The Wolf Wants In

by Laura McHugh

  “That doesn’t sound likely. Do you think someone broke into the house?”

  I looked toward the dark kitchen. If anyone was inside, they knew I was here. They would have heard me calling for Lily, talking to Greg on the phone.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Why don’t you call the police to check it out, just in case. We’ll be there shortly, but I can’t stay. And if someone did break in, you and Lily probably shouldn’t stay either. Maybe you should go to your sister’s.”

  I waited outside for Greg and Lily, calling around the yard for Gravy, even though it was pointless, since he couldn’t hear. The deputy who showed up was Robby Frazier, whom I’d known since Head Start, when we were three or four years old, and I did feel much safer once he’d stomped his hefty uniformed frame through every room and confirmed that whoever had broken in was gone. The sliding door had been jimmied, and Robby, his face red with exertion, sawed off a piece of two-by-four he found in the garage and stuck it in the track to keep that from happening again.

  Robby said break-ins out in the country were common these days, unlike when we were growing up and no one on a farm locked their doors. “Druggies,” he said disdainfully. They targeted the elderly, the sick, homes where someone had recently died—places they were likely to find prescription pills. They looked for money, too, or things they could pawn, though it didn’t appear that anything had been stolen, which made Robby think that it might have just been juvenile delinquents messing around. I wondered if maybe Crystle was somehow responsible, if she’d do something like that just to scare me.

  I couldn’t quite tell if anything was out of place, and it was unsettling knowing that someone could have rifled through our things and then carefully put it all back as it was before. I was ready to start making calls and launch a search party for Gravy when Lily and Greg arrived, and Lily located him, wedged against the wall beneath the pie safe, dead asleep. She poured a little pile of Gravy Train on the floor near his head, for when he woke up, and then sprawled on the couch to watch A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. Lily complained that she was hungry again, another growth spurt no doubt on the horizon, so I fixed her favorite snack, Totino’s frozen pizza, the pepperoni cut into tiny cubes.

  We’d have Thanksgiving dinner at Mom’s house the next day because that’s what we always did, though it wouldn’t be the same without Shane. I took Gravy out one last time to pee, sticking close to the house, Lily training a flashlight on me from the porch, as though worried I’d disappear into the darkness if she lost sight of me.

  She didn’t want to be alone in her room, so she crawled onto my bed, stealing my favorite feather pillow and curling up on top of the covers in her smiling-sloth nightgown, falling asleep effortlessly.

  Sleep didn’t come as easily for me. I thought about what Robby had said, his angry tone when he talked about addicts breaking into houses, committing crimes. The year before, I’d met a recovering addict, a waifish young woman named Allie who’d been referred to social services. She’d been caught stealing from her church’s collection plate so she could buy fentanyl lozenges. Her family ran the Hallmark store in Blackwater, and they’d poured everything they had into treating her addiction. Her mother quit working to be with her around the clock, and they’d tried every kind of therapy and rehab program available, but Allie would always relapse. She was sweet and soft-spoken and smelled of lavender and bergamot, essential oils meant to aid her recovery. Her slender wrists were encased in bracelets made of crystals and other healing stones. She had recently returned from a therapeutic program out west where addicts communed with wolves, and hadn’t yet told her parents that it had failed to cure her.

  A wolf can go for weeks without eating, Allie had said, but they can’t live like that forever. After a famine, they’ll feast. Gorge themselves. If there’s livestock around, they’ll kill it. People hate them for it, but they’re only following their instincts. They’re not bad, they’re misunderstood. Like me. I don’t want to hurt anyone, she said. I’m just surviving. I can hold off for a while, stay clean, but the hunger comes back, and when it does I’m ravenous.

  I saw her obituary in the paper months later. It detailed her many talents and interests. She had played the piano at her church and gone on a mission trip with the youth group. She had been beloved by many, survived by a long list of friends and relatives. The final paragraph revealed that she had died of an overdose at home while her mother made a quick run to the gas station for a gallon of milk. I admired her parents’ honesty, their desire to shine light on the struggle, to let people know that it could happen to anyone.

