such a huge and powerful word—but I looked that driver straight in the eye and leaned in and said, “Excuse me, but would you mind helping my lover into the car?” It was the first time all night that Toby laughed. He turned his head away, trying to keep up the game. The driver’s mouth actually hung open, like a dumb guy in a cartoon, but I kept my eyes on him, like I didn’t understand what the problem was. I let the word lover hang in his mind until finally he gave a little lift of his hand, as if to say, “Whatever,” or “Only in New York,” or “To each his own.” The kinds of things people say about things they know they’ll never understand. Then he reached for Toby’s arm and eased him into the backseat of the cab.

  “So where to?” the driver said.

  I gave him my address. Not the apartment, but my real address at home.

  “But—” Toby began.

  “It’s okay.”

  “You have the money to go all the way up to Westchester?” the driver said. “I’m gonna need a deposit.”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a wad of the bills that Toby had given me all that time ago. “Here,” I said handing him two fifties.

  “Okay, okay. No questions asked,” he said, as he pulled away from the curb. He looked over his shoulder at us. “You two mind some music?”

  Toby smiled. “Music, yes, music,” he mumbled. The driver fumbled around with the radio dial, and a few seconds later he caught the NYU station and someone was saying, “. . . and now for Frankie Yankovic and the ‘Tick Tock Polka.’” The taxi filled with Frankie and his accordion and this silly, silly polka, and I looked at Toby and he looked at me and we laughed so hard it hurt.

  And that’s when I finally gave away one of my Finn stories to Toby. It was just a small story, like all my stories were. I told him about that day Greta brought the mistletoe with her to Finn’s apartment. I whispered the story into his ear. I told him about the weather that day. The pellets of sleet as we drove down. The way Finn looked. What he was wearing. I wasn’t even sure Toby could hear me, but I told him about the Requiem on the stereo. How the portrait was almost done. How scared I was. How stupid. And how, in the end, none of that mattered, because Finn saw through it all. I told Toby about Finn’s soft butterfly kiss on the top of my head. How he saw exactly what I was feeling and made it all right. Like he always did.

  Toby leaned on my shoulder and I felt him nodding just a little bit. He wasn’t coughing much anymore, but his breathing had turned thick and gurgly. Like he was breathing water instead of air.

  I would have ridden around like that for hours and hours. Maybe weeks, months. Maybe the rest of my life. The taxi took us out of the city, all the way up First Avenue and across the Willis Avenue Bridge, past Yankee Stadium, then away from the brightly lit streets and out, out onto the dark highway. Window open. Cool night air pushing in at us, and the radio buzzing out polkas about clocks, and beer, and yellow roses, and blue eyes crying. There was Toby’s drowsy head on my shoulder and my open hand on his head, and the rough wool blanket that covered both of us, and the feeling of having laughed and laughed and cried until there was nothing left at all. But stillness. The best kind of stillness. That’s how I remember that night. That’s how I want always to remember it.

  Sixty-Five

  Toby was right. Finn was my first love. But Toby, he was my second. And the sadness in that stretched like a thin cold river down the length of my whole life. My signature would probably set, and tax seasons would come and go. I’d eventually tuck the medieval boots way in the back of my closet and start wearing sneakers and jeans like everyone else. Maybe I’d grow some more, or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I’d become the Wolf Queen of the outer regions, or maybe I’d just stay June Elbus, Queen of Jealous Hearts. Maybe I’d spend my years alone, waiting for someone to come along who was even half as good as Toby or Finn. Even a quarter as good. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I already knew there was no point waiting for that. Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn’t have. Maybe there’s a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. Waiting to make me feel the same impossibility over and over again.

  But then, I guess it’s what I deserve. No. That would be kind. I deserve much worse.

  Toby slept on the couch in our living room. The painted Greta and the painted me and the real Greta and the real me all watched over him through the night. He slept covered in all the blankets from our beds, blankets printed with rainbows and balloons and Holly Hobby in her big straw ribbon-tied bonnet. He slept with our eyes on him.

