by Alix Ohlin
“Catherine of Aragon is paralyzed,” Robin said. I told her I was sorry to hear it. For once she didn’t seem to be speaking while simultaneously doing something else outside, and I noticed the quietness of the cottage behind her. I thought about a lecture I’d gone to in graduate school once, about the presence in film of “room tone”—the aural fingerprint of the production space, caused by the position of the microphones in relationship to the physical boundaries where filming took place. It was important to record spare moments of room tone for use in editing. The professor giving the lecture had constructed an entire theory of room tone, the specifics of which I couldn’t remember and probably hadn’t understood in the first place. What I did remember was her playing moments of silence from famous films—Casablanca, The Seventh Seal—without the images, some lush, some crackling, a soundtrack that was both nothing and not nothing, as we sat in the room and listened. She was building an archive of room tones, a treasure trove of background noise. A few of the students rolled their eyes. Others said it was the best lecture they’d ever heard; two of them later formed a band called Room Tone, which played cover songs punctuated by moments of silence.
My sister’s room tone was cool. De-peopled. I had the impression that she was home by herself, a rare enough occurrence. “I know you must have money,” she said. “You didn’t pay rent for all those years.” I’d never thought that Robin was paying attention to my finances. When I left Wheelock I did have a chunk of savings, but the treatments had almost drained it, and now I was living paycheck to paycheck. I hadn’t paid much attention to Robin’s finances either; from what I’d gathered, her inheritance had covered the land she bought but not much else, and her wolf project survived on donations.
“I want to ask you to help this wolf,” Robin said. She wasn’t requesting a loan but a gift, and I appreciated her directness. “We’re bringing in a specialist to treat her with high-dose antibiotics and daily acupuncture and physical therapy. I already spent a lot on a surgery that didn’t work. I thought you’d want to help her.”
I had no particular affinity for the wolves; they scared me, and whenever Robin had gone to feed them—from what I understood, she threw frozen roadkill into the enclosures and watched them tear it apart—I’d made myself busy elsewhere. No matter how tall the fencing, or how sturdily anchored in the ground, part of me believed that the wolves were capable of breaching it, and that they didn’t wish us well.
Now she waited for me to make up my mind. I looked around at the apartment, littered with evening primrose oil supplements and pamphlets from adoption agencies and visualization tapes. My room tone was a cluttered cage. The Meat Market’s current season was wrapping up; once it finished, I was scheduled to start yet another treatment cycle, with my last remaining embryos, and I dreaded the possibility of more failure, as well as the discussion with my doctor about whether it was time to give up.
“I’ll give you whatever you need,” I told her, “on one condition. Can I come stay for a while?”
“You can stay here whenever you want,” Robin said. “You don’t need a condition.”
But I did; I needed to feel that in one area of my life, however small, I had struck a bargain of my own devising.
26.
I landed in Montreal in dark mid-March, the city a wreck of slush puddles and salt-crusted sidewalks. Gritty snow was piled everywhere, studded with cigarette butts. I spent two days with Marianne, which were uncomfortable for both of us. At the beginning of my visit I mentioned her mind wandering and suggested she might see a doctor. She was furious.
“You think I’m senile,” she said. “An old woman halfway to the grave.”
“I worry about you, that’s all.”
At this she narrowed her eyes, blatantly skeptical. We ate a stiff meal at a diner near her apartment, Marianne introducing me to the waitress as “my daughter who thinks I’m insane,” and when I left she acknowledged my departure with little more than a curt nod.