  Plenty of people in Cutler County had contemptuous or even hostile attitudes toward addicts, questioning why taxpayer money was being spent on Narcan and emergency services to save people who were willingly taking drugs that could kill them. Maybe Shane had assumed we felt that way, too. He had kept his problems hidden, not wanting us to know, unable to ask us for help.

  I lay as still as I could, listening to the faint whisper of Lily’s breath, the wind siphoning through keyholes, the furnace brooding below. I was drifting near sleep when a sharp tapping sound jolted me awake. I was paralyzed, trying to imagine who or what might come out of the woods at this hour, wanting in, when the sound came again: tap, tap, tap, tap, from somewhere inside the house. My pulse surged, and I leapt up to crack the bedroom door, my chest burning with held breath. I heard rustling, Gravy sniffing around in the darkness, his nails clicking on the hardwood, tap tap tap, as he wandered through the house, looking for something he wouldn’t find. He finally came to rest at the foot of the stairs, a deaf and ineffective sentry.

  Henley had first set foot in the Ray-Lynne Funeral Chapel in Blackwater when she was four years old. Memaw’s brother Herb had died of pneumonia, and when Henley had come up to the casket, she’d poked his cheek and found it disturbingly cold and unyielding, like overcooked pudding. That’s not him! she’d cried. Great Uncle Herb had always fancied himself a magician, sometimes using sleight of hand to cheat at poker, other times to pull nickels out of Henley’s ear. It had to be a trick; Great Uncle Herb had fooled them all, placing a dummy in the casket, and she fully expected him to come out from behind a curtain and yell Voilà!

  Now, seeing Shane laid out in a silver casket in the viewing parlor, his head on a satin pillow, her breath left her body, eking out through her closing throat. She knew that it was really him, that he was truly gone. He didn’t look like real death now, though, not like he had the other night, when his body lay cooling on the floor. Somehow this artificial version was worse, a selfish attempt to make the dead palatable to the living. His eyes were shut, his jaw cleanly shaved, Gravy’s claw marks covered with makeup, lips and cheeks just pink enough to hide the pallor without appearing garish. She tried not to think about the draining of blood, the stitching and stuffing that had gone on behind the scenes, like the making of a human scarecrow. She pressed her knuckles against her eyelids to push back a fresh bout of stinging tears.

  She hadn’t wanted to come. She feared that the things she knew would be visible on her face, that anyone who looked at her would be able to tell.

  Pettits knew how to turn out for funerals, though, and it would have been odd if she hadn’t shown up. The extended clan filled the chapel, including Beauforts and Copelands and a few of the Rudds, along with Crystle’s friends, Shane’s kin, and a few of his coworkers. Charlie wasn’t coming, and that was one small relief, because she wasn’t sure she could have held herself together with him there. Shane had meant the world to him, and she couldn’t have lied to Charlie’s face. She circulated among her relatives, trying to blend into the herd, though it was impossible to act normal when her skin felt like it was crawling with electric ants.

  The Pettits migrated between the spread of food in the adjoining lounge and the open space at the back of the parlor, talking, laughing, eating. Junior rooted himself in t
he corner, holding a plate of Lit’l Smokies drenched in oily red sauce, spearing them two at a time with a toothpick. He nodded as Henley walked by, his eyes locked on hers as he murmured to Big Boy about getting into the workshop and moving out Shane’s tools. Henley kept walking, her spine prickling.

  She recognized Shane’s family right away, though she’d seen them only once, at the wedding the year before, and had never actually met them. Several rows of folding chairs had been set up facing the casket, and the Kellers huddled quietly in the very front, the only people seated. Shane’s mother had hair the dull gray of galvanized tin, hacked unevenly at the nape of the neck like she’d cut it herself. Henley imagined her reaching over her shoulder with the scissors, not bothering to glance in the mirror, not caring much how it turned out. Shane had rarely talked about his mother, though Henley had gathered from overheard stories of his delinquent youth that Mrs. Keller was a practical woman who’d been rightly frustrated by her son’s antics and was both surprised and intensely proud of how he’d turned out—the high school diploma, the lack of a criminal record, the steady job. Shane’s sisters sat on either side of her, and if she remembered right, Sadie was the one with straight shoulder-length hair and Becca wore hers longer, the ends curled. She’d seen their children playing in the gravel parking lot with one of the husbands, and she didn’t blame them for not wanting to be inside.