  Greta had waited up for me. She didn’t say anything when she saw I had Toby; she gave me a graceful nod so I’d know she understood. Mostly we sat silent, but every once in a while Greta would sing snatches of whatever she could think of, and every time she did we saw a little smile pull at the corner of Toby’s mouth. So she kept going. Songs from South Pacific and James Taylor and Simon and Garfunkel. We were careful to keep our voices low, and other than Greta’s soft, sweet singing, we hardly said anything. I sat on a chair next to the couch and kept my hand on Toby’s fevered head. Just like he probably did for Finn.

  And then the world started to wake up. At the first sign of light, Greta pulled the curtains closed so tight that not a crack of brightness could leak in. But even without light, the day was starting. Car doors slammed. The grind of tires on gravel driveways. My parents’ radio alarm clock, the serious voice of 1010 WINS. All news. All the time. The bathroom door closing, then opening again, and then slippered footsteps padding down the stairs.

  “Let me—” Greta said.

  “No.” I shook my head, then scooted my chair even closer to Toby. I wanted everything to be plain and true. I wanted my mother to come down and see my hand on Toby’s head.

  And she did. She stood on the stairs in her bathrobe, squinting into the dim living room. “June?” she said. But that was all she got out, because as she looked from me to Toby to Greta, there was nothing else to say. The whole story was there. Her hand flew up to cover her mouth and then she turned back up the stairs to get my father.

  There was a lot of talking after that. Some of it was angry, hurt. But mostly there were just questions, and by the end of it all, there was nothing left to say. Both of them understood that Toby had been my friend.

  For a long time, the four of us sat in the living room in the kind of brittle silence I’d only ever felt in churches and libraries. The kind everyone is careful not to break. We watched Toby’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall, the only proof that he was still with us.

  It was my mother who stood first. She walked across the room, knelt on the floor next to Toby, and laid her open palm on his head. I watched as she ran her hand over his soft feathery hair, and even though her back was to me, I think I heard her say, “Sorry.” I want to believe that’s what I heard. I needed to know that my mother understood that her hand was in this too. That all the jealousy and envy and shame we carried was our own kind of sickness. As much a disease as Toby and Finn’s AIDS.

  In the end it was just the two of us in the room. My mother and me. Toby’s body stilled, and she reached out and laid her hand on my shoulder. That was how one person’s story ended.

  Later that night, long after Toby’s body had been taken away and everyone was fast asleep, I saw something I mentioned only to Greta. I couldn’t sleep and so I crept downstairs. The living room was dark except for a single lamp on a t
able near the mantel. A dining-room chair had been dragged over next to the fireplace, and standing on it was my mother. She had a thin paintbrush in one hand and in the other was a plastic ice cream lid that she was using as a palette. I watched quietly, just out of sight, as she delicately dipped the brush into the paint. I saw her tilt her head and eye the portrait before she touched her brush to the canvas, just like Finn. I stood there in complete disbelief as I watched my mother make her own small strokes on the painting. In the morning I woke before anyone else to see what she’d done. Around my neck was an intricate, perfectly painted silver necklace. On Greta’s finger was a silver ring set with her birthstone.

  Sometimes I tell myself that it wasn’t so bad. Being responsible for killing someone who was dying anyway. Murdering a person who was already almost dead. That’s what I try to think sometimes, but it never works. Two months is sixty days, 1,440 hours, 86,400 minutes. I was a stealer of minutes. I stole them from Toby and I stole them from myself. That’s what it came down to. My family would go on forever thinking Toby was a murderer, but they’d never know about me. They’d never guess that there was a real killer living right in their house. It doesn’t matter that Toby forgave me. That he really truly left this world with not a single bad feeling for me. That we ended as the sweetest of friends. None of that changed anything. There are dark black buttons tattooed on my heart. I’ll carry them for the rest of my days.

  But there is another place in my heart that knows that I finally kept my promise. I was the one who took care of Toby right up to the very end, who stayed with him so he wouldn’t be alone. Just like Finn would have wanted. And sometimes, when I don’t want to be sad anymore, I think that makes it almost even.