Robin met me at the bus stop in Sainte-Agathe looking wan and thin, dark circles grooved beneath her eyes. She’d cleared the house of people, wanting to keep the environment calm, and built Catherine a special secured kennel right off the kitchen. I’d never been so close to a wolf before, and I was nervous, but the wolf was more dog-like than I’d expected. It probably helped that she was lying down, on a bed, like a patient in a hospital. Her legs were long and spindly and delicate, with large paws that made her look puppyish. Though she was a grey wolf, up close her fur was surprisingly varied in color: some threads silver, some white, the occasional strand of reddish brown. She had enough room to pace, if she could have paced, but instead she lay on her side, her yellow-green eyes flickering with constant movements that were hard not to read as confusion and anger. In order for the veterinary specialist to treat her she had to be sedated, Robin told me, and she had come to know when the drugs would be administered and to rumble throatily with defiance and fear.
My sister couldn’t sleep. Her hair looked greyer than the last time I’d seen her, her long braid shot through with it, though it had been less than a year. At night she smoked and paced the house as if walking for the wolf who couldn’t, her footsteps creaking on the old wooden planks of the stairs. At first the vet had thought it was a nerve injury, but now she’d decided it was a bacterial infection caused by eating rancid meat—alas, a common habit of wolves. Apparently they liked to cache the carcasses they couldn’t finish and come back to them later, after they were rotten. The vet, a known expert in such cases, made regular trips from New York State to administer antibiotics and stipple the wolf’s body with colorful acupuncture needles. I watched her do it, wondering if the wolf hated acupuncture as much as I did.
While the vet placed the needles Robin would sit on the floor, cradling Catherine’s head in her lap and speaking softly to her, words I couldn’t make out but whose tone was tender. I remained on the other side of the kennel; I was still scared of the wolf, even when she was sedated. The wolf bared her sharp teeth, making a noise that was part whimper, part growl. In response, my sister sang Beatles songs, folk songs, “Au Clair de la Lune.” The vet stood, her work with the needles finished. “Now we wait,” she said.
Robin stayed with the wolf as much as she could. When she had to go work a shift at the restaurant she made me sit by Catherine in case of emergency, with the vet’s cell number scrawled on the wall. “Keep her company,” she said. “Talk to her. They’re social creatures.”
I sat by the kennel, every twitch of the wolf’s limbs or fur making me flinch. I watched her chest rise and fall, thinking I should find some mystical meaning in it, some deep thoughts about wilderness and beauty, but all I felt was the gradual waning of my fear into something more mundane. “So, Catherine,” I’d begin awkwardly, “how’s it going today?” The wolf never raised her head, ignoring this question, which seemed what it deserved. When Robin talked or sang, it seemed natural for her to do it, but when I was alone with Catherine it felt absurd, making small talk with a wolf. One afternoon I hit upon the idea of reading out loud; I’d found a book about wolves on Robin’s shelf and I thought I’d learn about them. Opening the book in the middle I started reading a section about a German officer named F. W. Remmler, who’d trained eagles to hunt wolves, apparently a traditional practice in central Asia. To teach the eagles he dressed children in leather armor and attached strips of raw meat to their backs. When the eagles were able to knock the children down, they moved on to wolves. Later, Remmler moved to Canada and lived out his days on a wilderness preserve located on an island in Lake Erie. Horrified by this tidbit of information, I stopped reading, put the book back on the shelf, and never opened it again.
I preferred when Robin gave me other tasks to do. I took over the cooking, the grocery shopping, answering the phone. Occasionally I called Marianne, wanting to repair the damage my visit had done; I gave her updates on
the wolf, to which she responded with updates of her own. Some of her news was ordinary (the weather bad, her health bad) and some of it peculiar (she couldn’t find her glasses, and believed someone had stolen them while she slept). Often she’d tell me the exact thing she had the day before; our conversations were eddies, swirling around the same few topics, but I knew she’d be angry with me if I pointed out the repetition. I dreaded these calls without being able to stop making them, and I often had the sense that Marianne dreaded them too, but couldn’t stop herself from picking up the phone.
Before returning to the US, the vet trained Robin to perform Catherine’s physical therapy. Robin made me sit on the floor and hold the wolf in a kind of harness while she manipulated her legs, pressing up on each back paw in turn, bending the leg and then straightening it. The wolf smelled funky and strange, like forest and fur and metal all combined. Though she was sedated, she wasn’t unconscious, and I believed I could sense an agony of energy suppressed. It felt like holding back an avalanche.