  The women’s faces were wet and raw. She watched them as they studied the photos they had pinned to a felt board and followed, on a loop, a slideshow of Shane’s life: a swaddled baby in his grandfather’s arms; in a suit with high-water pants, taking his first communion; digging in the dirt, a huge grin revealing gaps in his teeth; standing on a woodpile in a snowstorm with a black, wolfish dog; a senior class picture against a backdrop of fake trees, hair neatly combed to the side. It was strange to see his entire life unfold over and over, a life she knew relatively little about except for the end and what bits he’d spent with the Pettits. As she watched Shane’s family react to the images on the screen, their grief commingled with hers, forming something new, something denser, thornier, harder to bear. Her stomach cramped.

  One particular photo jarred her every time it popped up on the screen—Shane sunburned on the riverbank, the day of his wedding—and on the third go-around of the slideshow, she realized why. She’d seen it before, not the picture itself, but the image, framed in the viewfinder of a disposable camera that had been set out for the wedding reception. She’d snapped the picture, at Shane’s request, because he wanted evidence of his clean, unwrinkled white shirt before they started eating barbecue and drinking in earnest. He’d already thrown back shots of Johnnie, Jack, and Jim, which had left a few amber spots along the collar, but she didn’t tell him that his shirt was no longer pristine. His eyes were a vivid blue against his reddened skin, his grin goofy and blissful. She remembered the joke he had told her just before she took the shot, one of his dumbest yet. Hey, Henley, why did the foot smile? Because it was toe happy!

  That’s why it felt like he was looking at her, and her alone, in the crowded viewing room. She had captured a brief moment they had shared, just the two of them, before the families arrived and the sun dipped into the river and Crystle got so drunk she vomited on the skirt of her mermaid wedding gown. Shane stared at her, again and again, the last picture before the screen flashed black and he reappeared as a swaddled infant. The easy smile. Earnest eyes the color of a jay’s wing. She could hear his voice in her head, clear despite the din in the funeral home, the words he’d spoken as he handed her the camera that day. Hey, Henley, can you help me?

  Crystle sauntered into the room, the crowd parting for her, and took up residence by the casket, leaning against it like she was bellying up to a bar. She wore a black lace tunic over a black tank and leggings, her hair freshly highlighted and styled in long waves, iridescent blush sparkling along her cheekbones. A small audience gathered around her, and she started into the story of the day Shane died, her voice loud enough that it cut through the crowd and Henley could hear her from the back of the room. Henley noticed that Shane’s sister Sadie had tilted her head to the side, like an attentive bird, her interest pricked by something Crystle had said.

  Crystle was bemoaning how unfortunate it was that she hadn’t been home when Shane died. On a normal day, she would have been there, but she had stopped to see her cousin—Henley. Shane had been texting Crystle that morning, she said, about how much he loved her. He hadn’t been feeling well, but he hadn’t said anything about it that day. He probably hadn’t wanted to worry her; he was thoughtful like that.

  “Henley.” Crystle waved her forward and she reluctantly obeyed, keeping her back to Shane’s family. The stabbing sensation in her stomach grew sharper with each step, as though her flesh might split open, spilling her guts out onto the floor.

  “I set my phone down somewhere,” Crystle said. “Go get it for me.”

  Henley found the phone in the bathroom, balanced on the toilet paper holder. She locked the door and turned on the faucet, not terribly surprised to discover that Crystle was still using the most common and ill-advised security code, 1-2-3-4. She scrolled through the texts until she found Shane’s. Most of them were pedestrian, Crystle telling him to get her a bottle of Bloody Mary mix on the way home from work, complaining that Gravy had pissed on the floor and she wasn’t going to clean it up, Shane responding each time with one letter, K. They hadn’t texted at all the day he died until late that afternoon, when Crystle sent Love you babe out of the blue. He had responded with Love you more, the brief exchange uncharacteristic compared to all the ones that had come before, like maybe Crystle had sent it herself, but Henley couldn’t be sure what had happened that afternoon, before it got dark, before she’d gotten there.

