The principal got on the bullhorn. “I understand it’s chilly, but you’re going to have to be patient. We’ll let you know the day’s schedule as soon as we have permission to open the building again.”
No one had sorted out how to deal with the lost lunch period or whether after-school activities would be canceled. The rehearsal for Friday’s halftime show was probably not happening. Weeks ago, Reece had thought this performance would be the best thing the Rockets had ever done. Now it would be the worst, especially with the new choreography they’d been forced to sub in, thanks to Caleb’s no-shows.
Backing out completely was an option, and Reece played out how that would go, sitting through the first half of the football game knowing the Rockets had given up.
It felt like shit.
“Anyone got anything to eat?” Gerald asked, but no one answered. “Beef jerky in anyone’s pocket? Piece of gum?”
Every student had turned to his or her own phone, his or her own thoughts, like they were in the security line at an airport, but worse, because the line wasn’t moving.
Reece knew a lot of people who had gone on college tours in the spring or summer. He’d ambled through one college fair, taking home more pencils and bouncy balls than catalogs. What did he want to do with his life? He’d decided, based on the disappointment of not getting to transfer to his preferred arts school, that it was too late to take dance seriously. He wasn’t a national-caliber dancer. But he wasn’t exactly old, either. Whatever his personal best was, he hadn’t reached it.
Maybe that was the source of his compulsive searching: because his life felt like it didn’t have meaning. No, forget that. Meaning you could find later. He just needed movement and a temporary direction. But he wasn’t going to find it doing random Internet searches or reading about Annie Oakley, interesting as that may have been.
Reece thought of Mr. Webb sitting on the floor with legs splayed, looking heartbroken, as if he expected a shooter to explode into the room, ending it for all of them.
He thought of Sergei Polunin saying, “I like imperfections in the world.” Reece could think of a lot he wanted to change in his past, but maybe everything that had happened so far would lead him to something more interesting, less predictable. A sideways path to some kind of success he couldn’t even imagine yet.
So maybe their Rockets performance wouldn’t be great. And maybe Reece would end up at some less competitive arts college and at best, become a big fish in a small pond. Maybe he wouldn’t go to college. Hell, maybe he wouldn’t be a big fish anywhere. But if he’d died today—if many of them had—what would his regrets be?
He hadn’t looked for summer dance intensives. He hadn’t looked for a job as an instructor, teaching kids after school. He hadn’t borrowed the car to go to Minneapolis for the weekend when good dance and theater acts came to town. Okay, all that was attributable in the last year to depression, but he hadn’t always been depressed. At the ripe age of fifteen, he’d scoffed at an invitation to apply for youth representative on the town arts council, even if it meant he might have a say in things like grant making and inviting performers to visit, because he’d assumed that any dancer or singer or painter who would come to their little town’s summer jubilee arts week couldn’t possibly have any talent. What an arrogant shit!
Reece folded his unlit cigarette in half and pushed it deep into his pocket.
My body is a temple. He took out his phone and texted the phrase to Ruth, because she was nuts herself and he could tell her anything. Remind me, would you?
Gerald whispered to Reece, “I’m tempted to cut out of here and go to my car. Mental health day. We barely have two periods left.”
Reece said, “I’m pretty sure you don’t want to do that.” In the distance, at the main exits from the massive parking lots, a half-dozen cop cars were lined up with a news van behind them. “Don’t you have stuff in your car you wouldn’t want a cop to see if they decided to pull you over and open your glove box?”
“Good point.”
The principal’s voice boomed again. “Show’s over. Let’s get back to work now, people.”
“She’s saying that like we asked to be standing out here,” Gerald complained. He scrolled on his phone. “Why does Kale have to be such an asshole? My balls are freezing.”
A girl, the one who’d been picking at the bottom of her shoe, said, “I don’t want to hear you say the word ‘freezing’ one more time, and I don’t want to hear about your balls. My mom’s going to see this on the news and she’s going to lose it.”
Reece narrowed his eyes against the autumn wind and pushed his hands farther into his pockets. From afar, he would have looked just like the other seniors standing next to him, impatient and indignant. But inside, he felt different.
As they shuffled single-file toward the doors, he pretended to be annoyed and uncomfortable, because that’s how his friends were acting, and for good reason. But he couldn’t deny it. For no reason at all, he felt invigorated—so suddenly buoyed that instead of passing through the doors, he took over door duty from the shivering kid who was holding one side open.
“My turn. Got it.”
Reece took another moment to gaze around the parking lot and beyond in search of a sign or symbol, but nothing appeared. He kept holding the door. He couldn’t get enough of the cold, clean air or the view beyond: football field, the encircling track, and behind all that, the dark tangle of green spruces and the clusters of aspens blazing yellow against a bright blue autumn sky.
“Pointless day,” Gerald said, ducking into the building.
“The worst,” Reece agreed, smiling.
Something had happened or just barely not happened, leaving him feeling oddly at peace and inexplicably refreshed.
36
Ruth
When the bus overheated halfway between Rochester and Marshall, Ruth felt it again: a pang of deep and unearned familiarity.