Robin wiped her hands on her pants. “Done,” she said. “Good job.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Robin rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t talking to you,” she said.
* * *
—
That night, as we ate dinner—I’d managed to produce an edible if unremarkable chili, which Robin swallowed without comment—she passed the keys to the pickup truck across the table. “Bernard’s coming on the bus tomorrow afternoon. Gets in at three.”
“Okay,” I said. “But I thought you didn’t want visitors these days.”
“Bernard’s not a visitor,” she said. “He’s family.”
I wondered exactly what she meant by that. “Are you guys still—you know, whatever?”
“You know, whatever?” my sister mocked me, and I flushed. I knew she was exhausted from worry and lack of sleep, and yet I couldn’t help but feel wounded. Her moods reminded me of Marianne’s, how she’d sighed with annoyance at us when we were children, and the familiarity pierced me with hurt while also making me feel at home.
* * *
—
When he stepped off the bus Bernard was wearing a red-and-black-checked jacket and a dark blue hat, which he took off in the truck to release a great profusion of hair. He looked very much like his old self in the Tunnel days of weed selling and international hip-hop. I was so surprised that I kept turning my head to look at him and a couple times he reached over to the steering wheel, afraid we were about to go off the road.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that last time I saw you, you were bald.” I didn’t add that I’d assumed he was shaving his head because he was losing his hair.
“I needed the insulation,” he said, lighting a cigarette. I rolled down the window, and the cold air cut through the car loudly, making conversation impossible. With all that hair he looked younger, his brown eyes soft and large, and he seemed to have put on some weight, too, not muscle but a layer of padding, like an animal that had fattened itself for winter. He finished his cigarette quickly and crushed it into the truck’s ashtray. When I rolled up the window, we could hear each other again.
“So how’s our girl?” he said. “On the phone she’s been sounding kind of wild.”
“She’s stressed,” I said. “Really worried about Catherine’s condition.”
“Yeah, she told me,” Bernard said, nodding. “She’s got no boundaries when it comes to those animals, man. Imagine if she had a kid.”
“Imagine,” I said, with an involuntary twinge in my body.
“No telling her anything, though. Never has been.”
“True,” I agreed. Then I added, softly: “She’s spending a lot of money on vet bills.” It was a kind of test balloon for his disapproval. I wondered if, as a guy who’d spent time in prison, who’d grown up in foster care, he saw her choices as ridiculous, indulgent. I realize now that I was testing his judgment of me, my own ridiculous expenses and indulgences. But if Bernard thought Robin spending money on a wolf was stupid, he didn’t show it. He seemed to accept it as a normal part of Robin’s life, as normal as having built a wolf preserve to begin with. He only nodded and said, “That vet from New York is expensive. Supposed to be the best though.”
“Don’t you think—” I began, and stopped. “Maybe—”
Bernard turned to me and smiled. “I’m going to stop you right there,” he said. “You better not second-guess Robin.” When I parked in front of the house, he opened his door and stepped out, then turned around and stuck his face back in the truck, right up close to mine. I could smell the smoke and sweat on him. “Not if you value your life.”
27.
On the tenth day of acupuncture and physical therapy, the wolf stretched her left back leg three inches, all by herself. Robin was elated, couldn’t stop talking about it, drank three glasses of wine at dinner, smiling with chapped lips. We were eating a roasted chicken Bernard had made—he’d taken over the cooking as soon as he arrived, much to my relief—and talking about the wolves. As I stood up to clear the plates, the world suddenly sloped and the clutch of forks and knives in my hand clattered to the floor. I sat down next to them, trying to focus the blur.
Bernard was by me instantly, resting a large hand on my shoulder. “You all right?”
