I saw the animal before I saw his prey. He was bigger even than the white wolf had been, his pelt a dark brown. He stood still in a beam of moonlight, ears forward like an eager dog that was about to get a treat.
The treat, I saw then, was a girl.
She was crouched down in the roots of a tree, her hands on either side of her knees. She wasn’t making any sounds, though her face was wet with tears.
She was a black girl, young, too young to be a student at my school. She was your age, dear one, maybe even younger. The raindrops caught in her hair. In the moonlight the raindrops sparkled. Here was a girl who would be dead in two minutes, maybe less, if I had not risen from the safety of my bed, if I had not left the apartment.
I didn’t want the girl to see me. That would be a complication later. I was glad I wore a hat, and I turned up the collar of my vest, and I crouched and found a rock. I stood, aimed for the wolf, and threw the rock as hard as I could. It struck him on his left hip and he yelped in surprise and pain. He swiveled his head to find me, and though the dark obscured me from the girl, it was nothing to the wolf. He pinned me with his gaze. He narrowed his eyes.
And then he swiveled in my direction, and I turned, too, and ran.
I tore through the forest, the thrumming rush of the wolf’s pace behind me. I hoped that the girl would get up, I willed her to get up and run toward home. Why she had been in the forest, what lies she would tell others and herself to explain her muddied shoes, her midnight absence, I did not know. She could meet with more or different trouble on her way, but that was beyond my reach. Now, I had two jobs: to lead this wolf far away, and to kill him.
As I ran, I found the sickle moon at my throat and I scanned the terrain for the most advantageous position. This wolf was fast, faster than the white wolf had been, faster than me. I felt the distance between his teeth and my back closing, and I knew that we would meet, either on his terms or on mine.
There is only one way to kill a wolf, dear heart. Quickly. No time for second-guessing, or hesitation, or misplaced guilt. No room for any of that.
He leaped, I knew he did from the grunt he released and then the absence of his footfalls. He was too close not to land on me; I had nowhere to go but down, and so I dropped my right shoulder and tucked my head and rolled.
The wolf landed as I turned faceup, and he was greeted with my claw. Your claw now, dear one. His neck was unprotected, an easy target, and I slashed through it, opening his pelt and loosing his blood.
He twitched as he died, drowning in his own blood. I waited for him to become a man—tall, white, naked—before heading home.
I was so glad that the rain had stopped. I imagined the trail of blood I would have left if there had been rain to wash it from me as I walked. The streets were empty, and I made it to the alley behind my building unseen. I stripped naked right there, in the alley, and I shoved my bloodied clothes, even my socks, my shoes, my bra, my underwear, deep into a trash bag in the Chinese restaurant’s dumpster.
I tiptoed up the stairs and into our apartment where Garland still slept, his arm thrown across his eyes. I locked the bathroom door behind me and climbed gratefully into the shower. I was naked except for the necklace—your necklace—which I took with me under the water, scrubbing it clean as I scrubbed myself.
Garland and I stayed in that apartment above the restaurant for three years, until I graduated. He was older than I was and following in his mother’s footsteps of working with computers, and he had no problem finding a job after he graduated, the year before me. We stayed in the tiny apartment anyway, even though his salary meant we could afford more, in part because it was convenient for me to be close to campus during my last year, and also because we loved our tiny nest and would be sad to say goodbye to it.
There were other wolves—not many, but a few, always pulling me out of bed and to the trees in the light of a full moon. I was good at it, killing them, and it was satisfying, ending them. The last year we lived in the apartment, though, there were no wolves. I don’t know why, I still do not—sometimes there are wolves, and sometimes there are no wolves. That year, there were none. There was only love, and poetry, and beauty.
After I graduated with a dual degree in women’s studies and literature, there was really no reason to keep living there. Especially because I was newly pregnant with your mother. That was a busy summer. I graduated, we married, we bought a house—this house—and I fell into the beautiful trance of pregnancy, of falling in love with those first kicks, admiring and appreciating my body’s amazing capacity to grow life and shift to fit it. We didn’t spend much time worrying about names; if the baby was a girl, her name would be Clara, after Garland’s mother. If it was a boy . . . well, we both felt certain she would be a girl.
And of course, we were right.
Clara Constance Wright, born on the first of February.
Oh, what a darling girl. You know some of the end of her story, but you don’t know who your mother was in those first years.
Such a fairy-tale life: me, married to a prince of a man, all the wolves banished to distant memory, to nightmares, and this sweet babe in my arms, all of us living together—well, not in a castle, but we weren’t castle people. In a charming cottage on the edge of the forest. Garland had to go back to work almost as soon as we were home from the hospital—fathers didn’t get much time off in those days—and then it was just me and dear Clara, in the dreamy haze of nursing, our bodies perfectly synched, my breasts swelling and aching the moment before she stirred for a feeding.
She was two months old when the killings began again.
It was a teenage girl, a student at the public high school nearby. She was fifteen. Later I learned that she had a bad reputation—she was a drinker, they said, and had a liking for short skirts and halter tops. She liked men, they said—emphasis on “men,” not boys. Nothing was said of the fact that “men” obviously liked her, too.