  Squeezing through the crowd, Henley spotted her cousin Trina, her scarlet hair unmissable, her massive studded purse known to be as well stocked as any Walgreens pharmacy. While Henley wasn’t one for pills, she quietly purchased a single Xanax and swallowed it with a swig of Trina’s Pepsi.

  Back in the viewing room, as she handed Crystle her phone and turned to leave, one of Shane’s sisters caught her eye. Sadie, the one who had been listening to Crystle’s story so intently. Henley ducked her head and walked faster, away from the continued unspooling of Shane’s life, the bleak vacuum of the Kellers’ sorrow, and out the door, the pain in her belly radiating through her chest to the base of her skull.

  The night air brought cool relief from the suffocating atmosphere of the funeral home. The leaves were still on the trees, the grass still growing, but summer was gone, its lingering overtures stale and depressing as darkness crept in ever earlier. She couldn’t leave town now—it wouldn’t look right—but in a couple weeks’ time, Raymond assured her, she could be on the road. He wanted it that way, in fact, for her to cut ties and get far away from Blackwater for a while, no forwarding address, so that if things started coming apart, she wouldn’t get caught up in it.

  She’d started searching online for places to stay, youth hostels and campgrounds and tiny rooms illegally sublet in other people’s apartments, ferreting out job openings for pet sitters and dishwashers and maids, all of it less daunting with Earl Sullivan’s money tucked away beneath her floor. She suspected it wasn’t possible to escape the growing dread in her gut no matter how far she ran, but her plan was the only thing drawing focus away from it, and she wished for the mountains to fill her head and blot out thoughts of Shane, of Earl, of Jason. There was already plenty of snow in the Rockies, and she imagined herself sinking into a frozen drift, being cleansed by the wind, the ice, the bitter transformative cold.

  Though she had mostly stopped cooking after Dad passed away, Mom usually made exceptions on holidays, resigned to laboring over our favorite yeast rolls, sage stuffing, and German potato salad made with bacon grease. She couldn’t bring herself to go through the motions now, and after she’d announced
that we’d be eating canned ham and Pillsbury biscuits from the Dollar General, Becca had decided that we would take over the Thanksgiving feast. Becca arrived early to put the turkey in, and Lily and I worked on pies at the kitchen table: pumpkin, apple, old-fashioned buttermilk, and Shane’s favorite, sour cherry, which Becca had requested last minute, sending Jerry and the boys to Walmart for frozen fruit, knowing they wouldn’t likely have fresh.

  Mom sat in her recliner, eyes drooping shut while the Macy’s parade played on TV. I’d found the piece of paper from Shane’s house. She’d hung his drawings on the wall above the television, including the sketch of Gravy. She’d trimmed away the part I’d wanted to see, the part with the writing, to fit it in a tiny frame.

  I’d only brought three pie pans, so I brushed the flour off my hands and dug through Mom’s cabinets to find one of hers. I unearthed the green jadeite one with the fluted edges, a wedding present to her and Dad from one of her aunts. As I wiped it off with my apron, I felt something stuck to the underside. I flipped it over and took it to show Becca.

  “Look,” I said. “I guess Mom figured she’d never make another pie.”

  A note was taped to the bottom, her careful cursive neat enough to belong in a manual, declaring that the dish would go to me when she died. Grandma had done the same thing when she’d found out she had liver cancer, attaching labels to the bottoms of her most-loved possessions in lieu of a will, notes we didn’t find until after she died. She had left me the cream pitcher shaped like a cat, which we’d always used to pour milk on our oatmeal when we stayed with her. Shane had gotten the pie safe, which I would come to covet; I hadn’t yet fallen in love with baking when Grandma died.

  Becca and I had joked about crawling around on the floor at Mom’s, peeking under the rolltop desk and waterfall vanity to see which one of us would get what, not knowing whether Mom would bother to label anything and not wanting to consider what it meant if she already had. No matter how practical and necessary it might be, it was uncomfortable to imagine her alone in the house, distancing herself from her possessions, preparing for death.