She walked to the front of the bus. “Do you think they’ll get a replacement vehicle out here pretty fast?”
The driver looked exasperated. “Honey, I don’t know anything except what they tell me.”
She returned to her seat. She’d been doing online searches for the first ninety minutes of the trip, looking for any further evidence that Van Vorst had been linked to any arrest, complaint, rumor, anything. Nothing turned up. Her phone’s charge was at 37 percent.
She logged in to her email and sent a note to Holloway explaining that, once again, she wouldn’t make it in time for either class. In her inbox was a single document combining some forty pages of scanned documents. Hetta had written, Physical copies in the mail to you, but Bert told me I should send you these. He has not finished reading beyond the first three, but he wanted no further delay and sends you his best wishes.
On a phone screen, the handwriting was tiny and even harder to read than the journal had been. Ruth held the phone close to her good eye with the intensity of someone looking through a peephole.
At the top right was a lightly sketched number one.
Dear H.D.,
You ask me if these episodes I have recounted might be dreams. I will tell you the difference, because I do have bad dreams.
For example, last night the He-wolf came looking for me, and though I run through the infirmary and then the town and then the woods, I can’t stay far enough ahead of him. Sometimes I am not even me but some other young girl, another slave he has caught and kept. I am a mixture of faces, and I know where these faces come from. They are real children from the Darke County Infirmary, other little girls I’ve helped wash and dress, who might have become slaves loaned out to the same men or other men after I left that place.
In this dream, I can’t find my way out of buildings or into them, out of fields or through them. I realize suddenly that I have forgotten my belongings, my warm clothes and my rifle. If I only had my r
ifle, I would turn and make him stop. Instead he is hunting me. I wake up in a sweat. Frank asks, but I don’t say anything except that I’ve had a nightmare. He presumes, probably, it is about the train crash. He doesn’t realize that even now, that Wolf hunting me in the woods is more frightening than any kind of mechanized pain or death.
That, good doctor, is a dream.
Now you will say that I am confused in my time-skipping episodes also, and that they therefore have a dreamlike quality. I am frustrated in these past episodes, but I am not dreaming. You must trust that I know the difference.
The train has pulled into the station.
I will write again soon.
Z
Dear H.D.,
I have made several false starts in our correspondence and wasted both paper and time, but I can wait no more to tell you that I have not only dreamed, not only worried or ruminated, but I have continued the other practice and recently managed to visit my earliest episode yet.
It is May of 1899. I am at a picnic with two friends, visiting an Indian graveyard, a moment that disturbed me. This is the first time I have skipped this far back and been in direct communication with others, able to move and speak at length, rather than simply haunt from the margins, as it were.
Realizing that I have no spectral limitations, I’ve decided to make use of my capacity for action. I’ve written a letter to Leon Czolgosz. Surely you know the name? All these assassinations lately and madness everywhere, Europe and America both. I will tell him I know what he is going to do, and that I will be watching him. I intend to go back in time and mail that letter. Then we shall see what he does. I must send this to you before I lose my courage and fail to mail my letter to him.
Sincerely,
Z
Dear H.D.,
I am disheartened. Only a day after completing my plan, while traveling to my next trial (dozens remain) I entered into conversation with a gentleman on the train and mischievously asked him what he thought of McKinley. I hoped and presumed our Ohio president was enjoying the first months of his third term. As soon as the man’s face fell, I knew that my letter hadn’t had any effect, though I had to ask two more people before I could completely believe. Once I did, the earlier memory of what I had known (the assassination being in June, in Ohio) began to fade. If I did not write this letter now, a year from now I might not even be able to specify “June” or “Ohio” or any of the other particulars of which I had been so sure, which of course have nothing to do with history as it is now.
I am halfway between disappointment and feeble hope. My actions have consequences, but outcomes are hard to predict. My mistake was thinking I could influence someone else or change an event of a public nature, something that never involved me in the first place. It is hard enough to direct one’s own actions and thoughts.
You can likely see that the shake is making the writing of this letter difficult. The trip made in order to send a letter to a stranger was yet another waste of my energies. I don’t look well upon waste. I won’t make that mistake again.
Sincerely,
Z
Ruth snapped to attention. The bus driver was ambling down the aisle. “You can get out if you want,” he told her.
She’d sunk down in her seat, lost in her reading and her latest realizations: only three letters in, and Bert would have found what he wanted. He knew the outcome of the letter that Annie had written to his ancestor. Annie noted that the assassination was only delayed, not prevented. That kind of meddling was unsuccessful.
But for Ruth—and Annie—the loose ends were still there, frayed and quickly unraveling, given that Annie’s failed trip worsened her symptoms.
Ruth opened the fourth letter. It was the one about Sitting Bull, half of which she’d already seen.
The driver cleared his throat. “You don’t have to go, but there’s a Dairy Queen across the street.”
Across the highway, the other passengers were climbing a grassy slope toward a parking lot.
“I’ll stay here, at least until my battery runs out.”
“Makes no difference to me.”