Her name was Leila. I would have saved her if I could have. But I had felt no pull to leave the house, none of the tingling urgency I had felt during my college years. And anyway, I had a baby to protect now.
I began to look down at my daughter, asleep in my arms, with a terrible feeling of complicity. It wasn’t my fault that this girl had died. Of course it wasn’t. But still.
I racked my brain, wondering what I could possibly do, if there was anything I could do. And it came to me, during a middle-of-the-night feeding, just a week after Leila had died. I looked down at my daughter, her mouth a cupid’s bow at my breast, and I realized that one thing was different between this wolf attack and those that came before. Do you know what the difference was, my dear one? Have you worked it out?
Yes. That is right. During each of the other attacks—even the night of my own attack by the white wolf—I had been bleeding. With the full moon came my menses, and with the full moon came the wolves.
One Who Is Not Willing to Risk Her Child Will Not Catch the Wolf.
—CHINESE PROVERB
All right, my darling. All right. Every story has its sad parts, and we have reached that point in mine.
You know what I had to do: I had to wean my child to bottle, and though my breasts ached and leaked milk as she cried, as her sweet mouth searched for my flesh but found only rubber, I denied her. I bound my breasts and I refused to give her what she begged for, even when her screams became angry, even when she rejected the bottle again and again.
This was the first fight between me and Garland. “I just don’t understand,” he said the second night after I’d made my choice. He said it again and again, his distress mimicking Clara’s—first confused, and then anxious, and then mournful. Then angry. “Why won’t you just give her what she wants?” he demanded, pacing, watching me try to fit the rubber nipple into her furious mouth. “You have it! She needs it! Give it to her.”
I shook my head, I ignored my own tears, and it must have seemed to him that I ignored Clara’s tears, too, and his. Of course, I did
not ignore them. How could I? These were my people, my two people in the big wide world. They were all I had. Beneath the cloth that bound my breasts, I felt my heart break from the pain of denying my child.
Eventually Garland took Clara and the bottle from me. He walked her outside, to the front porch, and he paced with her, back and forth, until she resigned herself to her new reality. They both did. And she took the bottle at last.
And with the next moon came my blood, and with my blood came my senses, and with my senses came the hunt, and a kill, swift and merciless, the wolf who had killed the month before and had come to kill again. I took no joy in any of it, but there was the grim satisfaction of knowing I was doing a job that needed to be done, and there would be girls saved by my actions, by my daughter’s unwilling sacrifice.
How many girls might have died if a wolf had been prowling at the start of my pregnancy? I thought about this, awake at night in bed next to Garland, a chasm between us. Nine. Nine women, plus another three for the months I breastfed, the months before I forced Clara’s weaning and began my menses again. A dozen women.
One was dead—Leila—and I began to say her name in my head all the time, Leila, Leila, Leila, it thrummed in my veins and my chest, I barely noticed I was still saying it, thinking other thoughts over her name, going about my day, tending to Clara, straightening the house, cooking a meal. But always it was there, beneath the other thoughts, a baseline of regret and shame. Leila, Leila, Leila.
I would never get pregnant again. That was clear. In the first months after weaning Clara, that seemed like something I didn’t need to worry about, as Garland would barely look at me, let alone touch me. But Clara grew, thrived even, learning to laugh and sit up on her own. And before she was crawling, Garland was smiling at me again, taking my hand on our evening walks, reaching for me in the night.
“It’s too soon,” I told him, and he waited.
But it wasn’t just my fear of pregnancy that kept me from sleeping with my husband—it was the knowledge that he could pull away from me, like he had. He could withhold his love. He hadn’t trusted that what I was doing, I did for a good reason. He hadn’t trusted me.
We wouldn’t be celibate forever, I knew that. I could have gotten on the pill, but I didn’t know how that might affect my cycle, my awareness of the forest and the wolves. My instinct told me it would dampen my senses, maybe overpower them entirely, to allow something other than the moon to regulate my flow. And by the time Clara was five months old, pulling herself to standing, making noises that sounded like “Mama” and “Dada” even if she didn’t yet mean them, I found myself needing the connection with Garland as much as he needed it with me.
I bought some condoms, and when I offered one to Garland, he took it. But the next day, he asked me when I might be ready to try for another baby. He was an only child, and he wanted Clara to be raised with a sibling. This was something I had known before we married. At the time, it was an easy thing to agree to.
But now, when Garland asked when I’d be ready for a second pregnancy, I answered, “Never.” There could never be another child.
Well, dearest, I’ll spare you the details of the cycle of arguments this caused. I will tell you that though I had bought a pack of a dozen condoms, I had no pressing need to buy a second.
We loved our baby. That seemed like perhaps enough. We slept like strangers most nights, backs to one another, and we spent our days together like very polite acquaintances.
Clara crawled, then walked, then babbled and talked, and soon she was a beautiful big girl of three years old. There were no wolves, not then. Not in the forest, though they began to appear in my poetry, again and again.