“It’s just my vertigo,” I said. “It still comes back sometimes.” The wall next to me shimmied, then stilled. The nurses had told me to find a fixed point and stare at it—closing my eyes would only make it harder to stabilize myself, they’d said. You can’t rely on your inner compass when your inner compass is broken. The wall was composed of blue painted planks and I found a knot in one and stared at it, a tiny whorl that seemed, the longer I looked at it, to grow both larger and more meaningless, an expanding and arbitrary universe, as a word looks stranger the more you fixate on it, trying to remember how it’s spelled and what it means.
Robin glanced at me and then got up, clearing the plates herself. Bernard kept his hand on me, and this comforting weight, more than the knot in the wood, steadied me, fastening me to the ground. After a while I was able to sit back up in the chair, and my eyes focused on my sister, as she dried her hands with a towel, the dishes already done. She raised her eyebrows at me, asking if I was all right, and I nodded.
“Does that happen a lot?” Bernard said.
“Sometimes,” I repeated. I felt like I ought to say more but the words were beyond my reach, slipping away through some dark water, tangled with weeds.
* * *
—
Hours later, unable to sleep, tired of listening to every creak and groan of the house, I went downstairs and poured myself a small glass of Robin’s whiskey. Standing in the kitchen, I heard a moaning sound. For a second, I thought it might be the wind, but when it came again, I knew it wasn’t. In my sock feet I padded over to the kennel where Catherine was housed. It was just before dawn, the sky sooty. The wolf was asleep, and my sister lay beside her, one arm flung across the wolf’s neck. One leg was pressed against the length of the wolf’s back. The moaning was coming from Robin, in her sleep, and I didn’t know—still don’t know—whether she was in pain or having a bad dream. The wolf’s eyes flickered open, and she gazed past me as if I didn’t exist.
* * *
—
The next day everything looked strangely crystalline, the sparkling delineation of objects made that much more extreme by the sun, which came out in full force after days of clouds. This happened to me sometimes after a fit of vertigo, as if by re-centering itself the world grew more solid, and sharp, and clear. For the first time, I walked with Robin to the wolf enclosures and watched her throw frozen deer haunches over the top. The wolves sprang instantly to the meat, tearing it apart one at a time, according to the hierarchies they’d established. My sister watched them intently, one hand gripping the fenc
e.
Inside, I sat with Catherine in my lap while Robin manipulated her limbs, and the wolf licked her lips, which Robin said was probably a request for food and indicated that her appetite was returning. That night, we ate quickly—sandwiches Bernard had picked up in town—and standing up. Then we separated. I lay down with a book but didn’t read it. After a while, smelling cigarette smoke, I went out to the back porch, where Bernard sat drinking tea and reading What’s Bred in the Bone. I reached out my hand for a cigarette and he gave me one, which I inhaled along with the cool night air. For months I’d been treating my body as a scientifically controlled environment that could be contaminated by the slightest misstep—a sip of coffee, a French fry—and the trashy taste of nicotine was deeply satisfying. Maybe, I thought, I’d give it all up. Move to Australia and live on a beach, until I shriveled to a happy, wrinkled husk. Or maybe I’d move back to Montreal and become one of those old ladies I used to see in our neighborhood, stepping carefully around the slush in their orthopedic shoes, carrying plastic bags from the supermarket with one apple, one can of soup.
In the yellow porch light above Bernard’s head moths swirled curiously, as if they too liked the smoke. “Are you enjoying it?” I said.
He frowned. “Robin gave it to me. She said it’s her favorite book.”
This was news to me. “And?” I said.
“I hardly understand it,” he said. “I should have stayed in school.”
“You could always go back,” I said stupidly.
He shrugged, then leaned forward. “There’s an angel and a demon in this book,” he said. “And the demon believes that adversity can make a person stronger, and the guy whose life it’s about has terrible things happen to him, right, war and Nazis and all kinds of stuff, and I don’t know? I think adversity is just stuff you’d avoid if you could.”