Ruth had been too absorbed in the letters to notice Scott’s first text when it arrived.
I’m sorry for not trying longer than we did.
He never texted and had certainly never expressed this kind of plain remorse.
A new message came in before she could compose a response.
Everything fine. I shouldn’t have texted.
Ruth checked the time: school had been out for an hour. His first text had come in twenty-one minutes ago.
She texted back: Sure you’re okay?
She didn’t expect an immediate answer. He might not even see this before he got home.
The other new message was from Reece, and just as inexplicable: My body is a temple. Remind me, will you?
Was that code, or just a random thought?
Then it hit her. When she’d first met Reece, she’d felt the urge to tell him not only about how to approach history, but also that he should stop smoking in those exact words: “Your body is a temple.” She had felt it then, a week ago, a faint outer ring of waves emanating from a pebble dropped into a pond.
But where and when had that pebble dropped?
Something had begun.
She texted Reece: Are you okay?
Never better.
Something had happened. But not the thing.
And maybe it wouldn’t?
Annie hadn’t stopped Czolgosz from killing McKinley, but she had made him pause and perhaps reconsider. Czolgosz had been determined. Even after having second thoughts, he’d met an anarchist, Emma Goldman. He’d first heard her speak in May, around when he would have received the letter from Annie. But then he’d visited Goldman in July. Another nudge.
Some dominoes must tip more easily than others. Whoever was prepared to carry out this violent act might not be so motivated.
Ruth tried to imagine the possibilities that might account for a change: Scott had talked to the principal, to the police, to some student, to Vorst himself. He had done something he wouldn’t otherwise have done. Something changed.
It had to be Scott’s actions, based on her call to him last night. It hadn’t been a pleasant call, and she winced to think of her own emotional outburst and his apparent lack of concern, which had created another contradiction. For the first time today, he was reopening his heart to her. And for the first time in a long time, she wasn’t feeling particularly tender toward him. He’d defended Vorst. He’d shown practically no sympathy for Ken.
But then again, it had been a hurried and difficult discussion. Maybe he’d had time to rethink the ways he hadn’t supported Ruth during their relationship. Maybe he wished he’d stepped up earlier and was trying to do so now.
I’m sorry for not trying longer than we did.
Maybe.
She was overthinking it, failing to appreciate the simple good news. Scott was sorry. And more important, he was safe.
Ruth texted him: On a broken down bus 2 hours from home. Crazy week. Worried about you. Glad you texted. Want to talk more. Miss you.
A warning popped up. Ruth’s phone battery had dropped below ten percent. She tapped the message away and moved on to the fifth letter.
Dear H.D.,
My attempts have continued at the cost of my own physical well-being. You will see that the shake in my hand makes this letter even more unruly, but it can’t be helped. At last I arrived to the right place and nearly the right time, and with as much fury in me as I had ever felt. But it didn’t go as I’d expected. She was the problem.
I haven’t told you much about her, and I didn’t expect to because she did not seem to matter, but of course all of it matters.
I hadn’t remembered the She-wolf’s vulnerability. “I know it isn’t easy for you,”
she told me, “but you’re young and stronger than I ever was. You’ll be living a better life somewhere, someday. Truth is, he’s left me half alone since you’ve been here.”
Sitting at her kitchen table, I felt I had both the ultimate power and none of it. I knew the future, who would live years later and who would die, but in another way, I was still stuck in that period. I would always hear her bawling and begging. I would still feel the He-wolf years from now, leading me to the woodshed. I had to change something—do something—in order not to keep living through it again.
But at the same time, her lament weakened me. The last thing I heard her say was, “It means the world that you don’t hate me.”
Then I was with Sitting Bull again, only briefly. He said nothing this time. I sensed disappointment in his weathered face. I do not wish to disappoint him or you or myself.
That is the last trip I have made as of this date. But I have exhausted myself in its telling.
Yours truly,
Z
Ruth looked up to see the bus driver coming down the aisle. “Last one off. Your replacement chariot awaits.”
She looked down at her phone: two percent. If she’d thought about it, she would have followed the others into the Dairy Queen a half-hour ago, if only to keep her phone plugged in somewhere as she read. It was too late now.
As the driver leaned his hip against a seat, watching her, she gathered all the scattered contents of her book bag, hurried off the broken bus and onto the working one, already rumbling and ready to pull away. Claiming the quietest seat she could find in the back, Ruth pulled out her phone again: one percent.
Dear H.D.,
I have made no visits recently, but that is only because I am gathering my energies for what I hope will be my final attempt, and if it is not successful, I don’t know what I will do to enable myself to return to the life I once had, without nightmares or rage, feeling further than ever from the affections of my husband and even my own self-regard. If there was one thing I was certain of prior to these last few years, it was that I was both a moral and disciplined person. I don’t fully understand how this certainty has been shaken after so many years. Yes, the trials, the nightmares, my own frustration at being older, injured, newly vulnerable, even financially affected by Hearst’s persecution. And yet all that isn’t enough to explain why a Wolf, a demon, should regain his ability to haunt me.
Annie and the Wolves Page 26