One night, Garland and I had a rare evening out together. We’d hired a sitter, a neighbor girl, to stay with Clara. He and I went to dinner, and then stayed in the restaurant bar for another drink, and then a third. We were well and truly drunk when he asked me:
“What is it with all the wolves?”
We were drinking whiskey, and I took a long drink before answering. “They haunt me,” I told him. “Ever since the white wolf took Laura and I didn’t stop it, they haunt me.”
Of course, Garland was talking about the wolves in my poems, not the wolves in the woods, and I am certain that deep down I was aware of that. How long can a person keep such a secret from her partner? For me, it turned out that the answer was ten years—from the time I met Garland until the ice knocked about the empty glass of my fourth drink that night.
Ten years, dearest, is a long time for a secret. In ten years, a secret grows deep roots. It works its way into every crevice of the relationship. Sometimes, when you expose the secret to the light, when you untwist its limbs and pull it away, the relationship can grow stronger. But other times, dear one, this is not possible.
Garland pressed me. What did I mean, a white wolf had killed Laura? He knew who she was, of course; he’d been a student at the university when she died.
I didn’t want to carry my truth alone anymore. Our daughter was four. I wanted my marriage back, I wanted my husband back, I wanted my family back. And so I told him everything—about killing the white wolf, and about the wolves that followed.
Garland listened, his drink growing warm in his hands, and when I finished, he put his drink on the bar, he put one hand in my lap, the other in my hair, and he kissed me. He kissed me, and I kissed him, whiskey and truth on our lips between us.
I was dizzy with all of it—the alcohol, the relief of speaking the truth, at long last, of spilling my secret to him, and with the passion of our kiss, the heat it created.
Well, sometimes people do the things they swear they will never do. And so it was that two weeks later, when the moon was full and my blood was due, it did not come.
Darling dear, I could not have another pregnancy. You must understand. That would mean at least nine months, more likely ten, even if I didn’t breastfeed a single time, that I would be without my menses. There could be nine lives lost, maybe ten, because of my foolish mistake, my selfish passion.
I found that I was not willing to trade potential life for potential deaths. And so, I made the necessary arrangements, much as it pained me to do so.
And my mistake, dear one, was not the abortion. My mistake was leaving a phone number with the clinic.
When they called to check on me the next day, I was resting in bed. The second I heard the ringing of the phone, before Garland even answered, I knew who was calling. There was nothing I could do; the house had only one phone, and it hung in the kitchen where Garland was cooking dinner.
I lay in bed, eyes tightly shut, and imagined his face as he answered the phone—quickly, not wanting its ring to wake me—his dear face, the face I loved so much. His smudged glasses. His hair, less tidy now, in messy waves pushed back from his forehead. Those lips that had loved me saying “Hello?” into the receiver. And then I pictured his face shifting as the nurse on the other end of the line asked for me, then refused to answer when he asked who was calling, said only that she’d call back. I saw his face crinkle in confusion, I imagined a flash of fear in his eyes as he wondered if—no, it couldn’t be—and then I heard him place the phone, gently, back on the cradle.
I heard his steps coming down the hall. I heard him turn the handle to our bedroom door.
Though I wanted to keep my eyes shut, though I considered pretending to be asleep, I opened my eyes. Garland deserved the truth. And, I told myself, he had listened when I had told him about the wolves. He had understood that. He would understand this, too.
I sat up. Still tender, my abdomen cramped, and my hand went to my stomach.
Garland’s eyes grew wide and round with fear. “Sybil,” he said, “what have you done?”
I thought he had understood me, that night. But I had been wrong. He thought that I had been telling him a story. Speaking in metaphors. Being poetic. But he had been wrong, too.
When he understood, that day as I bled after my abortion,
that I meant everything I had said—that there were actual wolves in the forest, and that they killed girls, and that one of them had tried to kill me, and that under their wolf skins they were really boys and men—then he took two steps away from the bed.
“You’re telling me you’ve killed six men,” he said.
“Six wolves,” I told him. “I’ve killed six wolves.”
“Six men,” he said, “and now our child.”
Semantically speaking, I had terminated my pregnancy, not killed our child. Our child was Clara, playing in the next room with her dolls.
That was the day our marriage died. And when Garland backed out of our room and then drove away from our house, he took Clara with him.
It was a week before I heard anything from him. A week of barely sleeping, of no recourse. What could I do? There was no one I could call, no one I could ask for help.
Then the letter came. The letter from Garland. There was no return address, but I recognized the handwriting, and I recognized the name he’d written in script above our address—Sybil Martel, my maiden name, not Sybil Wright, the name I’d taken when we’d married. And I knew what the letter inside would say, though I read it anyway. He had taken another job in another city. If I was wise, he wrote, I would not try to find them. If I did, he would tell the police what I had told him, and I would end up either in jail or in an institution.
My daughter was gone. My husband was gone. I was alone, in this house, in this cottage on the edge of the trees. All I had left were my poems, and my duty. And that necklace, dear one. My only inheritance.
Wolves Will Pay Dearly for the Tears of the Sheep.
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